Student Newspaper of the University of Southern California Since 1912 | www.dailytrojan.com | VOL. 165, NO. 65 | Tuesday December 2, 2008
InDEX
2 · News Digest
4 · Opinion
7 · Lifestyle
12 · Classifieds
13 · Crossword
16 · Sports
Penn name: Sean Penn
shines as California’s first
openly gay politician in ‘Milk.’
PAGE 7
D-Day: USC defense holds Notre
Dame to three points in a rout at the
Coliseum. PAGE 16
By tiffanie wu
Daily Trojan
A San Francisco man has pleaded not guilty to
charges in connection with the November stabbing of
USC senior Kellen Spani last month at a San Francisco
bar. Herman Zhu is charged with attempted murder, as-sault
with a deadly weapon and battery with serious
bodily injury. He currently remains in custody, with
bail set at $300,000, said the San Francisco District
Attorney’s office.
Another man, Aaron Ng, has been charged with one
misdemeanor count of destroying evidence in connec-tion
with the stabbing.
Spani, who was visiting the Bay Area for the an-nual
Weekender football game, was stabbed in the
neck and chest outside a San Francisco bar Nov. 15 af-ter
coming to the aid of one of his friends. Spani was
rushed to San Francisco General Hospital but was re-leased
soon after.
According to witnesses, several men had been pro-voking
Spani and a group of other USC students at the
Balboa Café.
Zhu’s next court date is scheduled for Dec. 16, and
Ng will be in court Dec. 30.
Pair charged
in SF stabbing
of ’SC student
San Francisco man pleads not guilty to charges
of attempted murder, assult with deadly weapon.
By laura nelson
Daily Trojan
USC President Steven B. Sample
has approved an athletic depart-ment’s
plan for a new athletic com-plex
that would be built where
an intramural athletic field and a
Thornton School of Music building
currently stand.
Plans for the facility have not yet
been drafted, but Undergraduate
Student Government Director of
University Affairs Owen Caine
said the complex might eventu-ally
include a new strength and
conditioning room, a new wing
for Student-Athlete Academic
Services, conference rooms and an
auditorium.
Carol Dougherty, senior associ-ate
director of athletics, said the
Athletics Department wants a new
facility because the department
has drastically expanded in recent
years. In 1972, when Heritage Hall
opened, the department support-ed
10 varsity teams. Now, Heritage
Hall serves 19 athletic teams.
“Football and all of our other ath-letic
programs have become much
more competitive since we built
Heritage Hall,” said Caine, who will
work closely with Dougherty on the
project as a student representative.
Plan calls for
new football
complex
Facility would replace an
intramural field and a
Thornton music building.
| see football, page 11 |
By natalie chau
Daily Trojan
After more than two years of construc-tion,
the $175 million Lucas Center is set to
open Dec. 18.
The donation that funded the center
came as a gift from the Lucas Foundation,
started by filmmaker and USC alumnus
George Lucas.
The building will house the School of
Cinematic Arts.
The move to the new facility will be
a huge boost for the cinema school, said
Douglas Wellman, the school’s director of
facilities and operations. The current cine-ma
building is operating at about 110 per-cent
capacity, forcing many classes to relo-cate
elsewhere.
Keely Flanagan, a freshman majoring in
screenwriting, said the current building
feels a “little overcrowded.”
“People consider the new film school
to be the face of USC; it has that glitz and
glamor factor,” Flanagan said. “I’m excited
to take classes there.”
Despite a few minor setbacks, Wellman
said the construction is on schedule.
“As in any construction, there was a cer-tain
amount of things that didn’t quite work
out right,” he said. “For example, we weren’t
sure whether the steel had been ordered to
the correct length. We just got the lighting
fixtures that we ordered a year ago too.”
The new facility will boast a main 137,000
square-foot building, a 36,000 square-foot
instructional building and three separate
soundstages.
The main building is five floors, and in-cludes
a 200-seat theater and a café, as well
as post-production suites, offices and class-rooms.
Several of the buildings were added to the
plans part way through construction.
“We originally were only building one
building. Now we’re going to add four sound
stages and two more buildings,” Wellman
said.
Lucas himself has come to campus to
check on the construction progress. Lucas
also raised more money during the con-struction
to enable the school to add the ex-tra
facilities.
“His constant supervision of the project
and his desire to make it the best school
possible have really helped,” Wellman said.
The new complex also sports several palm
trees in front of the main entrance. The city
of Los Angeles has recently discouraged
new building construction from including
palm trees; it has called the trees ecologi-cally
unnecessary.
Steven Dupruy, tree surgeon supervisor
for the city of Los Angeles, said palm trees
aren’t meant to survive in Los Angeles and
don’t provide much shade.
“The city isn’t really crazy so much about
palms, because a lot of them are getting in-fected
with funguses and they don’t contrib-ute
to shading factor or cooling,” Dupruy
said.
There are no statutory restrictions
against using palms in Los Angeles, and
Wellman said the school stuck to all the
codes necessary for making a new building
and the palm trees were not really an issue.
Construction hit a snag in October, when
about 40 members of the Carpenters Union
gathered outside the building’s construc-tion
site to protest what they said were un-fair
wage practices, but the protest did not
cause a lengthy delay.
New cinema building, two years in the making, set to open this month
The new complex houses a 200-seat
movie theater, sound stages and a cafe.
Alexandra Tapley | Daily Trojan
Final stage · The newest addition to the USC School of Cinematic Arts, the $175
million Lucas Center, is set to open its doors Dec. 18 after two years of construction.
Students gathered at the USC Chabad House Monday night for a vigil to remember victims of
the terror attacks in Mumbai. The attacks began Wednesday and lasted for three days.
Solidarity
Young Kim | Daily Trojan
ALSO IN NEWS
Former USC Student Sentenced
Zao Xing “Crossing” Yang was
sentenced to five years probation for
making threats at a party. Page 11.