Friday, April 30, 1999 The University Daily Kansan Section A·Page 5 Fire code crackdown costly at KU By Chris Honkine By Chris Hopkins chopkins@kansan.com Kansan staff writer Summerfield Hall may have been built 44 years ago, but thanks to changes in state policy, a new door will be added three feet from the current door to comply with fire codes. The door, which costs $12,000, should be finished in two weeks. The door in Summerfield is being added because of a violation that is common to more than a dozen campus buildings, said Bob Rombach, project manager for design and construction management. The staircase on the north side of Summerfield exits into the lobby, whereas state code says staircases must directly exit the building. The new door will be an exit only much like several of the front doors to Strong Hall. Bill Lewis, lecturer in the school of business and building coordinator for Summerfield, said the change didn't make much sense. "Are we just going strictly by the rule or should there be some logic?" he said. While he believed that the new door was unnecessary, Lewis said he understood the state office of the fire marshal's position. "If you've got a code and you're the fire marshal and you're not enforcing the code, then you're open to criticism," he said. "Perhaps they've been criticized in the past for signing off on things." Bob Rombach, project manager for design and construction management, said that two things had brought about the change to Summerfield as well as millions of dollars worth of changes to other buildings on campus. First, Rombach said, a policy change by the office of the fire marshal in the early 1990s required existing buildings to be more up to date with current code. Second, the state attorney general's office has asked that Kansas universities be examined more closely for fire code compliance. Rombach said the fire marshal requested 340 changes in KU campus buildings last year. In years prior to 1991, Rombach said numbers were at most a third of that, maybe lower. The staircase on the north side of Summerfield Nail exits into the lobby, whereas state code says staircases must directly exit the building. "I'm hesitant to say it was 10 percent, but it was a whole lot less," he said. Rombach said about half of the violations were behavioral, such as furniture left in the hallway, while the other half were structural. Rombach said he thought that before the policy change, they were mostly behavioral. Jerry Briggs, Derby senior, was ambivalent about the door. He said that the congestion at the exit into the lobby wasn't that bad but that at the same time, he certainly didn't want to burn to death. Ken Stoner, director of student housing, said that the same sort of problem had been addressed in the renovations of Templin Hall and Lewis Hall and will be addressed in the upcoming renovation of Ellsworth Hall. Stoner said one of the other changes being phased in were wired-in smoke detectors. "We still have a few battery-operated smoke detector systems," he said. Larry Laubham, liaison to the University from the office of the fire marshal, said that he was unsure if citations had gone up as dramatically as Rombach claimed but that his office had been looking more aggressively for offenses. Rombach said the projects would not be finished for eight or nine years and already cost the University millions. - Edited by Jason Pearce The Web: learning tool or time-waster? By Jennifer Roush By Jennifer Roush jrush@kansan.com Kansas staff writer In an increasingly technical world, people are finding it harder to be productive without computers or Internet access. College students are no exception. To keep students at the University of Kansas cruising on the information superhighway, the Department of Student Housing began making the residence halls and scholarship halls at KU Internet-ready in 1994. That meant the students who lived in the halls didn't have to pay a dial-in fee to access their e-mail accounts or the World Wide Web from computers in their rooms. University administrators also had discussed the possibility of requesting that all students have a home computer by Fall 1999. Kathleen McCluskey-Fawcett, associate provost for academic affairs, said that the issue had been discussed but that computer ownership would not become an official KU requirement. But not everyone thinks that it is a good idea for college students to have Internet access piped into their rooms. Nate Stulman, a student at Swarthmore College, wrote a recent column for The New York Times that called computers, especially those with Internet access, "The Great Campus Goof-Off Machine." In his column, Stulman recounted stories of students who spent hours in front of their computers playing games, visiting chat rooms or downloading software, rather than doing homework or attending classes. Some students at KU think that Stulman has a point, but they haven't seen their hallmates doing all the things that Stulman described. Scott Raymond, Belton, Mo., junior and Templin Hall resident, has to spend a certain amount of time online every day because he won a Levi's contest that requires him to do all of his shopping on the Internet. However, he said that he didn't think he wasted too much time online. "I'm not a big game player." Raymond said. "Sometimes I do just kind of mindless surfing, like you do with TV. And chatting is a big time waster." But Raymond said that he had never seen anyone in his hall spend large amounts of time just doing nothing on the Internet. Robert Reddig, Kansas City, Mo., junior, also lives in Templin Hall. He said that he didn't think Internet connections in residence halls posed a problem. said. "College is all about learning how to live on your own and balance work with everything else." Although he said that he knew of students who did skip homework to play games, such as Quake, Warcraft or Starcraft, he hadn't heard of anyone skipping class just to keep playing. "I think it's a good thing," he Thomas Helike, assistant professor of political science, said he didn't consider computers or the Internet necessary to a good liberal arts education. He said computers were useful as word processors for students to write papers, but they weren't really a requirement for students in his classes. "They're a convenience, not a necessity," Heilke said. "They can definitely have a downside. It's just like with TV. 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