ASUCD Senate Meetings are scheduled to begin Thursdays at 6:10 p.m. Times listed are according to the Feb. 25 meeting location, the Memorial Union’s Mee Room.

Meeting called to order at 6:12 p.m.

Joe Chatham, ASUCD president, left early

Chris Dietrich, ASUCD vice president, present

Abrham Castillo-Ruiz, ASCUD senator, present

Adam Thongsavat, ASUCD senator, present

Alison Tanner, ASUCD senator, arrived late from a break scheduled to end at 5:55 p.m.

Andre Lee, ASUCD president pro tempore, arrived late from a break scheduled to end at 8:55

Bree Rombi, ASUCD senator, present

Don Ho, ASUCD senator, arrived late

Joel Juarez, ASUCD senator, present

Levi Menovske, ASUCD senator, arrived late from a break scheduled to end at 8:55

Liz Walz, ASUCD senator, present

Osahon Ekhator, ASUCD senator, present

Ozzy Arce, ASUCD senator, arrived late from a break scheduled to end at 8:55

Selisa Romero, ASUCD senator, present

Appointments and confirmations

Keith Sun was appointed Spiritual and Religious Chair to the ASUCD Outreach Assembly.

Tanner was appointed head of the Campus Media Board.

Presentations

Dietrich presented the Student Government Administrative Office’s Michael John Tucker Leadership Award to Previn Witana.

Sunny Dhillon, a senior computer engineering major, and Fei Li, a senior computer science major, presented their UC Davis Mobile iPhone application.

Farewell addresses

Former senators Justin Gold, Shawdee Rouhafza, Trevor Taylor, Joemar Clemente, Kevin Massoudi and Witana gave their farewell speeches.

Consideration of old legislation

Senate Bill 36, authored by Witana, co-authored by Ho, to allocate $2,850 from Capital Reserves to purchase a screen, a blower, a Denon AV-V210 DVD player, cables, a switcher and tie-downs for the Entertainment Council, passed unanimously.

Consideration of urgent legislation

Urgent Resolution, authored by Amelia Goodfellow, co-authored by Lee and Quentin Voyce, in support of Health Education and Promotion’s (HEP) first UC Davis Nap-In on March 10, passed with an 11:1 vote.

Public discussion

Lee proposed creating a committee for continuing work on UC Davis Mobile upon Dhillon and Li’s graduations. The proposition was tabled for further discussion.

Meeting adjourned at 11:08 p.m.

JANELLE BITKER complies the senate briefs. She can be reached at campus@theaggie.org.

Coming to a meeting room near you: A candid explanation for the University of California financial crisis.

This scenario hasn’t happened yet, but maybe not far off at the rate Kelly Ratliff is going.

Ratliff, associate vice chancellor of Budget and Resource Management, and Jason Murphy, UC Davis director of state government relations, have been traversing the campus presenting an overview of the university’s budget and advocacy with the state.

The two have already met with leaders from the Graduate Student Association, Women’s Resources Center, LGBTRC, Cross-Cultural Center, the two student assistants to the chancellor and the Center for Leadership Learning – and may still schedule more.

“The basics I try to clear up are where the UC gets its money from, what it does with it and how it decides what to do with it,” Ratliff said.

The goal is to make sure that students have good information, Murphy said.

“It’s frankly not productive to have conversations about things that are not accurate – there’s a lot of misinformation out there, and we’re trying to clear up the issues,” he said.

Murphy said the idea to sit down with representatives from campus organizations was hatched after a forum in November about university fee increases and incidents at Mrak Hall.

“Kelly and I take a two-pronged approach: She has a presentation she’s refined that’s a primer on sources of university funds, and I talk about advocacy and statewide discussions that affect the UC,” Murphy said. “We’ve been working through student services to talk to groups they have in mind and people that they work with.”

One element of the personal presentations Ratliff and Murphy have been delivering to student leaders they say is tough to convey to large groups, because of their interactive nature. In this setting, they’re able to pause and answer questions at any time, and invite feedback from their audience.

“I spend all day, every day, working on this stuff and then I get invited [to speak to a large group], and people want me to explain everything in 15 minutes,” Ratliff said. “The feedback is invaluable; I added a whole slide after meeting with the student assistants to the chancellor that details key steps to the campus budget.”

Student Assistant to the Chancellor Allison Zike, a senior community and regional development major, said their recommendations aimed to translate budget terminology into something more student-friendly.

“A lot of it has to do with trying to understand where students are coming from, and finding the easier way for them to hear the message,” she said.

Zike became interested in sitting down with Ratliff after hearing her present at the fall dialogue with the chancellor.

