I demand that Quinnipiac administrators reverse these restrictive rules. Quinnipiac bestows the Fred Friendly First Amendment award each year to an accomplished journalist who has championed the free flow of information and the public’s right to know. It is beyond hypocritical for the university to give out this award when its own administrators infringe upon the rights of its own student journalists.

David Hutter

Class of ‘07

The Chronicle

Campus News Editor 2006-2007

An increased number of larcenies is not uncommon during the second half of the semester, he said. Campus Security believes that the thieves are Quinnipiac students.

“The thieves steal textbooks because they either need the books to study for final exams or because they need money,” Twining said via telephone April 23. “In that case, they resell the textbook back to the bookstore.”

In the wake of the thefts, Campus Security has dispatched a team of officers to patrol the Arnold Bernhard Library, which is a location for some of the thefts, Twining said. In the library, officers keep watch for people displaying “suspicious behavior.” Some of the thefts occurred when a student left his or her textbooks unattended in the library for several hours while she or he was in class. One computer has been stolen since the end of March, he said. There have not been any burglaries on campus since the end of March, Twining said. A burglary by definition would involve a thief confronting a person and stealing belongings under the implied threat of using physical force.

“This is a very safe campus,” Twining said. “Students need to be aware of where their belongings are at all times and they need to keep them in their sight at all times.”

He continued: “As always, if a student sees anything that they consider to be out of place, they should report it to security.”

Campus Security’s main phone number is 582-6000. Its office is located on the first floor of Irmagarde Tator Hall. Security workers wear uniforms, which also display their name on their shirts.

On the first Sunday in February, at least four students had their computers, DVDs, a purse, and an iPod stolen from their dorm room while they watched the Super Bowl in another room. Some of the students had unknowingly left a door to their individual suite unlocked. In March, Stratford police arrested a 31-year-old man in connection with those thefts.

“All American citizens and peoples of the entire world own the legacy of Eleanor Roosevelt,” Anna Roosevelt said last Wednesday to a packed Alumni Hall audience in a lecture sponsored by the Albert Schweitzer Institute. “I cannot tell you how to remember Eleanor Roosevelt, nor should I be able to do so.”

As the wife of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt “leveraged the position” of First Lady in an unprecedented way, elevating the rights of the poor and disenfranchised. Until then, the role of the wife of the American president was relegated to symbolic leadership and official state visits, she said. Even so, while Eleanor Roosevelt garnered widespread acclaim for her civil rights work, she struggled with feelings of inadequacy about how to be a successful mother to her five children, her granddaughter said.

“She never felt she was doing anything right in raising the children because her own mother had died when she was an infant, so she did not have a model by which to base her mothering skills,” Anna Roosevelt said. Another factor that contributed to household tensions between Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband stemmed from her mother-in-law’s influence over her husband, she said.

Born in 1879 into a wealthy and politically prominent family in New York City, Eleanor Roosevelt transformed herself from an “extremely shy” child into an “independent” young woman, Anna Roosevelt said. During her formative years, Eleanor Roosevelt noticed the different opportunities in life that were inherently available to people based on their socioeconomic status, Anna Roosevelt said. “These observations shaped her activism on behalf of the have-nots of society,” she said.

Telling a story about the pain her grandmother experienced upon learning of her husband’s marital infidelities, Anna Roosevelt cautioned the audience against lionizing prominent politicians: “They’re not saints; they’re just folks like the rest of us. But they take the time to care to move the public agenda forward.”

In an interview with The Chronicle, Anna Roosevelt drew a distinction between feeling obligated to incorporate her grandmother’s values into her own life and adopting those same values because she authentically shares them. “Her values need to become my values,” she said. “Only then I can make my own decisions as to how to live. The things she worked for have transferred to me.”

As far as the extent to which Eleanor Roosevelt was a pioneering First Lady, Anna Roosevelt said that a few earlier First Ladies had worked toward improving the lives of the disenfranchised but that they worked toward these goals outside the public eye.

“I think Eleanor Roosevelt was the first First Lady to go outside the White House and play a public role. My grandmother was the first one to go outside and speak for herself, even though it was not always the official position [of the administration],” she said.

The Albert Schweitzer Institute invited Anna Roosevelt to speak about her grandmother’s legacy because it wanted students, teachers, and townspeople to hear about someone who furthered humanitarian values on an international scale, said David Ives, executive director of the institute.

