August 16, 2009

By Rachel Cieri and Pam Richter

According to Director of University Relations Dan Anderson, within the last two weeks, 14 Elon football players were confined to their rooms after reporting flu-like symptoms. As of Monday, all but one have returned to practice.

The remaining quarantined player is expected to return to practice Tuesday. The affected players were allowed to return to practice 24 hours after their fevers subsided, a measure recommended by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The rest of the team members are having their temperatures taken before practice, and coaches are watchful of their conditions, Assistant Vice President for Student Life Jana Lynn Patterson said.

None of the affected players were confirmed to have the H1N1 flu virus. According to Patterson, the state has stopped testing blood samples for the virus. Two players were confirmed to have contracted a flu virus by quick tests at a local clinic.

Patterson said the players responded well to the antiviral medications prescribed to them. The physician treating the players recommended that they wear masks for a few days, a measure that goes further than what the CDC recommends.

While the ill players were isolated, they were brought take-out meals to prevent spreading illness to campus dining halls.

WXii 12, in Winston-Salem reported Sunday that six Elon football players were still in quarantine and more than a dozen were affected by the flu.

According to an unnamed source close to the football team, “everyone on the team is feeling better.”

The Times-News also reported that more than a dozen football players were quarantined at Duke University for flu-like symptoms.

Elon University recently sent a letter to all parents regarding the flu and preparations the school is taking to prevent an outbreak.

by Rachel Cieri, June 23, 2009

When rising senior Andrew Quay enrolled in Elon’s newest satellite program, he expected to get a taste of the New York business experience in an internship at a corporate office. What he and three other students got, though, was more like a school project to work on from their dorm rooms.

“I’m not allowed to say I’m an intern for the company because our adviser at Bloomberg did not go through human resources, so we aren’t technically employed by Bloomberg,” Quay said.  “Additionally, my group is not working in the Bloomberg office for space reasons, so we aren’t getting a real idea of what the office life is like.”

Elon in New York, a new Summer Session I program geared toward business majors, was designed to give students the experience of working and living in the city through an internship and professional development course.

Quay said the experience is not living up to his expectations. Now, he said he wishes he’d pursued other options.

“I’m from Richmond, Va. and I was struggling to find an internship related to my major,” Quay said of his decision to participate in the program. “I’m not really getting much from the internship, and I probably could have found something more challenging and task-oriented at home or around Elon if I had starting looking for internships last fall.”

has had a similar experience with his internship for Credit Suisse.

“It is basically a report about Sovereign Wealth Funds,” Walker-Drennan said. “It feels more like a school project because its purpose is to educate ourselves about them, not so much for Credit Suisse’s benefit.”

Walker-Drennan and the other students assigned to Credit Suisse are also working remotely, meeting with the Elon alumnus who set up the internship only on the first and last days.

But the experience isn’t all bad. No matter what their internships are like, Quay said he and the other students still get to experience New York culture and living from their Upper East Side Manhattan dorm rooms.

“The living situation is perfect,” senior Melissa Mastropolo said. “The housing has a hotel-type set-up, and the rooms are similar to a college dorm— two beds, two desks, two closets, refrigerator, microwave and full bathroom.  The rooms are air conditioned, which is a plus for spending summertime in New York.”

Mastropolo’s experience, unlike Quay’s, is turning out to be everything she’d hoped for. Interning for the fragrance and flavoring company Symrise with five other students, the marketing major is soaking up city culture. She said her favorite memory was her first day on the job.

“I loved the early morning rush of people on the subways, and I love the Symrise office,” she said. “The office is clean and beautiful and the people couldn’t be friendlier.”

In addition to their internships, students have been exploring the city’s museums, parks and night life. The program includes a few extracurricular activities for students to attend, such as a walking tour of New York’s financial district and a networking event with Elon alumni who live and work in the city.

“It was nice to meet younger people working in the city and learn about their work experiences,” Quay said.

These activities served as part of a professional development course that students attended to build their skills in areas like resume preparation, interviewing and business etiquette.

by Rachel Cieri, June 3, 2009

Tuesday evening after final exams ended, items awere literally flying over the third-floor railing of Elon University’s Colclough Hall and into an overflowing dumpster. A desk lamp, a set of dishes and an entire sofa were just a few of the items discarded in this year’s move-out garbage.

