A TREVENGER RUNNING
Weather Today: Partly cloudy with a high of 82 and low of 54. Tomorrow: Partly cloudy with a high of 79 and a low of 53.
The University Daily Kansan
THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS Wednesday, September 27, 2000
Sports: The volleyball team travels to Waco Texas, tomorrow to take on Baylor.
SEE PAGE 1B
(USPS 630-640) • VOL. 111 NO. 23 For comments, contact Nathan Willis or Chris Borniger at 864-4810 or e-mail editor@kansan.com
Inside: The deadline for deciding whether to take a course pass/fail has been pushed back.
SEE PAGE 3A
WWW.KANSAN.COM
Mr.Wong cartoon flier incites furor
Bv Travis Reed
Special to the Kansan
Senior exchange student Carol Chung thought nothing was out of the ordinary yesterday afternoon as she grabbed a flier, sticker and fortune cookie from an individual on Wescoe Beach.
But when she opened the pamphlet and fortune cookie, Chung became an unwitting viewer of what she said was racist material.
Instead of a restaurant menu, Chung found an advertisement for "Mr. Wong's Kitchen," a Web-based cartoon strip that some say exploits stereotypes of Asian Americans. The "menu" offers an entire section of cat entrees and panda selections and a beverage menu composed entirely of alcoholic drinks.
At the beginning I thought it was a restaurant," Chung said. "I was shocked and angry because it was so racist. My second thought was, 'How could people spend money on something that is so racist?'
The flier was an advertisement for Icebox.com, a site that includes several animated shorts of Mr. Wong, an elderly servant who is consistently mistreated by Miss Pam, a sultry, scapely Caucasian employer. Mr. Wong is drawn with unnaturally yellowed skin, and his hunched countenance provides a stark contrast to that of his employer.
Icebox.com creates and presents a handful of other original animation shorts, including series featuring "Hard Drinkin' Lincoln," "Garbage Island," and "Rock and Roll Dad," but "Mr. Wong's Kitchen" has generated more rancor and backlash than any other, said Lisa Spirita, a representative for the company.
"Some people are offended because of their background; some people think it is hilarious. It's purely entertainment," Spiritus said. "Our mission is to create entertainment you can't find on networks or in theaters."
The company has received several complaints from consumers, including reproach from the Organization of Chinese Americans, but icebox.com representatives said they had no intention of diluting the material.
"While some content is controversial, it is well within the bounds of current satire-based, comedic programming." Spiritus said in an e-mail. "But it's up to the viewers to decide whether this is the type of content they want to watch on a week-by-week basis."
Although the menu's content has been offensive to some, one student who tossed the fiery away and ate the complimentary fortune cookie thought it was a pleasant surprise.
Tiffany Bode, Newton freshman, received a fortune that read, "You smell like this man's ass," but never read the accompanying "menu" information.
"I thought it was hilarious," Bode said. "I'd just gotten done taking a test, so I'm looking at it, and usually you expect to see a tute, general piece-of-crap fortune that could apply to anyone. But I know I don't smell like his ass, so I don't see any reason to be offended."
- Matt Merkel-Hess contributed to this story
- Filed by Erin McDaniel
The freshman experience
Five students share thoughts on life at KU
Editor's note: During Hawk Week, the Kansan asked a group of new students who were just moving in to start recording their experiences and thoughts about their new lives at the University of Kansas.
The Kansan was looking to see the University through the eyes of students from different backgrounds to gauge initial reactions to the University and the people here and to experience the transition that comes with life at a university.
What follows are excerpts from the journal entries of five freshmen during their first month here.
Rea Judilla First entry
Lia Wullbrandt, Hampton, Iowa, freshman, is one of the freshman who volunteered to keep a journal about her college experiences. Photo by Tara Kraus/KANSAN
Deciding how I feel is something I never used to have problems with. Each day now, I have to get dressed in a non-Catholic school ensemble, knowing that people judge what they see. I'm in a sorority. That was a decision I made for me. I get mad when I realize how different I am from most people.
unough. A lot of times I feel cut off from the majority of the Asian population, regardless of my father's background. I often feel labeled as just another white girl.
Second entry
I met a Filipino-Caucasian girl the other day who I felt I really connected with [Editor's note: Rea also has a Filipino-Caucasian heritage]. She urged me to do more "self-discovering" in a cultural group, and I was really excited to hear the invitation. It's hard sometimes to make that effort,
Today at lunch, I decided that my roommates and I should sit at the nearest and largest table. After a little while, someone made the comment of how many segregations there were around us. Nearly every table in our section was populated by African-American people.
How do I react to that? I feel like part of that comment is directed at me. I grew up surrounded by mostly "white" people, and yet I still take comfort in those type of people now.
"They separate themselves and call other people racist," someone said. "Why don't they try to expand from what they know?"
Why don't I step out of my comfort zone and try to meet some culturally different people? No matter my effort or thought on the matter, I'll end up being a hypocrite. You can't try to make friends with people simply based on the fact that they look different.
Third entry
Third entry
... Truthfully, people are the things I miss the most — high school shenanigans and the liberty of having someone knowing you so well. I miss the crazy, uninhibited times with with friends and late nights at play rehearsal. I can live without these things, but I never realized how much these things were worth until this year.
