trojan
Volume XCVII, Number 60	University of Southern California	Friday, November 30, 1984
GERALD LARUE
Professor defends the right of people to die with dignity
By Carol Ann Coates
Staff Writer
The whole situation of death and dying has changed in the modern world, said Gerald Larue, adjunct professor of the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, Thursday in a speech at the Topping Student Center.
"We now have ways of keeping people alive who would have been dead," he said.
He cited the situation of Karen Ann Quinlan, one of the first medical cases to bring up the question of the right to die with dignity, as an example.
Quinlan has been in a coma for 10 years and now weighs 70 pounds and lies in a fetal position in her hospital bed, out of communication with the rest of the world.
"You begin to say 'What is life?" Larue said. "Who's at the center, the patient or the physician?"
Larue is president of the Hemlock Association, a group of 10,000 people w’ho advocate that people have a right to die.
The death of Ricky Bell, the former Trojan tailback, at age 29 brings into focus the definition of w’hat life is, Larue said.
Death by accident or violence brings to light "the reality of existence in the 20th century," he said. "Statistics don't always tell us when we're going to die."
Death seems a long way off, Larue said, and people cope with dying in different ways.
"How do you cope knowing you are going to die?" he asked.
Denial is one way people deal with death. "They don't talk about it," Larue said. Others push death off to the back shelf, he said: "Death is the new taboo."
People do not make w'ills, he said, and use the euphemism "passed away" instead of saying "he died."
In addition to teaching Gerontology 437, "The Social and Psychological Aspects of Death and Dying," Larue w’orks as a therapist tw’o days a week, counseling patients who are suicidal or are trying to cope with a recent death.
Some patients do not seriously want to commit suicide but just want to have someone to talk to, he said. They want to be heard and have their problems listened to.
Larue counseled a woman who was a victim of molestation as a child and had been seeing therapists from different psychological schools of thought for 40 years.
Freudian psychologists had told her she was imagining it, that all young girls have fantasies of having sex with their fathers and brothers, he said.
If molestation is not dealt with when it occurs, it vill haunt the person for the rest of his life, he said.
Larue said he watched the woman's depression deepen. On a day the woman was scheduled to have her regular 8 a.m. appointment with Larue, her husband called at 8:05 and told him she had died in her sleep.
"The quality of life was gone," Larue said.
With couples who have been married a long time, when one partner dies, the other often dies within six months, he said.
Widows and widowers sometimes get angry at their deceased spouses. One woman jumped up during a seminar in (Continued on page 3)
Students discover they were victims of airline ticket scam
By Karen Castro
Assistant City Editor
At least three students have discovered they are victims of an airline ticket scam, and University Security and Los Angeles police have warned that many more students may find their tickets home for the holidays mav not be valid.
The void tickets were traced to David Johnson, who allegedly bought airline tickets with bad checks and resold them to university students.
Johnson advertised in the Daily Trojan in early October that he had cheap airline tickets and when students contacted him, he apparently told them he was a current university student who was an on-campus travel agency representative.
Because of the bad checks, airlines have canceled the tickets, leaving the students with no airplane reservations.
"We've found out about three students so far (who bought unusable tickets) but there could be as many as 50," said Det. John Campbell of the Los Angeles Police Department's Southwest Division. "We advise students who think they may have bad airline tickets to contact your security or us."
Campbell said the scam was uncovered when a student who bought a ticket on Oct. 8 called the airline later to confirm her reservation, and was told that the ticket was canceled because it had been bought w'ith a check that had bounced.
The student filed a crime report with the police department and since then, two other people have notified authorities of similar situations.
Police have not been able to apprehend Johnson, but have learned he was a university student who graduated in 1981.	---
Campbell said they discovered Johnson had pur-
chased airline tickets from at least two travel agencies, Network Travel Agency and World Vista Travel Agency, both of Pasadena.
John Schulthess, owner of World Vista, said Johnson used bogus checks to purchase the airline tickets, and "he w'ould get a client by advertising and then W'ould offer them a lower price than any agency. Anything he made was pure profit."
