The Bowdoin Orient

UPDATE (Saturday, May 2, 2015 at 1:05 p.m.): The petition submitted by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) received enough signatures to prompt a student referendum. Bowdoin Student Government (BSG) sent the referendum to students today at noon and students will have until Wednesday, May 6 at noon to cast their votes. 

In order to pass, one-third of the student body will need to vote on the referendum and two-thirds of all voters must vote in favor. If the referendum passes, it will be submitted to the administration as a representation of the voice of the student body.

The referendum reads as follows:"Do you support a resolution boycotting Israeli academic and cultural institutions as detailed below?

It is resolved that the Bowdoin student body endorses and will honor the call of Palestinian civil society for a boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions. It is also resolved that we support the protected rights of students and scholars everywhere to engage in research and public speaking about Israel-Palestine, as well as their right to speak out in support of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.

This boycott will remain in place until Israel:

1. Ends its occupation and colonization of all Palestinian lands and dismantles the Wall;2. Recognizes the fundamental rights of the Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and3. Respects, protects and promotes the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194."

Students have three voting options, "in favor," "opposed," and "abstain."

On Thursday, Bowdoin Student Government (BSG) revised the number of signatures that Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) must obtain on its petition calling on Bowdoin to participate in an academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions in order to prompt an official student referendum on the issue. 

SJP appeared to have reached its goal of one-fifth of the student body by its initial Wednesday deadline with 361 signatures before BSG amended the necessary number to 383 in order to account for students studying abroad. BSG has extended SJP’s deadline to 5 p.m. today. 

According to BSG’s constitution, student-initiated petitions require the signatures of one-fifth of the student body to bring an issue to an all-student referendum. A two-thirds majority of at least one-third of the student body is required for a referendum to pass. 

BSG realized that Bowdoin’s total enrollment was 1,915 earlier this week when it became clear that students abroad were not included in the base enrollment number. 

“They were given the number of 360 for the number of people they needed to sign, leading up to [Wednesday]...that number came from Bowdoin’s website and was verified by BSG. But essentially we started to question, ‘What about people studying abroad who sign it but aren’t actually counted in the denominator as far as the 20 percent,’” explained BSG President Chris Breen ’15.

SJP members expressed frustration about the decision.

“We were completely in the dark, I would say, in terms of  figuring out how it would be determined how much longer we would have to do this,” said SJP member Sinead Lamel ’15. 

Juniors Zachary Albert, Rachel Snyder and Evan Eklund submitted an op-ed to the Orient on April 9 expressing their opposition to SJP’s petition and urging BSG to reject the resolution.

“A lot of the people who are signing are minimally informed, and those signatures don’t mean anything because they don’t know what they’re signing. But they are about to mean everything,” said Snyder.

Earlier this week, members of J Street U Bowdoin, a student organization that labels itself “the political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans,” emailed all those who had signed the petition and shared a link through which students could unsign the petition.

Sasha Kramer ’16, one of J Street U Bowdoin’s leaders, said that many students thanked the group for enabling them to take their names off the petition. 

Leah Kahn ’15, acting on behalf of a separate group of students but not any specific organization, forwarded a separate email sharing the same link with petition signers.

While no group was able to provide an exact number, Lamel estimated that around 60  people unsigned the petition following the emails. 

According to Christopher Wedeman ’15, another SJP member, a decision from Bowdoin to take part in an academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions would mean the College would neither take part in events funded by Israeli universities or organizations, nor invite scholars to speak on campus as representatives of these institutions—though Israeli academics would still be welcome to speak on campus independent of their organizations.

However, some students expressed concerns about the boycott. 

“[The petition] is antithetical to the mission of Bowdoin College... This is fundamentally not in concert with what Bowdoin is, should be, or has been set out as,” said Matthew Liptrot ’16.

At press time, SJP needed 24 signatures to reach their new goal. The online petition currently lists a number eight below that recognized by BSG, since some students wished to sign but had issues with the petition website.

