THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN
The University of Kansas—Lawrence, Kansas
Friday, December 3,1976
Vol.87 No.70
Lights never flicker at architects' home
By DAYNA HEIDRICK
Staff Writer
It's 11 p.m. on Mount Oread. Lights go off in one building after another as students pack up their books to go home. But in one building, the lights stay on 24 hours a day, seven days a week—and the students don't go home.
Architecture students have strong feelings about the building where they spend so much of their college careers.
Marvin Hall, home of the School of Architecture and Urban Design, with students who work night and day on their architecture project.
"Marvin has its good points," Gary Popeno, Overland Park senior, said recently. "It's a very creative building. It's nice to work in—it's homey. We don't want the atmosphere changed."
OTHER STUDENTS POINTED out the advantages of having an old building, with adequate space.
"Like it because I can put my things up—it's like home," Cindy Summers, Prairie Village senior, said. "But I would like to see some of the things."
Other students were emphatic about the changes that needed to be made. One senior student, who asked not to be identified, compared
See related story, pictures page 11
the teaching of architecture in a building such as Marvin to teaching music in a building with poor acoustics.
"Marvin is the oldest unrenovated building on campus," he said. "We're ashamed of our facilities. How can you teach architecture in a building built in 1915 that was absurd at the time it was constructed?
"THE BUILDING REALLY projects a poor image for the School of Architecture. It's embarrassing when other architects visit."
The student said he thought the condition of the building eventually would result in one of two things: either the enrollment would have to be severely limited or the quality of education would decline.
Students pointed to specific problems in the building.
He said he had found light fixtures smoking and once one of the light switch boxes was too hot to touch, he said.
Staff photo by JAY KOELZER
ONE SENIOR SAID, "The wood is 80 years old and it's dry. It's been repainted so many times that if there was a fire the poisonous fumes and the smoke from the paint would get us if the building didn't collapse before we could get out."
Marvin after midnight
Popenoe said, "The building should be an example to us as architecture students, study problems of space and right here we are structure students."
"The school is packed. There's a limit to how close you can be. My younger year舍友都会跑进去, and back-to-back they always bump into each other."
"THROW SPACE" - a place to put drawings when they're not worked on-is a "must" for designers, Popenoe said.
A common sight in Martin Hall is the late-night architecture student who spends most of his night finishing a project. Mark Treiber, Northfield, ill, senior, kept at his last week, while Charlie Babb, Denver, Colo., junior, took a break for a nap.
Finals can cause strain, but help is available
By RICK THAEMERT
The end of the semester and final exams means an increase in stress and anxiety for most students, but according to University of Kansas psychiatric and counseling of officials, the extra emotional strain is rarely serious.
Richard Rundquist, head of the University Counseling Center, said yesterday that there was an increase in students who requested counseling at the end of the semester, and that often many of them were anxious or nervous.
"We get a lot of people this time of year that are up in the air about what they want to do," he said. "Sometimes they're nery and we try to help them right here, but if it's more serious, we see that they get the proper help."
THAT PROPER HELP is the University Mental Health Center, but few students have emotional problems serious enough to require professional Sydney Schroeder, KU psychiatrist, said.
In fact, he said, some stress is normal and healthy for most people, especially during beginnings and endings of different stages of living. For that reason, Schreder said, he must teach each semester is also a period when students experience sad emotional stress.
"Without stress, we don't really live!"
"That's what makes us learn and grow.
"Beginnings and endings always add stress to daily stress, but most people have reserve enough to cope with it. Students can get upset when change occurs in their life,
"USALLY THE STUDENTS that show up here are the ones who have the stress of their day."
Schroeder said one of the most common problems among students was overemphasis of finals. He said many students have failed and lost a final with failure or success as a person.
"Some of the students that are the biggest worriers and think they're going to flank you are not," she said.
Schroeder said that although school was very important, a person wouldn't need to know all the rules.
"They let finals symbolize whether they've made it or not," he said.
ANOTHER PROBLEM FOR students is be idealistic, Schroeder said. Students
"There are too many problems in the world for any of us to solve," he said. "It's normal to have some failures. You don't want students to throw away their ideals, but yet they have to realize that the world isn't always their oyster."
who are overanxious to be successful often have their bubbles burst when they find themselves in trouble.
Because the parents have sacrificed money to send their children to college, the students often feel pressured to do well, which can cause added tension, he said.
Family pressure is often another problem for students. Schroeder said.
