The Keene State College Senate met for the first time this academic year on Wednesday, Oct. 11 at 4 p.m. in the Mountain View Room to discuss various matters, such as changes to campus programs and Senate documents.

The meeting involved a lengthy discussion surrounding a language change to the Senate Curriculum Committee (SCC) bylaws.

The previous language in the bylaws stated that the committee reviews proposals for curriculum changes that cross school lines, but Senator Nicholas Germana said this is not how the SCC has been operating for quite a while.

He said the SCC reviews all curriculum changes, and he proposed to change the language in the bylaws to reflect that.

The motion was unanimously carried and will be implemented immediately.

In speaking about college programs, a member of the College Senate brought up the idea of inviting the Dean of the School of Sciences and Social Sciences Dr. Gordon Leversee to speak with the Senate Executive Committee about what’s happening for the future of the geology program for “transparency-sake.”

One member brought up the question of whether the Senate should play an advisory role about a program that’s possibly being eliminated.

Provost William Seigh said in conversations with athletic training faculty members and the deans in professional and graduate studies that effective Oct. 5, the athletic training program is under administrative review and there will be no admission to the program beginning in fall of 2018.

The reason for the review is because of changing accreditation requirements that now require a master’s degree option.

Seigh said having a master’s option would increase standards, require additional faculty and also require additional space.

Because of this, the hold was placed.

The meeting adjourned at 5:07 p.m..

Jessica Ricard can be contacted at jricard@kscequinox.com

As defined by The New York Times, civic engagement means working towards making a difference in our communities and “developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values and motivation to make that difference.”

Keene State College has been nationally recognized for doing just that.

For its leadership and revolution in civic engagement, KSC has been awarded the 2017 Higher Education Civic Engagement Award from The Washington Center in Washington, D.C.. Out of 100 nominations, KSC was one of five colleges and universities to receive the award.

ANGELIQUE INCHIERca / EQUINOX STAFF

The theme for the award this year was partnerships, and KSC’s partnership with the Keene Housing Kids Collaborative (KHKC) was the reason for the award.

KHKC is a non-profit organization that helps build a foundation for children to prepare them for a successful adulthood. This is done “by giving kids access to opportunities and experiences in the community that will help them gain confidence, have fun, learn, get ready for kindergarten, do well in elementary school, and exit high school with the tools that will help them become economically independent adults,” according to the KHKC website.

KSC’s partnership with KHKC has involved many people and ideas. Program Manager for Diversity and Multiculturalism Initiatives and Campus Coordinator for the American Democracy Project Kim Schmidl-Gagne said the collaborative’s purpose is to acknowledge and recognize that there is generational poverty occurring.

“Kids that are born in poverty have a 48 percent chance of remaining in poverty and not having any social mobility whatsoever, and an additional 24 or so percent of them will move up just from poverty to lower class,” Schmidl-Gagne said.

The idea behind the partnership with KHKC has been thinking about what can be done with children in order to break this cycle.

Schmidl-Gagne and Professor of Economics Dr. Patrick Dolenc have been working on a longitudinal study with the KHKC to track students and see how different activities the collaborative provides gives them the skills and competencies to increase their school achievement.

Dolenc, who was on the original board of directors for KHKC, said the longitudinal study has allowed them to track what is and isn’t working at the collaborative, but with data to support the details.

Additionally, Executive Director of KHKC Liz Chipman said KSC faculty members and students have been an integral part in maintaining the partnership they have with one another. Sociology students have come to the collaborative and completed focus groups with both parents and students by asking questions to discover the impact the collaborative is having on kids and their families. KSC graphic design students designed and developed the KHKC website, and volunteer organizations, such as the KSC Reads program, helped develop a reading nook at one of the centers to encourage early reading and literacy development. Last year, Chipman said KSC students helped to fill over 1,000 Easter eggs for families as well.

Dolenc said not only children in local housing at KHKC benefit, but KSC students do as well. “Our programs become, I think, richer when we can do real world stuff that connects the classroom learning to experience, so that’s fantastic. Getting national recognition is really kind of a nice bonus; it’s like icing on the cake so to speak,” Dolenc said.

KSC sociology major and psychology minor and senior Saunder Barnicle was among the students who were directly involved with the partnership at KHKC.

