Tomorrow's weather
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
Kansan
Partly cloudy and warm with light winds from the south.
HIGH 78
Tuesday
March 30,1999
Section:
A
Vol. 109 • No. 119
LOW 50
Online today
Now that college basketball is finished check out what is happening in Major League Baseball.
http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb
Sports today
Kansas assistant basketball coach Matt Doherty reportedly will be named Notre Dame head coach today at a press conference.
SEE PAGE 1B
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4,000 per hour evacuate Kosovo in mass exodus
The Associated Press
THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
(USPS 650-640)
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia — Thousands of bedraggled refugees, many with little more than the clothes on their backs, strag-
gled out of Kosovo yesterday in one of the largest postwar exoduses in Europe as NATO bombed Yugoslavia for a sixth day.
With nearly one-quarter of Kosovo's population now made homeless since Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic launched the Kosovo crackdown 13 months ago, disquieting reports surfaced of
ethnic Albanian leaders being summarily executed.
Milosevic: NATO has continued to bomb Yugoslavia
The newspaper's publisher,
Veton Surroi, and Rugova have gone into hiding, NATO officials reported.
NATO said it had reliable reports that Fehmi Agani, a close aide to ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova and one of the negotiators at the failed Rambouillet peace talks, was killed Sunday after attending the funeral of a slain human rights lawyer.
People forced across the border
Four other prominent ethnic Albanians were also reported executed in the Serbs' "scorched earth policy," NATO said, including Baton Haxhiu, editor in chief of Koha Ditore, the Albanian-language newspaper in Kosovo's capital of Pristina.
appealed to his countrymen to take in the refugees. Many of those arriving were in tears, exhausted and carrying their only possessions.
Refugees were streaming across the Albanian border at the rate of 4,000 an hour on Sunday, OSCE and NATO officials said Monday. The exodus was straining the already desperate resources of one of Europe's poorest countries.
The Albanian prime minister
were being stripped of their passports, identity papers, even their car license plates, in an apparent effort to make it impossible for them to return, authorities said.
"It's almost as if their identities are being canceled out," NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said in Brussels, Belgium.
Some 80,000-100,000 Kosovo Albanian refugees have arrived in northern Albania, more than double the rate of a few days earlier, the U.N. relief agency said. Thousands more headed west to Montenegro and southeast to Macedonia
"Are you American?" Neijmie Kelmendi asked an Associated Press photographer as she trudged up a steep mountain road near Pec in southwestern Kosovo, accompanied by her two daughters. "Tell NATO that Pec is burning, and where are the ground troops?"
More than 2,000 people have died and a half-million others have been displaced — many of them forcibly — since the clashes began in Kosovo.
NATO seemed to back up the accounts of destruction, saying Monday that Pec was "substantially destroyed."
Arts center directors expect commission OK for new building site
Yugoslav officials remained defiant, saying NATO's "shameful" attacks were only inflaming the crisis in Kosovo, where Yugoslav troops are bent on wiping out ethnic Albanian separatists.
By Heather Woodward hwoodward@kansan.com Kansan staff writer
Plans to build a new arts center in the 900 block of New Hampshire as part of the Downtown 2000 project will be presented to the Lawrence City Commission tonight.
reliability, said Karmen Huyser, president of the arts center's board of directors. "All indications look like it is going to be a go."
"We've asked the city commission to study this and determine
The new plan is an attempt to satisfy two groups at the heart of the Lawrence Arts Center expansion debate. Conflicts between the arts center board and historical preservation advocates have kept the project at a standstill for the last 12 years.
See ART CENTER on page 2A
Huyser said that the center has needed to expand for some time but
Jason Williams/KANSAN
that historic preservation restrictions have prevented flexibility in changes to its present home, the Carnegie Library, 200 W. Ninth St.
When the Kansas Historic Preservation Officer recommended different plans for the Carnegie Library last month, Huyser said the board of directors began looking at other options.
the board of directors begins loading a space on The planned 616-space parking garage on New Hampshire Street, which will face the new center, satisfies the demand for
Provost, senators question Regents-restructuring bill
By Kristi Reimer
Kansan staff writer
Provost David Shulenburger called an amendment to a bill that would change the way public universities and colleges are governed an "inherit insult" yesterday.
their senior yeducation.
The Senate passed a bill last week that would reconstitute the Board of Regents and add community colleges and vocational schools to its purview.
In addition, it approved an amendment that would limit the number of alumni on the board from any state university to three.
Seven of the nine Regents members have degrees from the University of Kansas.
"The amendment implies that we have somehow been favored, and I just don't think that's true." Shulenburger said. "I'm not at all pleased with the inherent insult."
The Senate's vote sent the bill to the House, where it has been referred to the Education Committee. Chairman Ralph Tanner, R-Baldwin, already has studied the bill and said the House likely would add a funding component.