By the time finals end each year, Elon’s campus becomes a graveyard for dorm room rejects, and May 2009 was no exception.

According to director of Environmental Services David Worden, Physical Plant prepares for move-out by bringing 17 extra dumpsters to various locations on campus.

Although Worden said Physical Plant does not keep track of the student waste at the end of each year, each of the 30-yard dumpsters is emptied about four times.

Some groups, though, are putting the abandoned items to good use. Senior Dana Wolff was one of the first to advance the idea.

“Some students think it’s an ‘inconvenience’ for them to have to trek it all the way to the Salvation Army,” Wolff said of students’ waste. “It’s easier just for them to throw it in the trashcan.”

Director of Religious Life Phil Smith said several groups had been talking about collecting unwanted items, but Wolff was the first to advance the idea into a reality.

Smith and the Truitt Center for Religious and Spiritual Life have a longstanding relationship with Habitat for Humanity, so they decided to donate the used items to the charity’s ReStore program.

“We talked about what worked and what hadn’t, and the original idea was to directly furnish the houses (that Habitat for Humanity builds),” Wolff said. “They took the idea and worked with Habitat to find out what would be best for them.”

Residence Life and the Truitt Center have now set up several locations around campus to collect used items that will be sold at Habitat’s store. Proceeds from the “ReStore” will go toward building and furnishing homes for the needy.

Any unwanted furniture that is still in usable condition can be dropped off at the “big yellow truck” that will be parked in the Elon Community Church parking lot until Monday.

There has been a variety of donated items so far this year, from desks and tables to microwaves and appliances. Someone even donated a chandelier.

Ripped and damaged furniture can’t be accepted, meaning that some of the items left in the parking lot had to be rejected. That’s where juniors Colin Campbell and Kyle Banks come in.
When the pair stopped by to donate their own items, they volunteered to load the rejected furniture onto a trailer and move them to the dumpsters around campus.

“We have a trailer and time,” Banks said.

The two had no other incentive than the desire to help. Both former Habitat volunteers, Banks and Campbell are helping Habitat avoid footing the bill for disposing of the furniture and other unusable items.

“Quarter!” Banks said as he pulled a coin out from the cushions of an abandoned couch. “That’s my incentive today.”

Before Preservation North Carolina acquired this home in Glencoe Mill Village in 1997, it was completely uninhabitable. The house had no remaining windows or doors, and it was overgrown with brush. (Photos submitted.)

by Rachel Cieri, May 12, 2009

Before the 1950s, it was a booming mill town. By the 1980s, the neighborhood was the scene of drug deals and homeless squatters. Now Glencoe Mill Village, located about five miles north of Burlington, is the home of a charming and diverse community that has added $10 million to the local economy.

Myrick Howard, executive director of Preservation North Carolina, has seen the change from the beginning. Preservation North Carolina, a private non-profit organization, began considering the area in the 1980s but saw its challenges as simply too large to overcome.

“At that point, it was way bigger than we could have handled,” Howard said.

Today, the same home has been renovated by its new owner. While much of the home is now made of new materials, it retains its original structure and character. An addition on the back makes the home more livable.

In 1995, the group completed the restoration of a mill village in Edenton, N.C., that saw tremendous success.

“The houses sold extremely well,” he said. “We thought maybe we could try again.”
Glencoe Mill Village was vacated in the 1950s, after the cotton mill started by James and William Holt became defunct in 1954.

When they first bought the property, Preservation North Carolina found the houses in extremely poor condition. Out of the 32 houses still standing in the village, only one was legitimately occupied.

“When I say extremely poor condition, I’m used to dealing with vacant houses and renovations,” Howard said. “Some had no windows. Some had porches lying on the ground. One had fallen completely off its foundation. One had an oak tree that had fallen in the middle of the roof.”

The organization began selling the properties for about $30,000 each, but the price amounted more from the value of the land and infrastructure than from the home on the land.