See FINALS page seven
SCHRÖEDER SAID THAT it was an American characteristic to want suc-
cession. In fact, he wanted to succeed.
Senate fails quorum exigency plan passes
By DEB MILLER
The University Senate yesterday passed the University's financial exigency policy because the Senate failed to meet its quorum.
Staff Writer
If Chancellor Archie Dykes, approves the document, which has been discussed for three years, it will become official policy. It is a state of extreme
Financial exigency is a state of extreme financial crisis that would warrant the intervention.
The financial exigency document was passed by the University Council in May, and the committee doesn't meet its quorum, the actions of the Council automatically are approved.
THE DOCUMENT, outlines steps for declaring a state of exigency, choosing which areas and which faculty members will be released, listing rights that those dismissed have and suggesting preventive planning to avert a state of exigency.
Although the policy was passed, Joel Gold, presiding officer for University Council and University Senate, said that it could be changed.
a robert Prieur, president of the KU
Bank of France, who is in charge of it.
In the case of financial exigency, one of
their
Gold was referring to several proposed amendments by the KU chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), most of which deal with greater faculty participation in financial exigency decisions. Because a quorum wasn't present, the Senate couldn't vote on the amendments.
ONE AMENDMENT CALLS for examination of ways to avert releasing tenured faculty members, such as Universitywide proportional salary ad-
the 20 members of a school or department had to be dismissed, some or all of the department members could take a salary cut to retain the professor.
After discussion on the necessity of including this clause in the document, a straw vote showed that the Senate was divided on the issue.
THE OTHER AUDP amendments including defined "faculty" to include administrative positions, providing that the faculty year's notice isn't given to dismissed faculty members and having the chancellor consult with the Conference on Promotions and Tenure as well as students, faculty and administration before making cuts.
At the start of the meeting, Chancellor Archie Dykes said that KU was wise to discuss financial exigency now, rather than to delay decision in the emotion of the moment.
HE SAID THAT the administration planned to follow the guidelines set by the policy to determine which areas would be cut.
Most recent new positions have been those of visiting professorships or teaching aides, which are positions that would be easier to cut than tenured faculty, he said.
Shankel stressed, as he has at past meetings, that KU's enrollment could possibly drop to 15,000 by 1986, resulting in faculty cuts.
Del Shakel, executive vice chancellor,
said that the University was doing
everything possible to ensure flexibility
in case reuse reductions couldn't be
predicted.
Commission chooses two sites for city hall
HOWEVER, HE SAID, KU's destiny is in its own hands, and the most important factor in keeping KU's enrollment up is maintaining its high quality.
By JOHN MUELLER
If Lawrence builds a new city hall, it will be next to either the Douglas County Courthouse, 11th and Massachusetts Court, or east of the Massachusetts Street bridge.
City commissioners, acting on information from City Manager Buford Watson, recently eliminated three other possible sites from consideration, including a site in the 600 block of Massachusetts Parkway, where students studied two months ago by 15 students from the University of Kansas School of Architecture and Urban Design.
OPTIONS, REJECTED by the commissioners were to renovate the police wing of the police and fire building in the 700 block of Vermont Street, and to remodel the Standard Mutual Life Insurance Building, Eighth and Vermont streets.
The Bowersock Mills proposal would cost as much as $1.8 million, which would renovate the Closeout Carpet building and develop the land around the Bowersock Mills. The courthouse proposal would cost between $200,000 in a new between the courthouse and the new Douglas County Judicial and Law Enforcement Center.
Commissioners didn't prefer one of the proposals more than the other, but they asked Buford Watson, city manager, at their regular meeting Tuesday to prepare a revised estimate of how much the plans would cost. The Bowersock Mills plan may not cost as much as $1.8 million, according to commissioners.
"LETS HAVE BUFORD dig further into
the alternatives," Commissioner Barkley
Cherokee.
Commissioners said that they wanted the estimated costs of the two plans to be closer.
but that the Bowersock Mills site might be too expensive at $1.8 million.
Watson and commissioners changed their minds by turning down the Massachusetts Street site, which would have put a new city hall north of the Lawrence National Bank.
In an earlier meeting with the KU architecture students to discuss their research, Watson called the Massachusetts Street site "the front door to the city." The students arrived at their recommendations, limited by Watson to the Massachusetts Street site after six weeks of interviews and examinations. They examined of site plans for a number of city office buildings throughout the United States, and construction of elaborate models for a city hall that would increase city office space by 70 per cent.