“The Schweitzer Institute is very similar philosophically to Eleanor Roosevelt. She was very concerned about international issues and peace and justice and we are, too,” Ives said. “There are a number of different programs that the Roosevelt Institute does that we would like to cooperate on in the future.”

Toward the conclusion of the lecture, Anna Roosevelt explained that her grandmother valued people more than anything else in life and that she eschewed the pursuit of material wealth: “Things did not mean anything to her,” she said, pausing. “What mattered to her human beings and spending time with them.”

Richardson was in the process of completing his master in journalism and was a native of Middletown, N.Y. He graduated from Quinnipiac in May 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in public relations.

“There are no words to adequately express our sympathy for this profound loss for Michael’s family and friends. We extend our prayers and condolences,” Carreiro said in the e-mail.

Grief counselors are available to assist students. The counseling center is in the first building on the right side of Bobcat Way. Its phone number is 582-8680. Campus Security is also available to assist students. Its office is in the first floor of Irmagarde Tator residence hall. Its phone number is 582-8200.

Members of the honor society are accepting donations on behalf of the scholarship from Monday through Friday, from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m., at tables in the hallway between the student center and Tator Hall. The group began its effort on Monday, Feb. 26 and plans to continue it until Friday, March 23, said Stephanie Pensa, president of the Quinnipiac chapter of Lambda Pi Eta.

“We decided as an organization to help the School of Communications to raise money for this wonderful cause,” said Pensa, a junior journalism major from Franklin Lakes, N.J.

Students can donate by giving cash, writing a check or making a transaction on their Q-card, she said. The honor society encourages all students to donate to the fund, Pensa said.

“Whether students give a few pennies or write a check, we’re just trying to work hard to support the fund,” she said. The honor society had received more than $100 in donations through Friday, March 2, Pensa said. She hopes to raise “at least $500.”

The scholarship is in memory of Quinnipiac freshman Robert Bruce, who died of injuries sustained in a car crash in December. The money raised in the scholarship will be given to Lewiston High School in Maine, where Bruce attended high school.

The School of Communications established the scholarship in January and publicized it through a monthly e-mail newsletter to the approximately 1,200 students who are enrolled in the school. Students can also contribute to the scholarship by seeing the secretaries in the Ed McMahon School of Communications.

Shapiro was admitted to the hospital Friday, Feb. 16, around 2 a.m., after his 2004 Mazda skidded of a bridge on Skiff Street in Hamden and careened into the Mill River. Last week, he had been listed in critical condition in the intensive care unit of the hospital.

Shapiro is a native of Wayland, Mass., and is studying media production and computer information systems. He is the manager of Q30, the student television station at Quinnipiac.

Students involved in Q30 and the WQAQ student radio station last week put up a huge banner reading “We Love You, Ben” on the exterior wall of the radio station’s studio on the second floor of the student center. The banner is covered with handwritten notes by several dozen students expressing their hope for Shapiro to recover and return to school.

In an e-mail correspondence Feb. 4 to the approximately 80 students and five professors who subscribe to his “Suggested Readings” list, Professor Leonard Long derided Quinnipiac law students about their concepts of how poor people and ethnic minorities are represented within the American legal system.

Long, who is black, wrote: “With the exception of those few QUSL students who come from impoverish[ed] backgrounds, or who have actually worked in agencies such as the Department of Family and Children Services, neither the typical QUSL student, nor the typical QUSL faculty member, has even the beginning of a clue about how poor people live their lives. Yet both feel quite comfortable pontificating and opining about what, if anything, should be done to address the complex issues of poverty.”

He also wrote that “several QUSL students will go off to be smug little assistant district attorneys and such, wearing ill-fitting power suit, and thinking themselves as doing justice. . Oh, and whether it should or not, race matters very much in America. Americans are not color-blind, and neither [are] their laws.”

Long often prefaces his suggested reading selections by including his opinions about social and political issues. These frequent e-mails are known casually among some law students at the university as “Professor Long Spam.”

In this particular e-mail, after Long’s comments, he recommended four texts pertaining to similar issues of race and class.

Law student Adam Gutcheon took offense to Long’s scathing comments. He replied to the e-mail Feb. 5 to express his anger to Long and to suggest specific plans of action the law school could implement to facilitate discussions about the issues of race and poverty, both within the law school and in Greater New Haven. Among his ideas, Gutcheon proposed the establishment of a program that would send law school students to local middle schools and high schools to expose the younger students to the possibility of a career in law or public policy and the holding of study-group discussions among students and teachers at the law school.