“The difference between a lot with a house and a lot without a house was almost nothing,” Howard said.

Even with the desolate conditions of the homes and the neighborhood, the properties flew off the market. Preservation North Carolina set up stringent restrictions for the changes that future homeowners in the village could make to their houses, which gave buyers confidence that the neighborhood would stay quaint and charming.

Houses in Glencoe Mill Village cannot be expanded beyond 30 percent of their original size, and the materials from which the houses are built must all be the same.

“All the houses there look alike,” Howard said. “Fifty years from now, we want it to still have the feeling of there being a lot of uniformity.”

In fact, there are 14 identical houses still standing.

Similarly, all the new houses that are built in the village must look like the rest. Preservation North Carolina is trying to keep the neighborhood’s historic significance rather than change it altogether. There is only one lot in the entire village that has not been sold.

The insides of the houses, though, are a different story.

The owners of the houses were responsible for completing each of the renovations themselves, and in return they were given North Carolina tax credit.

Many of the owners have personalized their homes to fit their needs, giving the houses’ historic characters a modern twist. One house even features a bathtub as the centerpiece of a bedroom.

On Saturday, May 16, the village will offer an open tour for visitors to see the changes in this now bustling neighborhood. The draw here was the community feel that can be hard to come by in modern neighborhoods.

“Villages can be charming,” Howard said. “They’re walkable and street-oriented. They’re modest in size, but it’s a nice layout.”

by Rachel Cieri, May 5, 2009

Opinion

Students at the Elon University health center wear masks in the waiting room. Families fear serving pork for dinner. And the media never tires of reporting every cough and sneeze to the entire world.

The swine flu has taken the world by storm, if only in people’s minds. With fewer than 900 cases reported out of the world’s 6.7 billion people, one would think the story would be minor news. After all, the United States alone experiences about 200,000 cases of the common flu in a typical season.

But somehow, the word “pandemic” is being tossed around like the surgical masks in the streets of Mexico City.

The validity of the swine flu as a real threat has been challenged before, but the same righteous retort is given repeatedly.

“People are dying from it,” I’m told.

Yes, people have died from the swine flu. That’s undeniable. But there are a few factors that need to be taken into consideration before jumping to the conclusion that the human race has met its doom.

First, only two of the more than 400 confirmed cases in the United States have led to death, and one of those deaths was that of a toddler’s. Toddlers have always been more susceptible to disease, especially to the flu. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention even calls young children a high-risk group for the common flu.

Second, the only other deaths from the H1N1 strain have been in Mexico. Some speculate the strain in Mexico is more severe than the one afflicting Americans, but there is likely another explanation.

The Mexican standard of living is not exactly ideal for disease control. According to Library of Congress statistics, about 21 percent of the population of Mexico has no access to sanitation systems, and there is only about one doctor for every 555 patients in the Mexican heath care system.

Mexico’s GDP is one-fourth that of the United States’, giving it much more limited resources to treat the virus. As of 2002, a quarter of the Mexican population was living below the poverty line.

In contrast, America has some of the world’s best doctors and hospitals, with breakthrough technology and treatments discovered regularly.

The threat of the swine flu is even less valid when compared to the common flu. There are about 36,000 deaths annually from the common flu in the United States alone. The common flu in the United States results in death in about 18 percent of the cases, but the number is less than 1 percent from the swine flu.

The excessive media coverage of the H1N1 virus rarely takes the time to explain these factors. It is simply repeating the hype of hypochondriac health officials.

One would think the media had learned its lesson from the 2006 bird flu scare that has since fallen off the radar for most Americans, after it didn’t leave the impact the public was promised.

Back then we feared chickens, and now we’re scared of pigs. What will be next, the aardvark flu?

Junior Jenna Stout won second place for her essay “Hamilton’s Country: Economics and Politics in Jeffersonian America,” and senior Olivia Hubert-Allen was awarded first place for her essay “The Pursuit of Happiness: Thomas Jefferson’s Understanding of Liberty and Empire in Early American Economic Development.” (Photo by Rachel Cieri)

by Rachel Cieri, April 28, 2009

Politics and economics have crossed paths more than once in U.S. history, as participants in the Thomas Jefferson essay contest discovered.

