Marlize van Romburgh

At first, pitch darkness. He walks inside the bridge of the ship and lets his eyes adjust. Blackness surrounds him, but he knows that in a few moments he will start to pick out the recognizable shapes and lights. There are the windows, outlined by the moonlight reflecting off the water outside. There, too, are the bright flickers of red and orange and yellow of the instruments and radar equipment on the panel before him. And looking out of those windows onto the outside deck below, the dark shapes of his fellow cadets standing on night watch.

When independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader came to Cal Poly to speak in late September, hundreds piled into the auditorium and overflowed out into the hallway outside, hustling and bustling to get a seat. Mixed in the shuffle stood Scott Waddell, a student passionate about politics but without a candidate.

A friend had e-mailed him information about the Nader which peaked his interest. Not finding that either of the two major-party candidates resonated with him, Waddell decided to go hear Nader speak.

As the Peace and Freedom party candidate took the stage, he received a several minute-long standing ovation from an energetic and vocal crowd.

With no definite end in sight for the global economic crisis, concerned community members and students turned away from the political punditry on TV and to a local panel of experts on Friday afternoon to answer their questions about the financial future.

Several hundred people showed up in the Performing Arts Center’s Philips Hall, many with notebooks and pens in hand, ready to take notes and ask questions at the town-hall style forum sponsored by the Orfalea College of Business.

A three-person panel of experts, compiled by Cal Poly economics professor Sanjiv Jaggia, spoke to the eager crowd about the causes of the crisis, the prospects for moving the country forward and the implications for their pocketbooks.

San Luis Obispo congresswoman Lois Capps (D-Calif.) went head-to-head with Republican John McCain earlier this week when the presidential candidate held a rally in Santa Barbara to discuss energy issues.

McCain visited Santa Barbara on Monday and Tuesday; the first day for a private fundraiser with local Republicans, the second for a green energy rally at Museum of Natural History alongside Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

MSNBC reported that the demonstration outside the rally was the largest anti-McCain gathering they’ve seen this election season.

McCain recently proposed lifting the moratorium on offshore drilling in an effort to increase domestic oil production and ease consumer gas prices.

A leaked e-mail conversation between Cal Poly officials regarding the proposed faculty exchange between Cal Poly’s College of Engineering and Jubail University College (JUC) in Saudi Arabia detailed the apparent concern to push the controversial deal through before “the Saudis lose patience.”

The e-mail dialogue between CENG Associate Dean Ed Sullivan, Cal Poly Grants Development Director Xenia Bixler, Cal Poly Provost Bill Durgin, and Dean of Research and Graduate Programs Susan Opava was apparently inadvertently attached to an unrelated e-mail sent to all Cal Poly engineering faculty on May 16. A faculty member, who wishes to remain anonymous, also forwarded the e-mail to the Mustang Daily.

As campus-wide concern about the yet-to-be finalized and controversial contract between Cal Poly’s College of Engineering and Jubail University College (JUC) in Saudi Arabia mounts, students are taking action to ensure their voice on the matter gets heard.

A petition requesting for an open forum between Cal Poly students, the Academic Senate and university administrators was circulated in the University Union this week, and presented at the Associated Student Inc. Board of Directors meeting later in the day.

The petition, which circulated for six hours, gathered 120 signatures in support of such a forum, according to Christina Chiappe, Cal Poly College Republicans president and one of the organizers of the petition.

When guests enter her house, Susan McKee politely asks them to take off their shoes before stepping inside. It’s a habit she learned in China, and one she still likes to keep along with the Oriental watercolors on the wall behind her.

As two “60-somethings,” McKee and her husband Robert decided nine years ago to embark on the kind of adventure that many half their age aren’t bold enough to do. Selling their cars and renting out their comfortable home in San Luis Obispo, the two accepted a Mormon humanitarian mission to teach English to college students in a rural village in China.

They’re coming to Cal Poly tonight and they’ve got an Appetite for Construction. Guns N’ Roses turned nice? No, Switchfoot and Relient K on their co-headlining nationwide rock tour.

The two Grammy-nominated rock bands will play at the Recreation Center tonight as part of their Appetite for Construction tour, so named because a dollar from each ticket will be donated to support Habitat for Humanity. The tour has raised more than $67,000 for Habitat so far.

Switchfoot and Relient K have long been fans of each other’s music and, while working out the details of this tour, discovered they also held a mutual respect for Habitat for Humanity’s mission of eliminating poverty housing and homelessness around the world.

The California State University system was strongly criticized for questionable executive compensation policies in a detailed audit released last week by the state auditor.

The report, entitled “California State University: It Needs to Strengthen Its Oversight and Establish Stricter Policies for Compensating Current and Former Employees” revealed no legal breaches but urged the CSU system to modify its employee compensation procedures and to make future decisions more transparent.

The 115-page audit concluded that the CSU has not developed an adequate central monitoring system to review compensation policies or measure the impacts of such payments on the system’s finances.

Marlize van Romburgh
Originally published in the Mustang Daily 11/1/07

Two Cal Poly aerospace engineering professors have each been awarded million dollar contracts with NASA for design research related to future-generation aircraft.

David Marshall and Rob McDonald submitted separate winning proposals to NASA that, if received well by the agency, will be implemented into the design and engineering of commercial aircraft.

“NASA has had a transformation in their philosophy of how they want to do research,” McDonald said.

“They’re getting more and more ambitious and giving out larger awards.”