NCSU tuition may soon rise
Trustees vote for a $900 increase over three years. The Board of Governors takes up the matter in February

Hundreds honor Graham's life
Celebrated - Mourned

N.C. jobless falling to national level
State's rate has dropped for three months in a row / Though more people are finding work, many get low-wage jobs, and others are still dropping out

Teacher sees star roles ahead
When Stanford Middle School teacher Judy Thibodeaux traveled to Huntsville, Ala., earlier this month, she had an out-of-this-world experience.

Bargains attracting early holiday shoppers
You may have noticed an influx of sale coupons in your morning newspaper.

Authority agrees to terrorism insurance
Taxpayers will pick up the tab for new terrorism insurance at the RBC Center in West Raleigh.

People: NC State University
Calvin H. Carter Jr., John R. Jordan Jr., Hugh and Julia Morton

Top jobs open at ECU
Supporters worry over its next steps

Activism that's out of fashion
The return of fur

Students fight subpoenas
One each at UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State University want their identities to remain hidden from the RIAA

N.C. State places diving coach on leave
N.C. State placed its long-time diving coach on paid administrative leave Thursday after receiving an e-mail alleging misconduct 37 years ago, university officials said Friday.

Editorial: Moving on mold
It is a fair question: If UNC-Chapel Hill or N.C. State University had turned up with major mold problems in campus buildings, would there be any hesitation in the legislature to make sure money was found to fix the problems post-haste?

Food supply remains at risk of terrorists
cites Lee-Ann Jaykus, associate professor of food science

Establishing Free Exercise
written by Vincent Phillip Muñoz, assistant professor of political science

Hog Farms and the Environment: An Investigative Series
cites Dr. Mike Williams, director of North Carolina State University’s Animal and Poultry Waste Management Center

Classic tweed 'wears like iron,' has stayed above fray of fashion
cites Dr. Philip Carter, department of microbiology

Education Briefs
cites Harold E. Mitchell, alumnus

States' incentives keep best, brightest at home
cites NC State's admission standards

Obit: Elwood Howard
retired employee of NC State

NCSU tuition may soon rise

Nov. 22, 2003
The News & Observer
By Barbara Barrett, staff writer
© Copyright 2003 The News & Observer Publishing Company.

Cecelia Hill's son dreamed since childhood of becoming a meteorologist, and now he's a freshman in the program at N.C. State University.

As a single mother, a retired Air Force tech sergeant and an administrative assistant with the state who hasn't seen a raise in years, Hill doesn't earn much money. But she'll do anything to keep her son at his chosen school: eat less dinner, take a second job, use the fireplace to heat her Goldsboro home.

Now, Hill's efforts are about to get more challenging.

NCSU trustees voted overwhelmingly Friday to increase tuition $900 -- $300 a year for the next three years -- and to raise fees about $100. The increases would affect both in-state and out-of-state undergraduate and graduate students.

A proposal, which would have directed nearly half the money raised from the increase to student financial aid, failed, though trustees advised Chancellor Marye Anne Fox to make that a priority as she decides how to spend the money. The tuition increase is expected to raise $7.47 million the first year.

The trustees' tuition request still must go through the UNC system Board of Governors, which is scheduled to take up the issue in February.

But trustees Chairwoman Peaches Gunter Blank said the increase is needed.

"I'm for quality education," she said.

So is Hill. A few years ago, she sat down with her son, Robert Alexander Hill, to talk about college. He had become fascinated with weather when his mom was stationed in Okinawa, and he wanted to study meteorology.

Robert Hill, now 18, researched schools, kept up his math and science work and won a few scholarships. His mom set aside the money she thought was needed.

"Now, it's like in the middle of the game, the rules have changed," she said Friday.

The 10-2 tuition vote was met with silence by about three dozen students who crowded into the standing-room-only meeting. Some had worked for months to persuade trustees that raising tuition again would hurt North Carolina's families.

Students handed out a booklet of more than 100 stories of students, parents such as Hill, alumni and faculty members who asked trustees to leave tuition be. In the book, students talked of working two jobs, parents described taking out second mortgages and faculty implored the leaders to keep the university affordable.

"I hope each member of the trustees writes ... these families and explains why they voted for a tuition increase," said Amanda Devore, a senior accounting major who organized the personal stories.

A father's sacrifice

Another tale came from David H. Hauser, a Clemmons dad who is working two jobs, has borrowed as much as he can against his house and is living off credit cards to keep a son at NCSU and a daughter at Western Carolina University. Both students work part-time jobs, too.

Hauser attended NCSU for three years but never graduated because of grades. He doesn't want his children to have to leave college because of cost.

"We'll do everything we can to try to keep them there, but it just means I have to go find the money somewhere," he said Friday.

The stories affected trustee Richard Robb, who opposed the increase, along with student trustee Tony Caravano.

"Did you see the book of stories?" Robb asked after the vote. "It's heart-rending, isn't it?"

Robb said the legislature ought to take more responsibility for education costs, even raising taxes if it must. And, he said, university officials should take pride in NCSU's low tuition rather than insinuating that the university is somehow lacking because of it.

But those in favor of the tuition increase said the university needs the cash to make up for budget cuts from the legislature. They also pointed out that NCSU has sharply increased financial aid in recent years.

Fox said she wants to use some of the new money for financial aid, but if the legislature funds its own financial aid package next summer, she will shift more dollars to "academic excellence," including money to retain top faculty and add course sections.

Hill said her son is getting a good education at NCSU. He's not working so he can concentrate on his studies, and she figures it will take him five years to finish the math- and-science-heavy meteorology program.

A tuition increase would hurt, she said, but she'll cope.

"I figured he worked as hard as he could to get there, and it's my responsibility to keep him there," she said.

Staff writer Barbara Barrett can be reached at 829-4870.

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Hundreds honor Graham's life

Nov. 24, 2003
The News & Observer
By Todd Silberman, staff writer
© Copyright 2003 The News & Observer Publishing Company.

RALEIGH -- Maye Clark and Janet Crowder learned a lot about Jim Graham during the last years of his life.
Among the most important facts: He loved oyster stew and toasted pimento cheese sandwiches.

The two women, who cared for Graham at Mayview Convalescent Center, were among the hundreds of relatives, friends and political leaders who crowded First Baptist Church on Salisbury Street on a brilliant Sunday afternoon to pay their respects and share stories. Graham died Thursday at age 82.

Few seats were empty for the 45-minute public memorial service for a man whose name was synonymous with old-fashioned politics and North Carolina agriculture for 36 years.

Many in the crowd wore red campaign buttons that declared "Jim Graham is my friend."

A men's choir sang "Amazing Grace" and the Rev. J. Daniel Day recalled Graham as an "authentic slice of Americana" who cared as "much about the little folks in Watauga County as the suits in downtown Charlotte."

A portrait of Graham wearing his trademark Stetson hat rested on an easel in the front of the sanctuary, flanked by harvest arrangements from North Carolina fields: cotton, tobacco leaf, apples, peppers, carrots and more.

Graham retired as state agriculture commissioner in 2001 with a legacy that stretched from the time when tobacco was king of the state's crops, raised by thousands of farmers, to an era of far-reaching agricultural consolidation.

Day, who delivered the only formal tribute at the service, remembered greeting Graham for the first time seven years ago at the doors of the church. Graham had a smile almost as huge as his size 15 1/2 EEE cowboy boots and a gift: an envelope with tickets to the State Fair. Day remembered attending an N.C. State University football game a year ago when a steady stream of admirers -- young and old -- stopped to wish Graham well.

Graham's ashes will be buried today in Cleveland, in Rowan County, far from the bustle of state politics. But in Raleigh on Sunday the powerful peopled the church: Gov. Mike Easley, former Gov. Jim Hunt, legislators and congressmen -- even N.C. State University football coach Chuck Amato.

"We have truly lost a great giant," State Auditor Ralph Campbell said.

Clark and Crowder, though, remembered Graham human-sized.

The women sat in the pews reserved for family and those closest to a man fond of saying he never met a stranger. They joined at least half a dozen members of the Mayview nursing staff in seats near the front of the church.

"He was a super sandwich man," Crowder said during a reception that followed. "And if he was ever returning from a trip away, he'd call ahead and ask for oyster stew. He loved food."

It wasn't just Graham's appetite that Clark remembered. It was his way with people, she said, right up until the end.

"He never failed to say thank you," Clark said. "Even on his sickest day. If you gave him a drink of water, he would lay there and catch his breath, but he'd say thank you."

One of Graham's two daughters, Connie Brooks, was in tears as she embraced Clarece Denning, who cared for Helen Ida Graham, Jim's wife, for several years before she died in 1999. Denning said she often joked with Jim Graham.

"Whenever he asked how I was, I told him what my uncle used to say," she said. "I'm kicking, but not high," she'd say. "Fluttering, but cannot fly. We always had that together."

Peter Daniel, who worked at Graham's side for 20 years as assistant deputy commissioner, said he got a firsthand education in the art of personal politics.

"It was a trip to go to Ballentines cafeteria," said Daniel, now assistant to the president of the N.C. Farm Bureau. "It was like a political rally. He'd walk in, and people would line up to talk to him. The servers knew him. They knew what he wanted."

