The Carolinian [February 13, 1997]

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Girolinian The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
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Thursday,
February 13,1997
"Dialogues of the Carmelites" to Open Sunday:
See the Story, Page 4
Spartans Defeat UNC Asheville:
See the Story, Page 6
Issue 35, *2~
Volume 76
UNCG students challenge proposed fee hike
•Decision to be reached today, student participation encouraged
Deanna McDonald
News Editor
In a Student Fee Advisory Com-mittee
meeting Friday, distraught
students and committee members
listened on with solemn faces as
Chancellor Patricia A. Sullivan
announced plans for a proposed
increase in student fees for the
1997-98 school year.
Sullivan stated that she will ask
the Board of Trustees to approve
an increase of $8 each for student
activity and athletic fees.
If approved, the athletic fees
will support a $7 dollar allottment
toward university staff salary in-creases
while the remaining $1
will provide increasp<; in athletic
scholarships as mandated by
NCAA.
Where Your Maney s Going...
Student Fee Allocation for 1996-1997
Athletics: Varsity Athletics
Health Service
Educational & Technology
Student Facilities: Debt service
Student Activities: Campus Recreation. Commuter Student Association.
Cultural Diversity Programs, Dean of Students. Fine Arts (Art. Dance. Music).
Grad Student Council, HHP Building, Minority Affairs. Movies. Performing Artists.
Piney Lake, Residence Halls-Social Fund. Student Government. Student Media.
Student Union. Summer Theatre. University Theatre. WUAG-Radio Station. Pep Band.
Student Facilities Operation, Student Postal Center. Student ID Center
Geoffrey Gartner/THE CAROLINIAN
Chancellor Patricia Sullivan discloses plan to propse fee increases at the Student Fee Advisory Committee meeting as Dr.
Phil Richmond, Vice Chancellor for Business Affairs, listens.
Student activity fees will be
split evenly, having $4 contributed
to legislature-mandated increases
in both University workers' sala-ries
and student employees' mini-mum
wages, since non-faculty
members are not paid through
state funds, but rather through stu-dent
fees.
The Chancellor made her deci-sion
in response to final recom-mendations
of the Student Fee
Advisory Committee, who sug-gested
a freeze on any increase in
student fees for the upcoming aca-demic
year.
The committee specified in
written terms that instead of rais-ing
student fees, "the Chancellor
and her staff reallocate existing
fees."
Since the committee was aware
of current demands as dictated by
the state and federal government,
they agreed that student activity
fees and athletic fees should be
given priority in budgeting.
Student Government Associa-tion
President Brandon Mathis,
who is also a committee member,
tried to clarify the difference
betweeen priority of funding and
actual financial support.
He stated, "We felt that some of
the departments requesting an in-crease
should redesign their bud-get.
We acknowledge the impor-tance
of these departments receiv-ing
funding but not through a fee
increase."
At Tuesday's SGA meeting,
Mathis reiterated his position in
support of the committee's find-ings.
He urged everyone to keep in
mind that students still have not
felt the $30 increase in facilities
fees that was approved last year,
since the new rates will apply in
Fall, 1997, when construction of
See Fees, Page 3
Future historians may have to use e-mail as archives
Joya McTillmon
Information Services
GREENSBORO - E-mail, list
servers, chat groups, on-line ar-chives
and databases - these elec-tronic
tools are changing the face
of communication. As historians
incorporate this expanding tech-nology
into their work, they're
finding a mixed bag of pros and
cons.
At UNCG, history professors
are using personal computers to
speed up and enhance their re-search,
their discourse with dis-tant
colleagues and, most dramati-cally,
their teaching.
But even as they enjoy this
boon, they have concerns about
the future. Will e-mail spell the
end of the paper trail historians
have traditionally been so depen-dent
upon? Or, will chat rooms
and other forms of electronic
communications give to future
historians a window into the
thoughts of ordinary people- a
window that has been largely
closed by telephones?
"If these chat rooms are saved
and if they're archived somehow,
then historians might actually
have more to work with than they
do now in the telephone age," said
Dr. William Blair, an assistant
professor of history at UNCG.
Blair's work focuses on the
Civil War, a period during which
letters to and from soldiers told
personal stories that have been
invaluable to historians. While
people stopped writing when tele-phones
became the preferred
mode of communication, many
are starting again as their personal
computers draw them into ex-panding
electronic communities.
"You're much more likely to
write these days than you were."
Blair said.
The key question, however, is
whether or not all this electronic
communication is being saved.
Much of it, unfortunately, is not.
"Typically people don't keep an
e-mail record," says Dr. William
A. Link, a UNCG professor of his-tory
and an associate dean of The
College of Arts and Sciences. "A
lot of e-mail software will auto-matically
delete. That'll be a large
amount of communication that's
lost."
Link, the author of a biography
of former University of North
Carolina system president William
C. Friday, has had to contend with
Weather
Outlook
Thursday:
Cloudy and cold
40% Chance of snow
and freezing rain
Friday:
••■**«*-»•
Cloudy
High in the 40's
Source: National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration
Kooney/TriE CAROLINIAN
Chris Wright helps set up for the new computer lab. With all the technology in
the Computer Age, historians are worried thai modern events may have no trace.
gaps in the paper trail left by tele-phone
use.
