“People ask me, ‘Why are you wasting your time with ASG?’” the Weinberg freshman said. “Let’s be honest, ASG did not do what it was supposed to last year.”

As leader of ASG’s Winter Campaign, Singh hopes to help the organization become more accessible and accountable to students through firesides, forums and a new ASG Web site.

“Hopefully we are able to reach out to students, to let them know if you have an idea or concern, you can just bring it to us. After all, we are here to serve you, and we will do our best to address those problems,” Singh said.

Allison Hall hosted the first fireside last week, while Slivka held one on Tuesday and ISRC held a fireside on Wednesday. Topics included the availability of senators to students, shuttle service to South Campus and meal plans.

The Winter Campaign will also create forums between administrators and faculty, Facebook groups, pamphlets and a revamped, interactive ASG Web site.

The Web site will be available as early as March and will feature an online chat room where students can compliment, propose or tear apart ASG policy.

ASG Student Services Vice President Nate Perkins hopes bettering communication between ASG and students will improve ASG’s reputation on campus as well as its effectiveness.

He believes that the behind-the-scenes nature of ASG’s work has kept many students in the dark about what the organization does for them.

“Every year we accomplish a lot of great initiatives and get a lot done, but people don’t necessarily see that,” the McCormick junior said. “This year has been a big push within ASG to expose the campus more to what we’re doing.”

Medill sophomore Daniel Bristow said the new campaign sounds promising, but hopes ASG’s recent emphasis on transparency succeeds. “Quite frankly, I never know that they do,” Bristow said. “ASG does a lot of stuff that affects me, and I would like to know about it.”

Perkins said preconceived notions about ASG are common. “People make assumptions about ASG based on what they’ve read and what they’ve heard,” Perkins said. “People don’t interact with us on a face-to-face basis, and they have misnomers and assumptions about the type of work ASG does.”

The Winter Campaign is ASG’s chance to break down that perception. “This is a way for us to directly answer questions students have, and to tell students what we can do for them and how they can get involved. Face time itself is going to be invaluable,” Perkins said.

While the Winter Campaign may seem limited to the cold three months of Winter Quarter, Singh said the program is only the beginning: “The initial response is good. But there are a lot of changes to be made, and it can’t be done in one campaign.”

“ASG has a lot of potential, and we need people to step up and own up to responsibility,” Singh said. “Hopefully this will continue and help students find more confidence in ASG.”

“We were really afraid about people writing off Northwestern,” Mills said. “We wrote [to parents and students] saying ‘That’s hard to get your mind around, but it’s not uncommon for Northwestern to cost less than a Michigan or an Illinois school.’”

Early data on this year’s applications showed that a higher number of students are applying for and requiring more aid.

“We got a big boost in applications from very needy families, so that tells me our strategy worked,” Mills said.

While the economy has drained about a third of the university endowment, Northwestern’s policy of need-blind admission will not change, Mills said. Other schools, such as Tufts University in Massachusetts, are considering abandoning need-blind admission due to the declining economy.

“But we’re going to be fine, because our endowment is so big,” Mills said.

With a smaller endowment and an increase in the financial aid given to students, the university will have to cut back on construction projects, dorm renovations and faculty salaries, said Mark Witte, Director of Undergraduate Studies for Economics at Northwestern. The university does, however, have investments in place to secure its long-term future, Witte said.

“Universities think long-run: What do we need to do to make sure that Northwestern is around 100 years from now?” Witte said. “The endowment is down by a third. That’s a pretty good whack. But there are good years and bad years, so we won’t overact to things like that. The economy will not affect us much.”

According to Witte, the economy will not lower the quality of students who attend Northwestern.

“Top students will go to top schools. Northwestern always fills up,” he said, adding that a Northwestern degree will continue to make an impression.

“Corporations and non-profits kind of rely on selective universities to filter the best and the brightest,” Mills said. “Of that group they take the subset, who graduates with the highest credentials and the highest GPAs.”