Daniel said working with Graham, often privy to closed-door discussions, taught him lifelong lessons.

"It was like a Harvard graduate degree in politics and public life," Daniel said. "So much in government is accomplished through relationships and trust -- people sitting down and understanding each other.

"He was a master in participating in that kind of government that is so dependent on personal relationships."

Staff writer Todd Silberman can be reached at 829-4531.

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N.C. jobless falling to national level

Nov. 22, 2003
The News & Observer
By Karin Rives and Chris Serres, staff writers
© Copyright 2003 The News & Observer Publishing Company.

For three consecutive months, North Carolina's unemployment rate has dropped, suggesting that the state's economy may finally have turned around to mirror the nation as a whole.

In October, 6.1 percent of the state's workers were idle, down from 6.4 percent the month before. It's the lowest jobless rate in six months, despite continued job losses in the state's ailing manufacturing industry. At 6.1 percent, North Carolina is just one-tenth of a percentage point above the U.S. unemployment rate after running higher almost every month for the past three years.

"I think we're in a bona-fide recovery," said Michael L. Walden, an economics professor at N.C. State University, who predicts that the state will add 60,000 to 70,000 jobs in the next year.

That may explain why Michael Thomas, a Raleigh software developer and writer, suddenly has difficulty finding friends to pass job leads to.

"They have already found the jobs they wanted," he said. "The people who were unemployed have found contract jobs, and the contract workers have found full-time work."

But a closer look at the data released Friday by the N.C. Employment Security Commission shows that the recovery depends largely on where you live, what your occupation is, and what you expect to make. The job market signals are mixed, which helps explain why 4,000 North Carolinians dropped out of the labor force last month. Many may have returned to school or moved out of state, economists say.

The state's manufacturing communities continue to lose jobs -- 3,200 just in October. And like the rest of the country, much of the job growth is now occurring in industries that pay low-to-moderate wages: the retail sector, which added 7,200 jobs in October, and administrative support services, which added 2,900 jobs.

"It's not uncommon for the quality of jobs in the early stages of recovery to be less than stellar," said Mark Vitner, an economist who follows the labor market for Wachovia Securities in Charlotte.

That leaves many professionals, especially in the Triangle and other urban areas, with few opportunities.

"They keep saying jobs are returning and everything is turning around," said Paula Mazzanti, a 49-year-old former graphic designer in Chapel Hill. "But we were all sitting there the other day saying, 'We don't understand where that recovery is.' "

She was laid off in May, along with almost her entire department at a mail-order vitamin and supplement company in Research Triangle Park. Only two employers have called her for job interviews.

A single mother of a daughter in college and another in high school, Mazzanti's unemployment insurance will expire in three months. So far, she has scraped by on $275 in weekly unemployment benefits by postponing doctor's appointments and defaulting on her credit card debt. But unless something comes her way soon, she says she will extend her search to the $9-an-hour retail jobs she has resisted thus far.

Although North Carolina is finally gaining jobs, rather than losing them, overall job growth is still slow. Since October 2002, the state has added just 1,300 positions. Economists believe the pace of job creation will pick up in 2004, but perhaps not as vigorously as it did after the last recession.

With manufacturers expected to continue to lose ground against lower-cost producers overseas, many jobs will disappear for good.

When Paul Baker of Raleigh was forced in April to close his textile mill in Leland, he thought he would be able to find a job in the textile industry. After all, until lower-cost foreign imports wiped out his profit margins, Baker had ran a successful business with 50-some employees and $4 million in annual sales.

But the few textile mills that were still operating were not hiring, so Baker took a job as a commercial real estate broker.

Contracting out work in foreign countries is also picking up in certain white-collar sectors, allowing employers to run leaner domestic operations than they did in the 1990s.

Productivity gains also mean that many jobs that vanished over the past three years won't return, economists say.

For example, two years ago, Triangle Rent A Car of Raleigh was scrambling for ways to cut costs after a severe slowdown in air travel had reduced the company's sales. The company found that many of its sales agents were spending time on the telephone, fielding calls for reservations, rather than dealing with customers.

So Frank Colonna, the company's president, decided to route all calls to a reservations center in Raleigh. The move allowed the company to reduce the staff in some of its branches, cutting the company's annual payroll costs by about $1 million, Colonna said.

"Before, we had to have three or four people [in each branch] fielding calls when things got busy," Colonna said. "Now, we can have two people, and we still have a safety net with the reservations center. ... As a company, we have fewer people but we are more productive."

Still, more North Carolina companies are hiring, and that's the bright spot in today's job market.

Art.com, a Raleigh-based poster company, plans to fill about 20 positions throughout the company by the end of next quarter. AW North Carolina, a Durham auto transmission manufacturer, has grown from 350 to 600 employees and plans to add 200 over the next year.

And this week, Alphanumeric Systems, a technology services company, held a job fair to hire 50 to 60 contract technicians, help desk specialists, system administrators and other professionals. Dorothy Hicks, a senior technical recruiter for the company, cautioned that the jobs were only temporary. She also noted that some positions pay half of what they did during the late 1990s.

But that didn't discourage job seekers. Nearly 240 people interviewed during the three-hour job fair Thursday.

The fact that someone was hiring at all made people very happy, Hicks said.

Staff writer Karin Rives can be reached at 829-4521.

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Teacher sees star roles ahead

Nov. 23, 2003
The Durham Herald-Sun
By Carolyn Norton, staff writer
© Copyright 2003 The Durham Herald Company.

HILLSBOROUGH -- When Stanford Middle School teacher Judy Thibodeaux traveled to Huntsville, Ala., earlier this month, she had an out-of-this-world experience.

And with what she's learned -- paired with what she's learned in her past year as a Kenan Fellow -- she plans to give her students the same.

Thibodeaux, who teaches academically gifted students, traveled to the annual conference of the Association of Gravitational and Space Biologists Nov. 14. She was the only public school educator there.

"I learned there that scientists do believe there are life forms on other planets," Thibodeaux said. "That's our future."

And helping her students think about what those other life forms might be, and where they might live, is part of Thibodeaux's work as a Kenan Fellow.

"I've always like science, and I like space science a lot," she explained. "I do a lot of science stuff with my kids because it's the fun, hands-on stuff."

That science-based hands-on instruction is what makes Thibodeaux's class unique, said Dave Ebert, the principal of Stanford.

"She does what an A.G. teacher is supposed to do -- she stretches their minds," he said. "I hate to say she sells her class so well, but she really does."

Through her fellowship, Thibodeaux was paired with Chris Brown, an N.C. State University astrobiologist.

The Kenan Fellows for Curriculum and Leadership Development Program is an initiative of the Kenan Institute for Engineering, Technology & Science.

During her fellowship, Thibodeaux wrote a curriculum on astrobiology -- or the study of life in the universe -- for her students.

The students began an in-depth study of extremophiles, creatures that live in unique, extreme environments.

"All of them are incredibly different from what we consider normal," Thibodeaux said.

The students did different "discovery activities," looking at substances -- such as yeast and Alka-Seltzer -- and determining if they were alive.

"They did a lot of stuff with what makes things alive and what makes things not alive," Thibodeaux said. "That was some high-level thinking they had to do."

At the end of last year, the students made clay models of extremophiles, and made a video about what planet those creatures might live on.

Eventually, the students may put the clay figures into claymation, and set the videos to music.

With the contacts she made at the Huntsville conference, Thibodeaux plans to take her lessons a step further -- even after her fellowship ends in May. She may take the students to the astrobiology lab at N.C. State, were they can see actual cultures of extremophiles. Or, she might attend next year's conference in New York City, and put on workshops for teachers there. Also, some researchers invited Thibodeaux along on a dig for extremophiles, where she'd work along side them, digging in the mud.

She also met scientists who taught her about the future of science, information she plans to pass on to the students.

"The biggest impact on these kids is how this is going to impact their future," Thibodeaux said. "We have a sun, we have a solar system, but there's a future way beyond that for our kids."

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Bargains attracting early holiday shoppers

Nov. 21, 2003
News 14 Carolina
By Tony Jones, staff writer
© Copyright 2003 News 14 Carolina.

You may have noticed an influx of sale coupons in your morning newspaper. The coupons are designed to get customers into the stores before the holiday shopping season normally begins. Economists and retailers agree the tactics work.

"That's a significant form of advertising whether those sales are real or not, I mean, that's a way to attract attention,” N.C. State economist Dr. Michael Walden said.

According to retailers, the coupons are working by attracting more early holiday season shoppers.

"It's been really interesting to watch our customers in September and October,” Hudson Belk V.P. Richard Hudson said. “They're buying Christmas presents."

The coupons, combined with markdowns, are driving early season sales. Economists also point to an improving economy and lower unemployment. According to the National Retail Federation, the 2003 holiday shopping season should be a merrier one for retailers than in 2002. The organization predicts sales will increase nearly six percent to more than $217 billion nationally. That would be a healthy increase over last season when sales rose a paltry two percent.

Dr. Walden believes the coupon phenomenon may be short-lived because, as the retail environment improves, merchants may offer fewer discounts.

