February 2008

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Judy Shepard, mother of hate crime victim Matthew Shepard, will give the keynote speech on the acceptance of gay rights and equality on March 5 at 8 p.m. in the Hansen Student Center (300 E. Beecher Street).

This event is part of Illinois Wesleyan University’s annual Gender Issues Week which sets out to inform, educate and provide programs dealing with issues pertinent to women and men, and it is free and open to the public.

On October 8, 1998, Matthew Shepard, an openly gay man from Wyoming, was murdered in his college town of Laramie, Wyo. His death was the result of a hate crime and his mother, Judy Shepard, has since then committed her life to fighting for gay rights. His death was also the inspiration for the HBO movie turned play, The Laramie Project.

In May of 1999 Shepard testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of the Hate Crimes Prevention Act where she said, “I can assure opponents of this legislation firsthand, it was not words or thoughts, but violent acts that killed my son.”

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BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – The pressures of patriotism are taking their toll on freedom, says writer John K. Wilson.

Wilson, author of the book Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies (Paradigm Publishers, 2007), will speak at Illinois Wesleyan University about the issues facing academic freedom after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center. His talk is scheduled for 4 p.m. on Wednesday, March 5, in room C101 of the Center for Natural Sciences (201 Beecher St., Bloomington) and is sponsored by the Illinois Wesleyan University chapter of the American Association of University Professors. The event is free and open to the public.

Author of five books, Wilson compares “patriotic correctness” to political correctness. He charges that journalists and professors are coming under fire for questioning the government’s decisions or discussing military operations in an unfavorable light. “Today’s wave of repression in the name of patriotic correctness has only begun,” wrote Wilson.

Wilson is the founder of the Institute for College Freedom and coordinator of the Independent Press Association’s Campus Journalism Project. His works are often quoted in blogs and Web sites such as the Independent Media Center. He has also written Barack Obama: The Improbable Quest and Newt Gingrich: Capitol Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Now living in Chicago, Wilson is also the founder of the Indy, an independent newspaper for Bloomington-Normal.

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – The moment is coming. The Earth is reaching a point of danger from which it cannot be rescued.

This was the message of James E. Hansen, an expert on climate change and the Director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies, at the address for Illinois Wesleyan University’s annual Founders’ Day Convocation Tuesday in Westbrook Auditorium.

“Change is essential if we are going to keep the planet that looks like the one we live on now,” said Hansen, who has been studying global warming for more than 20 years. An author of numerous articles and scientific studies on climate change, Hansen has testified his finding before Congress. His speech, titled “Climate Tipping Points: The Threat to the Planet,” called upon young people in the audience to slow the devastating damage being done to the planet through the use of fossil fuels.

“Fossil fuel interests think it is a God-given fact that we will burn all the fossil fuels in the next few decades,” said Hansen, “but we have free will. Young people can say, ‘Hey, not so fast, nice planet you are leaving us,’” said Hansen.

Hansen encouraged the audience, dominated by students, to advocate changes, such greater use of renewable fuels, the implementation of no-till agricultural practices and the building of coal-burning facilities that capture carbon. “The future is inherited by young people. They can influence elections and impact global change.”

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BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Time does not really exist.

Certainly the sun rises and sets, the Earth spins, but time as we know it – chopped into months, hours and milliseconds – is a fabrication of mankind. Never are we more aware of this fact than on that rare day, February 29 of leap year.

“Leap year is one of those ways we keep the clock that we live by in sync,” said Linda French, associate professor of physics at Illinois Wesleyan University. “If we didn’t have leap years, then over decades, we would find the seasons start to drift, and instead of the first day of spring coming in at the end of March, it would come at the beginning of March.”

In other words, leap year works out the kinks in our calendar. The Earth takes about 365 days to go once around the sun – 365.24222 days to be exact. The idea of adding one more day every four years is to take care of all of those numbers past the decimal. “If you add in one day in the calendar, it catches us up so that we still have the first day of spring around March 21,” said French.

Noticing this slipping of seasons, Pope Gregory XIII decided in 1582 to revamp the old Julian calendar. His Gregorian calendar we follow today set down leap year as every four years. This, of course, included exceptions that sound a bit like the disclaimer portion of pharmaceutical ads:

Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100; the centurial years that are exactly divisible by 400 are still leap years. For example, the year 1900 is not a leap year; the year 2000 is a leap year.

Chalk it up to a stubborn universe that refuses to go on Greenwich time, but in fact none of our closest celestial neighbors tend to roll by our watch. “It’s a big inconvenience, really, that no astronomical events happen commensurate with each other,” said French, who teaches students how time would be different if we judged it by a star other than the sun. “The time it takes the Earth to go around the sun and the time it takes the Earth to rotate on its axis simply don’t divide into each other evenly.”

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BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – After several years of research and planning, Illinois Wesleyan University’s student-run radio station, WESN 88.1 FM, began Webcasting its music programs on February 5. Listeners can access the Webcasts through WESN’s Web site, www.wesn.org

“We really wanted to boost our listenership levels, and the only way to do that was to stay abreast of new technology,” said WESN Promotions Manager Kari Irwin, a junior religion and philosophy major from Palatine, Ill.

The WESN staff decided that Webcasting was necessary in order to compete with online music services and video streaming sites such as YouTube. “We conducted surveys of the student body and found out that no one really listens to the radio anymore,” said Irwin, who has been on the WESN staff for three years. “Webcasts have completely rejuvenated the station.”

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