Tuesday, April 15, 2008

The Brown Daily heralDTuesday, april 15, 2008Volume CXLIII, No. 51 Since 1866, Daily Since 1891

www.browndailyherald.com 195 Angell Street, Providence, Rhode Island News tips: [email protected]

CAMPUS NEWS OPINIONSMETRO

DOJ: COPS IMPROvINgProvidence Police have improved their civil rights record, the Justice Department has found

5 11STICKY PHANTOMNew Dorm resident has his door glued shut; suspects remain at large

BABYISH REPORTERSSarah Rosenthal ’11 thinks pundits should take a break and stop being so “infantile”

3TOMORROW’S WEATHERIt’s going to be sunny tomorrow in Providence, even if you can’t get a job here.sunny, 63 / 37

Med School inches up in latest U.S. News rankingsBY AlESSANDRA SUUBERgConTribuTing WriTer

Alpert Medical School placed 31st for research and 23rd for primary care in U.S. News and World Re-port’s 2009 rankings of about 130 medical schools — improving from last year’s ranks of 34th and 27th, respectively.

The rankings were based on peer and residency director assessments, research activity, student selectivity and test scores, among other fac-tors.

Robert Morse, director of data research for U.S. News and World Report, said Brown’s scores in those categories increased across the board this year. He said improve-ments were seen in the school’s scores for peer reputation, under-graduate GPA and MCAT scores.

Brown medical students as a group had some of the highest MCAT scores on the list, he added.

The only area in which Brown’s scores decreased was in faculty-to-student ratio, he said. That decrease was the result of “slight fluctuation” in the year-to-year enrollment of students, Karen Scanlan, commu-nications manager for Bio Med and Medical Affairs, wrote in an e-mail to The Herald.

Dean of Medicine and Biological Sciences Eli Adashi said the medi-cal school has “made significant progress,” but added that there “is still more work to be done.” That includes more than just climbing U.S. News’s list, he said.

“It is a mistake to tailor one’s strategy on (the rankings),” he said.

Olympic boycott on student groups’ radarsBY gAURIE TIlAKsTaff WriTer

As violence in Tibet and Darfur and calls for a boycott of the up-coming Beijing Olympics opening ceremony continue, student groups have taken different positions, or none at all, on the issue.

Increasing violence in Tibet and continuing violence in Darfur have raised concerns that China has not lived up to the human rights stan-dard of an Olympic host. Many, including members of Congress, have urged President Bush not to attend the games’ opening cer-emony in August. The House of Representatives passed a resolution officially asking him not to attend, though it is non-binding. Many Eu-ropean heads of state have already

declared they will not attend the opening ceremony of the games.

Last week, even the Interna-tional Olympic Committee, the organization that selected Beijing to host the games, took the rare step of criticizing China’s human rights record, the New York Times reported Friday.

Among students who have ex-pressed support for a boycott are those concerned with the violence in Darfur.

“It’s overly simplistic to say the Olympics are just a sporting event,” said Scott Warren ’09, president of the Darfur Action Network, Brown’s chapter of STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition, both of which he founded. Warren added that a boycott of the open-ing ceremony has the potential to

make a powerful statement, espe-cially since the leaders of England, France and Germany have already pledged not to attend.

However, Warren said a boycott of the games themselves would be irresponsible. “A complete boycott is unfair to the athletes,” Warren said.

The Chinese Students Asso-ciation, among other groups, has no official opinion on whether the Olympics should be boycotted to protest the country’s human rights record, citing its identity as a cul-tural rather than political group. “CSA’s members all come from dif-ferent backgrounds and have dif-ferent viewpoints,” CSA President Julia Chiang ’09 said. “It would not

Black athletes face challenges, panelists sayBY gAURIE TIlAKsTaf f WriTer

Black athletes are exploited by universities, professional teams and the media, panelists said at a discussion titled “Reflections on Race and Sport in America” held Monday night in a packed Andrews Dining Hall.

Professor of Africana Studies James Campbell mediated the discussion, which included New York Times sports writer William Rhoden, former men’s basketball head coach Craig Robinson and track star Nicole Burns ’09.

The issue of race in sports “has become so much a feature of our lives that we scarcely even see it anymore,” Campbell said.

Rhoden drew attention to a problem with the power struc-tures in professional sports. He said that although most athletes and some coaches are black, most team owners are white. “Who’s got the real power?” he asked.

Robinson agreed with Rho-den’s point and said that in his ex-perience in college sports, most athletic directors were white.

Rhoden compared the world of professional sports to a planta-tion, where athletes, both black and white, are exploited by team owners. He said players are often traded like commodities and not paid as well as team owners.

Rhoden and Robinson both said it was unfair that athletes

Two student activistsarrested Sunday in D.C.Warren ’09, O’Brien ’10 protest Darfur genocide outside White House BY JOANNA WOHlMUTHsenior sTaff WriTer

After more than 500 students marched across the National Mall on Sunday to Lafayette Square, 18 of them — including Scott Warren ’09 and Colin O’Brien ’10 — broke with the group. They crossed Pennsylva-nia Avenue to stand on the sidewalk directly in front of the White House with protests signs and, as they had planned, were arrested.

The protest was one of the many held around the world for the “Global Day for Darfur” to mark five years of genocide in Sudan. It was organized by STAND: A Stu-dent Anti-Genocide Coalition, the national umbrella organization for more than 700 high school and col-lege programs, including Brown’s Darfur Action Network.

The primary goals of Sunday’s protest were to put pressure on President Bush to intervene in Su-dan and to get press attention for their cause, said Warren, the na-tional student director and founder of STAND.

After standing in front of the White House holding signs bear-ing protest slogans for about 15 minutes, federal law enforcement arrested the students one by one using plastic handcuffs. They were driven to a jail and spent about two hours in holding cells while they were fingerprinted and paperwork was processed.

Both students and police knew that the protest and arrests were going to take place beforehand, Warren said. Students were told what would happen once they were arrested and instructed on

how to behave during the process, he said.

“We wanted to make sure we were doing it as peacefully as pos-sible and not provoking any alterca-tions with police,” Warren said.

Everything was going accord-ing to plan until an officer began to go over the holding procedures, said O’Brien, STAND national high school outreach coordinator. The officer told the students that they would spend the night in jail and would be taken to a judge in the morning. “After 30 seconds of really awkward silence he started crack-ing up,” O’Brien said. “For those 30 second I was about ready to die.”

To be released, each accepted a misdemeanor charge of violating a permit, since the students occupied the area in front of the White House with protest materials for an extend-ed period of time, and paid $100 bail, Warren said. Because they do not plan to challenge the charges, the misdemeanor will go on their permanent record, but no further action will be taken against them by law enforcement officials.

“I had doubts beforehand about getting arrested but was really, real-ly happy with my decision,” O’Brien said. “It was really encouraging for us to see so many people on the other side of the street as enthusi-astic as we were.”

O’Brien said he was concerned about having the charge on his permanent record and questioned whether engaging in civil disobe-dience would help or harm their cause. “Like everything we do in the movement, it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the im-pact beforehand. ... You have to do these things a bit blindly, but we have already seen positive results,” he added. “I am confident that it was

a S t I R R I N g m e m o R I a l

min Wu / Herald

anna Ninan ’09 and members of the Darfur action Network put flags on lincoln Field to represent people killed in the conflict in Sudan.

alex DePaoli / HeraldNew York times sports writer William Rhoden (second from left) and former basketball coach Craig Robinson (second from right) discussed race and sports at a panel event.

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ToDay

The Brown Daily heralD

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By Gail Grabowski(c)2008 Tribune Media Services, Inc. 04/15/08

04/15/08

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

RELEASE DATE– Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword PuzzleEdited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

[email protected]

C r o s s W o r d

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Fill in the grid so that every row, every column and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 through 9.

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lUNCH — Butternut apple Bake, Vegan tofu Pups, mufeletta Calzone, tuna Noodle Casserole

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Page 2 tHe BRoWN DaIlY HeRalD tueSDaY, aPRIl 15, 2008

If you do one thing on College Hill today...the Janus Forum presents: “global Climate Change:

the end of the World as We Know It?”alumnae Hall at 3 p.m.

But Seriously | Charlie Custer and Stephen Barlow

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MeTrotueSDaY, aPRIl 15, 2008 tHe BRoWN DaIlY HeRalD Page 3

‘Plantations’ doesn’t belong in R.I., rep. says BY DEvIN gOUlDConTribuTing WriTer

A bill to take out the last three words of the state’s official name — “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations” — has been intro-duced several times over the past quarter of a century, but if state Rep. Joseph Almeida, D-Dist. 12 gets his way, this year Rhode Is-landers will finally vote in a ref-erendum on whether to remove the contentious phrase from the state’s name and constitution.

Almeida, who plans to intro-duce the bill soon, contends that the word “plantation” harkens to a time when Rhode Island was a major hub in the slave trade. More than ten percent of Rhode Islanders were enslaved at the middle of the 18th century, ac-cording to the repor t of the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. Plantations in South County were an integral part of the economy, and slaves were abundant in Newport.

According to Almeida, a Dem-ocrat and District 12 represen-tative, his district is 95 percent people of color. “You name it, we have it. We are the rainbow of America,” Almeida, a former po-lice officer, said. “This bill is our way to say that we’re also Rhode Islanders.” Almeida’s district is made up of Providence neighbor-hoods Washington Park and the South Side.

“The word ‘plantation’ is in-sulting to us as African Ameri-cans,” Almeida said, “because generations of us were brought against our will. Because we built Rhode Island.”

Almeida has been proposing the bill every year for the past eight years, but the House Ju-diciary Committee has not ap-proved it yet, he said. Former Rep. George Castro was the first to propose the bill and Mayor David Cicilline ’83 continued the tradition while a member of the state house of representatives, Almeida said. But it has never

made it to the voters’ ballot. Cicil-line did not respond to inquiries regarding the bill.

Travis Rowley ’02, vice-chair-man of the Rhode Island Young Republicans, responded to the bill on behalf of the organization in an e-mail to The Herald. “Almeida is a small-minded champion of political correctness,” Rowley wrote. “If he wishes to continue his obsession with what happened a long time ago, to people he did not know, he should do it on his own time.” Rowley argued that the state’s name is a historical fact and that altering it would make people more ignorant of history, not less.

House Majority Leader Gor-don Fox has not taken an official position on the bill, according to spokesman Larry Berman. “He sees both sides of the issue,” Ber-man said. “He is waiting to see what comes out in the hearing.”