“If there’s then a referendum, BSG will run that right away,” said Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster.

—John Branch contributed to this report.

At Monday’s faculty meeting, the Bowdoin faculty voted 55 for and 21 against, with three abstentions, to approve a new financial accounting course that will be offered next spring in conjunction with the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. The experimental class, combining in-person and online instruction, will be administered on a trial basis for 50 students and used to evaluate whether this type of program fits in the Bowdoin curriculum.

Proposed by the College’s Curriculum and Educational Policy Committee (CEP), the course’s two 25-student sections will feature dual instruction from Tuck and Bowdoin faculty—Associate Professor of Economics Greg DeCoster will lead class meetings on campus and Tuck’s Professor of Accounting Phillip Stocken will conduct weekly online sessions. DeCoster will make assignments and create the grading rubric, while Stocken will grade students’ work.

“We are delighted to launch this experiment in learning with Bowdoin,” said Robert G. Hansen, senior associate dean at the Tuck School of Business, in an interview with the Bowdoin Daily Sun. “Both of our institutions have a time-tested approach to education that relies on active student-faculty engagement in an intimate and small-scale environment.”

At the faculty meeting, President Barry Mills tentatively estimated that the new course would cost the College roughly $60,000—substantially cheaper than the Fullbridge Program, a business preparation program offered over the past two winter breaks that aimed to increase students’ financial literacy at a cost to the College of roughly $160,000.

“Accounting is really a language and an essential part of finance,” said Mills in an interview with the Bowdoin Daily Sun. “We’ve taught accounting in the past at Bowdoin, but this exciting collaboration allows our students to take advantage of the expertise at one of the nation’s distinguished business schools, to learn from highly skilled faculty at both institutions, and to use technology in ways that fit well within our liberal arts model.”

Bowdoin economics faculty and Tuck professors will collaborate throughout the semester to adjust the syllabus and content when necessary, and CEP will review the course at the end of the semester.

Students received a blunt reminder of the Bowdoin bubble’s vulnerability last weekend when burglars entered a Harpswell Apartments unit and stole thousands of dollars worth of electronic equipment.

On Saturday evening around 8 p.m., seniors Anthony Todesco, Jack Donovan, Brian Golger and Peter Yasi were in their living room watching television and using their computers, according to Todesco. They opened the unit’s sliding glass door “for a couple of hours” due to the room’s heat.

“There were people outside circulating around because it was a Saturday night, so they would have been able to see inside,” said Todesco. “We had a couple of TVs right by the door and we were on our laptops, but it was just students out there, at least as far as we knew.”

Around 10:30 p.m., the students shut their sliding door and pulled the shade down. Both the front and back door were closed and locked and the four roommates were asleep before midnight.

“At one point during the night I thought I heard some shuffling around or doors opening, but I didn’t think much of it—I just thought it was my roommates,” said Todesco.

The next morning, the students awoke to find that a television and two Apple MacBooks had been stolen from their living room sometime during the night. With each computer worth approximately $1,500 and the TV worth several hundred dollars, the total estimated value of the stolen property is close to $4,000, according to Director of Safety and Security Randy Nichols.

“It wouldn’t surprise me at all if a number of apartment doors were checked and that was the one that was unlocked,” said Nichols. “We’ve run into that before, when suspects will literally walk down the length of an apartment complex checking doors as they go.”

“If there is a crime of opportunity, people will take it,” said Molly Soloff ’15, who lives in a neighboring unit at Harpswell Apartments. “I think it’s a lesson to be more cautious. We live in an incredibly secluded part of campus.”

The students whose apartment was burglarized contacted the Office of Safety and Security and the Brunswick Police Department (BPD) and were able to provide the computers’ serial numbers, which will be added to the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database of stolen properties. 

If the burglars attempt to connect to the Internet using the laptops on College WiFi or if the serial numbers are checked against the NCIC’s records, Security or the police will be notified.

“We have those Find My Mac apps, and we could actually see that one of the computers was turned on at one point somewhere in Portland” said Todesco, referring to a tracking service included with Apple’s iCloud software. “But I don’t know that the police can really do anything with that since it’s not an exact location.”