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Authority agrees to terrorism insurance

Nov. 24, 2003
The News & Observer
By J. Andrew Curliss, staff writer
© Copyright 2003 The News & Observer Publishing Company.

RALEIGH -- Taxpayers will pick up the tab for new terrorism insurance at the RBC Center in West Raleigh.

The price is $98,600.

The Centennial Authority, the public board that oversees the arena, has agreed unanimously to make the payment at the request of Gale Force Sports and Entertainment, the private company that runs the arena day to day.

The arena was not covered previously in the event of a terrorist attack, and officials said they wanted that coverage.

Arena managers also are looking at beefing up security inside and surrounding the arena, including new video cameras and metal detectors.

Gale Force, a sister company of the Carolina Hurricanes, asked the authority to pay as it continues to lose millions on the arena operations.

Dave Olsen, the arena's general manager, said Gale Force asked because "we needed the help."

"And we're partners in the building, and that's what partners do," he said. "They help each other out."

The authority also might pay more toward the arena's $1 million premium on property, flood and general liability insurance. In December, it will consider contributing another $225,000 for insurance, officials said.

Under an agreement that put Gale Force in charge of the arena, the authority is not responsible for insurance payments. But the authority can make them if it chooses.

Making the payments is also beneficial to the authority, said Bill Mullins, the authority's finance committee chairman, because the authority has been dangerously close to violating IRS rules that govern tax-exempt financing of the type that built the arena.

Those rules generally require that no more than 10 percent of the money used to repay the tax-exempt bonds can come from long-term private users of the arena, such as the Carolina Hurricanes.

Most of the debt is repaid by the public, which includes major tenant N.C. State University, and from collections out of countywide hotel and meals taxes.

But it's close. One report shows the percentage could reach 9.9989 percent under certain circumstances. If the 10 percent threshold is crossed, it could cost the authority millions.

So, to stay below that percentage threshold, the authority can spend on arena operations and maintenance and keep its overall rental income lower. That spending includes such things as insurance premiums.

Staff writer J. Andrew Curliss can be reached at 829-4840.

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Students fight subpoenas

Nov. 22, 2003
The News & Observer
By Ann S. Kim, staff writer
© Copyright 2003 The News & Observer Publishing Company.

Two university students caught in the music industry's copyright crackdown are fighting subpoenas that seek their identities from their schools.

The names of a student from UNC-Chapel Hill and another from N.C. State University were sought in subpoenas issued by the Recording Industry Association of America last week.

The recording industry trade group alleges that an NCSU computer user who went by the name "CadillacMan" and a UNC-CH user called "hulk" were infringing on the copyrights of its member companies by offering songs for download through their respective universities' computer systems. The subpoenas filed last week listed 14 songs by name that were available for download in September as examples.

The move is part of the recording industry's legal push to curb music piracy. The group has filed 341 lawsuits against suspected pirates around the country since September.

Lawyers for each of the students filed motions Friday to quash the subpoenas in U.S. Middle District Court in Greensboro.

The UNC student, referred to as John Doe, has enlisted the help of the American Civil Liberties Union.

"Basically, what we're arguing is not that the recording industry isn't entitled, at some point, to get the names, but that they must do so in a fair way ... in order to ensure they don't curtail the right to anonymous speech," said Aden Fine, a staff attorney at the ACLU headquarters in New York.

The brief filed for John Doe argues that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which gives the RIAA the power to issue the special copyright subpoenas, does not require Internet service providers to respond to subpoenas when they are acting as conduits, rather than storehouses, for the copyrighted material in question.

The reasoning is that ISPs, whether they are universities or companies, are not responsible when they are merely conduits and therefore do not have any policing responsibilities, the brief argues.

A judge has ruled against Verizon, which made a similar argument in an RIAA subpoena case. The decision by an appeals court in Washington is pending in that case.

John Doe is challenging the law also on constitutional grounds, arguing that the copyright act violates due process in regards to First Amendment rights. In this case, the brief argues that the law does not provide adequate safeguards to protect the right to anonymous speech on the Internet.

While the subpoena deals with suspected illegal downloading of music files, the reach of the copyright act is much broader, Fine said. "It applies to any context in which the Internet is used to communicate. It can apply to an e-mail, a posting on a message board," he said.

The law doesn't require the RIAA to give any notice to the subjects of the subpoenas, Fine said, so those who are accused have no chance to defend their protected speech rights.

The lack of notice may be the reason why most of the challenges to RIAA subpoenas are brought by ISPs rather than the Internet users themselves, he said. Fine said he knew of only a handful of challenges brought by individuals.

The RIAA issued a statement that dismissed the ACLU's objections as "based entirely on procedural technicalities."

"They are legally unfounded, and we are confident that the court will agree," the statement read.

Lawyers for the NCSU student, called Jane Doe in her motion, are arguing that the subpoena was not lawfully issued.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which governs student records, does not allow the disclosure of her identity if the subpoena is not valid, and this one was filed in the wrong place, the motion states. NCSU is located in the federal court's eastern district, and therefore should have been filed in Raleigh, not Greensboro, according to the motion.

The RIAA has refiled its subpoenas in other cases when ISPs objected to the venue.

The subpoena seeking information from UNC-CH was initially filed in Washington last month, but the RIAA refiled it when university lawyers said they would object.

Staff writer Ann S. Kim can be reached at 932-2014.

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People: NC State University

Nov. 24, 2003
The News & Observer
By staff report
© Copyright 2003 The News & Observer Publishing Company.

N.C. State University

Calvin H. Carter Jr., an alumnus and one of the founders of Cree Inc., was awarded the 20020 National Medal of Technology by President Bush on Nov. 6 at the White House. The award is the nation's highest honor for technological innovation. Carter was nominated for his pioneering work in developing high-quality silicon carbide wafers.

University of North Carolina

Retired lawyer and former Board of Governors chair John R. Jordan Jr. of Raleigh and lifelong university system supporters Hugh and Julia Morton of Linville are the 2003 recipients of the University Award, the highest honor given by the Board of Governors of the 16-campus University of North Carolina.

Jordan was one of the 32 original members of the UNC Board of Governors and served on the board for nearly 24 years, including two terms as chairman. He was honored for his leadership and service to the university.

The Mortons were recognized for their service and many contributions to higher education, particularly to UNC institutions.

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Top jobs open at ECU

Nov. 24, 2003
The News & Observer
By Jane Stancill and Jerry Allegood, staff writers
© Copyright 2003 The News & Observer Publishing Company.

GREENVILLE -- East Carolina University lost another top administrator last week and another football game Saturday. It has been that kind of fall in Greenville.

The university is on the hunt for a new chancellor -- its second search in two years -- to fill the vacancy left by William Muse, who resigned in September under pressure from trustees and UNC system President Molly Broad.

Muse's departure was marked by two audits that embarrassed the university, and questions about management practices that led to the ouster of the university's top academic officer, former Provost William Swart.

And to make matters worse, ECU was snubbed by the Big East when the conference went searching for new members.

ECU leaders insist the wheels aren't coming off in Greenville, but some supporters say they are worried about the future of the state's third-largest university.

"I feel like we're a ship without a rudder," said William Dansey, a Greenville businessman who is an ECU graduate and a former member of the Board of Trustees. It will be difficult to gain any momentum with so many interim administrators running the campus, he said.

All told, four key positions are now being filled by interim leaders, including athletics director Nick Floyd, who stepped in when former director Mike Hamrick left for the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

This week, ECU expects federal investigators' report on suspected misuse of funds in a grant from the National Library of Medicine. In December, administrators and trustees must get remedial training that Broad ordered to make sure they understand the rules and responsibilities for hiring, firing and setting salaries.

These steps will help the university get back on track, said Jim Talton of Raleigh, chairman of ECU's trustees. He said when the second of two negative audits emerged, "It became crystal clear we had some problems that needed to be dealt with."

Pirates stay with ship

Acting Chancellor William Shelton, a former Eastern Michigan University president who arrived as a vice chancellor at ECU this year, has won praise for corrective actions he has taken. He is working with Jim Smith, longtime faculty member and interim vice chancellor for academic affairs, to untangle an unpopular restructuring made by Swart, who has been reassigned to the faculty.

When people ask him what's going on, Shelton responds in an upbeat, can-do manner. "I say, 'Don't feel sorry for us. The institution is strong. We don't need any sympathy at East Carolina University.' "

There are positive signs. This fall, ECU recorded the most dramatic growth of any campus in the 16-campus UNC system, adding about 1,200 students, for a total enrollment of almost 22,000. The average freshman SAT score, 1048, was the highest in ECU history.

Last month, leaders dedicated a $67 million science and technology building -- the largest of the university's projects funded by the 2000 higher education bonds. The campus is expected to have three new doctoral degree programs by January. And in the past three weeks, ECU has announced three federal grants totaling $7 million for research in surgery and education.

Shelton said the administrative shakeup has not affected what goes on in classrooms and research labs. "An institution of higher learning," he said recently, "just keeps on going."

The university is pressing forward with ambitious initiatives, including plans for an engineering program and hopes for a $60 million cardiovascular diseases institute.