The essay committee picked the contest’s topic before they knew the country would face a deplorable economic situation, but it turned out to be perfectly timed when they asked students to address the relationship between politics and economics in Jeffersonian America for the contest’s thirteenth year of existence.

Her winnings will buy her a new pair of tennis shoes, but first-place essayist and senior Olivia

Hubert-Allen found the real prize in the knowledge she gained from her research.

“I learned so much, not just about Jefferson, but about early America,” the journalism and political science double-major said. “I saw the titles of the other entries, and I was intimidated. Those look awesome.”

Each entrant found his or her own interpretation of the topic as guests of the contest’s annual dinner learned Monday.

Hubert-Allen’s take on the topic was that Jeffersonians were forced to change positions in the pursuit of a successful American economy. The Jeffersonians “abandoned hopes of a free and open marketplace,” Hubert-Allen wrote in her essay.

Junior Jenna Stout, the contest’s second place winner, took an entirely different side to the argument.

Jefferson was not alone in America’s economic success, she said. Alexander Hamilton, one of Jefferson’s strongest adversaries, played a key role in setting the country’s finances in order, Stout argued.

The contest’s other four essay arguments ranged from junior Brett Scuiletti’s assertion that slavery was a driving economic force to senior Laura Gaither’s application of the past to today’s economy.

Both Hubert-Allen and Stout were surprised they were selected as winners.

“I didn’t think I was going to get anything,” Stout, a history major, said. “I didn’t even know it was my essay (Communications Professor David Copeland) was introducing until the very end when he said the title.”

Hubert-Allen received $1,000 for her first place essay, Stout received $600, and each of the four honorable mentions, Sarah Costello, Laura Gaither, Andrew Johnson and Brett Scuiletti, received $100.

Every participant was given $10 in two-dollar bills, symbolic because the bills feature Jefferson’s face.

This year was Hubert-Allen’s second time entering the contest. Last spring, she was awarded second place, and she entered again this year at the encouragement of Registrar Mark Albertson.

Next year’s essay contest will be moved to the fall in the hope that more students will be encouraged to enter and learn from Jefferson’s wisdom.

Information courtesy of the World Health Organization

by Rachel Cieri, April 28, 2009

Reacting to more than 40 cases appearing across the country, Elon University officials are taking precautionary measures in case the swine flu hits campus.

The emergency response team and safety committee met Monday to review plans to deal with the threat of a pandemic. The university prepared pandemic response plans more than three years ago in response to a similar bird flu scare.

The R.N. Ellington Health Center is also taking a few precautions, although staff said the community is not at any immediate risk. Students who experience flu-like symptoms can come to the health center for evaluation, and they will be asked to wear a surgical mask in the waiting room to prevent the virus from spreading.

Flu test results will also be sent to the local and state health departments for monitoring.
ARAMARK will also take extra precautionary steps in handling food to prevent the spread of disease in dining halls.

According to Assistant Vice President for Student Life Jana Lynn Patterson, the university has made arrangements with local health authorities to have medications delivered to Elon should an outbreak occur.

“We don’t have to worry about getting 5,000 people to the health department,” Patterson said.
If an outbreak of the swine flu does occur on campus, the university will be following direction from the state and local health authorities to take the proper response steps.

“If there is a case anywhere in North Carolina, we’ll escalate our surveillance,” Patterson said. “(The swine flu) seems to be hopping around the country with no natural progression, which is perplexing. When students come to health services, we’ll ask them if they’ve traveled to Mexico or Kansas recently, and if they’ve flown.”

Elon health services has been a leader in the state in developing precautionary measures and response preparations, Patterson said.

The level of threat posed to the campus is still uncertain as officials gauge the disease’s impact and spread.

A mutation of an animal influenza strain, swine flu is defined by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention as respiratory disease of pigs. Until last month, only 12 cases of the disease had been documented in humans in the United States during the past four years, but a recent lethal outbreak in Mexico is causing international alarm.

The World Health Organization said it had “pandemic potential,” and the Department of Homeland Security has declared the outbreak a public health emergency.