CITY OFFICES are on now two floors of the First National Bank Tower, 900 Massachusetts St., and cost Lawrence $60.00 a year in rent.
Robert Gould, assistant professor of architecture and urban design, supervised the students' research and said that it hadn't been wasted.
IT WAS ONE OF THE better educational experiences for those second-year students.
Gould said that the city seemingly had decided that the Massachusetts Street site was too expensive. It had been estimated to cost $400,000 for existing buildings would cost $500,000 which wouldn't include the cost of a building new hall.
Both the Bowersock and courthouse proposals provide adequate amounts of space-between 25,000 and 30,000 square feet. Both studies studied the Massachusetts Street plan, Bowersock hadn't been under consideration, he said.
For prof, spiders are pleasant pets
By SHANNON DREWS
Robert Beer's pets live in glass jars, go months without food, are virtually maintenance-free and have eight legs.
Scientists call them arachnids. Everyone else calls them spiders.
Beer, professor of entomology, keeps about 20 of them as pets in his office in Snow Hall, which is crowded by shelves and tables overflowing with glass jars, aquariums and other containers. Several spider webs spun on table tops and in corners throughout the office are left untouched.
"I love to keep these critters around so I can have them to show." Beer said recently.
"My black widows are all female," Beer said. "The males are so much smaller than the females that they are usually killed during mating. That's why they're called black widows."
Beer said he fed his large spiders cockroaches and his small spiders fruit flies.
HE WALKED OVER to a pair of gray file cabinets. "Here are my black widows," he said, pointing proudly to five quart jars on top of the cabinets. "And that's breakfast," he added, nodding his head at a cockroach waiting at the top of one of the jars. "She (the black widow) hasn't spotted it yet."
IN A JAR next to the black widows, a tubular white
worm was crawling on the wall. Bee caught two years ago while in Texas on a field trip.
The spider's gray-green abdomen was about the size of a marble, and Beer said she was almost ready to lay eyelashes.
"She has been isolated from a male for over two years
and she is still laying eggs. That indicates that live sperm have been maintained in her body for two years," Beer said.
"We used to pick up black widows with our hands," he said. "But we must have known they were dangerous because we always shook them in their hands and then dropped them out."
Beer, 58, has been collecting spiders since he was 4.
Today, Beer likes to handle only nonpoisonous spiders
Beer said when he first made gestures with his hands towards the tarantula she would rear back and elevate her fangs.
Spiders are like people, better said. When I'm the girl my tantala she was cantankerous beyond belief."
"There are only occasional days when she is unfriendly now," he said.
The largest spider in his collection, a five-inch tarantula, which he has kept for five years, died earlier than expected.
"It was the only pet spider I ever named," Beer said, as he picked the dead tarantula up from a tray on the table. "At first I named it Harry but it turned out to be Harriet."
According to Beer, the best location to find tarantulas is around the strip mining areas near Pittsburgh.
BEER SAID THAT spiders made "great pets" because they could go for months without eating.
"They're not quite as good as pet rocks, though," he added.
Beer said that although some spiders, such as the tarantula, had been known to live in captivity for over 17 years, most spiders lived only about two years.
He surveyed the various containers around the room then walked over to a table below a row of windows and carefully picked up a jar and lifted it to the light.
HE SQUINTED AT the jar, then shook it. Gently he lifted the lid and oaked a finger at the motionless figure.
"Well," he said sadly, the jark back on the table. "I was feeling well in my pets. She hadn't been feeling well the past few days."
Bee picked up a dead scorpion from the jar and laid it on the table. It was dry and shrieved up.
HE FOUND THE CONTAINER he was looking for,
reached inside and lifted a flat rock.
“Oh,” he cried, dropping the rock back into the container. “When we’re on field trips looking for scorpions I tell my students to look on the rock when they pick it up in their ground. Otherwise the scorpions will be on their hands.”
THE MEXICAN SCORPION was carrying 15 babies on her back. Beek looked up from the container.
Gingerly he lifted the rock again. This time the scorpion ran in circles on the sand in the container. Beer stood watching it closely. Suddenly he smiled.
"Look," he said excitedly. "Can you see what's on her back? This is only the second time this has ever happened to me."
"I'm going to go out and buy cigars for all of my friends," he said.
Staff photo by JAY KOELZER
Spiderman Robert Beer