In a class she took called Sociology of Families with Dr. Peggy Walsh, she said she spent class time brainstorming ideas on how to get more students living in the housing facilities involved, as well as went door-to-door to explain the options to families and hand out brochures.

“It shows that Keene State students were so excited to be involved with something so new. We were excited to get out into the community and it really felt like we were doing something,” Barnicle said.

Chipman said the partnership with KSC has helped her to do many things she wouldn’t necessarily be able to.

“I think sometimes campuses can be kind of closed universes, kind of closed worlds, one for themselves, and that is not the case at Keene State at all. I think there’s a real effort on the part of the college, the faculty and administration at the college and also on student’s part to really be part of the community and to be civically engaged,” Chipman said.

“You know, they put their money where their mouth is so to speak and really not just talking about it, but doing it. It’s a really fabulous collaboration that I hope will continue.”

As a whole, KSC has not yet made an institutional commitment to civic engagement, Dolenc said, but the college has a unique way of connecting it with other learning outcomes.

“What makes civic engagement so magical at Keene State is that we connect it with other college-wide learning outcomes like critical thinking. So if you do critical thinking and you do civic engagement that’s great, but if you figure out how they fit together, it’s even more powerful,” Dolenc said.

With the award comes a student scholarship to The Washington Center for the Inside Washington seminar in January.

Schmidl-Gagne said nominations have been sent out to faculty and staff members across campus and a selection committee will, then, look through the nominations and select a student to attend, free of charge.

Guilford College, Northern Arizona University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the State University of New York, College at Plattsburgh were among the other four institutions to receive the 2017 Higher Education Civic Engagement Award as well.

Jessica Ricard can be contacted at jricard@kscequinox.com

The United States and the Soviet Union were on the verge of nuclear conflicts just 55 years ago, and many know it as The Cuban Missile Crisis.

On Oct. 14, 1962, during the Cold War, a high-altitude U-2 spy plane provided photos of undeniable evidence that the Soviet Union made medium-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads in Cuba; not only did they exist, but they were located just 90 miles off the American coastline, stated history.com.

During the Bay of Pigs invasion in April of 1961, U.S.-trained Cuban refugees attempted to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government after landing in Cuba, which created tension between both the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The invasion was unsuccessful, history.com stated, but Castro suspected they would try again, so he seeked military assistance from the Soviet Union.

Although the missile sites in Cuba were incomplete, they were almost finished, and they had the capability to strike major cities in the U.S.. Just two days after the photos were found, they were given to President John F. Kennedy, and in the weeks following, the U.S. and the Soviet Union came the closest they’ve ever been to a nuclear war.

After the U-2 spy plane discovered the Cuban missile sites, President Kennedy developed a group called ExCom, which was comprised of an executive committee of senior military, political and diplomatic advisers to discuss how to respond to the nuclear disaster that was on the brink of occurring.

In order to prevent transportation of any other weapons from the Soviet Union to Cuba, President Kennedy ordered “a naval ‘quarantine’….The president made it clear that America would not stop short of military action to end what he called a ‘clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace,’” as stated on history.com.

On Oct. 23, the quarantine began, but President Kennedy decided to pull the line back by 500 miles to give Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev more time to consider his actions. All ships that were traveling to Cuba at the time seemed to back off, except for one, the tanker Bucharest, stated history.com.

United Nations Secretary General U Thant urged both the United States and Soviet governments to “refrain from any action that may aggravate the situation and bring with it the risk of war.”

Still though, U.S. military commanders began preparing for a full-scale war with the Soviet Union, and DEFCON 2 was issued, which is “the highest military alert ever reached in the postwar era,” according to history.com. Two U.S. aircrafts attempted to stop the Bucharest as it began to cross over the U.S. quarantine, but the efforts weren’t successful.

Eventually, President Kennedy discovered the construction of the missile bases had continued, so ExCom debated a U.S. invasion of Cuba. However, the same day, the Soviet Union proposed ending the crisis and said they would remove the missile bases if the U.S. pledged not to go through with the invasion of Cuba.