“That laptop could have already been sold on the street,” said Nichols. “Most laptops stolen here from campus are sold very quickly on the street for whatever [the burglars] can get for them.”

Also on Sunday morning, a masked man displaying a knife unsuccessfully attempted to rob a resident of Union Street. According to Nichols, the BPD believes that this was an isolated incident and that there is no threat to the campus. Both events follow a summer of relatively little crime. 

“I’ve been here nine years now and it was probably the quietest summer we’ve had since I’ve been here, in terms of significant incidents,” said Nichols.

They are among Brunswick’s stay-at-home moms, its career criminals, its 50-year-old businessmen—even its high school students—and they all have at least one thing in common. They are Brunswick’s heroin and prescription opiate addicts.

The opiate addiction epidemic has gained national attention in the past year as the number of fatal heroin overdoses has skyrocketed, particularly in New England. In January, Governor Peter Shumlin of Vermont dedicated his entire State of the State address to the problem. In March, Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts declared opiate abuse a public health emergency.In his own State of the State speech in January, Maine Governor Paul LePage called drug use a “troubling epidemic,” and said that 927 babies in the state—more than 7 percent of all newborns—were born addicts in 2013. 

LePage had been hesitant to approve the distribution of nalaxone—an overdose reversal drug—fearing that it would give addicts a false sense of security. Last week, after intense criticism from lawmakers, health professionals and the media, LePage finally approved a bill that allows family members of addicts to receive the potentially life-saving drug.

Everyone the Orient interviewed for this article—a substance abuse counselor, the director of the outpatient behavioral health at Mid Coast Hospital, Brunswick police officers, a defense attorney, and a psychologist—said that Maine’s opiate problem is not unique to certain cities, ethnicities, ages, or socioeconomic levels. Addiction exists everywhere, Brunswick included.

The most common path to heroin addiction begins with medicinal or recreational use of prescription painkillers like Vicodin, OxyContin and Percocet. These powerful drugs are often prescribed to patients following surgeries and can quickly lead to dependence.

“One of the fastest growing populations for addicts in the opiate world is adults who have had surgeries, weren’t recreational drug users, and now are breaking into their neighbor’s house going through their medicine cabinets because they’re desperate for drugs,” said Geno Ring, a licensed substance abuse counselor who works both with Bowdoin students and at Brunswick High School. 

“Nothing on their radar prepared them for this happening in their lives. They’re married. They’ve got kids. They’ve got careers—and all of a sudden they’re spiraling out of control,” said Ring.

Yet it is not only adults developing opiate dependence through prescribed drugs. Sixty-seven percent of teens receiving treatment for opiate addiction were prescribed painkillers in the previous year, according to the American Society for Addiction Medicine.

Director of Outpatient Behavioral Health at Mid Coast Hospital Eric Haram said that failing to dispose of unused pills also poses a risk, since teenagers will often find them and use them for recreational purposes. Most teenagers fail to realize the risks involved, or simply feel invincible, but Haram said everybody is vulnerable when it comes to opiates.

“Nobody chooses to be an addict; nobody wants to have track marks all over, be losing their kids, be losing their teeth…Black teeth are a tough thing to see in the morning at the jail,” said Brunswick defense attorney Chris Ledwick ’95.

“Opiates always produce physical dependence. It’s not one of those things that doesn’t happen to people—it’s simple biology,” added Haram.

Ledwick said that in the last five years, about 70 percent of the drug cases he had seen were based on legal drugs and prescription pills. 

“Anyone who goes into a surgery comes home with 50 pills for getting a tooth pulled. It’s crazy,” he said. “So you can have a grandparent with 500-pill bottles in their houses, and the nephew, grandson, stepson, they know about it and that’s how they get hooked on this stuff.”

The progression from occasional recreational use of painkillers to addiction can be rapid.