While Witte said that a difficult job market might encourage more applicants to Northwestern’s graduate schools, Mills said that the harsh economy will make a college education even more meaningful.

“For a $200,000 Bachelor’s degree, a thoughtful person will think, is this worth my while?” Mills said. “This will be more pronounced.”

Q: Can you tell me about the skates?
A: These are Freeline skates, and they are basically one piece of cast iron with modified skateboard wheels. They’re almost identical: there’s a right and a left one, and they’re angled to match how people generally stand with their feet at kind of an outward angle. They were invented by Ryan Farrelly about three or four years ago. He was experimenting with skateboard trucks and he realized he could ride them without a skateboard.

Q: How did you hear about the skates?
A: I had originally seen a guy with them in San Francisco, near Ghirardelli Square over this past summer. One of my friends Ren Zhao here also has a pair, and I talked about them with him. Then I bought a pair on eBay.

Q: How do you skate on them?
A: It’s a combination of having your feet go outward and inward and twisting your torso. You kind of push off, usually to get started going, and then it’s just moving in a snakelike motion.

Q: How long did it take you to become comfortable on them?
A: It probably took about eight hours.

Q: How would you use Freeline skates in comparison to, say, a skateboard?
A: It has a completely different feel from a skateboard. I haven’t been snowboarding before, but from what people say, it’s like snowboarding except on flat ground and your feet aren’t connected to each other.

Q: And what is the benefit of that?
A: On a skateboard you are just pushing off and going in a straight line. With these, your feet never leave the two pieces. You can step off of them at any time. You can make sharper turns. You can carve down hills which you can’t do on skateboards that easily.

Q: What are some of the downsides of the skates?
A: They’re easier to get caught in cracks in the sidewalk than a skateboard or rollerblades. It’s the same as using a scooter. You get to know where the cracks are in the sidewalk. However, you step off a lot easier. You can just angle your foot down and your toes are touching the ground. I feel more comfortable on these than skateboarding or even rollerblading.

Q: How often do you use the skates?
A: Every day, anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour.

Q: How are they in different kinds of weather?
A: They don’t do that well in ice. They’re fine in salt, and they’re great for rain. I can go through puddles no problem. Unlike a skateboard, where you have to push with your foot, I can go through pretty deep puddles and not get my feet wet.

Q: Do you think the skates will become a trend?
A: It’s definitely an eye-catcher, and I think its popularity is growing. It’s virtually unknown in Chicago. I’ve been riding downtown since I have been working there this quarter. I’ve been going around the block, and it’s funny seeing all the stares. I’ve stopped to talk to people around it and they’ve asked how they work.

Q: Could anyone use them? Or do you need previous skill?
A: It’s a steep learning curve. It takes a lot of work at first to get it. Once you get over that initial big hump, then it’s usually pretty good. It’s just the patience of getting up to that point. It’s great exercise too. It works your legs in places you never knew existed.

Resident meets the RA, and romance ensues

Returning to Northwestern campus with her new fiancé, Lynn Ryan saw the Rebecca Crown clock tower smiling down at her.

“My friend Ben was really good with credit cards and getting into things,” Jim Williams said. “He climbed up somehow and put some cardboard on the clock tower, so when it lit up it looked like a smiley face.”

Lynn and Jim Williams. Photo courtesy of the Williams family.

Lynn and Jim Williams became engaged on May 21, 1982, but they met in Foster-Walker Complex two years earlier. During what Jim calls “finals food,” Lynn introduced herself as Jim’s new Resident Assistant.

Housing had assigned Williams to help tame rowdy House 6, which was two-thirds male. She found a husband there instead.

The two started dating right before the Thanksgiving of 1980, when Lynn was a junior and Jim was a senior at Northwestern. On their first date, Lynn and Jim went to see Fantasia, a movie Lynn will never forget.

“It was one of those things you pretend that you’re interested, but I really hated it,” Lynn said. “I thought it was horrible.”

Luckily for Jim, Lynn was able to look past his taste in cartoon movies — and his clothing style.