Soviet leader Khrushchev, then, called for the disassembling of U.S. missile bases in Turkey the next day, and additionally, one of the U-2 spy planes was shot down over Cuba, which killed the pilot Major Rudolf Anderson. Because of this, history.com stated, Kennedy avoided any more military retaliation, and he agreed to disassemble the missile sites in Turkey at a later date.

On Oct. 28, the Cuban Missile Crisis came to a close, and Khrushchev agreed to dismantle their weapons in Cuba, and they began removal that afternoon. At this point, the world could breathe again, and a nuclear war had been avoided. Not long after, the U.S. also began to remove their missile bases in Turkey.

The relationship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union remained quite rocky for some time after the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in the 1970s, the Soviet Union build “intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of striking any city in the United States,” signaling nuclear parity with the U.S., stated history.com.

In 2015, relations between the U.S. and Cuba became normalized, as travel restrictions eased up, embassies opened and diplomatic missions opened up as well.

Jessica Ricard can be contacted at jricard@kscequinox.com

As the classic rhyme goes, “In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” and discovered America. But did he really?

The answer is no. 

The second Monday of every October is “celebrated” and dedicated to Christopher Columbus’ exploration and discoverance of America, but in reality, he wasn’t the first to discover anything.

In 1492, he did, indeed, sail across the Atlantic Ocean to make a voyage to the Bahamas and another to Cuba, which paved the way for Europeans to explore those areas later on, but millions of Native Americans were already living in the Americas before Columbus “discovered” the land.

At the time, he thought he had arrived in East Asia and claimed the land for Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain, both who sponsored his journey in finding “a western ocean route to China, India and the fabled gold spice islands of Asia,” stated history.com.

Rather than interacting with these people in a friendly and welcoming way, Columbus was more so selfishly focused on becoming rich and taking over the land. He began calling the indigenous people “Indians,” converted many of them to Christianity and used extreme violence and slavery towards them.

On his first journey, which took three months, he landed on an island in the Caribbean and seized six native people, wanting to make them servants as he had written in his journal. “Throughout his years in the New World, Columbus enacted policies of forced labor in which natives were put to work for the sake of profits. Later, Columbus sent thousands of peaceful Taino ‘Indians’ from the island of Hispaniola to Spain to be sold. Many died en route,” stated history.com.

Those “Indians” that weren’t sent to Spain were left with Columbus to search for gold and complete laborious work in plantations.

Eventually, the natives began to revolt, and in order stop further rebellion, Columbus “ordered a brutal crackdown,” killing many of the native people. Their bodies were, then, displayed and paraded through the streets, as Columbus ordered them to be.

In addition to killing many of the native people, Columbus brought new diseases to the New World as well, which helped to devastate the population of those living there.

In a slightly more positive light, Columbus’ voyages did spark trade of plants, animals and other goods between the East and West, also called “Columbian exchange.”

Oppositely though, many of these exchanges resulted in biological warfare, meaning bacteria, viruses and fungi, for example, were used to kill humans as an act of war, as stated by emedicinehealth.com.

About 250,000 Taino “Indians” were present on the island when Columbus had arrived, and 60 years later, only a few hundred remained, according to history.com.

Eventually, people began to catch on to Columbus’ detrimental, selfish and disturbing ways. The Spanish court accused him of mismanagement, reported history,com, and in 1500, the king and queen of Spain sent someone to bring him and his crew back home.

Throughout the country, people protest at Columbus Day parades and many have even pushed to eliminate his history from classroom curriculum and change the holiday, history.com stated.

Each year, this federal holiday acts as an opportunity for many to become educated about the “Columbus controversy,” regardless of how you personally view the matter.

As many schools give the day off on Columbus Day, Keene State College does not, and all classes and college operations will remain in full effect.

Jessica Ricard can be contacted at jricard@kscequinox.com

Just 52 years ago, Keene State College only admitted 33 percent of students who applied to attend the college, placing the admissions process up to par with the University of New Hampshire and other colleges and universities around the country.

In the Oct. 14, 1965 edition of The Monadnock, the former name for The Equinox, the newly-hired Director of Admissions John J. Cunningham said in that year, only one of every three applicants was accepted to KSC as a first-year student.

Cunningham said, “This is a statistic which shows more selectivity than many colleges in this country, and this selectivity cannot help but increase as the demand for college grows. Over 1,600 applications were received during the past year, and our office could only admit 528.”

