6A THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
NEWS
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2004
Up in lights
Steven Bartkoski/KANSAN
Damian Powell and Zach Snyder, Lawrence residents and Kansas Union employees, hang lights on the trees outside the Kansas Union yesterday afternoon.
CHANCELLOR: Hemenway identifies with college students
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1A
budget cut of about $19 million. Closing the museum was not something anyone took any pleasure in doing. Hemenway said.
The museum cost $200,000 a year to sustain and had very low attendance.
All of the anthropology collections were saved and are still available for students to view, he said.
Hemenway was also asked what was the one thing he was most proud of.
He said he couldn't pick just one "thing," so he talked about several. One of those was the Freshman-Sophomore Advising Center. The center is a strong point of the University, he said. In 1997, the student retention rate for freshmen and sophomores was 74 percent, which meant 26 percent of students left the University between their first and second years. The retention rate for 2004 was 82 percent.
When asked what his college experience was like, Hemenway said for the first two years he
worked 40 hours a week while he was a full-time student. For the last two years, he worked 30 hours a week. Hemenway said he had a great understanding of students who have to support themselves while going to school.
This year, athletic officials from the University and the University of Missouri decided to change the name of the game between Kansas and Missouri from "Border War" to "Border Showdown" because of controversy.
"Border War or Border
Hemenway said a real war was going on in Iraq, but then again, "Those Missourians came and burned down Lawrence," he said. "I don't know what the answer is."
Showdown?" a student asked.
Hemenway ended the night visiting with a couple of students, including Flay, who wanted to follow up on some of the questions asked.
"It's a way to communicate with students," Hemenway said of the session.
— Edited by Marissa Stephenson
DNC wins fiscal battle, loses war
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — Capping a stunning year of record fundraising by both sides, the Democratic National Committee said Thursday it outraised President Bush's GOP this election cycle. Its Republican rival wasn't disputing that, but noted the money didn't buy victory.
"We're going to need every bit of support we can get to do what we need to do. We've got a long battle ahead, but compared with where we were four years ago or eight years ago we're in great shape," McAulife said in a phone interview.
Now, it can spend four years building the groundwork to try to reclaim the White House in 2008, he said.
The DNC said it raised at least $397 million from January 2003 through Nov. 22, the period covered in its new campaign finance report; the RNC said it took in $385 million and wasn't questioning the Democratic committee's financial edge.
Figures the DNC planned to file with the Federal Election Commission showed the DNC took in at least $12 million more than the Republican National Committee since Jan. 1, 2003.
DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe said he considered the fund raising — combined with a lack of debt — all the more remarkable because the party finished the 2000 presidential race with $18 million in bills to pay.
"I think that you had an energized and engaged electorate this election cycle on both sides of the aisle and that's reflected in the fund-raising totals that you're seeing," said RNC spokesman Brian Jones.
Still, added Jones. "The bottom line at the end of the day is we won, we did what we needed to do." Besides keeping the White House, the GOP strengthened its House and Senate majorities in the Nov. 2 election.
The Democratic total is not worthy in part because the DNC had been operating at a multi-million-dollar disadvantage. After a financial surge during President Clinton's years in the White House, it found itself with no sitting president or congressional majority leaders to woo donors.
Strategists in both parties had predicted a campaign finance law imposing new contribution limits after the 2002 elections would hit the Democratic Party harder than the GOP. The Democrats historically were more reliant on the unlimited checks from unions and others that the new law banned, while the GOP was much better at collecting lots of small donations.
However, it was the RNC along with the California Democratic and Republican parties, not the DNC, that sued unsuccessfully to try to overturn the new restrictions.
The Democratic National Committee redoubled its efforts to collect donations up to the new $25,000-per-year limit and in more modest amounts, using Internet "Weba-thons" like those pioneered by presidential hopeful Howard Dean in the primaries to raise millions in a matter of days or even hours.
In the end, the DNC and the RNC raised more heading into the election than they had when they could collect corporate, union and unlimited donations. It's too soon to say which side had more cash on hand overall; finance reports by outside groups are still coming in.
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