“One weekend my sister came to town, and Jim was wearing a plaid, flannel shirt, jeans, geeky shoes,” Lynn said. “She was less than impressed.”

When the Housing Office found out that one of its RAs in Foster-Walker was dating a resident, they weren’t thrilled.

“There was no rule against, but they definitely weren’t happy about it,” Lynn said.

Unlike other couples in their groups of friends, Jim and Lynn spent most of their dates in Chicago, exploring Michigan Avenue. The couple also frequented Second City, blues clubs, and Cubs games.

The night that Jim popped the question, he took Lynn to dinner at the Blackhawk, an old Chicago restaurant.

“He must have told the guys at the next table what he was going to do, because when I came back from the bathroom they were all smirking at me,” Lynn said.

After dinner, Jim proposed along the Chicago River. At first, he planned to bring two ring boxes and pretend to drop one in.

“It’s a good thing he didn’t,” Lynn said. “Or one of us probably would have ended up in the river.”

Lynn accepted the proposal, and the couple married on December 30, 1983. Ben, the student who put a smiley face on the clock tower, was part of the wedding. “We were married on the coldest recorded day in western Pennsylvania. It was 9 below,” Lynn said. “It was our reminder of Chicago.”

Jim and Lynn now have five daughters: Elaine, 20, a Medill sophomore at Northwestern; Maggie, 18, who will attend Vanderbilt next year; Brigid, 15; and two girls adopted from China: Ling Er, 9; and Mai, 8.

“We brought the girls to Northwestern more times than I can count. They were here all the time. We tried to brainwash them, and it worked on Elaine,” Lynn said. “We were so excited when she decided to come here.”

Northwestern couple met 40 years ago at NU student union

Eugene and Holly Sunshine only recently realized that this year’s Valentine’s Day would hold special significance – it’s the 40th anniversary of their first meeting, in Scott Hall.

On February 14, 1968, Eugene Sunshine and Holly Leach stood in the former student union anticipating their interviews for NUgarde, the freshman orientation program. They stood around with a bunch of other nervous, twitchy underclassmen, comparing notes, wondering what they would be asked.

When Gene finished his interview, Holly quizzed him on what to expect. They didn’t know each other well, but when Holly finally finished her own interview, Gene was still waiting.

“I hadn’t gotten her name. I didn’t know who she was,” Gene said. “So I waited, and asked her if she wanted to get a cup of coffee.”

Holly, however, already had plans.

“I thought, ‘This guy was kind of cute,’ but I couldn’t, because it was Valentine’s Day, and I had a date waiting for me in Allison Hall,” Holly said. “So I told him, ‘No I can’t, but I’d like to some other time.’”

When Holly reached Allison, she asked her date to stay downstairs while she ran upstairs and looked up Gene in her freshmen directory.

“It didn’t have pictures. We didn’t have Facebook then. You could see where they were from and whether they were in a sorority or a fraternity,” Holly said. “I was thinking, ‘Sunshine? Did I really hear that right?’”

In 1968, girls waited for the boy to make the date. Unfortunately for Gene, setting up their first date would be more difficult than flipping through pages to learn her hometown and major.

“In those days, people really dated. [Girls] would date multiple people at a time,” Holly said. “And [the guys] would call Sunday or Monday to ask you out on Friday or Saturday. For two weeks in a row, I already had dates for the weekend when Gene called. But he kept trying.”

Three weeks after their meeting, Holly and Gene finally had their first date, at a student production of “A Man for All Seasons.” A second date followed and pretty soon the two were in a relationship.

Gene said that the biggest problem they faced was Allison Hall, where Holly lived. All female students lived on South Campus and males lived up north — Gene lived in McCulloch. Girls were required to be back by 2 a.m. or face punishment, which cut short dates and removed their intimacy.

“Everyone would be jammed into Allison lobby. The room would be packed, and you would try to say good night to your date,” Gene said. “Everyone was so close that if you went to kiss her and missed, you would have hit someone else.”