'Too aggressive'

ECU partisans say such bold moves are important for the region, and they attribute many of the university's recent setbacks to North Carolina politics, which UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State University tend to dominate.

Some even say that Muse was brought down because he lobbied for ECU to be included in the Atlantic Coast Conference last summer and sought state funding for the cardiovascular institute.

Dansey said Muse's detractors used the audit and dissatisfaction with ECU administrators as reasons to get rid of him.

"He was getting a little too aggressive -- which is what we need," Dansey said. "We can't afford to go through another 10 to 15 years of passiveness."

Upset with the treatment of ECU, some boosters have considered forming a political action committee patterned after one at UNC-CH that donated $182,000 to legislators' election campaigns in its first year of operation.

Greenville Mayor Don Parrott said Eastern North Carolina residents want more fairness in the distribution of state funds.

"When you get too aggressive in the East, you get your hand slapped," Parrott said.

ECU alumnus Bill Johnson, a real estate broker in Cary and the parent of an ECU freshman, has followed the events closely and said he just wants the university to get its due.

"The fact is, East Carolina is and always has been the ... stepchild of the university system," he said. "Are the students and alumni paranoid about it? Well, yes. Should they be? Yeah, probably so."

Broad said those who have not been involved in what she called the "painful actions" at ECU are understandably concerned "that Eastern North Carolina not be left out."

But she said a series of problems in personnel, financial and legal matters led to the change in leadership. Broad said she asked Muse to do some "soul searching" about what was best for him and the university.

"My discussions with Bill Muse did indeed relate to a pattern of behavior that reflected shortcomings and that placed East Carolina at risk, in my opinion," she said.

Muse, who has the opportunity to return to an ECU faculty position next year, declined to comment.

Hunt for a new leader

A 13-member search committee is looking for the next chancellor. The panel will review candidates and make its recommendations to the ECU trustees, who are to forward three names to Broad in March. Broad will then give her choice to the UNC Board of Governors for final approval.

Broad said it is important that the university find a strong and experienced leader, ideally someone with knowledge of Eastern North Carolina. ECU's student body is projected to grow by 47 percent this decade, and the campus has a vital role to play.

"It is one of the campuses within the university that is going to undergo the most dramatic transformation over the course of the next 10 years -- the growth and the outreach into Eastern North Carolina in the area of health and other aspects of economic development," Broad said.

"They are going to be the economic engine that helps Eastern North Carolina become much stronger."

Students have not taken much notice of the reshuffling in the Spillman Building, which houses the chancellor's office.

"It really hasn't been a big issue," said Jesse Harris, a freshman from Richmond, Va. "There have been a lot of stories coming out, a lot of hoopla, but it hasn't really affected student life in a drastic way."

Morale is generally good, said Frederick "Rick" Niswander, chairman of the Faculty Senate, the governing body for the 1,400 faculty members. He described the administrators, including Shelton, as straight shooters. "When we ask a question, they give us an answer."

Faculty members are concerned about who will take office after Shelton, Niswander said, and the Senate has passed resolutions calling for the next chancellor to have an academic background.

Dale Knickerbocker, an associate professor who heads a branch of the American Association of University Professors, described the campus mood as mixed. He said faculty had been concerned that some administrators saw their own role as that of executives, but thought of professors simply as employees. Faculty members also were unhappy with large salary increases for administrators when the faculty did not receive significant raises.

There is still concern about the trustees implementing a "corporate mentality" that would not properly emphasize teaching and research, Knickerbocker said.

Niswander said he was strolling through his neighborhood recently when a neighbor asked if ECU was broken. He said he replied that the university continues to teach students, conduct research and reach out to the community.

"All those things haven't changed," Niswander said. "It absolutely, positively is not broken."

Staff writer Jane Stancill can be reached at 952-2464.

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Activism that's out of fashion

Nov. 23, 2003
The News & Observer
By Karen Guzman, staff writer
© Copyright 2003 The News & Observer Publishing Company.

The minivan slows just enough so the driver's voice cuts crisp and clear through the open window. "Get a life!" he barks and guns his engine with a menacing roar. On the sidewalk, Gina Wilson doesn't flinch. She's heard much worse. She raises her "Boycott Belk" sign higher and stares defiantly into the whir of traffic.

In her years as an anti-fur activist, she's learned this much: There are people you can reach and others who'll just never get it. They don't matter. What does matter to Wilson is her conviction that millions of animals suffer and die needlessly for the sake of style.

A petite, tireless woman, she strides over to a stockpile of signs that her comrades-in-the-cause -- Carolina Animal Activists Together (CAAT) -- have assembled for this morning's protest in Cary.

She chooses two new ones: "Honk! If you hate fur" and "Tell Belk No Fur' and returns to her corner perch. A supportive toot sounds immediately. Wilson smiles and nods.

Score one for the animals. But the game is far from over.

Fur's celebrated return to fashion's center stage this season has inspired an ongoing renaissance. Sales are spiking, and few consumers seem interested in the animal rights movement's tired, bleeding-heart arguments. The '90s are over.

The debut fur salon in Hudson Belk at Cary Towne Center mall opened in October. Belk company spokesman Stephen Perotta isn't troubled by the CAAT protest.

"She's entitled to her opinion," he says of Wilson. "Our trunk shows have been very successful and we thought a permanent fur salon was what the market really wanted."

Wilson met with local store management two days ago to tell them her posse would be out this weekend. "I told him we'll be here a few more times, and he was very pleasant, very cordial," Wilson says.

So is she. Soft-spoken and armed with a ready smile, Wilson, 47, bears no resemblance to the radical, paint-hurling activists of yesteryear. The fur revival grieves her, but she doesn't lash out. CAAT protocol dictates no response to hecklers, and there are plenty at this intersection.

"First you kill it, then you grill it," a grinning dude in a baseball cap shouts from his pickup truck.

Protester Trish Wright, a feisty blonde, rolls her eyes. "That's mild compared to what people usually say," she shrugs. "They flip us off, too. They do that a lot."

In the adjacent mall, the new salon is having a 40 percent-off sale. Racks of downy, luxurious fur wait in a corner of the ladies section. Dark, bristling mink. Bushy red fox. Sleek shearling. It's Hudson Belk's first foray into fur salons.

A shopper wanders in, skimpy cardigan sweater draped across her shoulders. "I'm cold," she says.

"Try a fur coat," the saleswoman offers, smiling sweetly. "It'll warm you right up."

Outside, the sun chases the chill from the autumn morning. The Cary High School band, practicing in a lot across the street, adds a brassy note to the hum of traffic. Wilson's husband, Dick Wilson, stakes out the corner opposite his wife. The Cary couple are animal lovers. They live off Maynard Road in a house full of windows and light and the sound of dogs scuffling across wood floors. For them silence is not an option.

"You never know," says Dick, a staff physician at SAS Institute. "As long as the message doesn't just die, there is some hope some people will see and some people will think."

At his wife's corner, a dark SUV slows. A window slides down. Out pops a ratty white fur. It's either a blanket or a shawl, streaming out the window while a mocking hand points to it. Gina Wilson watches the car disappear.

Trimmed in fur

Fur is back. Free of the politically incorrect stigma of the '90s when supermodels declared they'd rather go naked than wear it, animal pelts this year adorn everything from hats and boots to gloves, handbags and blouses. And that's not counting the coats. Major designers embraced the furry spectrum this fall, especially for trim and accessories.

Fluffy flourishes, such as trim, are allowing the fur industry to target a younger, less affluent market than the usual ladies-in-mink.

Trim has brought Gina Wilson to The Streets at Southpoint mall in Durham this afternoon. She patrols area malls a few times a year to get a sense of the market. The CAAT crew will be here in force the day after Thanksgiving.

Wilson's honey hair hangs in a bouncy, angled bob. She wears a simple, gold wedding band. Her voice carries the distinct accent of her upbringing. She grew up in Colombia, the daughter of transplanted Lithuanian parents. She speaks fluent Lithuanian, Spanish and English. Her father, a dentist, still lives in Colombia. Her mother, who rehabilitated injured birds, also owned two mink stoles. "I guess she didn't know any better," Wilson says.

In Nordstrom's department store, Wilson spots the real thing immediately. "That's rabbit," she says, fingering a velvety $175 purse. The upscale store's pianist is drifting through Beethoven's morose "Moonlight" Sonata. Wilson spots more rabbit fluffed at the top of suede boots. Leather, to her, is as bad as fur, and she doesn't buy it anymore, though she admits to an old leather coat hanging in her closet. She doesn't use any animal products and keeps to a vegan diet.

She picks up a rabbit scarf and gloves. "These are beautiful," she says wistfully. "Fur is beautiful. It just doesn't belong to us." She has an eye for style. A furniture designer who has created pieces for some of North Carolina's biggest companies, Wilson came to Raleigh in the '80s to attend graduate school, met Dick Wilson and stayed.

She also discovered the animal rights movement. CAAT is small but active, best known for its annual protest outside local fur shops the day after Thanksgiving. Hertzberg Furs in Raleigh is the usual target, though this year, in light of the trim explosion, the group will target The Streets at Southpoint.