“The way it usually works for people is that they’re using this once or twice a month at parties, and then it’s once a week, and then it’s three to five times a week, and then they’re an addict,” said Haram. “I’ve heard that story thousands of times in the last few years.”

He said the number of patients he sees has doubled to 800 in the past seven years. In the past year, about 200 of those patients were Brunswick residents.

Responses to the rise in painkiller addiction have included reducing availability and reformulating pills like Oxy 30 to make them more difficult to abuse. An unintended consequence of these changes has been a spike in the use of heroin—a cheaper, more accessible and often more potent alternative.

“It’s a demand issue no matter how you put it,” Haram said. “When you restrict access to pain medication, you haven’t reduced the volume of addiction; you haven’t reduced the demand in a community for that high.”

Since heroin is an illegal substance with an established social stigma, newspapers and politicians tend to devote more attention to it than painkillers. But from a treatment and public health perspective, Haram said, there is no difference.

“Opiates are opiates,” Haram said. “There’s social stigma associated with [heroin]—did you get that Oxy from your mom’s medicine cabinet or did you get heroin in the alley—so it sounds much graver.”

The likelihood of an accidental overdose from heroin and prescription painkillers is the same, according to Haram.

Brunswick is home to one of the country’s most effective addiction treatment centers. The Addiction Resource Center at Mid Coast Hospital, which Haram oversees, has won national awards for improving patient outcomes using science-based approaches. According to Mid Coast’s website, the Center’s approach has reduced wait times from 11 to two-and-a-half days and improved its treatment completion rate from 60 to 94 percent.

Treatment for opiate addiction generally includes detoxification, followed by counseling and the controlled use of medications like Methadone or Buprenorphine (often referred to by the brand name Suboxone). These medications act on the same parts of the brain as heroin and can reduce withdrawal symptoms and cravings.

The Center uses BASIS-24, a computerized outcome measurement tool, to evaluate its effectiveness. Patients are asked questions halfway through treatment and every 90 days thereafter. Their responses receive scores in six categories—depression and functioning, emotional lability, psychosis, relationships, self-harm and substance abuse—as well as an overall score. The scores of Mid Coast’s patients are then compared to the scores of similar patient populations around the country.

Mid Coast performs in the top two percent of treatment centers nationally, which makes it competative with well-known counterparts like the Cleveland Clinic, the Hazelden Foundation and the Caron Foundation.

“People pay 40 grand up front for going to places like this,” Haram said. “We’re a publicly funded, community hospital and can produce those same kind of outcomes, but treatment where I work might cost four grand.”

Despite a sharp increase in the number of addicts over the last decade, public funding for Maine’s Office of Substance Abuse—which funds treatment centers like the one at Mid Coast—was lower in fiscal year 2012 ($26.7 million) than it was in fiscal year 2006 ($29 million). In the same time period, the number of Mainers seeking treatment for opiate abuse increased from 3,023 in 2006 to 4,697 in 2012, according to the Maine Office of Substance Abuse.

Haram’s primary problem has been meeting the demand for treatment.

“The number of beds, the number of detox, the number of outpatient slots—just the number of treatment slots in general—gets cut every year,” he said. “Certain medicines that are available to treat opiate dependence that are FDA [approved]—this administration has reduced access to those medications specifically.”

Providing access to treatment became even harder this January, when cuts to Maine’s Medicaid program kicked in. Haram says that about 15 percent of his patients, or roughly 100 people in the greater Brunswick area, lost their health care coverage.

“Typically what happens is those people drop out of treatment and return to street use,” Haram said.

The opiate addiction epidemic has caused problems for the Brunswick Police Department (BPD) as well. Detective Richard Cutliffe, who works with BPD and the Drug Enforcement Agency, estimated that 95 percent of all crime in Brunswick is drug related. He said that other than marijuana, heroin is now the most commonly used illicit substance in town.

There have been several arrests for trafficking heroin in Brunswick over the last year, including that of Angel Quinones of Connecticut last May. Sergeant Marty Rinaldi of BPD told the Bangor Daily News at the time that Quinones was “a substantial dealer in the area.”

