Sitting on the UC Patio for lunch is routine for senior Kristin Jacobus.
And after eating lunch – a bagel and soda on this particular day – throwing her trash away in the regular garbage can has also become routine for this New Jersey native used to rigorous recycling regulations.
“In New Jersey, you are fined if you don’t recycle,” she said. “There are bins everywhere, and if you don’t sort your trash, they won’t pick it up.”
Recycling habits on the University campus are, like much of Miami’s, mediocre.
“When I first got to UM, I thought it was strange to see people throwing cans and glass in the regular trash, but after being here for four years, I’ve realized that the problem is that no one sees bins around, so they don’t want to make the extra effort to look for them,” Jacobus said.
A couple hundred feet from where she sat were two green bins recently placed in the patio for recycling.
Has the trite issue of on-campus recycling become a blind eye that the University community is now accustomed to, or a poor program in need of a shake-up?
In the eyes of Associate Director of Contract Administration Alan Weber, the 12-year-old recycling program at UM boils down to dollar bills. If the University doesn’t make enough money on a particular item, it will not be recycled.
Consider the three main recyclable items: glass, plastic and paper.
According to Weber, glass does not make the University any money so they don’t recycle it.
Easy solution.
Now, plastic has eight grades and it would be a nightmare to try to sort all of them out properly, he said. Plus, the higher the grade of plastic, the less recyclable it is, so recycling a grade eight bottle is almost pointless.
But paper has potential.
“We’ve focused our program on paper and cardboard, especially office paper, since cardboard becomes tricky because it is easily contaminated,” said Weber.
The entire recycling operation on a campus of 14,973 students and 2,511 faculty members is a two-man show, contracted from UNICCO to pick up, compress and ship the recycled paper. This team, led by Recycling Manager Irving Kohen, works on a rotating schedule to pick up approximately 196 bins, 79 boxes and 6 containers throughout campus in the library, behind the cafeteria, in each classroom building and in the residence halls.
Following the theoretical paper trail, each professor is supposed to be given a small box to throw away paper at the beginning of each academic year, according to Weber, as well as a UM Recycling Manual.
When those boxes fill up, they are then responsible for taking the paper to larger trash bins located throughout each building.
After this, the UNICCO recycling duo starts its course throughout campus, picking up the paper, depositing it into one of two University recycling trucks and taking it to a compactor.
When the paper is compacted, the university pays $120, according to Weber, to have it shipped to the waste management plant in Broward.
“Paper makes $80 per ton,” said Weber. “We pay to ship our compacted paper, but we also make money from it. In October we recycled 17 tons, but we can do up to 50. That’s a lot of money.”
In addition, each year the University makes approximately $17,000 from its recycling program.
Now if this is a money-making operation, then where is the student involvement?
“Nowhere,” said Kohen. “For university students who are supposed to be educated, this campus is a shame. They contaminate the recycle bins by throwing regular garbage in there.”
Both Kohen and Weber agreed that the UM’s recycling program runs smoothly and is becoming more and more visible throughout the University. But students unanimously disagreed.
Sophomore Lisa Hannigan, who lives is Mahoney Residential College, concurred that bins, especially in her building, are not noticeable.
“You have to hold on to your trash and seek the bins out if you want to recycle,” she said. “Students are just too lazy for that.”
In Virginia, Hannigan’s home state, there are a lot of incentives to recycle, and she thinks that creating something similar at UM might boast student awareness and participation.
“A university is about students, isn’t it?” she said. “Putting bins beside each trash can will make it very easy for us to get involved.”
Student groups like Greenpeace and Earth Alert have made efforts almost every semester, according to Weber, to implement creative plans to get people to recycle, but “they never work.”
“They’re usually complete failures because people simply don’t care,” Weber added.
While students blame the school’s program and UNICCO blames the students’ apathy, some say that the only reversible solution can come from the administration.
“There are so many opportunities to recycle here,” said Hannigan. “If the administration would spend more money on recycling and less on landscaping, then maybe students could play a more active role in this process.”

La Casa Cultural brings the diversity of Miami to the first floor of Pearson Residential College.
The program, which currently has 10 resident participants, gives students the opportunity to converse with one another in Spanish and further their knowledge of Hispanic culture through activities planned throughout the year.
“La Casa is a unique living and learning experience for those interested in furthering their exposure to the Spanish language and the wide variety of cultures in which Spanish is a major language,” said Professor Lillian Manzor, the faculty advisor for the program.
“I wanted to be an RA of LCC so that I could have the opportunity to contribute to the program,” junior Shani Simpson, resident assistant of LCC, said. “I lived on the LCC during its first year and I felt that it was a program worth coming back to.”
Organizers of the program try to promote an informal interaction among students, professors and individuals from the Spanish-speaking community in Miami.
“Word of mouth is key in attracting new residents, along with forms of advertisements like flyers, e-mails and working with student organizations and various offices on campus.”
However, the La Casa program is not restricted to those students who live on the floor.
“Students who are not residents of La Casa can also participate in our programs as members,” said Manzor.