According to Cunningham, the selectivity did not come from the Office of Admissions, but from the necessity that the college can only admit students who have the strongest application materials. “Many students who we have admitted in the past would not be admitted under today’s situation,” he said.

The 1965 first-year class presented high school averages of C+ to B- grades, the article stated, and Cunningham said with these strict standards, the quality of applicants can only increase.

“It is the primary function of the Director of Admissions to admit qualified applicants to the College. It is his job to evaluate personal and academic records in order to reach a decision regarding admission or refusal. But, this is not the sole function of the Director,” Cunningham explained.

The Office of Admissions, he said, is the office in which the quality and personality of the student body will be determined.

Not only do admission officers accept and refuse prospective students, but he said admissions officers must counsel students, whether they are accepted to the college or not.

In the case that they are admitted to KSC, he said admissions officers must inform students of which programs they should apply for, as well as guide them in taking additional high school courses that will adequately prepare them for the course load at Keene State.

In the case of a student not getting accepted and admitted to KSC, he said the applicant should be notified of the reason(s) for refusal, and advice should be given to the students to help them achieve their college ambitions in the future.

“No student should should ever be treated as a number in a file drawer. Each student, each applicant is important and deserves understanding and fair consideration,” Cunningham explained.

In the fall 2017 semester, 82.6 percent of students who applied to KSC were actually accepted to attend. However, about 21 percent of accepted students actually attended and were admitted to KSC.

Jessica Ricard can be contacted at jricard@kscequinox.com

School spirit: a concept that carries many different meanings for students and schools, whether it be elementary, middle, high school or even college.

Although some go “all out,” sporting painted faces and spirited colors at various events, others prefer to express their school pride in other ways, such as playing on a sports team or representing the school in a club or organization.

But what signifies a true representation and embodiment of school spirit on the Keene State College campus?

In the 1950s, Keene State College students seemed to have concerns about the concept, and one (or many, as it is unclear) chose to express it in The Monadnock, the former name for The Equinox.

In the Oct. 3, 1950 edition of The Monadnock, an article without a byline read the following:

“The mad hysteria so often witnessed in football stadium– is this spirit? The cheering that welds frenzied masses into one great restless body– can this be spirit? No, this alone is not spirit, though it may be a visible consummation of it. The roots of true school spirit grow deeper than the larynx. Spirit, when present, manifests itself visibly on many occasions, not only at athletic contests, but at concerts, assemblies, dances– all group activities of the college.”

Further in the writing, the individual expressed that at the time, attendance at college functions was poor, and excitement and pride was moreso directed toward smaller groups within Keene Teachers College (KTC), but not at the college as a whole.

If forces were combined, “each organization could serve as a funnel– individuals pouring in their efforts and these efforts being directed by the organization toward a campus-wide goal–unity.”

With the goal of bringing more school spirit to the forefront of KTC students’ minds, the writer recognized that the flick of a switch could not bring about such a drastic change in attitude and campus morale. The idea, however, involved creating an on-campus group dedicated to “instill a love of school in its students.”

About one year later, in the Oct 2, 1951 edition of The Monadnock, nothing much seemed to have changed.

Again, the writer, this time named F. L. S., Jr., described school spirit as “sinking,” even with the addition of 120 students in the first-year class that year.

“We must have some excellent potential teachers in the upperclass ranks for it didn’t take them too long to orient the freshman on how to stay away from college functions and show a general lack of interest,” he stated. Activity, pep, life, dash, vivacity and energy, all words associated with spirit, were talked about and discussed, “but certainly not displayed.”

It seems as though the writer of this article was truly conflicted in discovering how to revive the lost spirit of the college.

The college as a whole, at the time, created more Friday afternoon classes in effort to keep students on campus for part of the weekend, but, as he stated, it didn’t help the cause.

“Perhaps the next logical step is Saturday morning classes,” he stated. “As long as there is a mass exodus every Friday afternoon, there can be little interest created in campus activities.”

In order to assure spirit, F. L. S., Jr. stated, he said the solution is up to the students themselves.

A mediocre college life? It’s yours, he said. A rich college life? That, also, can be yours, he explained.

