CAMPUS: An oil company donates a valuable fossil collection to the University. Page 3.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
VOL.103,NO.68
THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
ADVERTISING: 864-4358
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 29,1993
(USPS 650-640)
NEWS: 864-4810
Task force gives ban on dating a thumbs down
Committee suggests less restrictive wording for relationships policy
By Christoph Fuhrmans Kansan staff writer
The consensual relationships task force came full circle Wednesday when it finished its report on KU's consensual relationships policy.
The task force's recommendation that KU should have a policy discouraging consensual relationships but not a complete ban was the same recommendation made by the sexual harassment task force's report in Spring 1992.
The report was used by the administration to form the existing policy of prohibiting consensual relationships between students and professors who have a class together.
The report was written by the task force's 16 members, who represented KU's faculty, students, classified and unclassified staff.
Besides the report, the consensual relationships task force also created two possible policies that could replace the existing consensual relationships policy.
Kim Wilcox, associate professor of speech, language and hearing and head of the task force, said both policies recommended against a consensual relationship but did not ban it.
KANSAN
"They are two examples of policies that embody our comments," he said.
The consensual relationships task force was supposed to base some of its report on public response from University members. But the task force received only five responses about the policy.
Sandra Wick, assistant director of the honors program and task force member, said the task force managed without much University response.
"We had a lot of in the committee discussion about different scenarios," she said.
The task force was formed by University Council on Sept. 16 and was given a set of issues to address. Responses to those issues formed the basis of the task force's report.
The task force answered:
- whether the policy should be limited to sex.
The consensual relationships task force will present its report to the University Senate Executive Committee on Wednesday. SenExthen will send the report with possible revisions to University Council
What happens next
After reviewing the report, Council will make its own recommendations to Ed Meyen, executive vice chancellor. Meyen then will send the results to Chancellor Gene Budge for the final decision.
ual or romantic relationships or be amended to include other relationships that could harm the faculty/student or supervisor/employee relationship, such as faculty members teaching their relatives.
The task force recommended that all conflicts of interest, including consensual, parent/child or spousal, be avoided.
- whether the policy should be renamed the confictual relationship policy.
- The task force recommended that the policy be renamed the consenting relationships policy.
- whether the policy should clearly explain what types of relationships are allowed and prohibited.
The task force recommended the policy be general in purpose because of the difficulty in defining what types of relationships should be allowed or prohibited.
Record Breaker
Thanksgiving cold sets record in Lawrence
- whether the policy should be publicized in any special forms, such as the faculty handbook.
- The task force recommended the policy should appear in the faculty code of conduct and other unclassified staff handbook, the classified employees handbook, the students code of conduct and the University's affirmative action policies. The task force also recommended the policy should appear in a separate brochure.
- whether changes should be recommended for implementation of the policy.
The task force recommended the policy should be implemented through increased visibility and education of University members.
whether recommendations are needed for the sexual harassment policy.
The sexual harassment task force is being consulted for revisions to the sexual harassment policy.
By David Stewart Kansan staff writer
Along with turkey and stuffing, Thanksgiving in Lawrence this year came with a hearty helping of record cold weather.
A 95-year low of 10 degrees was recorded Thursday, breaking the 1898 record of 15. The cold weather created dangerous conditions on the highways throughout the state, according to the Kansas Highway Patrol.
During the four-day Thanksgiving holiday, eight people died on Kansas roads, including three members of a Chanute family killed Saturday in a one-vehicle crash near Garnett, which is in Anderson County.
Last year, two people died on Kansas roadways during the Thanksgiving holiday.
Along with the cold temperatures and icy roads, Lawrence experienced its first accumulated snowfall of the season Saturday, and low temperatures continued.
"It's a true arctic outbreak in every sense of the word," said Mark Bogner, meteorologist for Weather Date, Inc., a private weather service. "This is the same air that had been stored up over Alaska — it originated over Siberia.
"The thing that's hard to deal with is we're getting it in November instead of January."
some students said they still had to adjust to the dipping mercury and the ice roads.
Scott Hillard, Waco, Texas, freshman, said his return home for Thanksgiving break coincided with his birthday. He received some warmer winter clothes, snow boots and an ice scraper as gifts from his family. But even going as far south as Waco did not keep Hillard away from the subfreezing temperatures, he said.
"For the first time in the longest time, it snowed just a tiny bit," Hillard said. "It just usually doesn't get that cold."
Harmony Baldwin, Columbia, S.C., freshman, said she welcomed the change to colder weather. Before moving to Lawrence, Baldwin had been warned by friends and relatives who live in Kansas about the potential severity of Kansas weather.
While spending the Thanksgiving break in Little Rock, Ark., Baldwin said she received a call from Kansas friends telling her about the area's first snow.
"We get maybe one snowfall in five years in South Carolina," Baldwin said. "I had only been through here during Christmas time before coming here, but it's sort of why I really wanted to move here."
The Associated Press contributed information to this story.
