The Towerlight, October 6, 1983

tl19831006-000 "The Towerlight Man matures through work Which inspires him to difficult good. �Pope John Paul Il Vol. 77 No. 5 PUBLISHED BY THE STUDENTS OF TOWSON STATE UNIVERSITY TOWSON, MARYLAND 21204 October 6, 1983 Homecoming '83! Tigers seek 12th straight Homecoming victory 'Alumni bull shooting' heads impromtu events Someone once said that Homecoming is the time when all the alumni come back to their alma mater and tell stories about everything they never did as undergraduates. This year, however, Alumni Bull Shooting will only be one of the events, scheduled and impromptu, held during the Homecoming celebration which commences today with the dedication of the new Residence Complex at 3:30. 'Homecoming '83', which has been in the planning for three months continues tomor-row with pep rally on Burdick Field at 2 p.m. Bob Turk, Class of '69 and weatherman for WJZ-TV (Ch. 13), will emcee the hour-and-a-half long rally featuring the 'The Tiger,' the `Tigerettes', the Tiger football team, mar-ching band and cheerleaders, and the five finalists for Homecoming Queen. There will also be a Banner Contest with $150 in cash and prizes to be awarded to the best banners. On Saturday, the celebration will kick into gear around 10 a.m. as pre-game lailgaters' arrive in Towson Center Lot 20. Pit beef will be sold, but `gaters are advised to bring their own picnic. Balloons�benefiting the Joe McMullen Memorial Scholarship fund � will be available for a ""minimal donation of 25 cents"" according to Student Government Association Treasurer Kelley Ray. HOMECOMING '83 Schedule of events Thursday, Oct. 6 3:30�Ribbon-cutting ceremony, new Residence Complex. Friday, Oct- 7 2:00 Pep Rally, Burdick Field Saturday, Oct. 7 10 a.m.�Tailgating, Towson Center Lot 20 10:30�Alumni Lacrosse Game, soccer field adjacent to Towson Stadium. 2:00 p.m.�TSU TIGERS vs MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY BEARS, Football game, Towson Stadium. 9:00 p.m.-1:00 a.m.�Annual Homecom-ing Dance, University Union. Music will be provided by WCVT-FM/ WTSR-AM. At 10:30, the alumni will square off against each other in the Alumni Lacrosse Game on the Soccer Field adjacent to Towson Stadium. The action will move into the Towson Stadium at 2 p.m. as the Tigers take their 3-1 record against the Bears of Morgan State. The Tigers stomped the Bears 17-10 last year for their 11th straight Homecoming victory and are looking to make it number 12 this year. Halftime entertainment will include the crowning of the Homecoming Queen by Johnie Banks, last year's Homecoming queen, and performances by the team's respective marching bands. That evening Top 40, Funk, and Big Bands will take over the entertaining at the Annual Homecoming Dance which begins at 9 p.m. in the University Union. Dress is semi-formal and tickets are available for $3.50 per person at the Union Box Office. Planning for Homecoming '83 was begun last June 23, Ray said, under the impetus of Leonard Raley, director of Alumni Services. Ted Johns, assistant director of Special Ser-vices, chaired the Homecoming activities committee, Louise Shulack coordinated residence promotion and the banner contest and Ray organized the tailgating party and Homecoming Queen contest as the SGA's representative in the planning process. The SGA is paying the $1500 bill for the Homecoming activities, Ray said, but expects to make up the difference through the pro-ceeds from the dance. Towson State avoids national dorm overflow MILWAUKEE, WI �Barb Zicari, a history major at Marquette University, found herself stuck into a rented hotel room this fall, instead of moving into a university dorm as she had expected. To Zicari, it is great. In fact, ""I'd never go back to the dorms if I didn't have to. Here, you don't have to worry about doing your towels or linens, and a maid comes in every day and cleans the place up."" But to Marquette officials, it is a terrible situation. Besides placing Zicari and 29 other women students in the Continental Hotel, they have had to rent additional floors of a nearby YMCA and convert dorm lobbies into temporary living quar-ters for their new students. The cost is significant. The dam-age to a school's reputation as a desirable, comfortable place to study can be bigger. Towson State managed to avoid such problems despite the nearly 1500 new resident students on cam- Pus this semester. The University Opened a 1700-bed Residence Corn- Plex, built while other universities were closing dorms or forestalling plans to build new ones, earlier this semester and now posts a 92-percent Occupancy rate in University-owned housing. [In 1979, the