See FRESHMEN on page 8A
Marca Judilla
Rea Judilla
Hometown: Wichita
Major: fine arts and psychology
Can be found! Singing in the St. Lawrence Hill, at shops on Massachusetts Street, reading art magazines or listening to Lauryn Hill or Miss Saigon.
reading art magazines of listening to earnly Earthest destination: the Philippine islands
Farthest destination: the Philippine Islands
Came to KU because: "My father taught here many years ago. I was impressed with their art department. We come here to football games and the campus is gorgeous."
Goals for KU: "I want to meet some people very similar and very different from myself, some true friends to connect with, too."
Don't worry, be happy
Erica Andrade, Kansas City, Kan., senior, right, works with Sarah Zaragoza, Kansas City, Mo., sophomore, to make worry dolls out of popsicle sticks and yarn as part of Hispanic Heritage Month. Worry dolls are designed for people to tell their worries to at night. The doll does all of the worrying through the night, so the person can sleep. Hispanic Heritage Month continues through the middle of October. Photo by Craig Bennett/KANSAN
Women who live together often menstruate together
By Meghan Bainum
writer@kansan.com
Kansan staff writer
Women who live together may not only eat, exercise and study at the same time, but they may also have their periods at the same time.
Many women who live together find that their bodies adjust, and they begin to menstruate at the same times of the month.
Tara Tonsor, St. Louis junior, lives in a house with three other women. She and another roommate who are not on birth control quickly adjusted to the more regular cycles of their roommates who were on the pill. And all this happened within about a month of moving in together.
"it's kind of weird, but it's true," Tonsor said. "I think it's kind of funny, and we just laugh about it."
This occurrence is not limited to small groups of women. It also happens in living arrangements such as
scholarship halls and sorority houses. Eliza Bennett, Marion senior, said that while not all of her hallmates in Miller Scholarship Hall have their periods together, she had definitely noticed a trend. She said she thought the close living arrangement was to blame.
Although group periods seem real among many women who live together, the reason for community periods is sometimes not that easy to figure out, said Kathy Guth, gynecology nurse practitioner at Watkins Memorial Health Center. She said she had read about the occurrence of insync periods, but didn't know the exact cause.
"We know that it has to do with the circadian cycle — kind of like your biorhydhms." she said.
The circadian cycle is defined as a cycle dealing with biological activity or function.
Guth said conforming to roommates' cycles was inevitable, unless
the women were taking birth control bills.
"If they're on pills, it's not going to happen," she said. "But if it's just their natural cycle it's going to happen."
Tonsor said she and her roommates decided they would live with the pains of having four girls on their period at the same time.
"One thing that drives me up the wall is the trash can in the bathroom," Tonsor said.
Bathroom aside. Tonsor said that it was sometimes nice to live with a group of women, especially when it came to having somebody who was sympathetic to the problems periods could sometimes bring.
"Sometimes we all have the same craving and somebody will make cookies," Tonsor said.
But, Tonsor said, the best thing about sharing cycles was simple.
"It's all over with all at once," she said.
Student retention rate increases at University
Enrollment, ACT scores increase from last semester
— Edited by Wariso Chulindra
ey Kursten Phels
writer@kansan.com
Kansan staff writer
Enrollment at the University of Kansas increased 2 percent this fall - a jump of 514 students - and American College Test scores and freshmen retention rates rose with them.
According to the official enrollment count administered on the 20th day of classes, the University had the highest enrollment among Kansas Regents schools with 25,920 students. The University of Kansas Medical Center enrolled 400 students, down four from last fall.
"I think it shows the academic quality of the students that we bring in every year," said Kathleen McCluskey-Fawcett, associate provost.
The average ACT composite test score for new freshmen was 24.42, up from last year's average of 24.04. The national average is 21.7.
She said the increase showed the University's progress toward reaching its goal of a freshman class average ACT score of 25.
The University hopes to reach that goal in the next few years, McCluskey-Fawcett said.
A new admissions policy.
affecting next year's incoming freshmen, could help increase the average score even more, she said.
"One of the qualified admissions requirements is an ACT score of 21," McCluskey-Fawcett said. "A lot of the reason for our mean score is because, although we have a lot of students with high ACT scores, there's also students below 21. And qualified admissions should raise that
mean a little."
The University also improved in student retention, with 80.3 percent of last year's freshmen returning to KU — up 2.4 percent from last fall.
"I think that signals that we're getting a lot of good students interested in KU and getting them here, but we're also keeping the ones we get," McCluskey-Fawcett said.
Kathryn Nemeth Tuttle, director of the Freshman-Sophomore Advising Center, said that the retention rate was good for an open-admissions university, but that there was room for improvement.
"We want to get KU back to the retention rates for freshmen and sophomores that we have
"We've made a commitment to connect each student with an individual adviser to help them with classes — things like add/drop and career advice," she said. "I think that one-one connection and also us referring students to other important resources on campus has been real instrumental."
had in the past," she said.
"Anytime you retain a student and that student succeeds, it's a positive thing."
Tuttle said part of the Freshman-Sophomore Advising Center's role in improving student retention was helping freshmen and sophomores establish a relationship with KU faculty and staff.
— Edited by John Audleholm
Melissa Carr/KANSAN
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