The bill would abolish the Board of Regents and re-establish a new nine-member board July 1. The new board would be divided into three commissions one to oversee the six state universities, one to govern the 19 community colleges and 11 vocational-technical schools, and one to handle coordination issues.
Rep. Troy Findley, D-Lawrence, said that although community and technical colleges belonged under the Regents' control, he also had a problem with the alumni amendment.
problem with the administration.” It’s been described as a ‘get KU amendment,’” he said. “What concerns me the most is that the governor should have the opportunity to appoint the best people possible and not have to be held to the constraints of this amendment.”
Regents Executive Director Tom Bryant said that the board supported better coordination but that members should be allowed to divide responsibilities themselves instead of being appointed to commissions.
He also said the additional work was a matter of concern.
"We haven't been responsible for community colleges, so we don't know exactly what that workload's going to be." Bryant said. "But you've got to be doing more since you just added approximately 30 more institutions to the Regents' responsibility."
Shulenburger also said he was somewhat concerned about the increased workload for Regents governing public universities: The work of nine people would be placed on three board members.
"But on the other hand, if you are going to coordinate higher education, you've got to have a set of people who understand what's going on," he said.
The House Education Committee is expected to send the bill to the floor for debate this week. If the House passes it, it likely will end up in a conference committee.
Tanner said chances were good that the bill would pass, although nothing is guaranteed. This proposal has progressed further than any other higher-education reform proposal in state history.
education reform proposal.
"Sometimes you run across things whose time has come," he said. "Maybe this is one of those things."
Edited Darrin Peschka
Bids for Student Senate begin
By Nadia Mustafa
nmustafa@kansan.com
Kansan staff writer
YOU finalizes campaign agenda
Buttons, flyers and a couple of sofas on campus yesterday signaled the kick-off of the post-spring break Student Senate campaign season.
Members of YOU and Delta Force volleyed to attract students to their coalitions between classes. Delta Force sprawled its traditional "living room" on a lawn in front of Stauffer-Flint Hall, while members of YOU stood behind information tables in front of the Kansas Union and on Wescoe Beach.
While Delta Force released its campaign issues earlier this month, YOU did not have its campaign issues finalized until just before spring break.
Korb Maxwell, YOU candidate for student body president, said that YOU surveyed more than 1,000 students in housing and campus organizations before arriving at its issues agenda.
"We picked issues that focused on improving the quality of life at the University," he said.
Lett: Erin Simpson, Lenexa sophomore, tells Jennifer Smith, Manhattan, Kan., senior, about Delta Force. The Delta Force table will be set up at popular campus sites all this week.
Below: Molly Bennett, Roeland Park sophomore, explains the importance of wearing the "YOU For Senate" button to Aly Jones, Lenexa sophomore. The YOU For Senate booth was at Wescoe Beach yesterday. Photos by Gus Koffler/KANSAN
Efforts to achieve a tuition cap head the coalition's campaign issues.
Maxwell said that state support for KU is declining. He cited a 40-60 costfee ratio, by which students pay 60 percent of the University's operating costs while the state pays 40 percent.
if elected, YOU candidates would lobby the state Legislature to return to a 75-25 cost-fee ratio and increase financial aid distribution to national levels.
Maxwell also said that about 10 percent of undergraduate students receive financial aid, which is half of the national average.
Transportation and parking were also included on YOU's agenda. The coalition promised to work toward the creation of a citywide bus system retaining student control, increasing the number of student spaces in the new parking garage and ensuring that the parking department does not oversell campus lots.
Maxwell said that he was unhappy with the distribution of spaces in the garage, which allocated 300 spaces for students, faculty and staff and left the remaining 500 spaces as metered parking.
YOU's third issue was the creation
"We have to fight for students' rights," he said. "The parking garage by the union just infuriates me. We want to make the parking department more student-friendly."
of a five-year comprehensive campus safety strategy, which would include 24-hour student access to campus buildings such as Watson Library, Fraser Hall and Anschutz Science Library so that students could study in a safe environment late at night. The plan would also increase lighting in some campus parking lots and add more emergency phones on campus.
"We need to get out of the Band-Aid approach and get an actual strategy," Maxwell said.
YOU promised to expand Saferide by lobbying for state support and implementing the Safewalk program approved by the student body last spring. Also, the coalition would try to redistribute KU public safety by putting more officers on bicycles and foot rather than in cars to improve campus safety.
Along with those, YOU would attempt to alter the University's course retake policy so that students would be able to replace the poorer grade with the better grade instead of averaging the two.
Both coalitions plan to continue campaigning on campus during the next two weeks before elections on April 14 and 15.
Edited by Tara Hinkhouse
Dede Seibel, YOU candidate for student body vice president, said that if elected, she would require senators to make weekly visits to student organizations.