“Part of our goal is to try to get students to understand things better, and we have this problem of what may be every-day budget talk to administrators is not that simple for students to understand because we just don’t know that vocabulary,” Zike said.

By making themselves available to leaders of student organizations who will then speak to members of their group, Murphy believes their presentation is facilitating the spread of relevant information

“It’s impossible for [Ratliff] or I to sit with hundreds of students, but it’s our hope that by speaking with these different groups we can help get the message out,” he said. “For those that want to hear more, we think it’s very effective.

Ratliff’s PowerPoint also includes a slide answering students’ frequently asked questions, like how the UC can continue to make new buildings while struggling financially. Available online is a document entitled “Student Fees Overview,” which contains a table listing and defining every fee, who decided it should be a fee, and what the money goes towards.

“People are always calling for transparency, but we make public a ton of information that’s on our website if people go looking for it,” Ratliff said. “If they can’t find it, that’s different from us hiding it.”

LAUREN STEUSSY can be reached at campus@theaggie.org.

We aren’t in Kansas anymore. Or, at least journalists aren’t, said Huffington Post co-founder and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington, who spoke to a packed Mondavi Center Friday evening.

Huffington predicts the future of journalism will be a hybrid of the best of the old and new journalism: a combination of fact checking and journalistic reporting with the immediacy and interactivity of online journalism.

The speech highlighted the importance of social media outlets, such as Twitter and Facebook, to news today.

Though CNN and other media outlets were banned from Iran during the upheaval of the summer 2009 presidential election, the government of Iran could not control the thousands of Twitter and Facebook feeds – feeds that leaked the majority of the information about the resulting protests.

“You can’t use an analog map to find your way in a digital world,” Huffington remarked about the necessity of using new media.

The speech also touched upon her disappointment with the media’s obsession with trivial news stories. Huffington sees altruism, what she calls “the fourth sense,” as the solution to overcoming the media’s weakness.

Stories like the “balloon boy,” whose real name is Falcon Heene, should be replaced by stories about the thousands of impoverished children in the United States, she said.

In a 25 minute question and answer session with the audience immediately following the event, an audience member shared his experience as a blogger for the Post.

“I would like to thank you for providing me the opportunity to express myself at a time when the Huffington Post was the only outlet to do so,” said Joseph Palermo, a professor at Sacramento State who was recently furloughed. Palermo uses his blog on the Post to voice his frustrations with the economic crisis.

The popular site seeks to become the eyes and ears of the nation, as contributors like Palermo blog about personal effects of the economic crisis such as layoffs and furloughs.

Last Monday, the Post launched a section dedicated to college news, with the leading story titled “Majoring in Debt.” University papers across the nation, including The California Aggie, are teaming up with the Post to give college students the expression they may lack in mainstream media.

“I thought it was an interesting speech, but I don’t think anything she said was particularly insightful,” said Jeremy Botherwa, an Australian exchange student at UC Davis. “I felt like she talked just for the applause. It was something you hear all the time.”

After the event, Huffington sat down with Aggie reporters to discuss the UC fee increases.

“[The cuts] are really unfortunate. I understand that the state is broke, but education shouldn’t be made less accessible,” Huffington said. “Ultimately, it is the state that is responsible for making the cuts.”

The Huffington Post, a news and blog site launched in 2005 is one of the most widely read online media outlets. Huffington, a native of Greece and candidate for Governor of California in 2003, was named one of the world’s most influential people by Time Magazine in 2006, and one of the most influential women in media by Forbes in 2009.

ERICA LEE contributed to this article. GABRIELLE GROW can be reached at campus@theaggie.org.

The entrance to the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center (LGBTRC) on campus was vandalized Friday night with spray paint and derogatory phrases.

In addition, early last week, a swastika was carved into the door of a first-year student in a Tercero residence hall. The sign was approximately two inches and was carved next to the door of a Jewish student residing in the dorms.

UC Davis Police are currently investigating both crimes.

Police have not yet identified suspects for either crimes and request that any information regarding who might be responsible be brought forward.

In a letter sent to the UC Davis community, members of the LGBTRC announced that they would not immediately remove the vandalism in order to raise awareness for the struggles that the LGBT community faces. The front entrance where the vandalism appears will be cleaned on Monday night.

“We feel it is easier to erase physical representations of violence than to heal from the ongoing impacts of this hatred,” the letter read. “Erasing it makes it possible to avoid believing these things happen on our campus. We want to work towards a healing resolution.”

The LGBTRC will hold a town hall discussion to decide further actions and express any concerns tonight at 5:30 p.m. in Regan Main.