Holly and Gene got engaged in March 1973, the year after they graduated from Northwestern. Both originally from the East Coast, the Sunshines lived in Connecticut until 1997, when Gene became Northwestern’s senior vice president of business and finance.

Their Northwestern legacy continues through their children as well: son Brad graduated from Northwestern in 2001 and daughter Emily will finish her master’s education from the School of Education and Social Policy in June.

When the Weinberg freshman opens his mouth again, his speaking transforms. The pitch rises. Blough begins to rapidly spit out words, and the deluge of names, dates and statistics only stops long enough for Blough to take a gasping breath and then picks up again. Blough joined the Northwestern Debate Team this year, but he had plenty of practice in spitting out information throughout high school.

For Blough, racing through facts about Middle Eastern relations in a high pitch at full-throttle speed seems perfectly normal.

“When you only have nine minutes to make your case, you have to speak quickly,” Blough said. “People still understand you. If the judge doesn’t, he’ll yell ‘Clear!’”

He explains that in college debate, two pairs of students argue a resolution created for the year’s competition. The first pair introduces a proposal that, in their opinion, answers the resolution. Then the other pair refutes the proposal and the debate alternates.

The team is led by head coach Scott Deatherage, called “The Duck” by the team. He’s stepping down this year to become executive director of the National Association of Urban Debate Leagues but the team has had a lot of success under his direction.

A cluttered table in the Hardy House, home to the Debate Team, bears witness to Northwestern students’ talents at talking fast and smart. Trophies, plaques and cups compete with one another for space. Over the radiator, a plaque from the 2005 National Debate Tournament sits next to a cup from 1966.

“We’ve had a lot of success at Northwestern as a school,” said Kevin Hamrick, assistant director of Northwestern’s Debate Society who has worked with the team since 2004.

“We’ve won 13 national debate competitions. Second to that are Harvard and Dartmouth, who have each won six. Half of those national titles have been won in the past 15 years,” he said.

Northwestern’s reputation for excellence extends across the country.

“We are known as one of the teams to beat,” Hamrick said. “And we try to respond accordingly.”

Hamrick says the team succeeds because Northwestern students have an advantage over other students.

“The students at Northwestern are of a very high caliber, so when you put together a team of Northwestern students, they tend to debate more intelligently than other students,” Hamrick said. “There are not many outlets for clean competition where people can battle how smart or clever they can be,” Hamrick said.

Throughout the year, the Debate Team will travel to the University of Kentucky, Harvard and the University of Southerm California.*

“It’s a good skill to learn how to travel, to learn how to check into a hotel,” Hamrick said. “You see a chunk of the same people around, and you form close friendships and rivalries. It provides a check on our little world.”

*Correction – February 14, 2008: This article originally spelled the name of the University of Southern California incorrectly.

For four years, former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson has faced a government trying to “silence a critic.” Monday night, Plame spoke out at Northwestern University against an ailing administration set on censoring opinion.

Plame’s visit, organized by the College Democrats, also promoted her new book Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, which follows Plame’s career in the CIA after 2002.

“I have an important story to tell, a story of speaking the truth to power despite the consequences,” Plame said.

Plame worked as a classified covert intelligence agent for more than twenty years for the United States Central Intelligence Agency. On July 14, 2003, Robert Novak destroyed her cover when he named Plame as an “agency operative on weapons of mass destruction” in his syndicated column in The Washington Post.

According to Plame, the move was a “push-back” to punish her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, for criticizing the United States’ war in Iraq in an op-ed piece written for the The New York Times earlier that month.

“We were prepared for push-back,” Plame said, “That’s how this administration works…but we never expected the push-back to come against me…I never expected the push-back would come at the expense of our national security.”

She said her father’s and brother’s service in the armed forces influenced her decision to become a CIA agent.

“People ask me, ‘You’re such a nice blonde little girl, why would you go into that?’,” Plame said. “My father served in the Air Force in World War II, and my brother is a wounded Marine Corp officer. I like the idea of serving my country.”