“In my experience dealing with issues of race in other academic environments, the way to start a good-faith conversation about this very difficult and sensitive topic is not to alienate with fiery rhetoric your intended audience,” said Gutcheon, a first-year law student and a native of Windsor, where he is vice president of the school board and has worked for three years to close the achievement gap between white and black students. “My ethic is, it’s important to talk about problems openly, but that’s just the beginning. Once you talk about a problem, it’s your obligation to become part of the solution.”

Within seven minutes of receiving Gutcheon’s e-mail, Long responded with a terse dismissal of Gutcheon’s suggestions. Long wrote: “This is not even worth responding to.” Gutcheon says he immediately called Long at his office in the law school to continue the conversation, but Long neither answered the phone nor returned the phone call. Gutcheon stresses that he is not looking to engage in a personal attack of Long, but rather to dispute Long’s comments.

When asked in person to be interviewed by The Chronicle, Long’s response was: “I’m not interested.”

First-year law student Sean McGuiness was also insulted by Long’s characterization of Quinnipiac students as egotistical people whose motivations for pursuing legal professions are to become rich and gain prestige rather than work for justice.

“I’m offended by his comments and I think he should apologize to the entire academic community,” said McGuiness, who is from Colonia, N.J.

As for Gutcheon, he says that he is open to Long’s stimulation of conversation about sensitive issues but is baffled by the professor’s refusal to continue the conversation.

“I think Professor Long has an awful lot to contribute to the academic community,” Gutcheon said. “. But, I do not understand the willingness of Professor Long to devote thousands and thousands of words to talking about all of the problems that Quinnipiac Law has with respect to poverty and race and the culture of the students but not suggest any course of action to solve the problem.”

After a purposeful pause, Gutcheon added: “I think that when a pedagogue picks a fight with his students, my natural response is he’s asking for a little push back because a good teacher will do that to spark discussion. As for me, my door is always open.”

A 33-year-old native of Janesville, Wis., who was born without legs, Glowacki weaved a bevy of personal anecdotes with an analysis of the television shows “Family Guy” and “South Park” to spark conversation about the myriad ways in which people discriminate against each other.

“I cannot even begin to tell you how many times in my life someone has come up to me, stared and then declared to me: ‘You have no legs.’ Not wanting to disappoint these people, I look down at where my legs should be and scream ‘Oh, my gosh! You’re right!’” Glowacki said, eliciting a chorus of laughter from the mostly student crowd attending the university’s second annual Diversity Conference.

Glowacki used this kind of highly idiosyncratic humor, along with a liberal sprinkling of cheekiness, to facilitate discussion with students about racism, sexism, ageism and ableism. Glowacki described ableism as an assumption that a person living with a physical disability is automatically incapable of performing a particular task.

“Such thinking establishes a pattern of prejudice. A child learns prejudice if its parents are prejudiced,” Glowacki said. “By the time a child is seven years old, he or she will have developed his or her sense of morality.”

At one point during the conference, Glowacki asked audience members to shout out the names some people use to describe people who, like him, use wheelchairs to get around. Among the terms audience members
yelled were “crippled,” “disabled,”
“handicapped” and “gimp.”

“Those are the kinds of terms I am used to hearing,” he said. “But when people ask me what I prefer to be called, I tell them ‘Matt,’ or ‘Matt Glowacki,’ to be specific.”

Quickly adopting a serious air, Glowacki also acknowledged that people who have physical disabilities are not fundamentally different from anyone else. In this vein of thinking, he advised that people exhibiting such characteristics want to be treated like everyone else.

“If you run into an angry disabled person, know that the person has additional problems beyond the physical. The problem lies in them, not you,” he said.

Jenna Anderson, a senior occupational therapy major, said that Glowacki’s frankness and dialogue with students throughout his talk made the conference particularly meaningful for her. “I think interaction is the best way of learning,” Anderson said. “And, I think it’s good to see other students on campus are concerned about diversity and care to make a change.”

Rudy Ayala, a senior journalism major, expressed a similar sentiment regarding his hope for change among the student body. “It’d be nice to be going to class with a more diverse community, and not just in terms of skin color. But I would also like to have more people involved in student groups and students of varying religions and ways of understanding the world,” Ayala said.

Alyssa Beauregard, a junior nursing major, lamented the relatively small size of the audience as an unequivocal indication that Quinnipiac students as a whole are unreceptive to the opportunities of meeting and engaging people who come from different walks of life.