Any information regarding potential suspects should be reported to campus police at 530-752-1727.

For further information on these crimes, read tomorrow’s Aggie.

– Lauren Steussy

As part of its overall effort to increase student support, UC Davis has established an initiative fund targeted toward graduate students.

The Soderquist Matching Fund Initiative for Graduate Student Support is designed to match campus resources with the donations of faculty and staff from a minimum of $12,500 to a maximum of $25,000. The $500,000 used for the fund comes from the estate of Charlie Soderquist, a UC Davis alumnus who received a Ph.D. in agricultural and environmental chemistry from the university.

It is part of an effort by UC Davis to raise $120 million for Project You Can, a UC initiative aimed at collecting $1 billion over the next four years.

The fund initiative will give preference to academic fields that Soderquist was interested in, such as civil and environmental engineering, hydrolic sciences and population biology.

University officials said the money will help graduate programs by allowing faculty to recruit graduate students and boosting research funding.

The fellowship will create opportunities for graduate students to engage and focus in their scholarship, said Fred Wood, vice chancellor for student affairs. Wood also emphasized that such support might have less tangible benefits.

“For me, I remember, and other students tell me that it’s true as well,” Wood said. “Knowing that there is someone who is supporting you with their money has another impact in terms in your confidence, your belief in yourself, and your desire to complete the degree.”

Donations will have an immediate impact on graduate programs, but will be used with an eye to long-term use.

“It goes directly into a graduate program, wherever the donor might specify,” said Jeff Gibeling, dean of graduate studies who worked with former UC Davis Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef on the project. “It’s put into an endowment to generate income annually.”

According to Gibeling, the return rate for funds put into an endowment is about 5 percent. The endowment fund will be invested by the UC Regents or the UC Davis investment board in stocks or bonds to earn income.

UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi praised the effort of Gibeling and Walter Jennings, professor emeritus for food science and technology for creating for the first fellowships in the initiative.

“We are grateful to Jeff and Walter for their generosity and leadership in this initiative,” Katehi said in her Feb. 11 state of the campus address. “Which is part of the broader effort to secure support for all UC Davis students at a time when they need it most.”

The Soderquist fund is expected to serve as a model for additional funds that might target professional or undergraduate student support.

Wood said he expects that the fund’s method of matching donations will motivate people to give.

“That encourages a lot of people to reach for their checkbook,” Wood said. “Because they know it’s not just their dollar but it’s two times their dollar to support a graduate student. It’s a way to incentivize and encourage investment in this critical area of graduate student support.”

LESLIE TSAN can be reached at campus@theaggie.org.

Yesterday morning at 9:45, approximately 20 students at UC Irvine began a sit-in at the campus’s administrative building, Aldrich Hall.

The sit-in resulted in at least 17 student, faculty and staff arrests for unlawful assembly and refusal to disperse, according to a press release from University Communications at UC Irvine. All but five of those arrested were released on the scene.

By yesterday afternoon, staff members working in the building were evacuated while demonstrators chanted outside the building and throughout the street, physically blocking several exits.

“We call for the democratic education intended in the founding of the UC system,” read a statement from a list of demands the students wrote during the protest. “This means an end to the racist, gendered, hetero-normative, and exploitative practices currently in place.”

The protest was a response to a culmination of events on and off the Irvine campus, including the arrest of 11 UC Irvine and Riverside students at a campus meeting with the Israeli ambassador to the U.S.; the “Compton Cookout” event held by UC San Diego students; and the 5 percent work-hour reduction of represented employees on the Irvine campus, according to UCI media spokesperson Cathy Lawhon.

Also yesterday, hundreds of students walked out of a teach-in hosted by the UC San Diego administration on the UCSD campus. Members of the Black Student Union then held their own teach-in and protest outside Price Center.

Speakers from all over California, including students from Compton High School and a professor from USC spoke of the impacts events like the “Compton Cookout” have on the black community.

Those who attended the event said the discussion was a positive reaction to several events on the UCSD campus, including an independent newspaper’s usage of a racial slur. The outrage led to the student government temporarily cutting funding for all campus media publications.

“The teach-in today wasn’t just a reaction to the “Compton Cookout” party,” said Hosna Safi, a UCSD junior majoring in international studies. “There were underlying issues of race even before the party. It was a catalyst for change on our campus.”

In support of the black students at UCSD, UC Davis students will be wearing all black clothing today and tomorrow. On Tuesday, many students taped their mouths shut with words of support written on the tape to demonstrate awareness for the issue of racism.

LAUREN STEUSSY can be reached at campus@theaggie.org.