“I am most proud of the fact that we have a diverse group of students that attend the programs that the LCC program team plans,” Simpson said. “All of our activities are open to all UM students; thus everyone gets to learn more and get a taste of Hispanic culture.”
“I would like to see greater attendance at our conversation tables on Monday nights in the Mahoney/Pearson cafeteria,” Simpson said. “The table is a great way for students in all levels of Spanish to practice improving their conversational skills in a friendly setting.”
The only entrance requirement for the program is one year of college-level Spanish, three to four years of Spanish in high school, or being a native speaker of the language.
“I studied Spanish for three years in high school and one year at UM before the program was initiated,” said senior Melissa Mavers, a microbiology and immunology major. “I thought this was a great opportunity to improve my Spanish outside of the classroom and learn more about Hispanic culture.”
“My first year participating in La Casa was both the first year of the program and also my first year on campus,” said senior Greg Barnett, a communication studies and Spanish major. “The activities arranged through La Casa really explore the culture and allow for learning in a fun and enjoyable atmosphere.”
This semester, members have toured Little Havana, visited the set of an international television show, Sabado Gigante, and eaten at local Latin restaurants.
“I went to the Little Havana tour,” said Elizabeth Reese, a sophomore majoring in psychology who lives on the La Casa floor. “It was cool. We passed by a historic part of Little Havana and went to Domino Park.”
“We recently took a trip to the galleries on Calle Ocho,” said Mavers. “We also went to a taping of Sabado Gigante and saw ourselves on international television! That was a lot of fun.”
Despite the attractions and benefits of the LCC program, many participants think there is definite room for improvement.
“Perhaps with more advertising on campus, the program could grow and incorporate a greater variety of students on campus,” said Barnett. “Also, it would be helpful to have a larger number of Latinos in the program. The majority of the students now are Anglos.”
“I don’t think they should restrict the program to only people who have taken a few Spanish classes,” said Elizabeth Soffman, a sophomore majoring in English who lives in LCC. “All should be welcome.”
Some program participants feel the program has a lot to offer and that it will only get better.
“I think Professor Manzor and the RA are doing a good job at planning everything,” Reese said. “They really want to have our input.”
Students interested in living in La Casa Cultural who meet the language requirement must request to live on the designated floor in Pearson by contacting the Department of Residence Halls at 305-284-4505.

(U-WIRE) PHILADELPHIA – Harvard University, with its academics ranking among the highest in the nation, claims diversity, liberalism and a broad educational base as some of its cornerstones of success.
While this boast might slip by uncontested now, Amit Paley, a Harvard student and writer for The Harvard Crimson, recently uncovered a span of history during which this was not the case.
About six months ago, Paley discovered 500 pages of documents describing an episode from the 1920s in which the Harvard administration ousted a number of male students under the suspicion that they were gay or were associating with gays, The New York Times reported.
After intrusive rounds of questioning about the men’s sex lives, the students found “guilty” — two of whom later committed suicide — were ousted from the university and chased out of the town of Cambridge. The dean then ordered that a letter be added to the students’ files to hinder their professional and social prospects.
Although these events occurred more than 80 years ago, they haven’t lost their relevance. Debates over sodomy laws — which currently exist in 13 states — are still taking place. In fact, the Supreme Court is set for a re-evaluation of laws on gay rights, The Times reported. The current controversy stems from a challenge made by two gay men whose activities have been found illegal through the eyes of the Texas judicial system.
Given the ongoing struggles that many homosexuals face, Penn Communications rofessors Larry Gross and Katherine Sender said they were hardly fazed by the information that has been kept safely guarded for the past 80 years behind Harvard’s towering stone walls.
he Crimson article incited Gross to refer back to a similar incident in 1950, in which former Harvard Professor Francis Matthiessen, who, after being fired and persecuted by the press for his extremist views and sexual orientation, jumped to his death from an upper floor of the Hotel Manger in Boston.
Nonetheless, Gross insisted that these events are not to be taken as commentaries against Harvard, but rather as commentaries on the times.
“This was the same period in which universities recently opened quotas for the number of Jewish students,” he said. “There was an attitude of unabashed discrimination…. Let’s not even talk about colored people.”
Still, Gross insists that the events that occurred in Cambridge, while extreme, could have happened, to some degree, up through the 1970s.
The only difference, he said, is that then, administrators might have facilitated a quieter disappearance of students and faculty members rather than ensuring that they continued to suffer beyond their college careers.
Gross said that it is quite probable that incidents like this occurred relatively frequently in the realm of higher education. Given the difficulties Paley found in uncovering details, Gross said that other such occurrences probably remain stifled under similar barriers.
As an openly lesbian faculty member, Sender said that Penn seemed to embrace her sexual orientation rather than condemn or oppress it.
Still, she maintained that there are cases in which gay faculty are taken less seriously than their straight male counterparts.
Much of this rests on career choices, she said.
“It was partly a function of where I chose to apply,” Sender said. “I’m in a progressive discipline, but others who are in the engineering or medical schools might not be taken as seriously.”
Still, both professors continue to assert that in today’s world, universities — and particularly private universities in the northeast, Gross added — remain the best in terms of tolerance.
“Things have changed…. The culture has changed,” Gross said.