THURSDAY
October 19, 2000
Volume 107 ~ Issue 40
14 pages
Section A: 8 pages
Section B: 6 pages
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Students look to private
housing as alternative
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Aggies weigh differences in
dorms, off-campus housing
ByArai i Bhattacharya
The Battalion
Parita Sampat had to repaint her room and cover her
cracked walls and missing floor tiles to make her Keathley
Hall room look decent for living conditions. She is not the
only student who has had to make her old dorm room into
a home.
“There are electrical wires hanging from the ceiling and
loose ceiling tiles right above our heads,” said Sampat, a
freshman business major. “We had to work really hard to
repaint our room and use contact paper to cover the holes
and the cracks in the walls, along with the peeling door
paint and rotting wood.”
The greater number of students turning away from on-
campus housing opportunities is allowing private dorm liv
ing to become a popular alternative for college students. The
past two years have been the first time Texas A&M has been
able to accommodate all incoming freshmen with housing fa
cilities, said Mack Thomas, assistant director of residence
life. A decline of on-campus housing applications for the
1999 and 2000 school years has led to less than maximum-
capacity occupancy in residence halls.
“The decline in housing is not a source of concern yet, but
the boom of private dorm living is probably a source of com
petition,” said Tom Murray, manager for custodial and main
tenance services for Residence Life.
See Housing on Page 7A.
Off-campus dorm to he
erected on Mud Lot site
By Richard Bray
The Battalion
The Blinn College board of trustees is consid
ering an agreement with the developers of Jeffer
son at Northgate, a private, student-housing devel
opment on the site of Northgate’s Mud Lot.
Gena Parsons, public information officer at Blinn,
said the agreement would allow JPI, an Irving-based
developer building the Jefferson housing complex,
to secure a lower rate on bonds issued to finance con
struction. In return, Blinn would market the housing
to its students and earn profits from the operation.
“If JPI can link to Blinn College, it can get a
lower bond rating, which means it can get financ
ing for less because it is linked with a tax-exempt
entity,” Parsons said. “What Blinn gets out of it is
some of the profits from that development, if there
are any. All we have to do is some marketing, like
if they want to put their [advertisements] in our
course catalogs.”
The Blinn board of trustees and the legal de
partment are examining the proposal to make a de
cision, Parsons said.
“Right now our legal department is reviewing
the proposal,” she said. “The board of trustees took
it up Tuesday night and decided they just needed
more information and wanted to make sure every
thing was in its proper place and that we had all the
CHAD ADAMS/The Battalion
The Mud Lot behind Northgate will become
the new site of private student housing.
information we needed before we decide whether
or not to go with this.”
JPI has submitted its plans to the city of College
Station to convert the Mud Lot, at the corner of
Church Avenue and Nagle Street, from a parking
lot into a 225-unit upscale housing project.
According to the initial building plans, the struc
ture will contain 34 one-bedroom units, 152 two-bed
room units and 39 four-bedroom units. Neither the
room sizes nor the rent prices have been finalized.
JPI originally offered to team with Texas A&M,
• but the University declined the offer.
“If we're going to use our marketing and our
debt capacity at the University, we’re going to build
additional on-campus housing,” said William
Krumm, A&M's vice president for finance and
controller.
Krumm said the University would turn its at
tention to on-campus housing before it invested in
off-campus projects.
“We tore down Law and Puryear [Halls],” he
said. “We might choose to replace that before we
would spend time and effort worrying about an off-"
campus facility.”
JPI owns student housing projects across the
country, including developments in Lubbock,
Austin, San Marcos and Denton.
Program
raises
driving
awareness
Reptilian exhibit
By Rolando Garcia
condition, accord'
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Garden City.
ESPRESSO
Breakfast Items -Sail®
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Briarcrest
Wells Fargo Building, l‘W
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The consequences of sleep depriva
tion are nothing to yawn at, say organiz
ers of Drowsy Driving Awareness Week.