The Providence branch of the National Association for the Ad-vancement of Colored People is also undecided on the bill, but branch president Clifford Mon-teiro said the organization would “generally support” it.

“It’s important to people who grew up being told that we never had slavery in Rhode Island,” Montiero said. “But concern about the mortgage crisis, the price of gasoline, unemployment — there are a whole lot of issues that may be more important.”

Corey Walker, assistant pro-fessor of Africana studies, pointed out that the state name brings up a variety of issues about the relationship between European settlers, enslaved blacks and the indigenous population in Rhode Island. “Part of the contention surrounds the competing his-tories of people in this state,” Walker said. “How can we use this as a teaching point?”

Gov. Donald Carcieri ’65 and House Minority Leader Robert Watson, R-Dist. 30, did not re-spond to inquiries regarding the bill.

Slow economy limiting R.I. jobs for grads BY AlESSANDRA SUUBERgConTribuTing WriTer

A month after Brown’s class of 2008 began its final semester of study and set its sights on life after College Hill, Rhode Island’s Department of Labor and Training reported a 5.7 percent unemployment rate for the state in January — a figure that not only surpassed the national average, but is also the highest the Ocean State has seen in more than a decade. In February, the rate climbed further, to 5.8 percent, limiting job opportunities for Brown graduates wanting to stay in the state.

Leonard Lardaro, a professor of economics at the University of Rhode Island who has offered forecasts of the state’s economy since 1991, said a high unemployment rate could make post-college job searches more dif-ficult when students graduate this year.

“Obviously if they’re contemplat-ing staying in Rhode Island, it’s not going to be very easy to get good jobs,” Lardaro said. “There are go-ing to be some around, but it’s not going to be enough for the number of people graduating, and so (college graduates) are going to have to look at the national market.”

But Lardaro said the slowing of the national economy also translates to fewer opportunities for graduates who seek employment outside of Rhode Island. “Fiscal stimulus checks are going out (in a few months) and that’s

going to take a while to work, so prob-ably things will not improve for them in national job searches until probably the third quarter or the fourth quarter of the year,” he said, adding that with the country and the state currently in a recession, unemployment rates may still increase despite state and national stimulus efforts.

Kimberly Delgizzo, director of Brown’s career development, said some organizations, both in and out-side of Rhode Island, have been “a bit more conservative” in the number of Brown graduates they hire.

Delgizzo said the financial services sector — including Wall Street firms, for example — has scaled back hir-ing on a national level in connection with high unemployment rates and the overall poor condition of the national economy. However, she added that the numbers have not changed dramati-cally for Brown students.

In general, a 5.7 percent state un-employment rate is not necessarily a cause for concern, Lardaro said, adding that he would begin to worry only if the rate were to reach 6.5 or 7 percent.

Lardaro said he would not be surprised to see rates as high as 6 percent this year, adding that unem-ployment could reach 6.5 percent “if things get ugly with what the Federal Reserve is doing.” The Fed recently has tried to spur economic growth by cutting interest rates and introducing a stimulus package to offer returns to taxpayers.

Lardaro said a combination of national and state-level factors has brought Rhode Island down from the peak-employment status of a 4.7 percent unemployment rate the state-achieved in January 2007.

Rhode Island’s ongoing housing crisis is the primary problem, Lardaro said. “The housing meltdown has hit Rhode Island particularly hard, and we really relied on it a great deal for our economic momentum.”

He added that the slowing of the national economy and Rhode Island’s current budget deficit have “just inten-sified the problem of housing.”

“In this past fiscal year that still has several months to run, (Rhode Island has) had to balance a $300 mil-lion deficit,” Lardaro said. “Clearly, balancing a deficit of that magnitude at a time when the national economy is slowing and when the housing market, which generated so much momentum, is weakening, will clearly slow you down.”

But graduates may not need to be immediately concerned with the rising unemployment in the state, as Laura Hart, communications manager for the Rhode Island Department of La-bor and Training, said unemployment rates in general change every month and that national results released in March reported a 0.1 percent decrease in unemployment in February, during the same period R.I. unemployment increased by 0.1 percent.

The DLT will release data for March unemployment on April 18.

Justice Dept. inquiry into PPD completedBY JOANNA SHARPlESSConTribuTing WriTer

The United States Justice Depart-ment has completed a five-year inves-tigation into the Providence Police Department, Mayor David Cicilline ’83 and Providence Police Chief Dean Esserman announced April 3.

The study began in 2002 in re-sponse to claims of the use of exces-sive force and civil rights abuses, according to an April 3 press release issued by the PPD. No report has been officially published.

The study followed a federal in-vestigation into the January 2000 death of Sgt. Cornel Young Jr., ac-cording to the Providence Business News article. Young was an off-duty black officer who was mistakenly shot by two white officers at a Provi-dence diner.

The Justice Department found that the PPD has improved since Esserman became the Providence police chief, according to the press release. Esserman assumed the post in 2003, according to an April 4 ar-ticle published in the Providence Business News.

Rhode Island Attorney General Patrick Lynch ’87 thought the report reflected well on the police depart-ment, said Michael Healey, a spokes-man for Lynch. “Attorney General Lynch thinks it’s good news for the Providence Police Department and for the people of Providence. It shows that the Police Department has responded to criticism and is trying to be as sensitive as possible to the needs of the diverse popula-tion they serve,” Healey said.

Lt. Kenneth Cohen, president of the Fraternal Order of the Police, Lodge No. 3, said the Justice Depart-ment recommended the police alter their use of force policy and change the manner in which civilian com-

plaints are investigated. The Justice Department also encouraged the police to switch to using a different type of baton, among other sugges-tions, Cohen said.

Cliff Montiero, president of the Providence branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said he has heard of several civil-rights based problems with the Providence police. “The NAACP has had complaints of ra-cial profiling, excessive use of force, name calling. But it’s mostly racial profiling,” he said.

Montiero complimented Esser-man for actively trying to address such problems. “I think he’s more accessible than any colonel I’ve seen in many years. ... There’s never been a colonel that I heard of that has that kind of communication skills with the community,” he said.

Still, Montiero said he thought there needed to be more account-ability for officers who violate civil rights. “I’m really upset that you can’t have a dysfunctional policeman fired. In any other industry in this country, a person is fired,” he said.

Cohen said he didn’t think such abuses were rampant. “I wouldn’t have characterized the department as a brutal department back then,” he said. Nonetheless, he identified community relations as one of the department’s more significant prob-lems. “The perception in the com-munity may have been a little bit tainted toward the (members of the PPD).” The PPD’s interactions with the community have improved since Esserman took over, he said.

Cohen said he was pleased with the results of the study. “I believe it shows that the Justice Depart-ment has faith in the Providence Police Department, just as we do,” he said.

Montiero said he spoke with

Justice Department investigators toward the beginning of the study, but he heard nothing else about the study until it had been completed. He said he was disappointed that no report was published and that Jus-tice Department members were not present at the press conference.

“When I went to the press confer-ence, I thought the Justice Depart-ment would be there and I would get a report,” he said. He said he was told the Justice Department had sent a letter saying the investigation was closed, but he never saw the letter. “I think it should have been shared with us prior to the press conference,” he said.

The Police Department has been more sensitive to civil rights issues, Montiero said, but more needs to be done. His desire for further changes and his close working relationship to Esserman drove him to attend the press conference, despite criticism from some other NAACP members, he said. “We want a working rela-tionship with the police department, we want more involvement with the police department, and because we want to see more inclusion of mi-norities and women, that’s why I was there,” he said.

The Urban League of Rhode Island — which works to promote racial equality, according to its Web site — was involved in asking the Justice Department to study the Providence Police, said the organi-zation’s CEO, Dennis Langley.

He said he has also seen dramatic improvements. “I think the Police Department in Providence is un-dergoing a radical transformation,” he said, citing increased commu-nity engagement and department oversight. “We’re pleased with what we’ve seen.”

Esserman could not be reached for comment.

thanks for reading.


be fair to generalize and give you one stance on the issue.”

Still, it held an event April 4 where students could sign a flag that will be hung in the Beijing Olympic stadium this summer.

Chiang said the event was well-received. People were excited and surprised that the flag was actually going to be displayed at the Olym-pics this summer, she said.

Chiang said the only negative reception to the event was a single student promoting a boycott of the Olympics on the Facebook event for the flag signing.

Putzer Hung ’10, publicity chair for the Brown Taiwan Society, also felt his group should not take a po-litical stance.

“The people in the group all have different views on the subject, and I don’t think I have the right to speak for the entire organization,” he wrote in an e-mail to The Herald.

“The Brown Taiwan Society is purely a cultural organization and we do not take any political stands,” he added.

Hung said he personally doesn’t support an Olympic boycott. “I don’t think it would actually accomplish anything,” he said.

Boycotting the Olympics could be taken as an attack not on the Chinese government, but on the people who have expressed a great deal of genu-ine excitement about the upcom-ing games, said Visiting Assistant Professor of History John Delury, a specialist on modern China.

The International Olympic Com-mittee decided it was time for China to get a chance to host the event, Delury said. “The world community knew what they were getting into.”

Delury added that the situation hasn’t gotten worse since China won the bid for the Olympics.

From the perspective of Chinese citizens, he said, the main signifi-cance of the Olympic Games is a moment in which China plays host to the world.

“Putting ourselves in their shoes, there’s a legitimate concern of being let down,” Delury said.

Groups split on boycott

continued from page 1

the right thing to do.”While pleased with the results

of the protest and arrests, War-ren said it was not something he would want to do again without good reason.

“I was a little nervous going in but was really glad about the press attention and the positive student reaction,” he added.

“It catches peoples’ eye and gets the message out to as many people as possible,” O’Brien said. “It shows how important we think this cause is.”

With cameras and reporters on the scene, Warren said he felt the group’s goals to put pressure on Bush and to garner media attention were accomplished. The arrests were featured on the CNN Web site later that day.


Courtesy of Scott WarrenScott Warren (pictured) and Colin o’Brien ’10 were among 18 students arrested Sunday in Washington for protesting in front of the White House. Sunday, the ‘global Day for Darfur,’ marked the fifth year of the genocide in Sudan.

Students arrested at Darfur protest

generate large amounts of rev-enue for colleges while often not being offered scholarships.

He said student-athletes in the Ivy League work as hard as ath-letes at schools in major confer-ences and they should therefore be offered the same opportunities for scholarships.

“A busted knee at Brown hurts just like a busted knee at Auburn,” Rhoden said.