Brunswick’s central location offers one explanation for these trafficking arrests.

“We live on the Route 1 corridor.  You’ve got I-95 and you’ve got Route 1. So anybody who’s traveling to bring their drugs anywhere, you’ve got to come through Brunswick,” said School Resource Officer Aaron Bailey, who works for BPD at Brunswick High School.

Once drug offenders enter the legal system, however, district attorneys attempt to differentiate between career criminals and addicts who are simply desperate to continue funding their use.

“When someone’s on probation for a year or two and fails a drug test, the old response used to be to throw them in jail for 30 days… Their life falls apart, and they start using drugs again,” Bailey said. “Probation has been a little ahead of the curve, especially in Cumberland County, about looking at other ways to deal with it, like having graduated sanctions.”

LePage and law enforcement are concerned that recovering addicts will abandon their treatment programs and either abuse or sell synthetic opiates meant for medical use like methadone and Suboxone, a pattern experts call diversion. This has been cited as a reason for limiting access to these drugs; Haram said that he spends around half his time working to prevent it. 

“Making people show up to count their medicine, by doing observed urines, by controlling the size of the prescription, that they can only get it at one pharmacy—these are all strategies we use to prevent diversion,” he said.

Diversion mitigation plans are required by law, but Haram said Mid Coast’s is “way more robust than most.” He meets on a weekly basis with Brunswick, Bath and Lincoln County Police to discuss drug and crime issues.

“The first question at every meeting: Have you arrested anybody who had medicine that we prescribed? And month after month after month after month the answer is no,” Haram said.

According to Ledwick, however, these synthetic opiates are a major problem, particularly in Maine’s prisons.

“Suboxone is the big thing right now…We’re really struggling with it right now, almost more than Oxy’s in this region. If you talk to anyone in [the Maine Department of Corrections], that’s the bane of their existence,” he said. “People melt them onto the pages of the letters they send in; they melt them into the glue of envelope, and [inmates] can reactivate them once they’re in there. It’s very easy to hide...You can fit a lot of those strips inside a body. And people get pretty creative with that.”

Ledwick explained that the accessibility of drugs like Suboxone in prison makes it a place where recovering addicts are likely to relapse.

“There used to be this notion that at least if they’re in jail, they won’t be able to do drugs. And that’s just not the case anymore, especially in Cumberland County,” he said. “A lot of my clients will tell me there’s more readily accessible drugs in the jail than there are on the street.” 

That is just one of the reasons that people like Ledwick and Haram think that the criminal justice system alone cannot end the opiate epidemic.

“We won’t arrest ourselves out of this problem,” Haram said. “It really is both a public health problem and a public safety problem. We need to expand treatment while at the same time getting smarter about law enforcement strategy.”

At the Bowdoin Democrats’ first meeting of the semester, junior co-presidents Andrew Miller-Smith and Alana Weinstein announced that the group is partnering with Bowdoin Climate Action (BCA) to work on climate related issues. 

The decision —made by Miller-Smith, Weinstein and vice-president Allyson Gross ’16—is part of an attempt to drum up student engagement on a campus that is regularly less politically engaged in the spring semester, according to Miller-Smith.

“The big thing about this semester is that there are no elections going on, and traditionally the College Democrats have been very active in the fall, in election season, and then gone quiet in the spring. We wanted to change that,” he said.

In response to a statement issued by President Barry Mills on December 24 in which he expressed his rejection of a boycott of Israeli academic institutions, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) has written a petition lambasting Mills’ position and voicing support for the boycott. The petition has 52 signatures at the time of publication, including those of two Bowdoin professors.

“Many people say ‘we can’t mix academia with politics. We can’t blur these lines. We can’t use the classroom to discuss political issues,’ but the problem is these classrooms in Israel are built on political issues. They’re the consequence of political ideas,” said Zohran Mamdani ’14, a founder of SJP. “We can’t separate the two. We can’t privilege Israeli academic freedom over Palestinian human rights.”

