The 2001-02 school year has been nine months of odd anecdotes ranging from a massive wind storm to a false anthrax alarm. But many of these small stories will shape administrative decisions for years to come — including policies on campus safety and athletics ticket distribution. The following is a run-down of the top stories of the year that will affect future generations of Ducks for years to come:
Title town USA
This year, Eugene became known as “Title Town USA” for all of our success in athletics. The football team won the Fiesta Bowl in a smashing defeat of Colorado, men’s basketball surged into the Elite Eight and women’s basketball added the WNIT championship. The Club Sports volleyball team also became national champions for the second consecutive season and the track team placed second overall in the Pacific-10 conference.
Next year, the Athletic Department and ASUO will rightfully work to eliminate massive ticket lines and situations where students have to skip class just to get tickets.
Campus safety
Eight campus assaults, several public masturbation reports and even an attempted armed robbery made campus safety a top priority this year. University administrators and the Department of Public Safety made small strides with plans to improve lighting on footpaths, in holding a safety forum and the creation of the Yellow Jackets volunteer safety patrol. But frustration with the attacks was apparent as several women’s groups took center stage at the EMU Amphitheater in protest.
Quiet riot
Eugene hasn’t seen a major riot since Halloween 1998. But the Eugene Police Department was busy when as many as 500 rioters clashed with police May 31. The reasoning behind the riot on 17th Avenue and Patterson Street is up for debate, but we applaud the clean-up crews for clearing away tons of broken glass from the streets in record time nevertheless.
Before we can assess whether the officers acted correctly or if the partygoers instigated the whole debacle, we need more details of that night. But we can say that any riot involving college-age people gives a bad name to all students. We are not all violent rebels as most riots suggest, but the events of May 31 did little to detach all students from that stereotype.
Incidental fee
In one of the Programs Finance Committee’s most trying years, nearly all student groups and programs funded by the PFC had their budget hearings recalled so that committee members could rectify a $500,000 accounting error, and groups like OSPIRG and the Oregon Commentator were under scrutiny for the content of their mission statements.
Allowing four unsupervised student volunteers to allocate $4 million in incidental fee money is simply a bad idea, and student organizations suffer because of it. There must be more supervision of PFC members so they can make better decisions.
Anthrax
The effects of Sept. 11 terrorism trickled to the University in November when a letter supposedly laced with anthrax arrived for a professor in Willamette Hall. HazMat arrived on the scene and men in protective suits combed the professor’s office and secured the building. In the end, tests determined the powdery substance on the letter was not anthrax, but the scare tested the quick reflexes of response teams.
Dry greek houses
President Dave Frohnmayer’s decision to keep alcohol out of fraternities indefinitely was a huge administrative stance on an age-old moral issue. The decision was something Frohnmayer had been contemplating for a long time — and something some fraternities had been dreading for even longer. But with few guidelines on how to go dry with basically no help from administrators, we’ll have to wait and see if Frohnmayer’s plan will fundamentally work next fall.