Residents protest food
Three angry students picketed outside Trojan Dining Hall Mondav night protesting the quality of the food being served.
"You can't taste what you're eating. There's no difference between the flavor of the broccolli and the cauliflower. And I've stopped paving attention to the looks of the food," said Beth Juppav, a freshman. Laurie Ware, also a freshman, carried a sign that read, “When are they going to start serving us real food?"
Students in Marks Tower yelled their support from upstairs windows and a small crowd of supporters had began to form when a Campus Security officer and three residence hall food service officials appeared on the scene. "You really came about this in the wrong way. Why didn t you tell someone about the bad food before? I’m here every day and am ready to hear \ our complaints," said Pearline Small, assistant manager at 1 mjan Dining Hall.
Small, along with Gavla Pierce, manager of residence hall f»\>d services, and Vicki Reitano, assistant manager of the Elizabeth Von KleinSntid dining hall, asked the students to stop picketing and to sit down with them in the dining hall to discuss their complaints.
For more than an hour and a half, the students and managers discussed the problems in the dining hall and possible solutions.
Soggv, tasteless vegetables, runny scrambled eggs, tough, overdone steaks and an overabundance of carbohydrate foods were some of the complaints brought up.
Pierce explained that the soggy' vegetables and overcooked
steaks are largely due to the use of a steam cooker and cooking
more food than is needed to feed the students coming in at a
certain time period.
(continued on page 8)
Students doubt academic value of Washington, D.C. semester
Budget error causes $50,000 cut in drama department productions
By Brandon Bailey
Staff Writer
The drama department is making do with an estimated S50,000 less than it had planned to spend this spring due to an error in the budget request submitted last year.
The reduction in funds caused the cancellation of one production scheduled for the Stop Gap Theatre and scaled-down spending on other productions this spring. Spending for equipment and building maintenance is also affected.
No faculty of staff positions will be affected, said Richard Toscan, head of the drama department. "If the budget office hadn't been as understanding, there was a possibility of firing people. But in effect they allowed us to run into the red,” Toscan said.
The university's budget administrators agreed to subsidize some needed expenditures by the department, but these will have to be subtracted from its budget next year, Toscan said.
A surplus in the School of Performing Arts budget may be available to cover these expenditures, said Stanley Young, executive assistant to the dean of the School of Performing Arts.
Young has openly taken full responsibility' for submitting a budgetary request estimating a 20% increase in enrollment for the drama department without asking for a corresponding increase in the department's expense budget. "It was an error on my part in submitting the paperwork," Young said.
The request Young had intended to submit would have accounted for an expense budget
large enough to accommodate an enrollment equal to that of the previous year.
Instead, Young said he mistakenly submitted tentative proposal for expenses which Richard Toscan, head of the drama department, had compiled on the basis of a 20% projected enrollment increase.
This tentative budget was not intended to be submitted last year, both Toscan and Young said. By standard university procedure, Toscan would have waited until this year to submit a new request to account for increases in tuition and expenses if enrollment had increased at all.
Enrollment did increase by about the projected 20%, Young said, but the report he mistakenly submitted to the budget planners did not request (continued on page 13)
By Karen Holloway
Staff Writer
Several students participating in the Washington, D.C. Semester have criticized the academic component of the program. They accuse the course instructors of Incompetence and question the value of classroom sessions.
The students readily acknowledge the value of the internship and independent study programs but say the seminar portion is poorly coordinated.
'The greatest asset of this program is the opportunity students have to work in government. The greatest liability is the managerial incompetence of the instructors," one student said.
All of the students who criticized the program wished to remain unnamed for fear that their dissenting opinions would adversely affect their grades.
"The atmosphere around here is that people use grades as an intimidating force," a student said. "They use their authority as a weapon," another student said. "It's not enough that you're bright and you can do it — you have to do it their way."
"They're holding the grades over themselves," said Candy Duncan program coordinator. She said although striving for grades mav be a deterrent to
learning, grades were a necessary part of the program.
Eight units of credit are given for the seminar, four for the independent study projects and four for the internships.
Lana Choy, a junior in urban and regional planning, said she thought the students who found fault with the program were being childish.
"They thought it was going to be a play semester," she said.
She did agree the professors needed to clarify what criteria they were looking for in the written reports before they were handed in.
Duncan said there was a lack of communication between the in-house professors who are in close contact with the students and the adjunct professors who teach intermittently.
Several students complained professors arbitrarily assigned grades and that personality conflicts were apparent in these decisions.
One student said she overheard one professor say of another student, "So and so is on my shit list."
"The professors are at best mediocre," a student said. "I really question the credentials of instructors."
(continued on page 13)
trojan
Volume LXXVI, Number 37	University of Southern California	Tuesday, April 3, 1979
Trustees discuss good, bad
news at conference
Inflation, government force tough decisions
Photo by Janat McMinn
UNIVERSITY UPDATE—Members of the Board of Trustees and university administrators listen as a panel of constituency leaders answer questions at the group's annual trustee conference in Rancho Mirage Pictured panel members are John LeBlanc, president of the Faculty Senate and Jeanne Rathbun, chairman of the Staff Caucus.
By Michael Schroeder
Managing Editor
RAMCHO MIRAGE — The 20th annual trustees conference Saturday and Sunday was a combination of good and bad news.
The good news: The university has survived almost 100 years and has become one of the leading private universities in the United States.
The bad news: The joint forces of governmental intervention and inflation are demanding that tough decisions be made in what kind of an education the university will provide in its second century.
Zohrab Kaprielian, executive vice-president, summed up the attitude of the administration: "We have good reason to be cautious toward the future.’
One of the university's most solid fiscal areas — an annually balanced budget — was the first attacked at the opening session of the conference.
"To say that we balance the budget is a misnomer," said Forrest Shumway, member of the board and chairman of its finance and budget committee.
He explained that although the numbers balance each year, the university does things that would not be accepted outside the academic environment.
He said the lower level staff at the university was underpaid bv 13 to 14%, "something that wouldn't be tolerated in private industry." The small reserve the university maintains in its budget is actually no reserve by private standards, another condition that sets the university
(continued on page 7)