University was not so lucky. A housing office error forced 100 students off campus for the semester and into the Towson East motel and the Yorktowne Vil-lage Apartments in Cockeysville.] But a number of schools across the country are facing problems as dorm officials are being surprised by the number of students who have shown up asking to move into dorms in recent weeks. In addition to Marquette, Middle Tennessee State, Western Michi-gan, Iowa State, Connecticut, West Liberty State, Notre Dame and Oklahoma are among those who unexpectedly have run out of dorm space. ""Most of the Big Ten schools are pretty much at capacity or in need of special housing for their over-flow,"" Gary North, housing director at the University of Illinois and past president of the Association of College and University Housing Officers (ACUHO), said. ""Most of the larger state universities are in similar circumstances,"" he added. ""Little and private schools may be experiencing a surplus of dorm space, but even some of them are having overflows this year."" It was not supposed to be like this. Virtually all long-term predic-tions of enrollments in the 1980s showed the college population dropping off precipitously. Many cmpus officials shied away from buding new dorms, fearful they would be left vacant after the dead-line scheduled to start in fall 1981 and to accelerate after that. Some schools even closed exist-ing dorms over the last several years at the first hints of enrollment decline. Despite a decrease in the number of 18-to-24-year-olds in the general population, the enrollment decline is on hold. The college population, which peaked at 12.4 million last year, is expected to stay at or near that level throughout the decade, the National Center for Education Statistics predicted. Moreover, the continually-rising price of off-campus housing around the country has convinced more students to choose dorms over apartments. The result: an unantic-ipated increase in the number of dorm residents this fall. ""We keep waiting for things to level off like they're supposed to, but it's not happening,"" Marquette spokesman Dave Foran said. Western Michigan closed three dorms over the last few years, but has had to reopen two of its Val-ley II projects to absorb this fall's increase in dorm requests. Oklahoma, despite an overall enrollment decline of 400, also has reopened a dorm it shut down last year, and has made some double rooms in existing dorms into triples. Computer system open, officials hope to reduce student backlog By Jim Schoettler After considerable effort, Towson State's new $10 million academic computer system opened earlier this semester. Offi-cials now are seeking to reduce some of the backlog of students waiting for computer courses and to expand the computer's role University-wide. ""I think it's a fine system that's going to do a lot for the University,"" said Doris Lidtke, associate professor and coordinator for computer science. ""I think now is the time to realize how important computing is, not only to computer science, but all across the University, and begin planning for continued growth."" That ""continued growth"" has happened so rapidly that it is hard for the computer science department to meet the needs for all the students, faculty, and administra-tors who want to become part of the recent computer boom. ""We are beginning to work on the backlog of students who are waiting for computer science courses,"" said Lidtke. ""It's a slow process because everything we do to offer more classes seems to generate more student interest. That creates some-what of a problem,"" said Lidtke. Lidtke hopes the addition of the ""VAX,"" along with the increase in the size of some computer courses, will help alleviate the backlog problem. ""To the best of my knowledge, this semester all the students who needed a computer course were able to get in,"" said Lidtke. ""Ideally we should have most, if not all, students taking a computer in their freshman year. How soon that will be, I'd hate to predict."" ""We've got a computer�the VAX �which gives us a lot more capability� approximately 3.6 times more power�than we had before,"" said Ronald Blum, director of the academic computing center. ""How-ever, demand is expanding at an incredible rate. I don't know how much longer we have before our present situation is going to have to be upgraded in order to keep up SGA holds action with the demand,"" said Blum. ""It's not far off."" The rush to enter the computer science program at Towson State, along with the University of Maryland's cutback in their program, has made the department's pres-ent lack of sufficient