“People need to understand that get
ting behind the wheel when you're
sleepy can be just as dangerous as dri
ving drunk,” said Laura Pack, chair of
the Lupe Medina Program (LMP) and
a senior biomedical science major.
In addition to raising awareness of
the dangers of drowsy driving, LMP
promotes a hotel discount program for
students. LMP started in 1998 and now
includes 57 hotels in nine states. The
hotels offer discount rates to students
during late hours on weekends and dur
ing heavy traffic times such as winter
and spring break.
Baylor University, the University of
Texas-Austiri and Texas Tech Univer
sity have joined A&M in LMP, and oth
er schools have expressed interest in
participating. Pack said.
In its first year as a separate orga
nization in the Student Government
See Medina on Page 7A.
STUART VILLANUEVA/The Battalion
Elder Hardy, a volunteer at the Brazos Valley Museum of Natural History, treats Carey, an iguana, to a
meal and a walk on the museum grounds on Wednesday. Carey, who lives at the museum, is part of
an exhibit that allows visitors to get up close and personal with various wild animals.
Clinton hails
fallen, vows
retribution
NORFOLK, Va. (AP) —
Alternating between words of
grief and retribution. Presi
dent Clinton sought Wednes
day to comfort the sailors and
families of the USS Cole. He
praised the fallen as patriots
and sternly warned the “hate-
filled terrorists” whose attack
killed 17 aboard the Navy de
stroyer: “We will find you
and justice will prevail.”
Under a gray sheet of
sky, Clinton addressed a
memorial ceremony at a
Norfolk Naval Station pier
crowded with destroyers
and aircraft carriers. Sailors
in white dress uniforms
lined every deck of every
ship, listening to Clinton
praise the colleagues lost in
Thursday’s explosion at a
Yemeni harbor as “our
finest young people, fallen
soldiers who rose to free
dom’s challenge.”
“They all had their own
stories and their own
dreams,” Clinton said. “In
the names and faces of those
we lost and mourn, the world
sees our nation’s greatest
strength: People in uniform,
rooted in every race, creed
and region on the face of the
Earth.”
Clinton described the at
tackers — still unknown —
as “hate-filled terrorists” who
“envy our strength” while
holding warped religious, po
litical, racial or ethnic views
of the world.
“For them, it is their way
or no way,” he said. Ad
dressing those attackers di
rectly, the president warned:
“You will not find a safe har
bor. We will find you and
justice will prevail.”
One by one, Clinton
called out full names and
ranks of the 17 dead, in
cluding those whose bodies
have yet to be recovered.
In the end, a lone Navy
trumpeter played “Taps”
from the deck of the de
stroyer USS McFaul, one of
two Cole sister ships
docked nearby. A wounded
sailor saluted from his
front-row stretcher, his wife
at his side.
The military’s top civil
ian and uniformed leaders
also took part.
“Death snatched them
away in one violent, unsus
pecting moment while they
CLINTON
were making sure America
and its friends slept easily in
a dangerous world,” said
Defense Secretary William
Cohen. He warned those re
sponsible for the bombing,
“Our search for you will be
relentless.”
Army Gen. Hugh Shel
ton, chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of
Staff, was
more blunt:
“Those who
perpetrated
this act of ter
ror should
also never
forget that
America’s memory is long,
and our reach, longer.”
Wounded sailors, 36 in
all, came to him on gurneys,
on crutches, in wheelchairs,
with legs in casts or faces
pocked with injury.
Two sailors injured in the
attack remain in Germany
undergoing treatment, and
another was recovering from
surgery performed Tuesday
night.
The president spent
more than an hour visiting
with the wounded and
making his way slowly
around adjoining rooms,
talking with new widows,
childless parents and par
entless children, many of
whom wore blue-and-gold
lapel ribbons and clutched
photographs of their loved
ones.
“There were, obviously,
some tears and sobbing,” said
White House spokesman El
liot Diringer.
The president then went
to the ceremony at Pier 12,
which was surrounded by
the McFaul, the destroyer
USS Ross and aircraft car
riers USS Enterprise and
Eisenhower.