In the Chico's store, Wilson points to more reasons. A chocolate brown suede coat, its front trimmed with shag, has caught her eye. She feels it and reads the tag inside: Trim 100 percent real Mongolian fur.

"Mongolian fur could be dog," she whispers. Disclosures in the late '90s that low-end fur imports from Asia sometimes contained cat and dog fur have left Wilson permanently suspicious.

"What kind of animal is that?" she asks a saleswoman.

"I think it's lamb," the woman responds.

"Really? That's interesting that they say, 'Mongolian Fur,' " Wilson persists.

The woman laughs. "It's politically correct," she says.

Dogs hold a special place in Wilson's heart. She adopted two of her three after trapping them in the mountains on vacation three years ago. She spotted the half-grown pups running wild. Someone had abandoned them. Back in Cary, Dick read the novel "Disgrace" by John Maxwell Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, aloud to the more skittish of the two for hours to accustom her to humans.

In J.C. Penney, Wilson finds a trend that makes her smile: faux fur. Improved production techniques are yielding some pretty realistic fakes. Wilson walks among the racks, examining faux shearling, creamy acrylic suede and funky, natty shags. Then she stumbles upon a parka with a fox trim hood. The real thing. "It's probably a tail," she says.

The hood reminds her of another fox, a dead one she saw alongside the road in Cary last year. She stopped her car and pulled the body into the brush.

"The eyes were open. He had this beautiful narrow nose. A perfect, beautiful animal," she says. She covered the fox with branches, so no one would spot him and cut off his tail as a keepsake, which she has seen happen.

"Every time I see a dead animal on the road, I stop and pull them carefully over," she says. "Just so they don't get hit again, poor souls."

The furrier

Larry Hertzberg trusts in the food chain.

"The cavemen wore skins. We have a long history of wearing dead animals," says Hertzberg, 59, a straight-talking industry expert whose family has been selling fur in North Carolina since 1906.

Business has grown steadily since Hertzberg's opened off Raleigh's Glenwood Avenue in 1981. And now in the midst of the fur renaissance, the shop's storage vault is expanding for the second time.

Mink, raccoon, squirrel and fox all glint on racks in the reception area, alongside fox-trimmed capes and lambskin soft as silk.

Hertzberg is sorry the shop won't be CAAT's target this year. "They brought in new customers, letting everybody know where we are," he says, laughing and heading down a corridor, past the showrooms to the vault. He opens the heavy door to the windowless chamber.

Inside the temperature drops to a cryptlike 55 degrees. Rows and rows of fur coats hang silent, preserved in the cold air like suspended bodies waiting to be brought back to life.

"We store thousands and thousands of furs here," Hertzberg says. They range from $200 denim jackets with fur collars to $15,000 black mink coats. They are beautifully maintained, treasured by their owners.

"[Activists] pick the fur trade because it's an easy target. Some of these kids protesting fur wear leather shoes -- what's the difference?" Hertzberg says.

The fur trade, he notes, is one of the most strictly regulated despite activists' claims of animal abuse.

And anyway, only a minuscule percentage of animals killed in the United States are killed for their fur. Most are food. What the activists need to do is lighten up, and in some cases, grow up, Hertzberg says. The concept of animal rights, after all, is bizarre to much of the world.

"I had an agent from Hong Kong here once and we were driving down Glenwood and he saw a sign for an animal hospital and he said, 'What is this all about? That's unheard of,' " he recalls.

The Triangle is home to two other fur shops, Serotta's stores in Cary and Raleigh. CAAT protesters have targeted Serotta's, too.

"I've had most of my customers ... say that when they saw the group there, it made them want to come in and buy something because they did not appreciate someone trying to force their opinion on them," Barbara Serotta says.

Animal rights arguments, in fact, don't appear to be hurting sales anywhere. A Fur Information Council survey shows that fur salons nationwide did about $1.7 billion in sales during the September 2002 to May 2003 selling season, a 13.2 percent increase over the previous year.

New techniques in shearing, dyeing and laser-cutting have vastly broadened the market, says council spokesman Steve Kaplan. And the anti-fur movement has withered.

"The animal rights movement has so many other agendas beside just fur," Kaplan says, listing the abolishment of food and research animals, even questioning whether seeing-eye dogs are exploited.

"The 'Holocaust on a plate' campaign likens the treatment of broiler chickens to Jews in the Holocaust. Very offensive, I think," Kaplan says. The Anti-Defamation League denounced the photo exhibit campaign, by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which premiered in February in two California museums and on PETA's Web site, likening the slaughtering of animals to the killing of Jews in World War II.

"As the public has gotten a better sense of the true goals of these groups, they've really stepped back and said, 'We don't accept this.' "

Just regular folks

Tom Regan has heard all the accusations hurled at animal-rights activists, or ARAs as he calls them.

In his new book, "Empty Cages: Facing the Challenge of Animal Rights," the retired N.C. State University philosophy professor tells critics: "... the vast majority of ARAs are Norman Rockwell Americans, straight off his famous Thanksgiving cover for the old Saturday Evening Post, only with this noteworthy difference. We'll pass on the turkey, thank you. We don't eat our friends."

In his office behind the stacks in the NCSU library, Regan isn't flustered by the state of things. He has a genial smile, a grandfatherly head of gray hair and beard. Photos of the grandkids decorate his desk.

"Movements are cyclical," he says. "We've gone into a period where the movement has lost a little of its steam, and we are on the verge of a pickup."

The animal products industries have turned public opinion against ARAs by painting them all as lab-trashing, cow-hugging vandals. And it's nonsense, Regan says. Author of the landmark 1983 book "The Case For Animal Rights," Regan is widely considered the intellectual leader of the animal-rights movement. He has lectured the world over and is one of a handful of scholars responsible for incorporating animal rights issues into academia.

With his wife, Nancy, he has also founded the Culture and Animals Foundation, which seeks to improve the treatment of animals by educating humans.

Regan bumped into Gina Wilson in October at the International Compassionate Living Festival his group hosts every year in Raleigh. Wilson won the group's 2003 Outstanding Local Activist Award.

The case against fur fashion, Regan says, is that it's so unnecessary, and the animal carnage it wreaks is so huge. He cites the Friends of Animals organization in his book, stating that a single 40-inch coat of a single fur type requires: 16 coyotes, 18 lynx, 60 mink, 45 opossums, 20 otters, 42 red foxes, 40 raccoon, 50 sables, eight seals, 50 muskrat or 15 beavers.

Regan, himself, has not always been an activist. He once bought Nancy a mink hat. It was Mohandas Gandhi's writings on animals that pricked his conscience 30 years ago. At first, he resisted.

"I did what any red-blooded American would do. I decided to think about other things," he says. But not for long. Awareness, he says, is the key to awakening. Most people, Regan says, are simply not aware of the immense suffering of animals in fur mills or the cruelty of some trapping and skinning procedures -- charges the industry generally rebuts.

As Regan sees it, the compassion and respect Americans show their pets just need to be extended to all animals.

Or as he states in "Empty Cages": "There is somebody there, behind the eyes of a beaver or a seal, just as there is somebody there, behind the eyes of a cat or dog. As animal consciousness expands, as our perception changes, we see the one just as surely as we see the other."

Trying to get attention

Gina Wilson places a blood-red paper "collar" around her friend's neck and steps back to get a better look.

"This will be like a fashion show," she says, adjusting the collar in preparation for the upcoming protest. Model and fellow CAAT member Jean Marie Miller turns around, giving Wilson a 360 degree view. The collar has to be big and bright enough to command attention on the street in Durham.

"Everyone's going to be shopping. Let's make them think twice before buying any of those furs," says Miller, a trim woman who wears her silvery hair in a wispy bun.

The Wilsons and Miller have gathered this afternoon in the Wilsons' airy home to create the props for their post-Thanksgiving protest.

Every protest has a theme. Last year, they carried a makeshift coffin full of raccoon skins. This year's theme: Trim the Cruelty from Your Closet.

In the sunroom Gina uses as her home office, the three trace, cut and model the tools that will make their point.

"We thought we'd concentrate on three major props representative of the trim industry," Gina Wilson says.

The other props include white paper vests with red details and the words "CRUEL TRIM" printed across the front and enormous gloves with red cuffs.

Dick stands straight and patient while Gina fits him with a vest.

"Take it down a little on the left side," suggests Miller.

Pepper, a black mongrel with somber eyes and a feathery tail, lies in a square of sunshine, tracking the humans' movements.

In the back yard, sunshine filters through the treetops and spills across the lawn. Songbirds flit among the feeders and birdbaths. Somewhere in the brush Junior, a wild rabbit the Wilsons began feeding when he was "no bigger than a dinner roll," may be hiding.

Gina still feeds him. He will almost take the food from her hand, but not quite. The rabbit's budding trust touches her. She won't give up.

At her desk, she dips a brush in black paint and carefully prints "Cruel Trim" in block letters across a vest.

"Is it big enough?" she asks. "Will people notice?"

Staff writer Karen Guzman can be reached at 829-4752.