The swine flu has health experts concerned because it seems to be passed from human to human, as well as pig to human or pig to pig. While the closest infections are still several states away, the CDC recommends taking a few extra precautions to stay healthy.

Anyone who sneezes or coughs should hold a tissue to his or her mouth and throw the tissue away after using it. Individuals should wash his or her hands frequently and avoid touching one’s eyes, nose or mouth.

People are asked to avoid contact with anyone who is sick and to stay home if they become ill. Anyone with flu-like symptoms should report to the health center for an examination.

The swine flu is not caught by eating pork, a common misconception. The virus is killed like any other germs when the meat is cooked at 160 degrees or higher.

Because the virus can be passed from pigs to humans, areas like pig barns and livestock exhibits with pigs at fairs could be some of the riskiest places in terms of susceptibility.

While there have been more than 100 deaths in Mexico, the toll in the United States has not been nearly so severe. No one has died, and the illness is much like a regular flu.

The main cause for alarm is the sudden spike in numbers of a disease for which there is no vaccination and about which not much is known.

Patterson encourages students to pay attention and not panic.

An outbreak of the Spanish influenza swept the Town of Elon in 1918, according to Durward Stoke’s 1982 book, “Elon College: It’s History and Traditions.”

The book said the sickness hit the university straight on.

Around 300 students were affected, a makeshift hospital with cots was constructed in the gym and the extremely sick were taken to and stayed at the president’s house, the book said.

A student who died from the illness is still buried in Magnolia Cemetary, which is located across from the intramural fields next to the railroad tracks.

by Rachel Cieri, April 22, 2009

“Woo hoo!”

It was the first thing out of Brandon Tankard’s mouth after a Day of Silence on April 17.

The Elon sophomore stood up from Spectrum’s meeting table in the Multicultural Center and peeled off a sign he had taped to his “Gay? Fine by me” T-shirt.

“It was easier than trying to explain,” Tankard said.

 

It was Tankard’s sixth time participating in the Day of Silence, a national youth movement to raise awareness of the forced silence of the LGBTQ community. The movement was started in 1996 by a group of students at the University of Virginia to address the problem of anti-LGBTQ behavior, and it has since spread to more than 8,000 schools nationally.

While Elon’s Day of Silence was somewhat overshadowed by Pride Week the previous week, its impact was not diminished for the participants.

“It’s like an exact little replica of what the gay community goes through,” Spectrum president

J.R. Riegel said. “It’s an enlightening experience. I think it’s something everyone should do at some point. You never realize how hard it is not to be able to speak.”

Not speaking about their sexual orientations is something LGBTQ individuals go through on a daily basis, whether by choice or by force, Riegel said. Some come from families or communities where the subject is taboo, while other simply find it easier not to have to deal with the attitudes and looks they encounter.

“Even in the gay community here, there is hesitation,” Tankard said. “Because of the reactions and looks they get from some people on this campus, they would rather not be as out there. They want to be more ‘hush-hush,’”

This sort of attitude is what Spectrum adviser Danny Glassmann explained as “internalized homophobia,” a fear of revealing or admitting to one’s own homosexuality, and it is more common than one might think.

Riegel said he had just recently “come out” to his high school friends. Before this, he said he felt like he could never fully express his views to them.

“If they say ‘That’s gay,’ or something, I still feel like I can’t say anything,” he said.

But sometimes the silence isn’t literal.

Glassmann said he feels like he is silenced every time his rights or privileges are taken away in instances like California’s Proposition 8.

“It silences me as a person,” he said.

For junior Heather Laskin, assumptions bother her as well as the silence. She admits to being part of the “heterosexual-dominant norm,” but because she supports LGBTQ groups, others assume that she must be homosexual. Laskin’s mother even asked her recently if she’d found a girlfriend.She said that this bothers her because some see a person’s sexual orientation before they see the person’s personality. 

The same sort of assumptions apply on the Day of Silence.

“They see the sticker or tape (I’m wearing) first, before they see my personality,” Riegel said. “They assume, and you can’t fight it.”