Robinson said black and white athletes face dif ferent standards as players. When asked by an audience member to describe North Carolina’s star basketball player, Tyler Hansbrough, as an athlete, Robinson said, “Tyler Hansbrough is a terrific player. If he were black, he’d be an ordi-nary player.”

Campbell began a discussion about the experience of black student-athletes by asking Burns about her experience as a sprinter

and student at Brown.“I do personally feel comfort-

able as a black student-athlete,” Burns said, adding that she thought athletics foster unity among races. But she said that minority students often form groups off the field.

When she goes to lunch, she said, “I am sitting at a table full of black students.” Burns told The Herald that though the track team is racially diverse as a whole, the athletes in her event — sprinting — are mostly black.

Robinson said when he was an undergraduate at Princeton, many people stereotyped black athletes. He said people openly suggested that “you’re only here because you play basketball.”

Burns said that during her freshman year at Brown, she also noticed this prejudice. “But I don’t notice it anymore,” she said, add-ing, “I’m still getting the same grades that they are.”

Panelists agreed that student-

athletes are not properly edu-cated about the consequences of focusing on their sports over their schoolwork. “You can’t just be good at a sport,” Burns said. “You need to have some sort of education.”

Burns said she works with high school athletes in Provi-dence to teach them about the importance of completing their education.

Rhoden said many student-athletes drop out of school in hopes of becoming professional athletes, only to be injured early in their careers. Such athletes are left with nothing to fall back on, he said.

Robinson said the solution to this problem is giving student-athletes scholarships for life so they can resume their education if they return to school after playing professionally.

Ultimately, he said, only a small number of college athletes who are drafted will become suc-

cessful professionals. “The others should be able to come back and get their degrees,” he said. He added that a 28-year-old former athlete dedicated to getting a col-lege degree would be a positive role model for other students.

However, Robinson said he would not be in favor of pay-ing student-athletes. “There’s a beauty to amateur athletes that I see in my players’ eyes when you win a game you shouldn’t have won,” he said. “You don’t see that in the pros.”

Without athletic scholarships, student-athletes often struggle to pay for college and are steered away from Ivy League schools towards sports powerhouses that offer more generous aid.

Burns said she knows the hardship of working through col-lege while playing a sport. “I’m working three times a week,” Burns said.

She said she often finishes practice at 6 p.m. and then works from 6:30 p.m. until 10 p.m. in order to help her family pay for her education.

“Sometimes I think maybe I should have taken that scholar-ship and gone to another school,” Burns said.

Rhoden also told The Herald that in his experience as a journal-ist, the predominance of whites in sports media is a recent phe-nomenon that must be considered when examining race and sports. He said in the past, black writ-ers fought for the rights of black athletes to break into professional sports, but in recent years the media has become predominantly white.

When Campbell brought up last year’s widely watched trial of Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick for his role in an illegal dogfighting ring, Rhoden argued that Vick’s case demon-strated that when black athletes make mistakes, “The rug will be pulled out from under (them) so quickly.”

The event drew a diverse crowd, including students, coach-es and professors from other schools.

“This is the first time I’ve seen such a cross section of people,” said Associate Athletic Director Carolan Norris. “It was really in-spiring.”

Robinson: Student-athletes need scholarships for lifecontinued from page 1

BY ANNE SIMONSConTribuTing WriTer

Chenjerai Hove is one of Zimba-bwe’s most famous writers, having won several literary awards and served as the head of the Zimbabwe Writers Union.

But he has not been to his home nation for seven years. When he last spoke to his mother about it, she replied, “Don’t think about coming — they’ll chop off your head!”

Hove, an acclaimed author of novels, poetry, essays and plays, came to College Hill last August to begin his fellowship with the In-ternational Writers Project, which offers an office in the Watson Insti-tute for International Studies and a stipend for living costs to writers who feel that they cannot freely express themselves in their home nations.

Hove is best known for “Bones,” an award-winning novel published in 1988 about the plight of a woman in rural Zimbabwe.

But his “full-time job,” as he put it, is criticizing the regime of his native country’s long-time ruler, President Robert Mugabe. He has been leading what he calls a vaga-bond’s life, travelling from country to country since he was pressured to leave Zimbabwe — harassed by the government and sent a slew of death threats.

Since the country held elections March 29, Zimbabwe has been in a state of uncertainty.

The main opposition party, led by Morgan Tsvangirai, has claimed victory over Mugabe, who has ruled the country for almost 28 years.

The regime has been severely weakened by the persistence of extreme poverty, devastating mal-nutrition and the world’s highest inflation rate during its time in power.

The government has not yet re-leased its official vote count, saying it needs time for recounts in some areas.Meanwhile, the country’s citizens and foreign leaders are growing restless.

Hove, who said he grew up with the opposition candidate Tsvangi-rai, described him as a fighter. If

Tsvangirai comes to power, Hove himself would be likely to return to Zimbabwe, he said.

But it will take a long time for most of the educated professionals who were driven out by Mugabe, like Hove, to return to the country, he said.

These people, who will be cru-cial to the rebuilding the nation, will have difficulty returning if they have set up lives elsewhere, he said.

“The country is run by a man who is mad,” Hove said. “Nobody has the courage to say it to him.” Mugabe is known to have rigged elections in the past, most glaringly in 2002, when some think that the presidency was stolen from Tsvan-girai, he added.

Hove called Mugabe’s electoral tactics “vulgar.” For example, even though Hove hasn’t lived in Zim-

CaMpus newstueSDaY, aPRIl 15, 2008 tHe BRoWN DaIlY HeRalD Page 5

Two professors get guggenheimsassociate Professor of History

Deborah Cohen and Professor of eng-lish and Comparative literature For-rest gander received guggenheim Fellowships for 2008. the John Simon guggenheim memorial Foundation, which awards fellowships in the natu-ral sciences, creative arts, social sci-ences and humanities, selected 190 individuals from approximately 2,600 applicants, according to an april 3 press release.

“everyone applies for the guggen-heim because it’s there,” gander said. “It has a tradition of supporting both scholars and writers. I’ve been apply-ing for years and years. I didn’t think I was ever going to get one.”

Cohen will spend the next academic year at the New York Public library’s Dorothy and lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, where she will be working on a project focusing on family secrets in Britain from 1840 to 1990.

“What I’m interested in is the development of confessional culture,” Cohen said. “Why is it that so many of us feel that our intimate secrets should be barred from the public?”

Cohen said she anticipates working on the project for the next four to five years, though she hopes to teach a course resulting from her work at the Cullman Center when she returns to Brown after one year. Cohen currently is teaching a new course related to her project called HISt 1970J: “Families and Secrets.”

gander said he will be using his fellowship to continue his writing with “ecopoetics,” a branch of poetry that focuses on writing’s relationship with the physical world. gander will remain at Brown in the fall, serving as the director of the literary arts program, but hopes to use the spring and fall semesters of 2009 to work on his fellowship. He said he will be using funding from the fellowship to continue his work with eco-poetics and the Chihuahuan Desert on the mexico-texas border and his translation of two works by the argentine author Cesar aira.

according to the guggenheim Foundation’s Web site, the founda-tion awarded approximately $8.2 million in fellowships this year. Both gander and Cohen added that though the guggenheim does not of-fer comparatively more funding than other fellowship programs, the competitiveness of the award makes the guggenheim one of the most prestigious fellowships in the country.

— Noura Choudhury

Writer is watching Zimbabwe from afar

the undergraduate Council of Students agreed to nullify the results of an election to a university Resources Committee seat and begin a second election process at a special meeting monday evening, after the winner of the original race dropped out because he was frustrated with the council’s handling of the situation.

uCS decided last week to hold a second election after a lack of public-ity resulted in low voter turnout among students. the winner of the first election, Kieran Fitzgerald ’10, removed his name from consideration Sunday evening in an e-mail to the uCS listserv.

Fitzgerald removed himself because he felt that uCS was “incapable” of taking action, he wrote in the e-mail.

“I was really disappointed in uCS,” Fitzgerald told the Herald. “It just seemed like they were nothing but an ineffectual debating body.”

Fitzgerald added that he still would have liked to be on the uRC, a group of faculty, students and administrators that makes budget recom-mendations to the president, had the process not been a “nightmare.”

the election should not have been redone, Fitzgerald said. “there was an election, and I won, so I certainly think I have a right to be” on the uRC, he said.

uCS also agreed that the council could bypass the election in favor of an internal appointment process if the Faculty executive Committee approves the change. Currently, FeC rules require that the student body elect the undergraduates who serve on the uRC.

the council specified that the FeC must change the requirement by april 24 at 5 p.m., or else uCS would continue with the election, said Student activities Chair Drew madden ’10. the election will be held dur-ing the first week of reading period if the council adheres to a schedule madden proposed.

the council also considered whether it should mandate that a candidate for the uRC receive 50 percent of the vote, as it does for uCS elections, but reached no formal conclusion on the matter despite general agreement in support of such a change. the requirement could be formally approved at Wednesday’s meeting, though it would not necessarily require a formal vote, said uCS President michael glassman ’09.

“We probably will vote on it, just so we’re completely crystal clear,” glassman said.

the council also discussed improving publicity for the second election, avoiding the mistakes made earlier. table slips, all-campus e-mails and IPtV slides will all be used, madden said.

glassman also announced that this Wednesday’s general body meet-ing will be held in the Vartan gregorian Quad lounge, not in Petteruti lounge, because of a Day on College Hill events.

— Chaz Kelsh

UCS to redo election for budget committee

n e W s i n b r i e f Fire panel smashed, student’s door gluedBY MAx MANKINsenior sTaff WriTer

The following summary includes all major incidents reported to the Department of Public Safety between April 3 and April 9. It does not in-clude general service and alarm calls. The Providence Police De-partment also responds to incidents

occurring of f campus. DPS does not divulge information on open cases that are currently under investiga-tion by the department, PPD or the Office of Student Life. DPS main-tains a daily log of all shift activity and general service calls which can be viewed during business hours at its headquarters, located at 75 Charlesfield St.

Thursday, April 3:10:07 p.m. A student stated that

at about 8 a.m. she locked her bike to a parking meter outside the west

door of the Blue Room on Water-man Street. When she returned at approximately 5 p.m. the bike was gone. The bike is not registered with Operation ID and there are no suspects at this time.

6:28 p.m. A student stated that she left her wallet in the hallway outside her room door and went to help a friend put something in a car. When she returned she noticed that her wallet was missing.