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N.C. State places diving coach on leave

Nov. 22, 2003
The News & Observer
By Lorenzo Perez, staff writer
© Copyright 2003 The News & Observer Publishing Company.

RALEIGH -- N.C. State placed its long-time diving coach on paid administrative leave Thursday after receiving an e-mail alleging misconduct 37 years ago, university officials said Friday.

Wolfpack coach John Candler, who has coached 16 All-Americans, 49 ACC champions and one Olympian in his 35 years at N.C. State, met with NCSU athletics director Lee Fowler on Thursday. Candler will remain on leave until the investigation has been completed, a spokeswoman for Chancellor Marye Anne Fox said Friday.

The investigation was triggered by an e-mail message sent Wednesday to Fox's office by Jane Schneider, 53, of East Lansing, Mich.

According to circuit court records from Washtenaw County, Mich., John Candler from Columbia, S.C., (and formerly from Ann Arbor, Mich.,) was sentenced on Nov. 30, 1966, after pleading guilty to indecent liberties with a 12-year-old girl. The records indicate that the defendant completed five years of probation without any violations.

In 1985, N.C. State coach John Candler was charged with taking indecent liberties with a 15-year-old Wake County girl. According to Wake County Superior court records, Candler pleaded guilty to the charge and received a suspended sentence. Candler served three years of probation and was ordered to undergo therapy.

The 1985 charge garnered local media attention, but N.C. State officials declined to discuss Friday whether any disciplinary measures were taken at the time or whether Candler's personnel record had indicated any previous conviction.

Debbie Griffith, N.C. State's associate vice chancellor for public affairs, said that Fox has shared the contents of Wednesday's e-mail with Fowler.

"We want to make sure that we investigate this fully," Griffith said.

Fowler declined comment.

Candler, 63, could not be reached for comment.

His attorney, Jack Nichols, said that all they know at this point was that Candler had been placed on leave after N.C. State officials received an e-mail. Nichols declined to comment further, adding only that it was "unusual and favorable" that Candler had been placed on paid leave.

In a telephone interview Friday, Schneider said she wanted to make sure that N.C. State knew about the Michigan conviction. "People should be entitled to make an informed decision when someone has a history like this and they're going to be coaching young people," said Schneider. "If they knew they were hiring a man with this criminal background, is this the type of man they want coaching their students?"

On N.C. State's official athletics Web site, the online biography of Candler states that after he graduated from Michigan, Candler went on to earn a master's degree from the University of South Carolina. He has been coaching either part-time or full-time at N.C. State since 1968.

According to the online biography, Candler was an All-America diver at the University of Michigan. A native of Scarborough, England, he competed for England in the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome and in the 1964 Games in Tokyo. Candler also won two world professional diving titles before turning to coaching.

He also owns the Candler Swim & Gym Club at 1013 Jones Franklin Road.

Staff writer Lorenzo Perez can be reached at 829-4643.

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Editorial: Moving on mold

Nov. 24, 2003
The News & Observer
By staff report
© Copyright 2003 The News & Observer Publishing Company.

It is a fair question: If UNC-Chapel Hill or N.C. State University had turned up with major mold problems in campus buildings, would there be any hesitation in the legislature to make sure money was found to fix the problems post-haste? Probably not.

Both institutions, with their size and rosters of prominent alumni, have ways of getting the General Assembly's attention. N.C. Central University in Durham, one of the state's historically black campuses, has connections, too -- but still has faced some foot-dragging on Jones Street in terms of help with addressing its mold issues.

Enter Governor Easley, who happens to have earned his law degree at NCCU. Easley on Friday kicked the clean-up into high gear, giving the State Construction Office authority to direct the effort. Exactly where the money will come from isn't clear yet, but there are options. What's important is that the campus' mold infestations -- which have required some buildings to be closed -- are being tackled with a sense of urgency.

State Sen. Marc Basnight of Manteo, the Senate president pro tem, has said that chamber could address NCCU's need, perhaps as soon as an upcoming special session on redistricting. But Jim Black and Richard Morgan, the House co-speakers, panned the notion.

Members of the Legislative Black Caucus turned to Easley, suggesting the clean-up money come from a $300 million bond fund earmarked for repairs and renovations. That would be appropriate. Leaders of the General Assembly also need to replace another $10 million that NCCU was allowed to use from the 2000 higher education bond to begin the mold remediation efforts. A large, unforeseen expense to combat mold can't be allowed to set back the university's overall progress.

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Food supply remains at risk of terrorists

Nov. 24, 2003
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
By Byron Spice, staff writer
© Copyright 2003 The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The hepatitis A outbreak that has killed three and sickened 605 in the region has provided a sobering reminder of just how vulnerable the world's food distribution system is to either intentional or inadvertent tainting.

New federal regulations regarding the transportation and distribution of fresh produce, designed to address food terrorism concerns, will take effect next month. Nevertheless, many food safety experts maintain that the food supply chain will continue to be vulnerable.

The outbreak, which sickened patrons of the Chi-Chi's restaurant at Beaver Valley Mall, has been traced to contaminated green onions shipped here from Mexico.

Only a month ago, the Food and Drug Administration issued a report assessing the risk of food terrorism and concluded "there is a high likelihood, over the course of a year, that a significant number of people will be affected by an act of food terrorism, or by an incident of unintentional food contamination that results in serious food-borne illness."

Given the frequency of food-borne disease -- the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates about one of four Americans is sickened by food each year -- anticipating a significant outbreak of food-borne illness in a year's time is akin to predicting the Steelers will field a football team next season.

But with a new and evolving threat such as bioterrorism, FDA officials insist, any kind of prediction must be dubious.

"Can [food terrorism] happen? Yes," said Ted Labuza, a professor of food science and technology at the University of Minnesota. "Will it happen? I don't know."

Hepatitis A virus is an unlikely agent of bioterrorists. Growing this or any other intestinal virus in sufficient quantity for sabotage is all but impossible technically, said Lee-Ann Jaykus, a food scientist at North Carolina State University who studies hepatitis A in produce.

Hepatitis A is endemic in much of the world, but that doesn't make it easy to gather fresh virus. The only way Jaykus can do her own research, she noted, is by collaborating with physicians who can provide her virus from their hepatitis patients.

Hepatitis A nevertheless is a prime example of how devastating a food-borne disease can be. In what may be the largest food-borne disease incident in history, almost 300,000 people in China were sickened with hepatitis A caused by tainted clams in 1991.

"If an unintentional contamination of one food, such as clams, can affect 300,000 individuals, a concerted, deliberate attack on food could be devastating, especially if a more dangerous chemical, biological or radionuclear agent were used," according to the FDA's risk assessment.

Food solves one of the biggest hurdles facing potential bioterrorists: a delivery system.

Placing anthrax spores in postal envelopes killed five people and sickened 17 in fall 2001 and created a panic in places like Washington, D.C. If a terrorist intended to kill or disable large numbers, a more efficient delivery system would be needed.

CDC officials say sabotage of food and water would be the easiest way to launch a bioterror attack.

Anthrax and botulism are often cited as possible bioterror weapons because they can be deadly; both can contaminate food. Other likely bioweapons are less deadly, but perhaps easier to disperse -- agents like salmonella, shigella, E. coli 0157:H7 and ricin.

Large-scale food terrorism is speculation today, but it may not be for long. U.S. troops in Afghanistan, for instance, found U.S. agricultural documents that had been translated into Arabic and training manuals in al-Qaeda safe houses that included extensive sections on agricultural terrorism.

Early this year, the CIA investigated a possible al-Qaeda plot in London to use ricin to poison the food of British troops. And in September, the FBI issued a warning that terrorists might be using two toxins, nicotine and solanine, to poison food and water.

Many acts of food sabotage have been reported through the years, though many seem to have more to do with disgruntled employees than international terrorists. For instance, a supermarket employee in Michigan last December mixed an oily insecticide including nicotine into 250 pounds of ground beef. More than 100 people fell sick.

In a celebrated example of bioterrorism, a religious cult used salmonella to contaminate salad bars to disrupt an election in a small Oregon town in 1984. More than 750 people were sickened and 45 hospitalized.

The initial response to food terrorism events is likely to be similar to what has unfolded in the past three weeks in Beaver County.

The Real-time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance, or RODS, Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine is developing a system to detect outbreaks early by analyzing hospital information. But RODS does not receive data from Beaver County medical facilities. It was, instead, an observant emergency room doctor who tipped off state health officials Nov. 1.

Modern molecular biology, which allows scientists to quickly analyze the virus' RNA, is a key part of any food-borne illness investigation now, whether a suspected terrorist incident or not, said Catherine Cutter, a microbiologist and food safety expert at Penn State University.

Based on the viral RNA, investigators could see it was similar to viruses typically found in Mexico and particularly similar to viruses found in green onion-associated outbreaks in Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee.

Spurred by the growing percentage of food originating outside the United States and by fears of food terrorism, the FDA is taking steps to improve what it knows -- and when it knows it -- about the source and distribution of foods. On Dec. 12, new regulations take effect that will require all domestic and foreign companies that make, process, pack or hold food that will be consumed in the United States to register with the agency.

