University of Texas Austin - Cactus Yearbook (Austin, TX)

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tfo protests. 5 would be reww r.; ' lA CAPITOL PROTEST: Students assemble on the West Mall Sept 2.1 before marching to the Capitol to protest cuts in the budget for higher education. Brian Adamcik Exhausted 23

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The legislature said how much. The University said where. The faculty, staff and students called the action unfair. Frustrations were channeled into protests. When students returned for the fall semester, they faced some big changes in their everyday academic lives. Many classes were larger and had fewer or no teaching assistants, lines at Adds and Drops and in the Financial Aid Office were considerably longer because of reduced staff and library hours were drastically reduced. The cause: legislative cuts in the 1986-87 budget for higher education. Gov. Mark White requested a hiring freeze in July that prevented many of- fices at the University from filling vacated positions. Office clerks in the Financial Aid Office were doing extra work because of the staff shortage. Those delays and long lines also were caused by a greater number of students seeking financial aid. The second week in September, students found the hours in each of the system ' s libraries had been cut dramatically. Until that time, both the Peter T. Flawn Academic Center and the Perry-Castaneda Library offered students the latest study hours. But after the reduction in operating hours, both libraries closed at midnight. The cutback in hours was to accom- modate a smaller staff in the General Libraries Office. Michael Whellan, president of the Liberal Arts Council, organized a study-in. On Sept. 8, about 400 students sat in front of the PCL to pro- test and ask legislators to be careful when cutting higher education funding. Students studied in that library until 10:30 p.m. then moveoL outside the library and continued their studying by flashlight and candlelight. The Liberal Arts Council wanted to send the message by peaceful demonstration without breaking the law as in past demonstrations. On Sept. 23rd, students organized on the West Mall at noon and marched to the Capitol to protest budget cuts pro- posed during legislative special sessions. Some carried signs reading Cut Texas Schools, Cut Texas Future and Short Term Solutions, Long Term Disaster. John Furstenworth, engineering sophomore, said, I ' m unhappy with all the budget cuts. I participated today to make my statement. A bit of relief came Nov. 3 when the hiring freeze was partially lifted. Hours in several library units of the General Libraries were extended to near the regular hours. The Peter T. Flawn Academic Center again was open until 2 a.m. on weekdays. For the most part, it seemed that cut- backs in most areas of the University would be temporary. Many in the ad- ministration said cuts that most closely affected the students would be restored to near-normal levels and that threaten- ed cuts of classes and staff would not be implemented. The University ad- ministration tried to trim budgets carefully so that the most important elements of the University quality professors and a diverse offering ol classes could be maintained. by Bridget Metzger A BRIGHT IDEA: Students work by flashlight at the study-in Sept. 8 in front of the PCL. More than 400 hundred students gathered ta protest against the cutback in library hours. 22

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Late night, as Letterman signs off, researchers remain absorbed in their dedication. The University proudly secured million-dollar con- tracts and research awards that constituted glorious recognition in the newspapers and academic circles. However, real people supported these projects, spending hours tucked away in laboratories. Behind each piece of machinery, each computer program and underneath the piles of data printout were people who looked forward to horseback riding, playing basketball or swimming. Whoever imagined a guy in a black concert T-shirt handling the na- tion ' s defense mechanisms? Some researchers kept barroom hours. Experimental physics is painstak- ing, said Gail Webber, a physics graduate student who could be found at RLM after 1 1 p.m. It ' s inevitable that my experiment breaks down just as I ' m writing my thesis. It ' s frustrating. The University ' s various research projects ranged from human interests, as in self-esteem experiments in psychology, to genetically engineered bacteria developed in microbiology. The University of Texas received $110.9 million during the 1986 fiscal year, with a little more than half of that coming from the federal government, according to the state higher education Coordinating Board. University-level research was a resource for national, state and private industry. The Center for Enhanced Oil and Gas Recovery, for example, was one of four university programs in the nation that took over research once done by major oil companies. In the public sector, the Texas Water Commission relied on na- tionwide policy research conducted by students at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. Although the government and private corporations benefited from UT research, the students also received practical experience. Responsibilities for graduate-level research projects was carried mostly by the students themselves. The faculty members ad- vised and outlined the experiments. They tell you what they want, and you go out and do it, Webber said. Graduate students are very indepen- dent; they have to come up with their own techniques, she said. Undergraduate students usually were hired by the professors who headed the laboratories. They worked by semester and were given research tasks but did not play a large role in completing the ultimate goals for the projects. Since research was expensive, pro- posals for funding had to be submitted. Dr. David Snow, UT associate pro- fessor of sociology, said detailed plans and designs for projects were included in funding proposals. The two projects recognized most by the news media were the hypervelocity railgun at the Center for Elec- tromechanics and the robotics projects in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The robots developed by Dr. Delbert Tesar, holder of the Carol Cockrell Curran Chair in Engineering were shaped like human arms and were designed to perform hazardous work on nuclear reactors. The railgun, part of the Strategic AUTOMATED ARM: Toying with ideas of the future, Randel Lindemann, Graduate Student in Mechanical Engineering, monitors robots design- ed to work on reactors. .. Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, research, was a new technology that pro- pelled materials at ultrahigh speeds. It had non-military applications such as superfast welding, creating new materials and launching aircraft. The UT Physics Department ac- quired a scanning tunneling microscope, one of approximately a dozen in the nation, and Dr. Alexandra de Lozanne, assistant professor of physics and .expert on that particular in- strument. It was used to look at small regions of conductors, such as silicon, with a probe. The microscope reconstructed an atomic image. This pioneer invention enabled man to look at the image of an atom, said Chris Snyder, doctoral candidate in physics. The research conducted was serious, yet it had a lighter side as well. Dr. Mar- shall Rosenbluth, holder of the Fondren 24 In Depth