Members of the American Studies Association (ASA)—an academic group with more than 4,000 individual members—announced the boycott on December 16 to protest Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. 

A Portland ballot measure legalizing the possession of marijuana for recreational purposes passed with nearly 70 percent of the vote on Tuesday. Under the referendum, Portland residents above the age of 21 may possess up to 2.5 ounces of pot.

Marijuana use is prevalent at Bowdoin, according to a survey administered in February. According to the Orient's 2013 drug survey, 73 percent of respondents from the Class of 2014 have smoked marijuana on campus at least once, a significant increase from 32 percent in their first semester at Bowdoin, according to another Orient survey from 2010.

The new measure makes Portland the first city on the east coast to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes, and comes on the heels of last year’s successful legalization campaigns in Colorado and Washington. The city’s vote echoes a similar situation in Denver, where voters approved legalization by a much tighter margin in 2005 before Colorado’s statewide referendum.

Officers of the Brunswick Police Department (BPD) on patrol in plainclothes and unmarked vehicles addressed two unrelated incidents at College Houses last weekend, issuing one warning for disorderly conduct and one summons for possession of alcohol by a minor.

On Friday, September 6, a BPD alcohol enforcement detail noticed a student, who appeared to be underage, holding a red Solo cup on the porch of Helmreich House. The officers confirmed that the female sophomore was underage and in possession of hard alcohol.

According to Captain Mark Waltz, BPD “warned her for drinking in public and for furnishing a place for minors to consume” before issuing a summons for possession of alcohol by a minor—a civil infraction.

The College lost a valuable faculty member when Visiting Assistant Professor Leslie Shaw died unexpectedly on August 29 following complications from surgery. Shaw, who taught anthropology at the College since 1998, “set a high bar for service, excellence and collegiality,” wrote Dean for Academic Affairs Christle Collins Judd in an email to the Orient. In addition to her teaching and research, Shaw served as the adviser to the Native American Students Association at Bowdoin.

The men’s rugby team was required to forfeit two matches after the Office of Student Affairs found the team had violated Bowdoin’s alcohol and hazing policies on September 15, the night of the annual Epicuria party at Ladd House. The Office of Residential Life placed Ladd House on social probation until November 1, and both the president and vice president of the house stepped down from their positions. Four underage students were transported to Parkview Adventist Medical Center for over-consumption of alcohol on the night of the event.

The Bowdoin Daily Sun reported a 2.6 percent return on the endowment for fiscal year 2012, with the endowment standing at $904.2 million as of October 12. Despite a projected return of 7 percent, the endowment performed well in comparison to peer institutions.

Results from a December survey administered to graduates of the Class of 2011 show that 68 percent of respondents are employed part-time or fulltime, 26 percent are attending graduate school, and  3 percent are still seeking employment. Over 220 alumni responded to the survey.Compiled by the Office of Institutional Research, these statistics are nearly identical to those from last year’s “one-year out” survey of the Class of 2010, which found that 67 percent of respondents were employed, 15 percent were attending graduate school, and 3 percent were seeking employment.

While these statistics suggest widespread success among recent graduates, Nyle Usmani ’12 pointed out that these surveys include non-career-oriented jobs and part-time jobs, and therefore might be artificially high. 

“The statistics don’t lie. Most people leaving Bowdoin will find themselves at a good place. But in my case, I’m still fighting to be at a good place and I’m unemployed…it’s not happening the way that I imagined.”

Bowdoin Student Government (BSG) released a “Fall Semester Report” this week summarizing completed, ongoing, and cancelled projects from the first half of the year. The report, compiled by the seven members of BSG’s Executive Committee, also specifies the status of BSG’s long-term goals. This is the first time in recent memory that BSG has published such a report. “A lot of our work was preliminary; I think this semester is going to be a lot more active-looking,” said Brian Kim ’13, BSG’s vice president for student organizations. “For example, Dani’s GRE test prep program, which took forever to get off the ground, now is actually getting off the ground, which is awesome.”