Schulthess sympathizes with the "poor students who bought the tickets."
"It just goes to show you that when you look for a bargain, you get exactly what you pay for," he said.
The ad ran in the Daily Trojan in early October through Oct. 8 and read, "Need plane ticket home for Xmas? LAX-NY round trip S200. Other routes available cheaply too. Contact Dave 795-4874."
When that telephone number, w'hich is in the 818 area code, is called, a recording says it has been disconnected or is no longer in service.
Dexter Thomas, a senior officer with University Security, said that so far, students who have found themselves owners of canceled tickets have not reported it to security.
"There may be some people out there who have those tickets. Those students would go to the airport ready for Christmas vacation and find out they couldn't go home," Thomas said.
Thomas urged students who think they have fraudulent tickets to file a report with campus security. "We'll take them here or send them to Southwest. We'll try to get it straightened out."
If Johnson is arrested, he would probably be prosecuted for a felony, Campbell said.
"ft would depend on how many tickets-he-sold," he said.
Library computer may hook USC to resources at Princeton, Yale
By Diane Olivo
Staff Writer
The university library is seriously considering switching its bibliographic computer resource to the Research Library Group service, which would connect this university to prestigious libraries across the country.
Peggy Johnson, director of technical services for the library, said RLG, which is used mostly for cataloging and interlibrary loans, may replace the current research on-line computer, OCLC.
Charles Ritcheson, university librarian and dean of the library system, said he expects confirmation by Jan. 1.
Johnson said the library has been "actively pursuing (RLG) for the last four months." RLG includes Princeton, Yale and Columbia universities and the New York Public Library.
She said the university has been associated with OCLC about 10 years, and according to the OCLC contract, if one part of the system is dropped the entire system must be dropped.
Johnson said RLG, which has about 30 institutions as members, should make overall improvement because it has various programs such as specialized collections in law and music.
But one library staff member sees drawbacks to RLG.
Diana Lisignoli, inter-library' loan supervisor, who uses OCLC even’ day for interlibrarv loans, said about 25 libraries use RLG, while some 5,000 public and university libraries are on OCLC.
OCLC requires two or three
weeks to get a student a book through interlibrary loan, and RLG would take just as long, Lisignoli said. It would also probably not benefit undergraduate students, since graduate students and faculty members are the most frequent users of OCLC's interlibrary loan.
"Undergraduates don't understand that it takes two or three weeks to get a book," Lisignoli said. Graduate students and faculty members have more
By Steven Church
Staff Writer
Trying to inspire university workers to continue "a lifelong education," university President James Zumberge said Thursday that education should not stop w'ith school, but be continued throughout life.
"There are too many people who think that education is a period of life that begins in kindergarten, and goes through grade school, high school, maybe junior college, possibly the university . . . and then it's over," Zumberge said at the annual staff breakfast.
"That's how’ many conventionally look at education; it is something that must be endured while you are young," Zumberge said. "But we know that is not true. Education has got to be a lifelong process."
Zumberge told the large audience of university staff members
specific requests and present them earlier.
Johnson said that although there is an assumption that fewer materials would be available under RLG, there have been no studies conducted to determine if OCLC is more helpful in finding books that the university may not have.
Ritcheson said RLG would cost somew'hat more, "not a lot more, but somewhat more."
(Continued on page 5)
in Town and Gown, that this year he is getting together a group of faculty to study how this university can promote lifelong education among people who are not going to school.
In an interview after the breakfast, Zumberge said he and about a dozen faculty members from various departments on campus "want to stimulate the whole concept of lifelong learning,'' because "education does not begin and end with school."
A formal committee will not submit a w’ritten report to Zumberge, but rather a "seminar" will advise him on how to best promote the idea of lifelong education, Zumberge said.
"We sit around in my office and drink coffee and brainstorm," he said.
Next semester, Zumberge said, he expects to meet two or (Continued on page 5)
Zumberge calls education part of 'a lifelong process'