The publishing committee within the CIA blacked-out portions of Plame’s book because they were deemed to have revealed confidential information. These blacked-out sections have been included in the book to show the portions Plame was not allowed to publish.

Weinberg junior Danielle Provenzano believes that these blacked-out sections were valuable for the marketing of the book.

“It was a pretty good idea. It worked well,” Provenzano said about the inclusion of the blacked-out sections in the book.

However, Medill freshman Todd Kushigemachi said he was surprised by Plame’s forward explanation.

“I was surprised by how very direct she was in talking about her own experiences, especially concerning the faults of the Bush administration,” Kushigemachi said.

Since September 11, 2001, however, Plame says the expanded executive branch of the government has deteriorated the position of the America in the world.

“Look how we squandered opportunity of where we were. Our position in the world after 9/11, we had the world’s support,” Plame said. “President Cheney, I mean Vice President Cheney…has worked to place more powers under the executive branch…This is to our detriment.”

However, she said ordinary citizens still have power to stand up to such a government dominated by the executive branch.

“This fight is about democracy, which is only as strong as the citizens who participate in it,” Plame said.

Plame paraphrased her favorite quote from Thomas Jefferson: “‘When citizens fear their government, that’s tyranny, when government fears its citizens, that’s democracy.’”

“There’s never been a movie about bees,” Seinfeld said during press roundtable in Chicago several weeks ago. “Bees are the only animals that make something people want. Chickens do not think they are laying eggs, they think they are making chickens.”

At the time, Seinfeld only had the movie title in mind. But the story, characters and computer-generated images followed in the next four years.

When co-directors Steve Hickner and Simon J. Smith heard about the project, both looked forward to working with Seinfeld.

“He hadn’t done a project in nine years, and the fact he was going to make a movie became very important,” Hickner said. “I was attracted to the project because [Seinfeld] was writing it.”

Seinfeld’s involvement with Bee Movie remained constant over the four years of production, enabling Seinfeld continual interaction with the movie’s team.

“Many times, the writers write the show in an office and pass the script on to the director to interpret and then tell the actors what to do,” Seinfeld said. “The secret weapon of the TV show and now the movie is I was there…I was there when we shot it, I was there when we edited it, and I was there we finished it.”

Seinfeld said compromising an original comedic idea can destroy the funny aspects of a movie.

“Comedy is a very fragile little thing. [Jokes are] just like little cheese puffs, not a big deal, but if you screw it up, no one wants it,” Seinfeld said.

Unlike other computer-generated movies,Bee Movie was shot with multiple actors present. In previous films, such as Shrek, actors recorded lines separately and the production team combined the tracks later.

“We recorded a lot of the scenes together, with Jerry and Renée [Zellweger] or Jerry and Matthew [Broderick], and you can feel it,” Smith said. “It’s not literally manufactured by lifting [audio tracks] together from different times. [The shooting] is more organic.”

Seinfeld’s characteristic “observational humor,” which fueled the success of Seinfeld, defines the comedy of Bee Movie. Seinfeld said Bee Movie’s humor takes advantage of people’s everyday reactions to the world around them.

“Everyone thinks the same things about everything. All the things that you think, everyone thinks,” Seinfeld said. “What I do as a comedian is I feed on that. I pickpocket your brain. I know you’re thinking what I’m thinking, and so I use that against you to make you laugh.”

Although Seinfeld enjoyed making the movie, he said he remains unsure about any future big-screen projects. Nevertheless, stand-up comedy will remain his primary and favorite performance genre.

“I loved making the movie, but it’s not as great as getting on stage. I won’t be in the theater when people laugh. I won’t feel it,” Seinfeld said. “To me, it’s the purest connection to an audience that any artist ever gets…I would never give that up.”

The Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, inspired by NU’s InNUvation, brings together NU’s medical, law, business and engineering students in classes that combine problem-solving with marketing. Although most are graduate students, some honors undergraduates are involved.