The Office of Residential Life (ResLife) has placed Ladd House on probation until November 1 as part of the response to last week’s Epicuria party. Both the president and vice president of Ladd, where the campus-wide toga party took place, voluntarily stepped down from their positions this week. Ladd faced disciplinary consequences for what Director of Residential Life Mary Pat McMahon referred to as “an unregistered pre-event with hard alcohol prior to Epicuria.” Under the terms of the probation, Ladd House cannot host registered events with alcohol before November 1.

The Office of Student Affairs determined that the men’s rugby team violated Bowdoin’s alcohol and hazing policies in light of events at an off-campus house and at the annual Epicuria party last Saturday, September 15. Tim Foster, dean of student affairs, announced the ruling in an email to all students yesterday evening. On the night of the annual campus-wide party, which is hosted by the men’s rugby team, four underage students were transported to Parkview Adventist Medical Adventist Center due to over-consumption of alcohol. The two first years and two sophomores who were transported to Parkview were all “tied directly or indirectly to Epicuria and the rugby team,” Foster wrote. Two of the students were transported from Ladd House, where the party took place.

ASAP, which acts as a unifying organization to combine the efforts of multiple campus groups, was formed in 2008 under the direction of Davis. "There were so many groups working in different ways on the spectrum, from healthy relationships to sexual violence, that we decided to create this umbrella group," said Davis. In its first year, ASAP was made up of groups such as Bowdoin Men Against Sexual Violence (BMASV), V-Day, and Safe Space. The alliance has since grown to include 16 organizations, ranging from the Bowdoin Outing Club to the Spirituality Circle.

The annual Spring Gala almost fell off this year's social calendar after the event was left without a overseer. In past years, an ad hoc committee comprised of students has collaborated with the Office of Student Activities to plan the event, but this year no such committee was formed, an oversight that was not caught until two members of Bowdoin Student Government discovered that financing for the event had not been secured.

A total of $7,899 in damages to student residences occured in fall 2011. According to the report compiled by Lisa Rendall, associate director of housing operations, Baxter House accrued $3,193 or 40.4 percent of the damage costs.

Problems with printers? Cross-referencing crises? The Measuring Information Service Outcomes (MISO) Survey offers participants a chance to vent library and IT woes. Created at Bryn Mawr College in 2004, the MISO Survey collects student, faculty and staff opinions on both library and IT services from numerous campuses, allowing each college to compare its performance point by point to peer institutions. This is Bowdoin's first year using MISO; it is one of 30 participating colleges.

After five years of heading the women's soccer program, Maren Rojas has stepped down from her position as head coach. She recently accepted an assistant coach position on the Boston College women's soccer team, and left for Massachusetts on Wednesday. Nonetheless, Rojas attributes her decision to leave to more than just the offer from Boston College.

As part of an ongoing campaign against homophobia in sports, Paul Tagliabue, former commissioner of the National Football League, will visit campus on Monday. Tagliabue, who has a strong history of supporting gay rights, will deliver the keynote address at the third annual "Anything but Straight in Athletics" event. Created in 2010, the annual event is aimed at supporting the Bowdoin LGBT athletic community and eliminating homophobia in sports. One of the founders, Ben Chadwick '11, was an openly gay member of the men's lacrosse team.

Thirteen Bowdoin students have been transported to Parkview Adventist Medical Center due to over-consumption of alcohol since September. According to Tim Foster, dean of student affairs, this number shows that "we are tracking almost identically to last year," when 12 students had been transported by the third week of November. Yet this year, the numbers rose quickly. In September alone, six first year students were transported to Parkview for alcohol-related reasons. The head proctors of each first year dorm sent an email to the entire class of 2015, in an effort to curb the heavy drinking.

Between September and May of this academic year, a projected total of 215 students will study abroad in 46 different countries. Eighteen juniors will remain abroad for the entire year. The OCS has reported that this year an estimated 47.1 percent of the Class of 2013 will study abroad, a marginal increase from 46.8 percent of the Class of 2012.