Saturday, April 5:1:38 a.m. While on patrol, an

officer witnessed a student strike a fire panel in Barbour Hall with a baseball bat. The case has been turned over to Student Life.

2:02 a.m. A student reported that he and his friend discovered that hot glue was placed in the door lock of his room in Grad Tower A. The door could not be opened and Facilities Management was notified. There are no suspects at

this time.Monday, April 7:

9:07 a.m. While on patrol, an officer observed graffiti on the ex-terior of a stockroom building. Fa-cilities Management was notified.

1:11 p.m. A student reported that between 7 p.m. on April 6 and 11:11 p.m. on April 7, a laptop, an iPod and money were taken from his room in Harkness House. There are no suspects at this time.

Wednesday, April 9: 6:08 p.m. While on patrol, an

of ficer was flagged down by a member of the RISD Department of Public Safety. The RISD officer had noticed two unknown sub-jects on the roof of MacFarlane House. DPS officers arrived on the scene and observed two Brown students smoking cigars. Officers explained the safety issues con-cerning the students’ actions and they were both escorted out of the building.

Courtesy of the Watson Institute

Chenjerai Hove is in residence at Brown.

Courtesy of Brown.eduassociate Professor of HistoryDeborah Cohen

CRIME LOG

continued on page 6


babwe in seven years, he said his name still appears on voting lists, and someone has voted using his name in all of the elections since he left.

Whoever someday takes over

the Zimbabwean presidency will face great challenges in rebuilding the broken country, Hove said.

There is the physical reconstruc-tion that will come first, but more important will be the “psychologi-cal and emotional reconstruction of the people,” he said.


Visiting writer, amid threats, has hope for home

IRS outsources collections, to the ire of congressmenBY lYNDSEY lAYTON AND CHRISTOPHER lEEWashingTon posT

WASHINGTON — The Internal Rev-enue Service expects to lose more than $37 million by using private debt collectors to pursue tax scofflaws through a program that has outraged consumers and led to charges on Capitol Hill that the agency is wast-ing money for work that IRS agents could do more effectively.

Since 2006, the agency has used three companies to go after a $1 bil-lion slice of the nation’s unpaid taxes. Despite aggressive collection tactics, the companies have rounded up only $49 million, more than half of what it has cost the IRS to implement the program. The debt collectors have pocketed commissions of up to 24 percent.

Now, as Americans file their 2007 taxes, Democratic leaders want to end the effort.

“This program is the hood orna-ment for incompetence,” said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., a leading critic who has introduced a bill to stop the program. The measure has 23 cosponsors, all but one of them Democrats. “It makes no sense at all to be turning over these tax accounts to private tax collectors that end up costing the taxpayers money.”

Defenders say the program adds muscle to IRS efforts to close the gulf between what taxpayers owe the federal government and how much

the IRS collects. In 2001, the “tax gap” was an estimated $345 billion.

“The real choice is whether we use private collection agencies or let these tax debts go uncollected,” said Rep. Jim Ramstad, Minn., the top Republican on the Ways and Means oversight subcommittee. “I hope we don’t take an enormous step back-ward in our efforts to close the tax gap by eliminating a program that’s working.”

After years of lobbying by the private collection industry, the Re-publican-controlled Congress created the program in 2004. The goal was to use collection agencies to close the relatively easy cases the IRS said it did not have the staff to handle: in-stances in which the taxpayer is not disputing the debt and the amount owed is relatively modest. Support-ers hoped that the program would eventually be expanded to take over more of the agency’s debt-collection duties, and the IRS predicts that the program will break even by 2010.

Three firms were awarded con-tracts: Pioneer Credit Recovery, based in the western New York dis-trict represented by Rep. Thomas Reynolds, who supported the pro-gram and recently announced his retirement; CBE Group of Iowa, the home state of Sen. Charles Grassley, who helped create the program; and Linebarger Goggan Blair and Samp-son, a law firm based in Texas, home

continued on page 8

“The way that we would prefer to look at that is ... grow the substance and the rankings will follow.”

Medical Student Senate Presi-dent Kartik Venkatesh MD’10 said Brown’s increased scores could be attributed to a number of factors. He said the school’s research programs have been growing, with a number of high profile national studies cur-rently taking place at the school and its affiliated hospitals.

“At the administrative level it’s certainly been a focus of the Uni-versity ... to expand the research enterprise, and I think that’s being translated into the changes you’re seeing,” Venkatesh said.

Venkatesh added that the school’s recent switch to a standard applica-tion system open to pre-medical students outside those in the Pro-gram in Liberal Medical Education — instituted for the 2005-2006 school year — has helped the school gain recognition and, in turn, points at U.S. News and World Report and the attention of prospective students.

Adashi said his goal as dean, as

well as his hopes for his announced successor, Professor of Medical Sci-ence Edward Wing, was to foster programmatic coordination among the various elements of Brown’s medical school.

“On campus we are fairly physi-cally contiguous, and we are orga-nized in a way that is more conducive to interacting physically with each other,” Adashi said. “(But) when you have seven hospitals (affiliated with the University) ... it’s more of a chal-lenge,” he added.

Adashi said he would like to see the different elements of the medical school “increasingly congregate and assume a single identity as much as possible” in the future in order to continue building quality and mak-ing the type of positive progress the school has already seen.

“That remains the main priority that we are to focus on,” he said.

Joshua Gepner MD’08 said that when he was looking at medical schools, he considered the rankings in weighing his choices. “I think it’s great that Brown is a competitive school that does well in the rank-ings,” Gepner said.


Alpert 31st in research, 23rd in primary care

worlD & naTiontueSDaY, aPRIl 15, 2008 tHe BRoWN DaIlY HeRalD Page 7

Northwest, Delta to join forcesBY PETER PAElos angeles TiMes

Delta Air Lines Inc. and Northwest Airlines Corp. agreed to a merger Monday, creating the world’s largest airline and triggering what is ex-pected to be a long-awaited industry consolidation.

The oft-delayed pact came amid one of the industry’s most-tumul-tuous periods as three airlines col-lapsed in one week and American Airlines, the current largest car-rier, canceled thousands of flights because of missed aircraft inspec-tions.

Delta said the combined airline would have an enterprise value of $17.7 billion.

The latest industry turmoil could boost prospects for the merger’s ap-proval as the airline industry faces record fuel prices and slowing de-mand amid fears of a recession. Up next, analysts said, is a possible com-bination between United Airlines parent UAL Corp. and Continental Airlines Inc..

For the flying public, the Delta-Northwest combination could result in higher fares in some markets, but widespread hikes are likely to be muted because the two airlines have few overlapping routes.

The deal, which would require approval from the U.S. Justice Department, would create a new and expanded Delta with a fleet of 800 planes and 75,000 employees. It would fly more than 105 million passengers annually to more than 390 cities worldwide, and it would be the largest airline in terms of total passengers.

In a statement, the carriers said the new airline would retain the Delta name and have its headquar-ters in Atlanta, where Delta has its largest airport hub. In hopes of winning political support in Min-neapolis, Northwest’s home base, the combined airline would keep a major presence there, including maintaining Minneapolis-St. Paul In-ternational Airport as a major hub.

“Together, we are creating Amer-ica’s leading airline, an airline that is financially secure, able to invest in our employees and customers, and built to thrive in an increasingly competitive marketplace,” said Delta Chief Executive Richard Anderson, who will head the combined airline. “Delta and Northwest are a perfect fit.”

But the deal faces significant hurdles from consumer organiza-tions, which are fearful of rising ticket prices, small communities worried about losing air service and several powerful members of Congress. Rep. Jim Oberstar, D-Minn., the chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, has vowed to block the merger.

Court to decide whether D.A. liable for bad verdictBY DAvID SAvAgElos angeles TiMes

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said Monday that it would take up a Los Angeles case to decide whether a chief prosecutor can be held liable for a man’s wrongful conviction of murder.

The case of Van de Kamp v. Goldstein will test the reach of the long-standing legal rule that pros-ecutors are immune from being sued, even when the defendants are shown to be innocent.

Prosecutors, like judges, must be free to do their jobs without fear of being sued later, the high court said in 1976.

This rule of “absolute immunity” applies whenever a prosecutor “acts within the scope of his prosecutorial duties,” the justices said then.

But it is not clear whether this immunity rule protects supervis-ing prosecutors against suits over

alleged management failures.Thomas L. Goldstein, a Marine

Corps veteran from Long Beach, Calif., who spent 24 years in prison before his murder conviction was overturned in 2004, is not asking the Supreme Court to throw out the legal shield for prosecutors. In-stead, he argues it should be limited to prosecutors who appear in court, not to supervisors who set policies for the county.

After his release, Goldstein sued John Van de Kamp, who was the Los Angeles County district attorney from 1975 to 1983. He alleged that Van de Kamp and his top deputy allowed county prosecutors to make use of jailhouse informants, many of whom were unreliable and un-trustworthy.

Moreover, the county had no system for sharing information on whether informants had been used before and given promises in ex-change for their testimony.

In Goldstein’s case, Edward Fink, a repeat criminal, was put on the witness stand to testify that Goldstein, while in a holding cell, had confessed to shooting his neighbor. Goldstein maintained his innocence, and, years later, it was revealed the informant lied when he denied receiving favors from county officials in exchange for his testimony.

Goldstein said his suit, if suc-cessful, “would put every prosecu-tor’s office on notice they need to establish an information manage-ment system for informants. And that will result in fewer wrongful convictions.”

Lawyers for Van de Kamp said the suit should be thrown out on the grounds of prosecutorial immunity. But U.S. District Judge A. Howard Matz in Los Angeles and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco refused. They said pros-ecutors can be sued for managerial

failures that result in a wrongful conviction.

“We conclude that Goldstein’s allegations are administrative and not prosecutorial in function. (They) bear a close connection to how the District’s Attorney’s Office was managed, not to whether or how to prosecute a particular case,” said U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson of San Francisco, who served on the three-judge panel.

In their appeal to the Supreme Court, lawyers for Van de Kamp and Los Angeles County said the 9th Circuit’s decision, if allowed to stand, will “open the floodgates” to suit against top prosecutors. They said plaintiffs can always allege that a managerial lapse led to a faulty prosecution.

The California District Attor-neys Association and the National District Attorneys Association also urged the court to take up the case.

Physicist popularized fantastic phenomenaBY JOHN JOHNSON JR.los angeles TiMes

John A. Wheeler, the fertile-minded physicist who popu-larized mind-stretching ideas about black holes, wormholes and quantum foam and also con-founded admirers by helping to conceive some of the most potent weapons of mass destruction, has died. He was 96.