"There was a certain disadvan-tage
with Bill Friday because he
was pretty much a telephone per-son."
Link said, adding, however,
that Friday also has been careful
about documenting his important
decisions.
That's not the case with all of
today's leaders, and it's certainly
not the case with "non-elites,"
whose world historians have tra-ditionally
had a hard time enter-ing.
Link said. And if the loss of
documentation continues into the
computer age, historians will have
to rely more on oral history, a tool
that is already helping their efforts
to paint more complete pictures of
the past.
Link and Blair hope future his-torians
will be able to look at
archived electronic messages as an
additional repository of people's
thoughts.
"For me. that's very important."
said Blair, who has been studying
the way people remember impor-tant
events. "How do people re-member
tilings and how does that
differ from history:"
While there's a general consen-sus
that the broadening effect that
personal computing is having on
the study of history is a good thing,
the group that associate history
professor Dr. Paul Mazgaj is
studying would have disagreed.
"It's a very elitist group," said
Mazgaj, who recently received a
$20,000 grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities
for his study "Fascism and French
Intellectuals: The Cultural and
Generational Politics of the Young
Right, 1930-1945."
"A lot of them would have re-sisted
it as something that would
be a part of the democratic
upsurgence.... They worried about
culture being contaminated by the
mass media," Mazgaj said of his
subjects. "They wouldn't have
liked it."
For his part, Mazgaj is mostly
pleased with the effect electronic
communication is having on his
work.
"It certainly broadens the intel-lectual
discourse," he said, point-ing
out resources including on-line
library catalogs, Internet discus-sion
groups and interactive book
reviews. He added, however, that
finding the time to read all the new
information that's now available
is a problem for historians, whose
work has always required an enor-mous
amount of reading.
Of all the changes the computer
age has brought, professors say
they are most pleased with the
impact they are seeing on their
teaching.
Link says personal computers
have increased the communication
that his students have with him
and with each other. He says he
first incorporated e-mail and list-servers,
which automatically send
mail to all students in a given
class, into a U.S. history survey
course.
"I found that it was really suc-cessful
in increasing the feeling of
community in class," he said.
Blair notes that there are a vari-ety
of sites on the World Wide
Web that include historical infor-mation.
One site includes letters and
other documents collected as part
of a special project on American
memory by the Library of Con-gress.
With portable computers
equipped with projection screens,
more and more professors will be
able to share such collections with
their students.
"If you can channel this into a
classroom," he said, "you've sud-denly
opened them up to a piece
of the past."
Rumors of ethnic
violence threaten
peace in Chechya
Vanora Bennett
Times/Post News Service
NAUR, Russia-Liza A.
Mikhailenko was astonished to
hear that she had been raped and
murdered, along with her teen-age
daughter, in a fierce outbreak of
racial hatred carried out by
Chechens against their Russian
Cossack neighbors.
The truth? No one had laid a fin-ger
on either woman, the Russian
agronomist said, standing under a
withered vine at the collective
farm in Chechnya where she has
worked all her adult life.
For Russians and Chechens
who live together in northern
Chechnya, there is nothing reas-suring
about the stream of exag-gerated
reports in the Russian me-dia
of anti-Russian violence now
that Moscow has lost its war to
crush Chechens' dream of inde-pendence.
They are terrified that war-minded
groups in Moscow are
deliberately stirring up tension be-tween
Russians and Chechens as
a pretext for new Russian military
intervention.
The false report of
Mikhailenko's murder-on a list of
23 Russians allegedly slain in
Chechnya who are all still alive-has
already had explosive results.
The list caused such outrage in
Russia that it threatened to disrupt
the Jan. 27 presidential election in
Chechnya, destroy a peace deal
with Russia and send Russian
troops marching back into
Chechnya to protect their ethnic
kin.
The allegations surfaced just a
few days after the Chechen elec-tion
campaign began, as it became
clear that there were no pro-Rus-sian
presidential candidates and
that Russia's chief object of hate,
the passionately anti-Moscow
rebel commander Shamil
Basayev, was a leading contender.
Basayev is viewed as a terrorist
in Russia and a hero among
Chechens for leading a 1995 raid
into Russia. He emerged as the
strongest challenger to Moscow's
preferred candidate, moderate
Asian Maskhadov.
Moderate Chechen and Russian
politicians believe the list was fab
ricated-probably by the Russian
Federal Security Service, a suc-cessor
to the Soviet KGB-to con-vince
voters that a Basayev vic-tory
would bring back the war that
ravaged the south.
These fears are not as paranoid
as they sound to Western ears. The
most recent war in Chechnya,
which began in December 1994,
was preceded by increasingly ag-gressive
disinformation, leaked
from secret service sources in
Moscow. In Chechnya, any rerun
of these mind games is seen as a
sign that Moscow is still ready to
fight them.
If provoking more conflict was
the aim of the mysterious list,
whose origins are being investi-gated
by southern Russian authori-ties,
it only partially succeeded.
The election went ahead despite
the furor. Maskhadov beat
Basayev and the others, winning
by a majority. The peace held.
Real ethnic crimes have begun
to replace imaginary ones. Youths
from each ethnic group threaten
"betrayers" from the other with
fists and grenades. A 55-year-old
Russian in Naur recently tossed a
grenade into a police car, seriously
See Chechya, rage Z
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