The regulations require food importers to notify the FDA before bringing any goods into the country -- two hours' notice for goods moved by truck, four hours by train and eight hours for ships.

The notification is intended to make it easier for FDA inspectors to identify incoming shipments of foods that may be under suspicion -- such as green onions are now -- or shipments coming from suspect growers, such as the eight Mexican companies that might have produced the tainted green onions used by Chi-Chi's.

Eventually, the FDA also plans to issue regulations giving it clear authority to halt those shipments and to require companies to improve their record keeping, so that they can provide information about where food was produced and where it was sent within two hours.

That would have greatly speeded the investigation of the source of the Chi-Chi's onions, though that wouldn't necessarily have much impact on public health -- or in catching saboteurs, Labuza said.

"The fact that they could have traced it back sooner is sort of irrelevant," he said, because of the hepatitis A virus's long incubation period. Once a person is exposed, it often can take 30 days or more before they develop symptoms. By that time, he explained, a saboteur is long gone.

The problem remains in identifying the agents prior to consumption. There is no testing scheme or device that allows inspectors to identify a wide range of bacteria, viruses or chemicals that might contaminate various fruits and vegetables.

In the case of hepatitis A, for instance, "you can only see these little guys with an electron microscope," said Luke Labonde, Penn State food scientist who specializes in fruits and vegetables. Testing for the virus now requires growing the sample in a lab for a day or two; that's too long for produce that is in danger of spoiling and likely will be consumed within days.

Anyway, it's not possible to sample produce sufficiently to catch all possible pathogens. Depending on how the contamination took place, testing one part of a vegetable may fail to detect a pathogen elsewhere on the same vegetable. And just because one box of green onions tests negative doesn't mean an entire truckload is safe; CDC officials say they suspect all of the Beaver County illnesses might have been caused by just one or two boxes of onions.

The FDA is sponsoring more than 90 research projects to develop new testing procedures. But no one is predicting a foolproof testing scheme anytime soon.

"What we're lacking is a wand you can wave over produce and detect a hundred different bugs," Labuza said. "That doesn't exist now and it probably won't exist for a hundred years."

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Establishing Free Exercise

Nov. 24, 2003
PHX news (Phoenix, Arizona)
By Vincent Phillip Muñoz
© Copyright 2003 PHX News.

If conservative and liberal church-state scholars agree on one thing, it is that the Supreme Court’s religious liberty jurisprudence is a disaster. No single rule exists to guide decision making. The various doctrines employed are, at best, inconsistent and, at worst, blatantly contradictory. Divisions on the Court run so deep that actions demanded by “free exercise” according to some Justices violate “no-establishment” according to others. The result is an ever shifting, case-by-case jurisprudence based on narrow factual questions that encourages neither the rule of law nor a robust protection of religious freedom.

The history of contradictory decisions and doctrinal uncertainty could come to an end, however, if the Supreme Court acts decisively during the 2003-2004 term. Two cases on the docket will provide the Court a remarkable opportunity to reconsider its religious liberty precedents. If it can muster the will, the Court could reconstitute its religion jurisprudence, unifying the no-establishment and free exercise provisions into a coherent whole that recognizes the legitimate concerns of both sides of the debate while, at the same time, respecting our nation’s founding heritage.

In potentially one of the most explosive church-state cases ever, the 2003-2004 Court will decide whether public school teacher-led recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance violate the First Amendment’s ban on laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” In 1954, Congress added the words “under God” to the Pledge. When signing the act into law, President Eisenhower declared, “Millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty.” That very reasoning led Michael Newdow, an atheist lawyer with a daughter in a California public school, to challenge the Pledge’s constitutionality. Newdow argued that although his daughter was not required to recite the Pledge, she was injured “when compelled to watch and listen as her state-employed teacher in her state-run school led her classmates in a ritual proclaiming that there is a God, and that ours is ‘one nation under God.’” In mid-2002, a federal Ninth Circuit appellate panel agreed, ruling that the added words constituted an establishment of religion. President Bush and members of Congress from both sides of the aisle loudly decried the decision, which led the Ninth Circuit immediately to delay its implementation and to move for reconsideration. In a surprising show of resolve, however, a second Ninth Circuit panel reaffirmed the original ruling in early 2003, again declaring the Pledge unconstitutional.

Given the public and political outcry, it is not surprising that the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case on appeal. It may be more difficult than it seems, however, to save the amended Pledge. For starters, the Ninth Circuit’s decision is remarkably cogent, follows established Supreme Court precedents, and does not possess any of the characteristics typically associated with judicial mischievousness. The carefully crafted opinion demonstrates that under any and all of the Supreme Court’s three leading Establishment Clause precedents--“Endorsement,” “Lemon,” and “Coercion”--the 1954 Pledge violates the Constitution.

The Ninth Circuit began with the “Endorsement” test, a doctrine championed by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and most recently employed in 2002 by Chief Justice William Rehnquist to uphold the use of school vouchers at private religious schools. As its name suggests, the test prohibits the state from “endorsing” religion over irreligion. The Ninth Circuit concluded that “under God” implicitly endorses a particular religious concept, the existence of a singular deity. The facts in Newdow, moreover, closely parallel those in Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), one of the first and most seminal “endorsement” precedents. In that case, the Supreme Court struck down an Alabama moment of silence law because the state legislature added the words “for prayer or meditation” to the original statute, which said only that the public school day should begin with a “moment of silence.” The Ninth Circuit reasoned that if adding words suggesting that students may pray impermissibly advances religion, then adding explicitly religious words to a teacher-led recital clearly constitutes an endorsement.

The Ninth Circuit then moved to analysis under the first prong of the “Lemon” test, a three-part test originally set forth by Justice Warren Burger in the 1971 case Lemon v. Kurtzman. Justice O’Connor’s “Endorsement” doctrine was designed to replace “Lemon,” but Burger’s framework has shown remarkable staying power despite being frequently ignored. The test’s first prong requires legislation to have a valid secular purpose--that is, the state must be able to offer a nonreligious rationale for its action. Because the words “under God” were not a part of the original text, the Ninth Circuit examined the reasons for the addition instead of looking at the Pledge as a whole. The legislative history of the 1954 Act, they found, clearly indicates that Congress intended to acknowledge America’s dependence on God and to distinguish American republicanism from atheistic communism. Such intentions patently violate “Lemon’s” secular-purpose prong.

The Ninth Circuit concluded with analysis under the “Coercion” test, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s proposal for establishment jurisprudence. Teacher-led recitations of the Pledge coerce religious practice, the Ninth Circuit explained, because they place students in the untenable position of choosing between protesting or participating in an exercise with religious content. Given that students did not have to recite the Pledge, the Ninth Circuit seems to be taking an extremely expansive view of coercion, interpreting it to include actions that could make a student feel psychologically uncomfortable. Yet this is the exact interpretation set forth by Justice Kennedy in his precedent-setting Lee v. Weisman (1992) opinion. In that case, the Supreme Court held that exposing a junior high student to an officially approved nondenominational graduation prayer constitutes undue psychological coercion of religious practice. The Ninth Circuit reasoned that if merely being present while others pray at a single, non-mandatory, end-of-the-year school function is coercive, so too is listening to a daily recital containing religious language.

Given the rules that the Supreme Court has laid down and how they have been applied, the Ninth Circuit’s decision is not outlandish. A candid evaluation must admit that it lies within a fair reading of Establishment Clause precedents. Therein lies the problem and the opportunity for the 2003-2004 Supreme Court.

The Pledge case reveals that something has gone drastically wrong with Establishment Clause jurisprudence. If the Pledge is unconstitutional, so too are teacher-led recitations of the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln claimed “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” Teaching public school students that the Declaration of Independence is true--that our rights are, in fact, “endowed by our Creator” and that the American Revolution was just according to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”--would violate the Constitution. Even an invited performer signing “God Bless America” at a government-sponsored event, like a local county fair, would be constitutionally suspect. Newdow confirms what critics have long claimed: that pushed to its logical conclusion, the various “wall of separation” constructions of the Establishment Clause are hostile toward religious sentiment and drive religion out of the public square. The case demonstrates that the current interpretations of the Establishment Clause are not neutral and are unworkable and thus fit the criteria for being overturned.

If the Supreme Court does rethink its establishment jurisprudence, it should do so with an eye toward religious free exercise. In the past, the First Amendment’s two religious provisions (note, there is only one clause) have been read independently of one another. If the First Amendment is internally consistent, however, any plausible interpretation of establishment ought to be consistent with free exercise. Free exercise, in fact, is the more fundamental value. Too often it is forgotten that the reason why Congress and the states (since incorporation) are prohibited from making an establishment is that religious establishments tend to abridge religious liberty.

Religious free exercise, including the right not to exercise a religion, is the end; no-establishment is a means toward fulfilling that end.