Wheeler died Sunday morn-ing of pneumonia at his home in Hightstown, N.J., according to his daughter, Alison Wheeler Lahnston. He had been in declin-ing health for the past week.

In the world of science, the 20th century was seen as the century of physics, and Wheeler was its most imaginative adman. He was also science’s Zelig, seeming to be present at every important event or discovery. In a career that spanned eight decades, Wheeler consulted with Niels Bohr and Robert Op-penheimer to build the atomic bomb, helped Edward Teller with the hydrogen bomb, argued quantum mechanics with Albert Einstein and then, in middle age, turned his mind to some of the most challenging problems of cosmology.

Are there multiple universes? If there are, how can we move from one to the other? Would anything exist if mankind -- the observer/participator -- wasn’t around to see it?

He fearlessly explored ideas such as the possibility of travel-ing across deep space in fanciful constructs he named wormholes, by his example giving lesser-known physicists the courage to

pursue cosmological questions without fear of ridicule.

Along the way, he nurtured the careers of a new generation of physicists, including Nobel laureate Richard Feynman and Kip Thorne.

To the end, Wheeler asked big questions, adopting a person-al mantra: “How come the quan-tum? How come existence?”

“Some people think Wheel-er’s gotten crazy in his later years,” Feynman said. “But he’s always been crazy.”

Born July 9, 1911, in Jackson-ville, Fla., John Archibald Wheel-er was the eldest of four children of peripatetic librarians. At 4, he asked his mother about the universe. “Where does it end? How far out can you go?”

Her answer -- if any answer is possible -- didn’t satisfy. “This created a terrible worry in my mind,” he said in a 2003 inter-view. While still a child, Wheeler turned to J. Arthur Thompson’s “Outline of Science.”

Curious to the point of ignor-ing the need for self-preserva-tion, he set off bottle rockets indoors and once touched an 11,000-volt power line to see what it felt like.

Wheeler attended Johns Hopkins University, earning a doctorate with a dissertation on the dispersion and absorption of helium. In 1933, he traveled to Copenhagen, Denmark, to study with Bohr, the physics giant who won a Nobel Prize for his ex-plorations into the structure of the atom.

Wheeler was teaching at

Headlines from the pastApril 15, 1968

Forum to examine Status of the artsBrown RotC units Include men from Nearby Colleges

Students Display art

Kidnapped CBS reporter freed after two monthsBY ERNESTO lONDONOWashingTon posT

BAGHDAD — A British journalist kidnapped two months ago in the southern city of Basra while on as-signment for CBS News was freed Monday.

A team of Iraqi army soldiers found Richard Butler when they raided a house in central Basra on Monday afternoon, said Maj. Gen. Mohammed al-Askari, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry.

The freelance journalist was on assignment for “60 Minutes” when he was abducted from a hotel Feb. 10. He was “in very good health condition, mentally and physically,” Askari said.

“The Iraqi army stormed the house and overcame my guards, and they burst through the door,” Butler told al-Iraqiya state television. “I had my hood on, which I had to have on all the time and they shouted some-thing at me and I took my hood off.” He said he felt “pretty weak” and had lost weight.

“I’m looking forward to a decent meal and getting back to my family and my friends at CBS,” Butler said.

CBS News released a statement saying, “We’re incredibly grateful that our colleague, Richard Butler, has been released and is safe.”

His release provided a boost to Iraqi security forces, whose perfor-mance during a recent operation against militias in Basra drew criti-cism and led to the dismissal of 1,300 Iraqi soldiers and policemen.

Also Monday, car bombings and other attacks killed at least 22 people in Iraq. The deadliest, a car bomb-ing in the northwestern province of Nineveh, killed at least 12 people, ac-cording to a provincial police official who spoke on the condition of ano-nymity because he wasn’t authorized to release information.

At least four people, including two police officers, were killed in a car bombing in Baghdad, according to police.

And in Tall Afar, also in Nineveh province, four people were killed and nearly 30 wounded in a suicide bombing during a funeral for an Iraqi

soldier.At least two U.S. soldiers were

killed in Iraq on Monday. One died in Salahuddin province, north of Baghdad, in an “improvised explosive device attack,” the military said in a statement. In northeastern Baghdad, a soldier was killed after a roadside bomb struck his vehicle.

Late Monday, the U.S. military announced it would release an Asso-ciated Press photographer who has been in custody for two years.

The military said it decided to release Bilal Hussein because Iraqi judicial officials granted him amnesty for his alleged crimes. The military ac-cused Hussein of links to insurgents, which he and his employer denied.

A top U.S. military official told reporters in Baghdad on Monday afternoon that Iraqi and U.S. forces have succeeded in reducing the num-ber of rockets that land in the Green Zone.

After the Basra offensive, rocket fire had nearly paralyzed the heavily protected sector that includes the U.S. Embassy and the Iraqi parliament.

The official attributed the success to round-the-clock aerial surveillance of eastern Baghdad’s Sadr City dis-trict, a stronghold of Shiite militias loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the area where most rockets are launched. The surveillance allows for quick strikes against the rocket-launching teams.

“We’ve got this thing down to a science,” said the official, who briefed journalists on the condition of ano-nymity because he was discussing sensitive information.

Al-Sadr issued a statement Monday decrying the firing of the 1,300 Iraqi soldiers and policemen dismissed after the Basra operation. Some were accused of helping the militias, includ-ing al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

“The brothers in the army and po-lice who handed over their weapons to (the Mahdi Army) did so ... out of religious and patriotic commitment,” al-Sadr said.

—Special correspondents Zaid Sabah and Naseer Nouri in Bagh-dad and Dlovan Brwari in Mosul

contributed to this report.

continued on page 8


freshman Brynn Smith ’11 won the shot put with a throw of 44-04.75 feet.

The sophomores followed suit as Danielle Grunloh ’10 earned her third consecutive discus title with a throw of 145-06 feet and Shannon Stone ’10 came in third in the triple jump with a distance of 35-08.00 feet.

Tiffany Chang ’08 and Rachel Biblo ’11 also delivered solid per-formances in the field events with Chang earning second in the pole vault and Biblo coming in third in the long jump.

“Overall, the team took advan-tage of the great weather and Ivy League competition,” King said.

“Hopefully we can carry this mo-mentum into the weeks ahead. The outdoor season is very short, so it’s important to continue to work hard at practice and improve every weekend.”

With the Ivy League Champion-ships less than four weeks away, the team hopes to use this weekend’s success as a springboard for the rest of the season.

This weekend, the team will have split squads running at the Husky Spring Invite and the UConn Select Invitational, both at UConn.

W. track victorious at home meet


“I think it is another lesson learned and we need to focus on playing on a full 60 minutes to play well the entire game,” McCarthy said.

A positive during the game was the return of midfielder Kiki Man-ners ’10, who missed four games due to a hip injury.

Brown will look to make gains in its ball control against Yale on Wednesday in New Haven, Conn.

“I think there’s no doubt we’ll have a different start on Wednes-day,” McDonald said. Previous wins have kept the Bears in fifth place, still in the running for the Ivy title. The team has five games left, the last three at home, and though it has some work to do if it hopes to make playoffs spirits are still high.

“After we beat Dartmouth, the rest of the league is worried about us,” Kelly said. “We can be one of the best teams in the league.”


Big Red hits w. lax with 17-9 defeat

to President Bush.Pioneer Credit employees have

given congressional candidates and political action committees $117,450 since 1995, including $16,250 to Reynolds. CBE Group employees have given $9,372 during that pe-riod, including $2,500 to Grassley.

Linebarger, Goggan, one of the nation’s largest collection agencies, has extensive government ties. The firm, its employees and their spous-es have given political action com-mittees and federal candidates in both parties $423,260 since 1995.

The Austin-based company was abruptly dropped from the program last year for reasons that the IRS declined to make public. Its work-load was doled out to the two other companies. Mike Vallandingham, a partner at the firm, said Linebarger, Goggan met IRS expectations for collection results and “received high marks for regulatory and procedural accuracy, timeliness and professionalism.”

The firm had been under scru-tiny since 2002 because of some of its municipal contracts. A partner went to prison in 2002 for conspir-ing to bribe two San Antonio city councilmen. Last year, the city of Mansfield, Texas, ended its contract with Linebarger, Goggan after the firm made a $2,000 donation to the

mayor a month after his election.In February, the city of Chicago

fired the firm after officials learned that it had paid for a vacation for a contract officer.

Since the federal program began, the National Taxpayer Advocate, an ombudsman’s office within the IRS, has logged more than 1,500 com-plaints. Taxpayers have accused private collectors of bombarding them with phone calls, or repeat-edly calling the wrong taxpayer or sending written notification to the wrong addresses. Critics say the program has subjected taxpayers — some of whom owe the IRS nothing and have done nothing wrong — to harassment.

A common complaint is that con-tractors do not explain the nature of their calls until they confirm a taxpayer’s identity. They try to do that by asking for a Social Security number, something many people are reluctant to disclose.

Jeff Trinca, a lawyer for the Tax Fairness Coalition, which repre-sents Pioneer Credit and CBE Group, said the phone calls come after taxpayers have received writ-ten notice of their debt.

“That layer of potential confu-sion is there to protect the taxpay-er,” he said.

—Staff researcher Madonna Leb-ling contributed to this report.


Congressmen furious about IRS outsourcing

Princeton University in 1939 when Bohr arrived in New York for a visit, carrying the alarming news that scientists in Nazi Germany only weeks earlier had found a way to split the uranium atom.

Two months later, he and Bohr were sitting in Einstein’s office at Princeton when the Danish physi-cist declared that it was possible to make an atomic bomb, although, “It would take the entire efforts of a nation to do it.”

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 thrust the United States into World War II, these men were key thinkers in the Manhattan Project, commissioned by Presi-dent Franklin Delano Roosevelt to build an atomic weapon before the Germans.

Although Oppenheimer and other Manhattan Project scien-tists worked at Los Alamos Na-tional Laboratory in New Mexico, Wheeler consulted with DuPont engineers to build reactors in Han-

ford, Wash., that would supply the plutonium for the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. It was Wheel-er’s idea to house the reactors in domes, which have become the symbol of nuclear power plants.

Although the bomb makers would fall under criticism from succeeding generations of scien-tists, Wheeler was sorry that work on the bomb hadn’t started earlier, feeling that it would have saved millions of lives, including that of his younger brother Joe.