space, equipment, and full-time faculty more acute. Finding space to store new equipment, offices, terminal rooms, and classrooms, is still a problem, though a new computing center is under construction in the base-ment of Cook Library, to be completed by January, 1984. ""Things are more crowded than ever before,"" said Lidtke, who sees a ""slight"" improvement in space when the move to Cook is completed. ""This is a department office here,"" said Lidtke while glancing around her tiny office. ""Obviously it's much too small. There's just no way we can keep it very businesslike with things stacked everywhere."" The lack of a permanent full-time faculty is also hindering the establishment of a solid base from which to build faculty-stu-dent rapport and a strong curriculum. - Lidtke and other administrators are actively recruiting full-time faculty, but they [full-time faculty] are hard to find considering the low pay scale for teachers in computer science, relative to the wages they can earn in private industry. ""I think it's important to know we have 40 people teaching computer science, either day or night, and there wasn't nearly that many last year,"" said Lidtke. ""We've brought in a lot of part-time people to teach one or two courses. Some of these people have the qualifications that we'd normally expect of academic people, and others do not. They all have college degrees and expe-rience in the field, but few have Ph.D.'s,"" said Lidtke. ""This is not ideal to build a program. ""I think it's important for people to realize that we can't just say we got this new machine and that's enough,"" said Lidtke. ""We've experienced more problems than I would like to have seen, and that's frustrating."" on lecture series. Barnhart moves to unite Greeks By Shawn Hill At Tuesday's Student Government meeting, a bill aimed at canceling the current SGA-sponsored speaker series was withdrawn from consideration. Senators Kevin Shabow and Liz Luttrell, co-sponsors of the bill, held the bill in order to make revisions that would allow money from the canceled series to be placed into a new speaker series account. Currently, money for the speaker series comes directly from an account reserved for that purpose. The withdrawn bill, if passed, would have taken the money now in the speaker series and returned it to the SGA general account. Shabow also wants to contact the state attorney general's office to determine whether the series can legally be canceled. President Robert Barnhart also announced that an Inter Fraternity-Sorority Council is being created on campus to improve the image of Greek-letter organizations and, to West Liberty State College in West Virginia is stuffing three stu-dents in rooms designed for two, and moving people into resident advisors' (RA) rooms, normally reserved as singles for RAs. Iowa State University (ISU) cur-rently has 300 students temporarily living in offices, recreation halls and meeting rooms at the Student Union. At one facility, 19 men have to share two showers. Over 100 ISU students could not even get tem-porary housing. Dorms are more crowded where rates are low. ""At schools where the rates have gone up, the increases [in occupancy] have been much more modest this year,"" North said. ""Nationally, I'd say [dorm] rates are up about three to seven percent,"" Annette Smith, current ACUHO director and housing offi-cial at West Virginia, said. ""Last yew 's housing costs went up 11 to 12 percent. ""I think many schools have finally caught up"" with skyrocket-ing energy costs suffered in the '705, she said. ""We're hoping to hold our rates steady for at least the next year."" Consequently, ""it's definitely a better bargain to live on campus again,"" North said. ""And it's also much more convenient. That's why our schools are seeing such good occupancy rates."" a lesser extent, perform a judicial function within the Greek system. Barnhart said that he would be calling a meeting of Greek organization presidents ""within the next two to three weeks."" In other business, the Senate voted to allocate $362 to the Towson State March-ing Band. The money will allow the band to travel to Delaware and perform at halftime at the Towson-Delaware football game on October 15. This is the first time the band will travel with the team. See SGA, page 2 CORRECTION In an article last week on the Forensics Union, the budget figure cited�""over $4500"" ($4,678)�was for the fall semester only, not the entire year The Union will be given another budget in the spring. The Towerlight regrets the error. Those responsible have been sacked. The new Residence Complex under construction in December, 1082. "