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Two sites proposed for Nixon archives
DT photo by Marsha Traagar
POSSIBLE LIBRARY SITE — A makeshift parking lot next to the University Hilton on Figueroa Street may be the home of the university’s Nixon archives.
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Volume LXXV1, Number 27	University of Southern California
Tuesday, March 20,1979
Senate requests access to budget
PAC group wants detailed records
By Brandon Bailey
Staff Writer
The Student Senate is recommending that detailed records and projections of departmental budgets be made available to a committee of the President's Advisory Council. Members of the Faculty Senate are considering a similar measure.
The resource management and planning committee of the council reviews the administration's budget proposals each year. The committee would be more effective if it had access to details from departmental budgets, said Donald Greenwood, a student senator and a member of the council committee.
The committee's recommendations might carry more weight with the university administration and the Board of Trustees finance committee if it were known thev were based on more complete information, Greenwood said.
The resource management and planning committee's recommendations on next year's operating budget were based on summaries of the projected budget. The committee made its recommendations after questioning the officials responsible for formulating the budget.
This year, Robert Biller, dean of public administ-
'There are the same stresses and strains here in the Los Angeles metropolitan area as there are anywhere.'
ration and chairman of the PAC resource committee, attended the meetings where deans presented detailed requests to the budget administrators.
Requests for detailed budget information have been discussed bv the PAC committee in earlier meetings.
Some committee members and budget officials have commented that reviewing information from individual departments would be too cumbersome a task for the committee.
Committee members have also expressed concern that rivalries and emotional conflicts between departments would result if detailed budget information was publicized.
The information would be helpful in a review of the university's operating budget, but handling all the details is not that simple, Biller said.
At some universities which have systems for detailed public budgetary review, interdepartmental squabbles have become a problem, Biller said.
The PAC committee's function is to review budget proposals and recommend policy needs on a university-wide level, Biller said. Trying to identify spot needs within schools and departments would not be an effective committee goal, he said.
(continued on page 10)
By Bob Conti
Staff Writer
The Richard M. Nixon Library may soon become a reality here with administrators deliberating over two possible locations.
President John R. Hubbard discussed the preliminary proceedings and the two sites at a recent meeting of the President's Advisory Council.
The university proposed to the federal government in 1975 that it and the National Archives develop a library to house the documents of the former president.
Nixon has been protesting the moving of the materials from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles. Currently, the papers must stay in Washington and only Congress may allow them to be moved.
Also, the former president wants to prevent some materials from becoming public.
The court battle is concerned with the controversial Nixon tapes, said Mark Sheehan, a spokesman for the Justice Department.
The General Services Administration, a housekeeping agency in the federal government, is proposing the tapes be made available to the public at eight different locations in the country, Sheehan said.
A second major contention Nixon's lawyers are battling to keep are dictabelts which the presi-
dent used for dictating his diary.
President Nixon maintains the belts are personal, private material. Sheehan said General Services maintains they have the right to review the belts like any other presidential office record.
"We expect to go to trial on these (two issues)," Sheehan said.
It appears that when these two issues are cleared plans will begin on actually moving the materials into a permanent building. Currently, they are being stored in the National Archives, but not on public display, said Richard A. Jacobs, deputy assistant archivist for presidential libraries.
The university is reviewing two areas for a building. The first is north of the University Hilton and the other is in the Exposition Park area.
The university will provide the land and the building for the library and the National Archives will move the materials in. The university will then dedicate the . building to the federal government and it will take over the library's operation, Jacobs said.
The projected cost for the center is $10 million and is expected to come from a fund raising drive.
Jacobs said the library will contain Nixon's tape collection, all the papers of the president and his assistants, plus pre-
(continued on page 7)
Community members to join search group
By Carole Long
Assistant City Editor
Two community leaders have been added to the 23-member presidential search committee in response to a request by J. R. Fluor to include neighborhood representation on the committee.
Fluor, chairman of the committee, selected Grace Montanez Davis, deputy mayor of Los Angeles, and Marnesba Tackett, executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (West), from a list of five nominees submitted by the university-neighborhood relations commission.
The commission had ranked the two women as the top people for selection.
"People in the community think very highly of the two women. Each has an arms length full of consequential community service. I don't think we could have done better," said Robert Biller, chairman of the commission.
(continued on page 8)
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University suicides grow steadily; campus services offer counseling
By Alice Ragenovich
Staff Writer
Suicide was the second leading cause of death on American campuses in 1978 and the suicide rate among college students has almost tripled in the last 20 years, according to the Center for Information on Suicide.
"As much as we can be aware of, USC is about on par for any major institution in a metropolitan area, especially in southern California," said Anita Sieg-man, director of the university counseling center.
"There are the same stresses and strains here in the Los Angeles metropolitan area as there are anywhere," said Bob Rosenblatt, a staff clinician at the counseling center.
"After working at the University of Maryland and Cornell I’d say USC is average in its incidents of suicide. At Cornell there were seven suicides in the first month of classes. Cornell is more isolated than USC is.
"Here you can escape. . .you can go into Westwood or Hollywood and make a connection with the outside. The only thing at Cornell is Cornell. New York Citv is five hours awav," said Gareth Murray, a staff clinician at the counseling center.
All the counselors agree it is difficult to assess w’hat is a suicide and what is an accident.
In the spring of 1970, a student hung himself in a closet in his dormitory room. After several attempts
by other students and this suicide, the university set up its counseling services in 1971.
A university student was charged with illegally altering his record card and committed suicide by jumping from an apartment at Bunker Hill. A student who attended the university for his undergraduate studies was denied admission to the university's medical school and killed himself and his younger brother.
The counseling center cited a case in which one student crashed into a freewav center divider three times and it could not be determined if the action was intentional or not.
"A person's committing suicide is a communitv problem; it is a collectively traumatic environment where students can interact and not feel alone," Siegman said.
"A person who contemplates suicide tends to be someone who has isolated himself. He or she is usually neither a good student nor a poor one. Often the student’s parents have imposed unusually high expectations on the student and the student would rather die than face failure," Siegman said.
"You can usually point to one event that kicks off a suicide but it is rare that a student kills himself because of one bad experience. It's usuallv a series of experiences that reinforce a student's belief that he has never lived up to expectations," Siegman said.
(continued on page 12)
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