To the end of his life, Wheeler remained haunted by a note he received in 1944 from his brother, who was fighting in Europe. It con-tained two words: “Hurry up.”

Joe Wheeler died fighting in Italy.

In his 90s, Wheeler took up residence in a retirement home in Hightstown but continued to take the bus twice a week to Princeton, where he dictated his thoughts to a secretary. His wife, the former Janette Hegner, died in October at 99.

They had two daughters, Ali-son Wheeler Lahnston and Letitia Wheeler Ufford of Princeton, N.J., and a son, James English Wheeler of Ardmore, Pa., who survive him along with eight grandchildren, 16 great-grandchildren, six step-grandchildren and 11 step-great grandchildren.

Wheeler was the author of 13 books and hundreds of articles in scholarly publications. Among his awards were the Einstein Prize in 1965; the Enrico Fermi Award from the Atomic Energy Commis-sion in 1968, which was presented to him by President Johnson; the National Medal of Science in 1971; and the Niels Bohr International Gold Medal in 1982.


Physicist who studied black holes dies at 96

the second set and started up 4-3 in the third before losing three straight games.

“I had a little bit of a mental glitch,” Mansur said. “I knew there was a lot of pressure on my shoul-ders, and I just didn’t compete the way I should have.”

“She was pretty upset about the way that she played,” said As-sistant Coach Cecily Dubusker. “She’s tired of losing that way, as she should be.”

Making her debut at No. 3, Vucetic faced one of the best serv-ers in the conference in Tamara John. The Cornell junior used her serve — which the Cornell athletic Web site claims can hit 120 mph — to outlast Vucetic in a back-and-forth three-setter, 6-4, 4-6, 6-3.

Particularly in the final set, John showcased her overwhelm-ing serve, blanking Vucetic in her first two service games without even committing a fault.

Vucetic acknowledged that the conference challengers have been very competitive, leading to three-set matches in her first four Ivy outings.

“I’m probably not getting as many free points as I’m used to,” she said. “They don’t miss as much, that’s for sure.”

Finkelstein won at No. 4 sin-gles, but her failure to close out the match in two sets delayed a much-needed victory for the team.

She quickly gained a 6-1, 4-1 lead and was one point away from 5-1. At that point, the first, fifth and sixth seeds had already finished and the score was tied 2-2.

But Finkelstein couldn’t wrap up her match, losing the second set 6-4 after dropping five straight games. She recovered in the next set with a 7-5 win, but the team had dropped two straight matches by the time she finished, meaning Cornell had already secured the victory.

“I feel like if I had won that sec-ond set, that whole match might have been turned around,” Fin-

kelstein said.When asked about her down-

grade to fourth seed, Finkelstein said she didn’t want to comment.

At No. 5, Marisa Schonfeld ’11 was overmatched for the first time in conference play, Wardlaw said.

Schonfeld fell 6-0 in the first set, but she lost a closer second set, 6-4.

She said her defeat was a com-bination of not winning her own game points as well as some pre-cise hitting from her opponent.

“She was nailing every single line,” Schonfeld said. “How can you slap that many balls on the court ... and have them hit the line and not have them be out by an inch occasionally?”

Dubusker said the highlight of the weekend came from the performance of Alexa Baggio ’09. Playing at No. 6 against Cornell, Baggio won 6-1, 6-3, and she won again on Saturday at No. 5.

“I think Alexa’s been playing very brave tennis,” Dubusker said. “She’s been putting a lot of balls on the court.”

After playing at the No. 4 seed for much of last season, Baggio has adapted to her new role this season and aims to deliver victo-ries when asked.

“For me to be in and out of the lineup just means we’re getting better,” she said. “Now that I’m in, I have to take care of business.”

After the tough loss, the team took no prisoners against Colum-bia on Saturday. Brown swept the doubles pro sets, though two of the contests were close. But when it came to singles, the Bears made few mistakes, with each player winning in straight sets.

The rout was especially im-portant for Mansur, who won her match 6-3, 6-2. By being more will-ing to engage in long points, she resisted the temptation to aim for too many winners, she said. She said her win was mentally impor-tant to her as she prepares for the final two contests of the season this weekend.

“I have a little bit more confi-

dence going into (the weekend), finally winning something,” she said.

Aboubakare and Finkelstein finished off their weekend sweeps quickly. Aboubakare won 6-2, 6-4 at No. 1 and Finkelstein prevailed 6-3, 6-2 at No. 4. No. 3 Vucetic bounced back from Friday’s loss with a 6-4, 6-0 win.

After Baggio’s impressive win against Cornell, the coaches moved her to the fifth seed for the Columbia match, in which she won 6-2, 6-1. Schonfeld, now at No. 6, also won 6-2, 6-1.

Though the team won’t be able to match its 4-3 conference record from last season, the in-dividual match record of 18-17 shows how close the Bears have come to beating the top confer-ence opponents.

“From a big picture standpoint, if you’re just looking at numbers, it’s disappointing,” Wardlaw said. “But if you’re looking at how the team’s playing this year and has played in Ivies, we’ve stepped up from last year.”

Finkelstein, in her third year on the team, said this year’s squad

has played well enough to have a better record.

“I think it’s extremely frustrat-ing because we are as good as all these other teams,” Finkelstein said. “It’s really hard to get out there and walk out (losing) 4-3 each time.”

Now that the team has earned its first Ivy win, the players have shown they are able to learn from their losses and bounce back.

“I don’t think that our team is disheartened by our past up-sets,” Schonfeld said.“We’ve kind of turned that into positive energy now that we know we can get close to those teams.”

If the team can build on its first win in next weekend’s matches, Bruno might be able to end the season on a high note.

With just one graduating se-nior, the Bears will set a strong tone for next year’s team with their performance in their final two matches. They will host No. 72 Dartmouth (14-3, 2-2) on Friday at 2 p.m. at the Pizzitola Center, and then finish up their season at noon on Sunday at Harvard (2-14, 2-2).

tueSDaY, aPRIl 15, 2008 tHe BRoWN DaIlY HeRalD Page 9

1.2 innings of shutout ball, giving the Bears the 18-6 win.

Sunday was a day of great frus-tration for the Bears, who produced offensively, but came away with two losses, 9-7 and 16-14.

“I think Dartmouth is pretty good offensively, but they’re not a great offensive team,” said Head Coach Marek Drabinski. “When you throw balls down the middle of the plate when you’re ahead, and ... walk guys and hit guys, then you’re going to take a team that’s pretty good offensively and make them look very good.”

Starting pitcher Alex Silverman ’08 walked the first two batters and proceeded to give up two homers in a four-run first inning for the Big Green, forcing Brown to play catch-up for the remainder of the game.

In the second inning, Colantonio got on with a single, and Greskoff cut Dartmouth’s lead in half with his first of two home runs in the game.

“I was just seeing the ball really well,” Greskoff said. “I was able to hit a bunch of them, and they went far.”

But the Big Green struck for three more runs in the top of the fourth, and two more in the sixth, to build a 9-2 lead. Greskoff hit a grand slam in the bottom of the sixth to bring Brown within three, but the comeback effort ultimately fell short.

The Bears added another run in the bottom of the seventh inning, but with runners on first and third and one out, Papenhause grounded into a game-ending double play.

Greskoff put in another strong game at the plate in the second game, going 3-for-4 with two RBIs. With a potentially serious foot in-jury afflicting tri-captain left fielder Ryan Murphy ’08, Drabinski will likely give Eno, who has played first base for most of the year, more time in left field, opening up a spot at first for Greskoff.

“Pete’s going to see some more time, without question,” Drabinski said. “The day he had (Sunday) was a pretty great day ... and it’s good to see guys like him stepping up.”

The Bears held a 3-2 lead after three innings, but the Big Green scored six runs in the bottom of the fourth off Matt Kimball ’11 and Josh Feit ’11 to take an 8-3 lead. Bruno also had a big fourth inning, though, scoring five runs off of Greskoff’s RBI double and Eno’s grand slam, to tie the game at eight.

“I was trying not to do too much, just trying to do my job and make solid contact with the ball,” Eno said.

But Dartmouth struck for five more runs in the sixth inning, and held on for a 16-14 win, taking advantage of the Brown pitching staff’s nine walks, two hit batsmen, and three wild pitches.

“It’s frustrating, but that’s just the way it goes sometimes,” Eno said. “Sometimes the hitting’s not there, sometimes the pitching’s not there ... and the hard thing about baseball is putting all three aspects, hitting, pitching, and defense, to-gether.”

The Bears will try to return to form when they travel to Pough-keepsie, N.Y. for a doubleheader with Marist on Tuesday after-noon.


Baseball plays Marist this afternoon

W. tennis bounces back with first Ivy win against Columbiacontinued from page 12

s T a f f e d i T o r i a l

J O N G U Y E R

Common sense

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l e T T e r s

Comic is inaccurate and insultingTo the Editor:

I am writing in response to the Vagina Dentata comic published on Monday. In the second panel, Soojean Kim ’09 draws a typical scene from Spring Weekend with the caption: “Drunk crew guys who just want to be loved…”

While we do enjoy the occasional hug as featured in the scene, the suggestion that rowers were drunk during Spring Weekend is simply incorrect. The entire team has been dry since February. The team was also racing on the Seekonk River throughout Saturday af-ternoon and could not participate in many of the Spring

Weekend festivities. Kim’s depiction of rowers as drunken stalkers is

insulting and disrespectful, especially since members of the team don’t even know her. Perhaps she should think twice before using trite, libelous stereotypes about athletes, and specifically the rowing team, in future comics. Her time could be better spent attempting to be humorous or relevant, areas in which her comic is consistently lacking.

James Rowan ‘08men’s Crew team

april 14

eDiTorial & leTTersPage 10 tHe BRoWN DaIlY HeRalD tueSDaY, aPRIl 15, 2008

Column encourages productive dialogueTo the Editor:

I applaud Jonah Fabricant ’10 for discussing an issue that is as important as it can be unpleasant (“Breaking down boundaries,” April 14). For too long, discussion at Brown surrounding controversial issues has revolved around unproductive “preaching to the choir.” I am sure the majority of the Brown community would much rather see an honest, open discussion of the nitty-gritty that educates instead of insults. Along with Fabricant, I speak mostly to the Israel/Palestinian-territory issue, but I see no reason why the same does not hold for other, equally controversial topics.