In the stories told by the
families, Clinton said, he
could hear the pride of the
first time they saw their
loved one in uniform, or
“the last time you said
goodbye.”
Clinton pointed out that
the dead included Electron
ics Technician 1st Class
Richard Costelow of Mor-
risville, Pa., who had worked
with the White House Com
munications Agency, helping
to update its communica
tions systems.
Nader plants
roots in Austin
e
UR
World!
RAVEL
AUSTIN (AP) —
Across the railroad tracks
from George W. Bush’s
sleek campaign headquar
ters, an old house sits be
hind tangles of trees where
young people plot a differ
ent kind of campaign.
In this part of east
Austin, Spanish is frequent
ly spoken and roosters crow
in the afternoon hum of
barking dogs and crying ba
bies. It is also where the
Green Party lives and
where presidential candi
date Ralph Nader's grass
roots are being planted.
“It’s a totally different
world here,” said Adrienne
Boer, chairwoman for the
Green Party in Travis.
County. “We moved here
because we wanted to be
part of the community.”
Many issues in east
Austin, such as poverty and
education, have not been ad
dressed by most politicians,
she said.
Elsewhere in Austin,
the city where Bush has
presided as Texas gover
nor for nearly six years.
Green Party advocates
have flung themselves be
hind Nader, who arrives
for a rally Wednesday.
Nader’s supporters real
ize his bid for the presidency
is destined to fail. But that is
not the point, say students
campaigning for Nader- at
the University of Texas.
A&M professor named as Nobel Prize winner
By Richard Bray
The Battalion
Donald L. Parker, a professor in the
Department of Electrical Engineering,
will remember Jack Kilby as a quiet,
intelligent man who enjoyed photogra
phy and won awards for his freelance
work. The world will remember Kilby
as a Nobel Prize winner.
Kilby, a distinguished professor at
Texas A&M from 1978 to 1985, is one
of three scientists who received the
Nobel Prize in physics for their contri
butions to the devel
opment of the inte
grated circuit. The
other two scientists
who worked with
Kilby are Russian
scientist Zhores I.
Alferov and German-
born researcher Her
bert Kroemer, from the University of
California-Santa Barbara.
Since Kilby developed integrated
circuits in 1958, microchips have be-
KILBY
come smaller, cheaper and faster. They
are used in many electrical devices, in
cluding cellular phones, satellite com
munications and computers.
“My goal was simply to make things
more efficient,” Kilby said in a press
conference after the Nobel Prize winners
were announced on Oct. 10. “While the
original idea was mine, what’s happened
since is the result of hard work by tens
of thousands of the world’s best engi
neers. It’s been gratifying to see what
other people have done with this idea.”
Dr. Chanan Singh, head of the A&M
electrical engineering department, said
Kilby’s contributions to the information
age make him worthy of the award.
“The contributions that he made have
had such an enormous impact on the in
formation technology that we felt that
the Nobel Prize committee has done the
right thing,” he said.
Kilby’s associates said he was a man
who spent much of his time reading.
“He was quiet,” Parker said of Kilby.
See Kilby on Page 6A.
TAMUG asset to A8dVI main campus
By Courtney Stelzel
The Battalion
Many students and faculty do not realize that
Texas A&M-Galveston (TAMUG) is not a branch of
the Texas A&M University System, but a department
site of A&M's main campus. Students can transfer
from one school to the other without skipping a beat
or reapplying for admission.
“The relationship between the College Station
campus and Galveston can be defined as an organic
extension of Texas A&M-College Station, just on the
gulf,” said Dr. Walter M. Kemp, vice president and
CEO of TAMUG.
Kemp said TAMUG is subject to the same ailes,
regulations and admission processes set for the Col
lege Station campus.
Russ Graves, an academic adviser in the General
Academic Programs Office, said there are programs ANDY hancock/tkebat^llon
that involve students taking courses at both campuses. a ca mpus removed from the main campus, Texas
See Galveston on Page6A. A&M-Galveston is tucked away on Pelican Island.