Coach for a day
William Alix / KANSAN
Kansas second baseman Clint Hardesty, Choctaw, Okla., sophomore, coaches Taylor Parker, 8, as Josh Wisehunt, 13, and Karl Lischer, 7, wait for their turn. The Kansas baseball team had a clinic for children from the Lawrence area yesterday at the Anschutz Sports Pavilion.
Despite shortcomings, Hubble telescope a valuable tool
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — When tests in the summer of 1990 showed that the $1.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope had a flaw that left it seriously nearsighted, despair swept through the astronomy community.
it was crushing," recalled Sandra Faber, an astronomer at the Lick Observatory at the University of California who had spent years planning to use the Hubble. "Our whole hopes and plans — scientifically, financially, personally and otherwise — were completely demolished."
Some astronomers became like shell shocked survivors of a war, she
said. But others sought solutions.
Tod Lauer of the National Optical Astronomical Observatory provided the first hope. Days after the discovery of the problem, he demonstrated a way of using a computer to correct the flaws created by the Hubble mirror.
Others developed similar computer enhancement techniques, and within six months of finding the flaw, astronomers began to realize that something important might be salvaged from even a bleary-eyed Hubble.
Since then, photos taken by the orbiting telescope have reshaped some of the fundamental understandings about the universe. Even in its
degraded condition, Hubble has probed the previously unseen heart of distant galaxies and photographed the individual pieces of a speeding asteroid. Hubble has taken astronomy to the brink of locating and proving the existence of black holes, the mysterious, theoretical objects that are so dense even light cannot escape their gravity.
"We have done better than I thought we would at working around the problem," said Peter Stockman, deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. "There are many areas where the Hubble findings are unique. There are discoveries that could not have been
made in any other way."
With image enhancement techniques, "we got back about half of the capabilities that we had expected," said Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "The images were good enough to see the basic features of what galaxies look like at 4 (billion) to 5 billion light years away."
A light year is the distance light travels in one year, or about 6 trillion miles. It is also a measure of time because the light carries an image of what existed when it was created.
Most astronomers believe the fundamental success of even a myopic Hubble has been to study stars at the
center of galaxies that appear only as bright blobs on ground-based telescopes.
For example, in the center of a galaxy called NGC4261, about 45 million light years away, the space telescope found a disk of dust around a bright hub that may include a black hole. The immense gravitational force of the black hole pulls gas inward so rapidly that the material is heated millions of degrees.
But the Hubble has fallen short of what was expected when it was launched in 1990.
It has not been able to look back the full 10 billion years as planned. And it has not been able to precisely measure the size of the universe, one of the fundamental goals of the whole project.
"It hasn't acted as the time machine that we hoped that it would," said Stockman.
That may be changed by the Hubble repair mission of the space shuttle, set for launch Wednesday. If the adjustments go as planned, the Hubble will be able to look back in time 10 billion to 14 billion years, to within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang.
"The fix, if it works, will multiply the output by a factor of 10," said Faber. "And that will be well worth the money."
Kansas became only the second team to win the Preseason NIT twice when it defeated Massachusetts in Friday's final 86-75.
Twice is nice
Page 9.
Offensive pictures may trigger sexual harassment claims
Students told to remove poster of nude woman on Templin hallway door
By Brian James Kansan staff writer
When a few residents of Templin Hall taped pictures of topless women to their doors, they said they did not think the pictures would offend anyone — especially in a men's residence hall.
But when a female student housing employee saw the pictures, she was offended. She claimed that the pictures created a hostile working environment, thus constituting sexual harassment.
Her complaint left Dan Murrow and other residents facing the question of what is
appropriate for door decorations.
"Most of the guys have no problem with this kind of stuff," said Murrow, Kansas City, Kan., freshman. "I think I have the right to put up anything on my door, even if somebody considers it offensive. I don't see why they have a problem with it."
Murrow said he had posted a picture of a nude woman on his door two weeks ago and soon after received a letter from the hall director, Jim Schmaedeke, asking him to take it down.
Schmaedeke could not be reached for comment yesterday.
Murrow and other residents said the policy concerning offensive material on doors was too vague.
Fred McElhenie, assistant director of student housing, said offensive posters, such as pornographic pictures or derogatory signs, could trigger sexual-harassment
charges against a resident if that person refused to take down the material in question.
McEhenie said that residents who repeatedly refused to take down the offensive material could face expulsion from the hall or the hall system. But McEhenie said that such cases were rare and that often residents took down the material after they had been asked to do so.
McElhene said that material posted on the outside of doors was considered much different than material posted inside a residence hall room.
"We spell out everything in the contracts. We are not a moral arbiter. We respect their privacy," he said. "But the hallway is a public area. We feel we have every right to protect our employees and keep everything very much in line with sexual harassment guidelines established by the University."
According to student housing guidelines,
decoration on the outside of the room door is "permitted if it is not offensive according to University guidelines."
McElhenie said material that was visible to the public was subject to the guidelines, such as a poster displayed in a window or posted on the outside of a door. Posters displayed inside student's rooms are not subject to these guidelines.
Tom Berger, associate director of the office of affirmative action, said his office, along with the University ombudsman, handled most sexual harassment cases on campus.