The center offers its first class, Medical Innovation, this fall. Director Michael Marasco says he hopes the center will get into nanotechnology and computer science too.

Student teams attack problems in areas such as neurosurgery to imagine effective products. Grants ranging from $10,000 to $15,000 will help teams develop their prototype.

“The funding is from companies who are interesting in promoting entrepreneurship,” Marasco said. “They’re excited about this idea.”

After building a prototype, students devise a business plan to market the product.

Marasco said the program lets students from different fields work with one another, but also will create something that might change current industries.

“The program will allow students to do more than just study a topic,” he said. “The program will allow students to do something revolutionary.”

After speaking, King asked for contributions to help the student sit-ins then spreading throughout the state, Roberts recounted.

“Money was so hard to come by, no one wanted to risk losing a nickel or a dime or a quarter, and black maids in the South put their coins in a handkerchief and knotted it so they wouldn’t easily lose them,” Roberts said.

Co-authors of The Race Beat, a 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning history book, Roberts and Hank Klibanoff addressed students and faculty Monday in the McCormick Tribune Center. They talked about covering the civil rights struggle and the media’s role in drawing attention to the movement.

“From the windowsill I could see all these pocketbooks come out in unison, all of them open, hands in…handkerchiefs coming out,” Roberts said, “and I came away from the rally that night thinking for the first time we were going to see radical change because the depth of commitment ran far deeper than the white South realized or have accept[ed].”

The Race Beat focuses on how the American press elevated the civil rights struggle into one of the most dramatic news events in the 20th century.

Klibanoff said, “We hope the book frames a time, but also withstands the test of time, [to help] people understand the world worked at a very critical juncture in history.”

Oh, I remember the good ‘ol days from New Student Week 2006: going through AlcoholEdu; watching the “You are Northwestern” video; saying, “Hi!” to my Peer Adviser on Sheridan Road, only to realize she had no idea who I was.

So when I ran to Scott Hall to sign up for my Peer Advising interview, my expectations of the week included keeping in touch by e-mail, answering registration questions and arriving to campus a full week early to get in plenty of friend-reunion time. (Full disclosure: The author is the News Editor for North by Northwestern. She does not, however, edit stories related to New Student Week.)

When training began, we were told that New Student Week was going to be different, which we all agreed was a good thing. Hopefully, no freshman would go through the week without even meeting his or her Peer Adviser.

Little did I know how much our role would change.

First was the expectation to become a professional mover and an alcohol/diversity discussion-leading extraordinaire. Add in the need to master every detail of Medill distribution requirements and registration, and the responsibility became pretty overwhelming.

The job only became more strenuous when Wildcat Welcome arrived. The 7:15 a.m. check-in time for move-in day was brutal. Running up and down flights of stairs while carrying suitcases, fans, refrigerators and the occasional crate of mangos made us question how professional moving men could still have a beer gut. Equally puzzling was the fact that when you help students move into a dorm without an elevator, everyone lives on the fourth floor.

I think my proudest moment was balancing a upside-down desk chair on my shoulders. That, or watching a mom struggle to even pick up a suitcase to hand to me.

Wildcat Welcome challenged us in other ways too. We were all concerned about the talks on alcohol and diversity — we didn’t have much experience in leading such an important discussion. Nevertheless, the discussions went well. Since the freshmen experienced every Essential NU with their peer advising groups, there was enough trust between students to create a meaningful talk.

Also, I noticed that having the freshmen and transfer students experience their Essential NUs together ensured they spent plenty of time with each other. Peer Advising groups acted as a safety net of friendly faces for students to return to. Last year, I remember wondering what the point of the Peer Advising group was, since I knew no one. In my group, the students quickly learned each other’s names and started hanging out with each other.

Even with the early wake-up calls, sore muscles and the fatigue, getting to know my Peer Advising group made my Wildcat Welcome 2007. I had the privilege to meet 15 excited freshmen whose enthusiasm made me realize why I’m here at Northwestern.