Category: News

Last Thursday night the Office of the Dean of Student Life sponsored the USM Student Involvement Recognition Night. This ceremony awarded outstanding student leaders for the 2003 – 2004 school year. After a dinner catered by ARAMARK dining services, Joseph Austin, the dean of student life, acknowledged the stress students cope with while carrying a full course load while being involved with student organizations and student government.

Phone cards and groceries for troops…. USM Bookstore buyback and coursebook info…. Business ethics symposium this Friday…. Public invited to discuss marine ecosystems with experts.

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Philippi Hall on the Gorham campus and Portland Hall in Portland will be the first dorms at USM to offer gender neutral (co-ed) housing.

After an epic 7 hour and fifteen minute meeting, USM’s Student Senate successfully elected a new executive board last Friday.

The University of Maine School of Law, located on USM’s Portland campus, slipped from the third to the fourth tier in US News and World Report’s “best graduate schools” report this April. The report, which is released each April, is widely regarded by applicants to the school and by those who employ lawyers.

Due to increased costs across the board, USM students may once again see a tuition increase for the upcoming year. According to Sam Andrews, Chief Financial Officer for the University, the Board of Trustees will vote at their next meeting on a proposal from the USM administration that requests an increase in tuition prices for the 2004/2005 school year.

Craig Ardry and Chris Gelineau shared many fates. They both lived in Maine, were both at one point USM students and both served in the National Guard. Unfortunately, they both also rode in the lead Humvee that caught the brunt of an anti-American ambush in Iraq last Tuesday morning.

Evidence of the tight financial times facing the University of Maine System seems to manifest itself everywhere: in meager financial aid packages, in impossibly low class availability, even in budget cuts for university funded publications. Despite the recent university wide budget cuts, one publication continues to thrive even as its identity changes.

The 13 cars in the funeral procession for the environment were outnumbered by the 16 vehicle presidential motorcade for President Bush’s Earth Day address.

Is poverty a factor in the way parents speak to their children? How long does it take for farm-raised fish to adjust to predators? What kind of Research goes into producing a play? These were among of the projects that students presented at Thinking Matters, the third annual presentation of student research and scholarship.

Golfers will no longer have to smuggle beers onto the course, women will have easier access to the “morning after” pill, and some 17-year-olds will have the chance to vote in Maine primaries. These are all among the dozens of bills Maine legislators have been working on for the ’04 session.

Delta Surface Technologies (DST), LLC was the winning team in the 2004 Student Business Plan Competition. They were awarded $10,000 to start their own business and $15,000 in consulting services.

DST got their idea for making surfaces flat because Jonathan Wappel, one of the members of Delta Surfaces, is a hockey player and is part of his own management group that owns ice rinks.

The University could be affected by a new law which holds municipalities and manufacturers responsible for the collection and recycling of old computer monitors and televisions, and places a six dollar per unit fee on the retail sale of all televisions.

The concern is that computer vendors may be reluctant to do business in a state where it is required to pay for producing and recycling its products as well.

Police are called in to break up a group of drunken musicians…. Easter baskets stolen…. An “ex-boyfriend/girlfriend dispute…..

Students from California to Maine are feeling the pinch of the increasing cost of education and that includes everything from tuition to textbooks. While the rising cost of tuition stands in the spotlight every year, the rising cost of textbooks has largely been ignored, until now.

When she learned that the University had decided not to renew her annual contract, Erika Anderson, Lecturer in Communication was dismayed, she says, not for herself, but for the already short-staffed department she served. In an email sent to many communication majors on April 5, she urged students to organize and protest the communication department’s dwindling resources.

This year’s USM Job Fair drew 48 exhibitors and hundreds of job seekers to the Sullivan Gym in Portland last Thursday afternoon. Students wandered up and down the aisles of employers eager to answer questions about job openings at their organizations. Senior accounting major Melissa Hayman was pleased.

The Maine Scholar, a publication that in the past has represented the entire University of Maine System, has recently become a department solely under the University of Southern Maine.

When her professor thought she spoke some Yiddish, Sara Ehrmann, a third year music education major said, “he came up to me and asked me to teach him something because as he said, the only Yiddish word he knew was “schmuck.”

Kani Xulam, a Kurdish activist with 11 years of experience serving in Washington, D.C. as an advocate for Kurds in the Middle East, spoke Wednesday night at a packed Moot Courtroom in the Law Building. With nearly 50 people in attendance, many USM students, Xulam presented a detailed history of Kurdish “oppression and genocide” at the hands of a divergent range of Islamic nation-states with a “culture of violence” in the Middle East.

Sexually transmitted diseases previously not found on campus are now showing up. “Since I’ve been here I think we’ve had two positive cases of Gonorrhea,” said Larisa Semenuk, Clinical Manager since November at University Health Services. “I’ve already, myself, [seen] three positive cases [of chlamydia].

The top three floors of the Glickman Library in Portland were officially opened to the public last Friday, to much pomp and fanfare.

Students and Faculty gathered at the Woodbury Campus Center on Monday night to mourn the passing of Phil Hersey, technical director of WMPG for over ten years. The event was also meant as a celebration of his life and included a slide show, an open mike for thoughts and memories about Hersey, and performances by bands that had worked with Hersey at WMPG in the past.