“I think a big problem on this campus is that students experience only whatever they want to experience,” she said. “They are not open-minded.”

Beauregard said she appreciated the candor and humor with which Glowacki shared deeply personal stories, especially one about how he accidentally broke a toilet he was using at a Chicago middle school where he was scheduled to speak a few months ago.

“He had such a good vibe about him and he was so open to all our questions. I really respect his ability to do that kind of speaking,” she said.

Such an attitude may be the highest compliment Glowacki would hope to receive, based upon what he told the audience his reasons for becoming a motivational speaker were.

“You really can’t judge the quality of life of another person just by meeting and seeing them,” Glowacki said. “. I have a great life, but it has nothing to do with my not having legs. It has to do with living the life I want and traveling the country and sharing my story with people.”

At press time Monday, Shapiro was in intensive care at Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Shapiro was unconscious and not breathing when emergency personnel responded to the accident scene, his father Michael Shapiro and mother Susan Shapiro told The Chronicle in an interview conducted in a corridor of the hospital Sunday afternoon.

“His condition is still quite guarded. He has made significant progress in the last 48 hours,” said Michael Shapiro, who is a surgeon in Massachusetts. “We do not know the extent of his injuries and we may not know for at least several days or several weeks. . I can’t tell you if Ben will be at graduation.”

Susan Shapiro said that she believes another motorist must have witnessed her son’s car accident and immediately called rescue personnel.

“We don’t know who called 911. We just want to thank whoever reported the accident and got him out of the submerged car that was upside-down in the river,” Susan Shapiro said.

Ben is studying media production and computer information systems and is from Wayland, Mass. Among his injuries are a fractured cheekbone, his father said. Ben will be undergoing surgery in the near future to recover from this injury Michael Shapiro said.

In the hospital corridor not far from Ben’s room, about 10 friends and six family members spent Sunday afternoon talking to each other in subdued voices about their hope for Ben to recover from his injuries. Ben’s parents are thankful for the person who called 911, the emergency personnel who responded to the scene, the hospital workers who are caring for Ben, and all the people associated with Quinnipiac University who care for their 23-year-old son.

“On behalf of Ben’s family, we are deeply touched by the warmth of the extended Quinnipiac University community. From the mass communications students to the faculty and staff, everyone’s been terrific. Everyone has offered whatever help they can,” Susan Shapiro said.

Given the severity of Ben’s injuries, his parents are asking that his friends and acquaintances not visit him.

Many of the students who gathered in the corridor of the intensive care unit at Yale-New Haven Hospital on Sunday had met Ben through working together at the Q30 student television station, of which Ben is the manager. Most students did not want to be interviewed.

The student media organization issued a statement: “On behalf of Q30, we want to thank everyone for their concern and support for Ben. Our thoughts are with him, and we are hoping for the best.”

The cause of the car crash has been attributed to icy roads, Ben’s parents said. A toxicology report conducted at the hospital showed that Ben had not consumed alcohol or other drugs prior to the crash, his parents said.

As snow flurries fell outside the expansive glass-windowed corridor where Ben’s friends and family members shared hugs and fond anecdotes about Ben, their faces appeared melancholic as they expressed their hope for Ben to recover and return to school.

Narem Kelso has been friends and roommates with Ben for two and one-half years. Kelso was awoken early Friday by the ringing of his phone. He heard a friend’s voice tell him that Ben had been in a car accident. Kelso was incredulous.

“I got the call and heard the news and thought: ‘That can’t be possible. Ben is right here, sleeping.’ So I ran into (Ben’s) bedroom and saw that his bed was empty,” said Kelso, a junior from Stockbridge, Mass.

Also on Sunday, Quinnipiac University released a statement in the wake of Ben’s car accident.”Ben has made many friends on campus, not only among the student body, but among the faculty and staff as well,” said John Morgan, a university spokesman. “I know the university community joins me in hoping that Ben makes a full recovery and returns to campus to complete his studies very soon.”

On Friday, Hamden Police issued a press release on the accident. It read in part: “At 1:44 a.m. on February 16, a 2004 Mazda operated by Benjamin Shapiro was traveling westbound on Skiff Street when it veered off the road and hit a bridge abutment. After striking the cement abutment, the Mazda slid down an embankment and landed in the Mill River. . Hamden Fire Rescue extracted Shapiro from the Mazda and transported him to Yale-New Haven Hospital.”

For updates on Shapiro’s condition, pease visit quchronicle.com throughout the week.