As Fabricant writes, not only are events advertised with divisive language, but the events themselves are too often rehearsals of the same act: a lecture to a predomi-

nately biased audience is interrupted by a vocal minority who seek vocal vengeance for wrongs seemingly done them. Voices are raised, and tensions are high. Most insidious, with Palestine/Israel events, those precious few who come to the educational event to listen, learn and question are driven out by the vitriol and do not stay engaged but become the passive Brown students that we are all too familiar with.

I in no way fault students for being passionate about issues that shape our world, and for bringing that pas-sion to Brown. We must recognize, though, that finger-pointing does not work toward peace and progress.

Jimmy Rotenberg ‘09april 14

It’s not often that the term “common” is thrown around positively here on College Hill. We as Brown students tend to pride ourselves on the different — and not just in curriculum structure. But the application for admission to the University, drab by nature no matter what color paper it’s printed on, has never been particularly emblematic of our uniqueness.

So the recent announcement that Brown may adopt the Common Application in lieu of our current, Brown-specific paperwork shouldn’t cause much regret. The content of students’ applications will be essen-tially unchanged, with a Brown supplement covering nearly everything previously on the application but absent from the Common App.

Because most potential applicants will already have the Common App filled out, though, this supplement should seem like a piece of cake. And though we don’t endorse blindly following the other Ivies’ policies, nearly all of our peer institutions have been using the Common App for years without seeing any changes for the worse.

It’s questionable how many more applicants this will draw — after all, those who are seriously considering Brown shouldn’t mind taking another hour or two to fill out our application, right?

But before getting too cynical, remember what it was like to be a high school senior — overworked, overcommitted and likely overachieving — and you may remember being deterred from applying to a school just because you couldn’t stand any more paperwork. An increase in applicants could lower the University’s acceptance rate, which might lead to an increase in our national rank and eventually a higher-quality applicant pool.

But that’s not even the point. Implementing a nationally standardized application system will have the greatest effects on those of lesser finan-cial abilities. The application procedure is lengthy, complex and daunting, especially for high schoolers with little or no guidance. Well-connected guidance counselors and private college application advisers are often just not available to prospective first-generation college students.

Shifting to the Common App would make the application procedure less intimidating, even if only slightly so. It would be a small step toward equalizing socioeconomic disparities among applicants, but one that wouldn’t go unnoticed.

We hope the Admission Office carries through with its plans to change to a common application system. If a Brown education is to be truly accessible to students regardless of financial ability — as recent changes in financial aid policy can attest — then the University needs to carry that emphasis through to the application process.

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Chris gangStu Woo

New York Times opinions columnist Maureen Dowd has a strange obsession. She simply can’t seem to get over the fact that Barack Obama occasionally smokes cigarettes.

It started 14 months ago — Obama was struggling to win over Iowa caucusgoers — and in Dowd’s view, still adjusting to the scrutiny of the national media. Her column opened, “Barack Obama looked as if he needed a smoke and he needed it bad.” At the time, Obama was weak, and Dowd could easily pres-ent smoking as a sign of his weakness.

In a March column, Dowd recounted seeing Obama in the midst of his February winning streak. “Obama — slender, chewing Nicorette and perfectly groomed in his crisp white shirt — came upon me,” she wrote.

This time, Dowd’s reference to Obama’s smoking habit was used to symbolize the Senator’s strength — he was quitting smoking and winning primaries at the same time. (How Dowd knew Obama was chewing Nicorette and not Orbit is beyond me. Did she actually have the nerve to ask?)

And just last week, Dowd brought up Obama’s smoking habit again. She suggested at one point that Obama — who also admit-ted to experimenting with drugs while in college — might be trying “to depict himself as a cool bad boy.”

It seems that Dowd no longer views smok-ing cigarettes as a sign of Obama’s strength or weakness, but as part of Obama’s calculated self-image.

Of course, Dowd is a good enough writer that she can mold Obama’s smoking habit

into a symbol of almost anything. In doing so, Dowd seems to have missed the utterly tragic dimension of the facts she considers. A man who has the potential to be one of the most transformative political figures in American history has one extremely self-destructive habit.

Moreover, in the columns that mention Obama’s smoking, the conclusions Dowd reaches are entirely commonplace. Early last year, Obama was struggling to sway Io-wans. In February, he was looking strong, but

March was a reminder that he would need to toughen up for a protracted nomination fight. By repeatedly dropping in an unseemly detail about Obama, she might give her writing a little extra flair. But this unseemly detail does not contribute to thought-provoking analysis or insight.

Granted, Dowd’s column last week men-tioned some of the other candidates’ vices. Clinton and McCain have both been known to drink hard alcohol. Still, Obama’s smoking

habit occupies a strange, recurring position in Dowd’s column.

When Clinton was on a losing streak in February, Dowd never began a column by remarking, “Hillary looked like she could use a vodka tonic.” And when Clinton effectively saved her campaign by winning primaries in Ohio and Texas, Dowd didn’t write, “Hillary came off the podium after delivering her vic-tory speech and opted for water — the elixir of (political) life.”

As Dowd’s column last week noted, every-

body has a vice. But for some reason, only Obama’s vice has been repeatedly weaved into Dowd’s campaign narrative.

Dowd’s column concluded that Americans tend to prefer a candidate who exhibits a vice (Mitt Romney was all-too-perfect, she claimed). But is Dowd herself not the para-digmatic case of this tendency? Like many Americans, Dowd is keenly aware of the transformational nature of Obama’s candi-dacy. Obama is, after all, “the precocious boy

wonder” (her phrase, not mine). Perhaps Dowd has allowed herself to be

captivated by Obama’s vice precisely because he is such a unique, unprecedented figure.

Yet, I think an even deeper insight can be gleaned. Obama undoubtedly possesses a cer-tain aura. This aura is most likely the product of his ethnic heritage, inspiring message and rousing speeches. And this aura helped him pull ahead of the Clinton political machine.

But now, his aura is something of a liability. The slightest chink in the proverbial armor is magnified and pointed to as a sign of total hypocrisy. When Obama falters, critics are ready to proclaim that he is just another aver-age politician. And even a liberal like Maureen Dowd can’t help but make a spectacle out of the fact that he occasionally smokes.

Even if one can look past the aura and fo-cus on the basics, Obama is still (in my view) the best candidate. He is the only remaining contender who had the judgment to oppose the Iraq War from the start. Of the remaining candidates, he is the most committed to ethics reform. He has a professor’s understanding of, and respect for, the Constitution. He is enough of a Washington outsider that he can legitimately claim to represent change. But in his brief tenure as a senator, he dem-onstrated his commitment to bipartisanship and problem solving.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the Will.i.am music video as much as the next Obama supporter. But as Obama looks to secure the nomination and craft a general election strategy, he would be wise to make sure the aforementioned “basics” are not overshad-owed by his aura.

If the Democratic nomination race isn’t over soon, matt aks ’11 is going to need a smoke

I had a moment of clarity last August. I was in the gym, watching my number one source of nightly news, the satirical “Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” Rob Riggle, one of the correspondents and a former Marine, was reporting live from Iraq about the Iraqi parliament’s lengthy vacation. The segment showed messages from American soldiers to Parliament members such as “You guys enjoy your vacation — we’ll keep fighting for your country for you” and “Take the time off, I’m sure it’s well deserved. Go home and see your family. I bet you only get to see them three or four times a week.”

It was hilarious and it was heartbreaking. Meanwhile, someone else in the gym was watch-ing CNN on the other TV. The reporters were doing a shocking exposé on a fly that had landed on Chris Dodd’s head during the Democratic debate. Ah, I thought. So that’s what it looks like when a television network abdicates its responsibilities.

Maybe my view of the goode olde dayes before the twenty-four hour news cycle is domi-nated by nostalgic visions of families gathering ’round the television to watch Edward Murrow bring down Joseph McCarthy. But it’s hard to imagine that kind of straight-shooting journalistic integrity when you see the bloviating blowhards going in full force every time you turn on the TV, each desperately spinning and warping and cramming that day’s news into their predefined ideological niche. But tune in to Comedy Central between 11 p.m. and 12 p.m., and you might even get more info- than –tainment.

As a fake source for real news, The Daily Show has it all: the “resident expert” whose area of expertise changes depending on the day’s headlines, the flashy graphics designed to impress toddlers with ADD, the token minority correspondents and the hard-hitting investiga-tions with the overdramatic titles. (My personal favorite is “Bathtub Cheese: Culture of Death.”) His counterpart, Stephen Colbert of The Col-bert Report adopts the role of windbag pundit,

blinding viewers with flags, plugging his various personal enterprises and opening his interviews with, “President Bush: great president, or the greatest president?”

I would say that it would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Only it is funny — extremely so. How-ever, it would not be funny if it weren’t so spot-on, and as much as the best fake news anchors in television ridicule the nation’s politicians, they also spend significant time reminding us of the foibles — or let’s be honest, the idiocy — of the

television news media, particularly the so-called punditocracy.

You could call them talking heads, but shout-ing heads is probably more appropriate. Bill Kovach, the former New York Times Washing-ton bureau chief and the founder of the Com-mittee of Concerned Journalists, dubbed them “a group of loosely credentialed, self-interested performers whose primary job is remaining on TV.” And when you think about it, why should

anyone listen to Bill O’Reilly, Chris Matthews, Ann Coulter or Bill Maher? Do these people have any sort of education or experience that prepares them to opine on half the subjects they cover? No; I doubt anybody does. But infotain-ment is in high demand these days, and as long as these shows are ratings draws, no amount of controversy, misinformation or just plain stupid-ity will take them off the air.

The Daily Show used to run a segment called “Great Moments in Punditry,” where

small children would read aloud transcripts from talking head shows. Somehow, seeing five-year-olds attack each other and call each other names brought home just how infantile these shows can be. I haven’t seen feuds like this since middle school.

For instance, Keith Olbermann routinely called Bill O’Reilly “the worst person in the world” and implied that he is a Nazi; in response, a Fox News spokeswoman issued a statement saying, “Because of his personal demons, Keith has imploded everywhere he’s worked ... it’s obvious Keith is a train wreck waiting to hap-pen. And like all train wrecks, people might tune in out of morbid curiosity, but they eventually tune out, as evidenced by Keith’s recent ratings decline. In the meantime, we hope he enjoys his paranoid view from the bottom of the ratings ladder and wish him well on his inevitable trip to oblivion.”

Is this really what we want defining our national discourse, or are these people, as Jon Stewart so aptly put it, “hurting America” even as they pretend to defend it?