Perhaps providentially, the Court will hear a blockbuster free exercise dispute during the 2003-2004 term. The case, Davey v. Locke, was filed by Joshua Davey, a college student in the state of Washington. Davey won a “Promise” scholarship during his senior year in high school, a renewable $1,125 state-funded grant that could be used at any public or private accredited college in the state. Davey enrolled at Northwest College, an accredited Bible college affiliated with the Assembly of God, and declared a double major in Pastoral Ministries and Business Management. This prompted a letter from the state informing him that because he elected to major in Pastoral Ministries and because his college educates students from a distinctly Christian point of view, he would forfeit his scholarship. The statute authorizing the “Promise” scholarship explicitly states, “No aid shall be awarded to any student who is pursuing a degree in theology.” The provision was included to ensure compliance with the Washington State Constitution’s “Blaine Amendments,” which declare, “No public money or property shall be appropriated for or applied to any religious worship, exercise, or instruction, or the support of any religious establishment,” and that, “All schools maintained or supported wholly or in part by the public funds shall be forever free of sectarian control.”

Davey seems to present an open-and-shut case of religious discrimination and thus a clear violation of religious liberty. Yet if precedent holds, the Court will not invoke free exercise in its decision; in fact, the Court may not even address the case as a religious liberty controversy. For the past ten years, the Supreme Court has adjudicated religious discrimination cases as free speech questions. This strategy has provided religious citizens significant victories, but at the cost of the near elimination of free exercise as a significant constitutional right. In sum, not only has the Court developed a misguided conception of establishment, it has failed to develop a coherent conception of free exercise.

To understand why free exercise has all but disappeared from constitutional litigation requires understanding two related jurisprudential developments: the rise and fall of the exemption doctrine and the absorption of free exercise into free speech. Starting in 1963, the Supreme Court constructed free exercise to grant religious citizens exemptions from laws and regulations that, absent an overriding compelling state interest, significantly burdened religious life. The classic exemptions case involved Amish parents’ refusal to send their children to school past the eighth grade in violation of mandatory school attendance laws. In Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) the Court ruled that though the state had a legitimate right to pass a school attendance law and though the law was facially neutral and did not target the Amish religion, the Amish had a right to an exemption from the law because it significantly burdened their religious practice. The exemption doctrine prevailed until Justice Antonin Scalia’s 1990 majority opinion in Employment Division v. Smith. In that case, the Court rejected the appeal of members of the Native American Church who had sought an exemption from drug laws that made illegal their religious use of peyote. Reversing its earlier jurisprudence, the Court ruled that free exercise does not grant religious citizens the right to exemptions from neutral but burdensome laws. Justice Scalia went so far as to say that a presumptive right to a judicially granted exemption from a neutral law itself violates the rule of law.

Smith made clear what free exercise does not include, but it left unresolved what it does protect. If free exercise does not demand exemptions, what does it demand? In 1993, the Court had the opportunity to define its post-Smith conception of free exercise using two disputes that came before it. The first case, Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. Hialeah, involved a Florida city’s attempt to make the practice of the Santeria religion illegal. The local city council crafted elaborate regulations that did not mention Santeria by name but clearly were intended to outlaw the religion’s animal sacrifice rituals. A unanimous Supreme Court ruled that laws designed to suppress specific religious practices violate free exercise. The decision received little acclaim, in part because blatant acts of religious suppression are so rare.

The second free exercise case before the court that year, Lamb’s Chapel v. Center Moriches Union Free School District, had a more lasting impact. Lamb’s Chapel, a private religious organization, challenged a local New York school district’s regulations for after-hour use of public school property. The regulations permitted social, civic, and recreational uses, but explicitly prohibited groups from using facilities for religious purposes. School officials, accordingly, rejected Lamb’s Chapel’s application to use school grounds to show a series of James Dobson videos on Christian family values and Christian child rearing. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Lamb’s Chapel nine to zero, but it rested its decision on the First Amendment’s protection of free speech, not free exercise. The Court reasoned that the school district employed unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination when it rejected an otherwise permitted facility’s use because Lamb’s Chapel approached its subject matter from a religious point of view.

The victory of Lamb’s Chapel encouraged other religious groups suffering from perceived religious discrimination to litigate under free speech. In 1995, a Christian newspaper at the University of Virginia successfully appealed its denial of funding. Following Lamb’s Chapel, a five-member Court majority ruled in Rosenberger v. University of Virginia that the university’s policy of funding all school newspapers except those published from a religious perspective constituted unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. In a 2002 case, Good News Club v. Milford Central School, six Justices found a free speech violation by a school district whose community use policy explicitly denied the use of school facilities for religious purposes.

From a results-oriented perspective, Lamb’s Chapel, Rosenberger, and Good News Club were victories for religious freedom. In each case, the Court ruled in favor of religious citizens who were denied public funding because of their religious viewpoints. From a constitutional perspective, however, these three cases have had a devastating effect on free exercise. Aside from the rare case in which a specific religious practice is suppressed directly, religious free exercise has lost its independent value. The Court has transformed religion into a subspecies of speech. The effects of this change have been hidden because of the results the Court has reached. But should the Court reconsider what constitutes “viewpoint neutrality,” an inherently ambiguous concept, legal protection of religious free exercise would all but evaporate. More fundamentally, not all exercises of religion can be classified as speech. To the extent religion is more than speech, it possesses almost no constitutional protection under current precedent.

Davey represents a unique opportunity because it reveals the contemporary crisis in free exercise jurisprudence. A creative Supreme Court might interpret Washington’s confiscation of Davey’s scholarship to violate his free speech rights. But to consider the reception of a state-funded scholarship a matter of speech seems to strain ordinary common sense. Davey did not lose his scholarship for anything he said. It is doubtful that he considered his decision to major in Pastoral Ministries to be an exercise of expressive activity. He lost his scholarship because he sought to study religion from a religious perspective. The state did not punish a certain type of speech; it discriminated against religion. His case, accordingly, should be decided under the Constitution’s protection of religious liberty.

Given its standing establishment precedents, however, the Court cannot invoke free exercise to protect Davey from religious discrimination. The Court turned to free speech to protect free exercise in the first place because much of its establishment jurisprudence required state actors to discriminate against religion. The “Lemon” test formally required that government actions have a legitimate secular purpose, neither advance nor inhibit religion, and avoid an excessive entanglement between church and state. In practice, “Lemon” was interpreted to prohibit public money from flowing to religious schools or organizations. The Court reasoned that since money is fungible, government funding for secular purposes could be used by religious organizations for sectarian ends. Justice O’Connor’s “Endorsement” test and Justice Kennedy’s “Coercion” standard were meant to abate the harsh tendency of “Lemon,” but in their own ways they too required state actors to be hostile toward religion. Following the logic of these precedents, many government agencies drafted policies excluding religious organizations from receiving public money or benefits. If only to avoid possible (and costly) Establishment Clause litigation, school boards and university officials adopted policies explicitly discriminating against religion.

In Lamb’s Chapel, Rosenberger, and Good News Club, the Court’s majorities lacked the will to overturn these precedents. Without confronting them directly, however, the Court could not interpret free exercise to prevent the exclusion of religious groups from public programs on account of religion. If they had interpreted free exercise to prevent religious discrimination, free exercise would have prohibited the exact same thing that no-establishment demanded. Turning to free speech allowed the Court to reach the results it desired without overturning precedent. This move, however, only masked and complicated the contradictions in the Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence. Currently, free speech prohibits viewpoint discrimination based on religion. No-establishment, at least according to some standing precedents, demands such discrimination in order to prevent state funding of core religious activities. Free exercise, meanwhile, sits idly by, silently watching its warring neighbors.

With judicious decisions in Newdow and Davey, the Supreme Court could unify the First Amendment’s two religion provisions into one coherent principle of religious freedom. In doing so, it could both bury those establishment precedents that are hostile toward religion and resurrect the right to free exercise. To some extent the Court already has taken small steps in this direction. In 2000, the Court allowed private religious schools to participate in a government-funded program for acquiring computer and library services. Likewise in 2002, the Court upheld the participation of private religious schools in Cleveland’s school voucher program. In both cases, however, narrow Court majorities evaded, somewhat disingenuously, earlier establishment precedents. The Court did not overturn “Lemon,” “Endorsement,” or “Coercion,” which means all three doctrines can still be employed to demand affirmative discrimination against religion.

Overturning these precedents will require the cooperation of Justices O’Connor and Kennedy. In the past, they have been unwilling to break from their favored establishment doctrines, “Endorsement” and “Coercion” respectively. Yet the Pledge case pushes these doctrines as no prior case has before. It shows that they drive religion out of the public square; that they are neither neutral nor fair. Newdow also will bring with it an immense amount of public scrutiny, factors that Justices O’Connor and Kennedy have taken into account in the past. Given the nature and profile of the case, it is hard to imagine a moment when establishment jurisprudence has been more ripe for reconsideration.

If the Court can muster a majority to reconsider no-establishment, it should start by invigorating free exercise. As mentioned above, the First Amendment was drafted to protect religious liberty. Free exercise is the end; no-establishment a means. In fact, without a prior conception of free exercise it is nearly impossible to understand why religious establishment should be avoided at all.

To reformulate free exercise, the Court could do worse than turn to the writings of James Madison. Not only did Madison introduce the Bill of Rights into Congress, he has long been cited as the authoritative guide for the meaning of the First Amendment’s protection of religious li