Before an individual can heal, he or she must go through the stages of grief. Although the process is different for everyone, the steps can generally be grouped into these five categories.

by Rachel Cieri, April 14, 2009

With the deaths of both a student and a faculty member last week, the pain of loss has hit campus hard. But HEART, a new student support group, is here to help deal with the pain.

When senior Heather Broughton lost her father sophomore year, she said it seemed like her entire world had been turned upside down. She went right back to school after a period of mourning, but things were not the same.

“My friends were treating me differently. They didn’t know what to say to me,” Broughton said.

After talking to Counseling Services, Broughton began looking for support groups and found that Elon had none. Her search took her to a hospice in Burlington, where she found she was the support group’s only member.

“I thought, ‘I know I’m not the only one who’s lost someone,’” Broughton said. “Other students told me about what they had been through when they found out.”

It has been almost a year in the works, but HEART is now in its developmental stage, holding bi-weekly interest meetings to build the group.

Even with the campus’s recent losses, the group is still small. Its existence is being made known mostly through word-of-mouth.

“If you see a flier that says, ‘Join this support group,’ it can be intimidating,” Broughton said. “People will have to feel comfortable before they sit down to talk to us.”

Chaplain Phil Smith often talks with students who have experienced a death in the family and he’ll often recommend that students try joining HEART.

Counseling Services offers the opportunity for students to speak with professionals at no cost, but, as Broughton explains, speaking with peers provides an entirely different experience.

“I love what they do,” Broughton said of Counseling Services, “but it’s not the same as being able to talk to people in your shoes, in the same place you are, who are your age.”

Aside from just talking to one another, HEART holds service events that are named in memory of students’ lost loved ones. And students don’t have to be members of the group to join in.

“It’s slow starting, but there are so many who need it. You never really know how many do need it, but we’ll be there for the people who do,” Broughton said.

by Rachel Cieri, March 31, 2009

It’s a commonplace occurrence, according to Town of Elon Police.

A student posts a want-ad for a roommate on what he or she perceives as a safe, college-only Web site and accepts a rent payment from the person who answers the ad.

It is only after the student refunds excess money that he or she discovers the check was fraudulent.

Last month, two Elon students became a few of hundreds of college students across the nation to be duped by similar fraud scams through E-net ads.

Most recently, a student was shorted about $400 by a scam artist claiming to be interested in subletting an off-campus apartment in Phoenix Villas.

The student had posted an ad on E-net looking for someone to sublet the apartment she had secured but no longer needed.

“One individual seemed more interested than the others,” the student wrote in an e-mail to Dan Anderson, assistant vice president and director of university relations.

This individual, who called herself “Gina,” claimed to be studying in Indonesia and said she was coming to Elon in the fall.

When the student agreed to let Gina sublet the apartment, Gina said her father would send a check for an advance of several months’ rent as a way to show her commitment to the deal.

The check was more than the student had expected, but Gina had even given the student a UPS tracking number to make sure it arrived.

Shortly afterward, Gina contacted the student, asking her to use some of the money from the check to help Gina secure a car in Elon, one that she claimed she had only days to buy.

The student then became suspicious and checked the legitimacy of the bank the check came from and the company Gina said her father worked for, finding no problems.

The student could not cash the check right away because it was a weekend, so she took the money to pay for the car from her own account.

When the check was finally processed, it was found to be fraudulent.

The student contacted Gina, who told her that her father would send another check, but the student never heard from Gina again.
When the student called the company for which Gina said her father worked, she was told there was no individual there by that name.

“There is no third party guaranteeing transactions,” Anderson said of E-net ads.

Anderson said E-net administrators are planning to implement a warning to users that will be shown before an ad is posted.

Anderson posted a preliminary warning to students March 11, letting them know of the recent fraud and that anyone can view want ads even though only students, faculty and staff can post them.

These incidents are not the first instances of fraud on E-net, and while he has not kept track, Anderson remembers three or four scams in the past few years.

He believes this is the first time someone has lost cash as the result of the scam.

E-net will otherwise remain unchanged.

“E-net is such an important resource,” Anderson said. “We want to keep it operating.”