So come join the ranks of the well-informed, well-educated Daily Show viewers. (Though O’Reilly called us “stoned slackers,” we are 78 percent more likely than the average adult to have four or more years of higher education, and are more knowledgeable about current events than those who read newspapers or watch the nightly news.) Hopefully sooner rather than later, the poison on which the pundits all thrive will be sucked out of the news cycle. If that means the pundits lose their jobs, then that’s no great loss.

Sarah Rosenthal ’11 has neither the education nor experience to opine on this subject

BY SaRaH RoSeNtHalopinions ColuMnisT

Maureen Dowd’s vice

The great pundit menace

It’s hard to imagine any kind of

straight-shooting journalistic

integrity when you see the bloviating

blowhards going in full force every

time you turn on the tV.

When obama falters, critics are ready to

proclaim that he is just another average

politician. and even a liberal like maureen

Dowd can’t help but make a spectacle out

of the fact that he occasionally smokes.

opinionstueSDaY, aPRIl 15, 2008 tHe BRoWN DaIlY HeRalD Page 11

BY matt aKSopinions ColuMnisT

BY BENJY ASHERassisTanT sporTs ediTor

The baseball team’s 41 runs in four games did not produce the results that the Bears hoped for, as the team dropped three of its four games to Dartmouth over the weekend. The series did have some bright spots, including a breakout hitting per-formance from first baseman Pete Greskoff ’11 and a strong effort on the mound from Will Weidig ’10, but Brown lacked consistency, particularly on the mound and in the field.

In the first game of Saturday’s doubleheader, baserunning blun-ders and a lack of timely hitting hurt the Bears. In the bottom of the first, with Bruno down 2-1, short-stop Matt Nuzzo ’09 was thrown out at home on an attempted double steal, with tri-captain Rob Papen-hause ’09 at the plate. The Bears also stranded a runner on third base in both the third and sixth innings.

Anthony Vita ’08, coming off a three-hit, one-run complete game victory over Princeton last week-end, struggled on the mound, allow-ing six runs in six innings, and the Big Green took the series opener by a score of 8-2. Nuzzo and desig-nated hitter Conor Reardon ’08 had the only multi-hit games for Brown, each going 2-for-3.

In the second game of the dou-bleheader, the offense exploded, with seven players recording multi-hit games. After Weidig sur-rendered a solo home run in the top of the first inning, third base-man Papenhause singled in a run in the bottom of the inning to tie the score, and catcher Matt Colantonio

’11 laced a double to centerfield to drive in two more runs for the Bears.

In the second inning, second baseman Ryan Zrenda ’11 hit a leadoff single, then came around to score on a double by J.J. Eno ’08. Zrenda and Eno, batting in the eighth and ninth spots, expanded the lead again in the fourth, when they started off the inning with back-to-back homers to make the score 6-1. Centerfielder Steve Dan-iels ’09 followed with a triple, then came home on Nuzzo’s sacrifice fly.

Daniels went three-for-five in the win, and led the team with four

runs scored.In the top of the fifth, the Big

Green took advantage of three Brown errors to cut Bruno’s lead to 7-5. The errors also prolonged the inning for Weidig, driving his pitch count up and forcing him to make an early exit.

But the Bears increased their lead to 8-5 in the bottom of the sixth, and scored five runs in both the seventh and eighth innings. Brown got solid work out of the bullpen from Mark Gormley ’11, who allowed one run in 2.1 innings, and Peter Moskal ’08, who pitched

sporTs TuesDayPage 12 tHe BRoWN DaIlY HeRalD tueSDaY, aPRIl 15, 2008

W. tennis able to get first Ivy winBY SETH MOTElsTaff WriTer

A shake-up on the women’s ten-nis team was meant to maximize Brown’s opportunities this week-end after three close losses in the start of the conference season. Another close loss — to Cornell — brought more frustrations, but a blowout win against Columbia has the team hoping it has turned the corner.

On Saturday, Brown (10-8, 1-4 Ivy) captured its first conference win, 7-0, over Columbia (2-12, 0-5), winning every set in singles matches. However, Bruno fell 4-3 the day before to Cornell (9-5, 2-3), marking the Bears’ third one-point defeat of the Ivy season.

At Ithaca, N.Y., on Friday af-ternoon, Brown “came out flat,” said Head Coach Paul Wardlaw. The team started off in a 1-0 hole after dropping two of the three doubles pro sets.

Thus, the slightly tweaked sin-gles lineup took the court having to win four out of six matches.

For the trip to New York, Tanja Vucetic ’10 was rewarded for her 3-0 conference start at No. 4 with a promotion to No. 3, sending Brett Finkelstein ’09, 0-3 in Ivy League play, down a seed.

At the top, it was business as

usual for Bianca Aboubakare ’11. After a rare three-set loss to Penn-sylvania the weekend before, the No. 1 seed beat her Cornell op-ponent, 6-4, 6-4.

Aboubakare said she should have won by a wider margin, but she was still mentally recovering from her first loss in almost two months.

“I kind of had some loss of confidence after the loss,” the freshman said.

Wardlaw said he just needed

to “wind her up and let her go” after reassuring Aboubakare of her strengths.

At No. 2 on Friday, Sara Man-sur ’09 was engaged in a tough three-setter for the third straight match. Mansur dropped the Cor-nell match 7-6 (5), 2-6, 6-4.

In the first set, Mansur took a 5-2 lead in the tiebreaker before losing five points in a row. She then cruised to a 6-2 victory in

Big bats, little reward in Dartmouth set

BY lARA SOUTHERNsporTs sTaff WriTer

The Bears were hosts for the first time in the 2008 outdoor track and field season on Saturday at the Brown Invitational. The entire team made good use of its home- field advantage, with the women emerging victorious overall with 167.50 points and the men coming in second just behind Dartmouth. Seven men and seven women each earned individual first-place fin-ishes, while the women’s relay wins propelled them to victory.

Once again, the men excelled in running events, with four ath-letes winning titles in their races. These included Kevin Cervantes ’10 with a time of 48.91 seconds in the 400-meter dash and Nick Sarro ’08, who continued his winning streak in the one-mile race with a time of 4:16.87 minutes.

Sarro has now won all three outdoor one-mile races in the spring season. Ryan Graddy ’08 and Matt Jasmin ’09 also per-formed excellently, winning the 3,000-meter run and the 110-meter hurdles, respectively.

“The men are competing very well right now. It is great to see them stepping up to the plate,” Head Coach Craig Lake wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. “It was exciting to see Kevin Cervantes run a personal best to win the 400-meters and Matt Jasmin looks better and better each week in the hurdles.”

In the field, Ikenna Achilihu ’08 was also a victor, winning the triple

jump with a distance of 49-03.75 feet. Reggie Cole ’10 followed not far behind in third place.

The throwers were just as suc-cessful led by Bryan Powlen ’10. He out-threw the competition in both the shot put and the discus with throws of 53-03.75 feet and 160.08 feet, respectively. Eric Wood ’09 earned two solid sec-ond place finishes in the shot put and the hammer throw, and Sam Ulracher ’09 grabbed third in the javelin.

The women took full advantage of rare good weather to trample the opposition with nine overall wins. The winners of the track events included Nicole Burns ’09 who won the 200-meter dash in 24.56 seconds. Jenna Ridgway ’10 received first for her 4:45.50-min-ute time in the one-mile race and Akilah King ’08 won with an im-pressive time of 12.16 seconds in the 100-meter dash.

The best result, however, came from freshman Samantha Adelberg ’11, who won the 800-meter race with a time of 2:09.25 minutes.

Both King and Lake com-mended Adelberg’s performance afterward.

“This is the sixth-fastest time in school history — which is fantastic for a first-year,” Lake said. “She has a ton of potential.”

Other younger members of the team again proved their worth in the field events, as Grace Wat-son ’11 won the high jump with a height of 5-05.00 feet and fellow

W. lax suffers ‘ugly’ Spring Weekend loss to Big RedBY AMY EHRHARTsporTs ediTor

While many students took a step back from their work in anticipation of Spring Weekend, the women’s lacrosse team fought a hard battle against Cornell. But the Friday af-ternoon game — a 17-9 loss for the Bears — may have proved to be a letdown for the excited fans.

Brown gave up seven goals before scoring one of its own in the first half. Cornell’s Katherine Simmons and Libby Johnson led the first-half charge by putting two goals each past Brown goalie Me-lissa King ’08 before Jesse Nunn ’09 broke the Bears’ silence at 11:30 with a hard-charging free position shot that went by Cornell’s Kristen Reese.

“It was pretty ugly,” said Head Coach Keely McDonald. “They came out really strong at the be-ginning of the first and second half. It really hurt us.”

“We didn’t come out strong and we got ourselves in a hole,” said Kara Kelly ’10. “We take a lot of pride in being a scrappy, aggressive team and getting the draws and ball controls; We didn’t do either one of those things.”

Bruno cut the Big Red’s lead down to 8-4 when Kelly Robinson ’09 scored her only goal of the game at 23:46 of the first half. That was the closest margin Bruno could manage. The Big Red came out

firing in the second half, this time with six unanswered goals, many of them unassisted.

At 8:58 in the second half, Jus-tine Lupo ’08 gave Brown its fifth score before a pair of Bears earned yellow cards to slow the offensive attack.

“I think we started getting a little tired and let the frustration get the best of us,” said Molly McCarthy ’10.

After the penalties, Nunn and McCarthy scored four straight goals for Bruno in a six-minute period — three of them coming from Nunn, the team’s leading scorer with 22 goals on the season. She finished the game with four, while McCarthy had one tally and two assists.

“Nunner is a great cutter and we’ve always had a strong connec-tion,” McCarthy said.

In addition to their individual triumphs, Lupo had three goals.

Those in attendance saw a pa-tient Brown team on offense that needed to convert on more of its 24 shot attempts. Cornell’s offense at-tacked more quickly, utilizing fewer passes before charging the net, fir-ing off 33 shots total.

Brown controlled six fewer draws, but earned five more free position shots compared to Cornell. Thirty-nine fouls were called and Brown totaled all five of the yellow cards handed out.

ashley Hess / HeraldBrett Finkelstein ’09 won both her matches this weekend at No. 4, helping the women’s tennis team to its first Ivy win against Columbia.

ashley Hess / Herald

Shortstop matt Nuzzo ’09 went 5 for 7 at the plate in Saturday’s split against Dartmouth, but the Bears lost three of four to the Big green.

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Track teams perform well at weekend’s home meet

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Tuesday, April 15, 2008