“It’s your decision. Make sure you make the right one.”

Today, in 2017, Keene State College has made strides in order to improve school spirit across campus.

One on-campus organization titled Owl Nation makes it their priority to encourage and portray positive school spirit at all campus-related events.

The purpose of Owl Nation states: Owl Nation is a student-run organization with a purpose of promoting interest in school spirit and pride for Keene State College, providing fellowship among students and encouraging attendance at all sporting events.

Although the creation and establishment of Owl Nation may not have “solved” the school spirit concerns in the 1950s, it has the potential to revive that spirit in some ways in the present.

Jessica Ricard can be contacted at jricard@kscequinox.com

A spiritual leader, head of Tibetan Buddhism and ruler of Tibet describes none other than the Dalai Lama. After leading a nonviolent campaign focused on ending the Chinese domination of Tibet, the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Oct. 5, 1989.

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, was named so by Tibetan monks at three years old, and was announced as the reincarnated late 13th Dalai Lama, according to history.com. Led by omens, portents and dreams, monks were directed to him, and at just five years old, Gyatso was brought to the Lhasa, Tibet, the capital, and named the leader of Tibetan Buddhism.

Dalai Lamas have ruled Tibet since the 14th century and have had to resist Chinese efforts of gaining control over the region since the 20th century. Tibet declared its independence after the Chinese Revolution in 1911-12 and Chinese officials and civilians were expelled.

However, in 1950, Tibet was invaded by Chinese Communist forces and their unprepared and under-equipped army was caught off guard. After the invasion, in 1951, a Tibetan-Chinese agreement was signed, naming Tibet a “national autonomous region” of China, according to history.com. This meant they were still being led by the Dalai Lama, but in reality, they were now being controlled by the anti-religious Chinese Communist commission.

In 1959, the Dalai Lama fled Tibet with 100,000 other citizens in an extensive revolt initiated by the Chinese; they. After being prevented from entering their own country, the Dalai Lama and many Tibetan citizens exiled in India. History.com states, “Back in Tibet, the Chinese adopted brutally repressive measures against the Tibetans, provoking charges from the Dalai Lama of genocide. With the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in China, the Chinese suppression of Tibetan Buddhism escalated, and practice of the religion was banned and thousands of monasteries were destroyed.”

Although the suppression and ban on religion was lifted in 1976, it didn’t end there. To spread the word about the Chinese suppression Tibetan people were experiencing, the Dalai Lama traveled the world to speak about it internationally. In the late 1980s, anti-Chinese riots began to break out, and eventually, China announced martial law.

At a time when peace seemed like a foreign concept, the Dalai Lama tried to compromise with China. According to history.com, rather than demand total independence for Tibet, the Dalai Lama suggested putting China in control of defense and foreign affairs, while he hoped Tibet could self-govern themselves, and China rejected the offer.

In 1989, the Dalai Lama received the Nobel Prize for Peace and his autobiography titled “Freedom in Exile” got published in 1990.

To this day, Tibet still does not have any form of self-government, and the Dalai Lama continues to travel and speak about the suppression of the Tibetan people.

Jessica Ricard can be contacted at jricard@kscequinox.com

A college dropout and a successful billionaire are two things many people don’t associate with one another.

Technological guru and one of the masterminds behind Apple Inc. Steve Jobs resembled both of those titles, but died on Oct. 6 six years ago of challenges and complications from pancreatic cancer. 

A Syrian immigrant, Jobs was born to a pair of unmarried graduate students in San Francisco, California, and was later adopted by a couple in Silicon Valley. He attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, for one semester, but dropped out and began working for Atari, which was a developing video game company at the time, according to history.com.

Eventually, he traveled to India and began to study Zen Buddhism.

In 1976, however, a multibillion dollar company was born; in the basement of Jobs’ parent’s home, he and his friend Stephen Wozniak, a computer engineer, founded Apple Computer.

The Apple II was launched in 1977 and in 1980, Apple became a public company, making Jobs a millionaire at age 25.

In the original two computers Jobs’ created, you had to type commands into the device in order for it to perform given tasks. In 1984 though, they created the Macintosh computer, which contained a mouse and graphical user interface feature, stated history.com.

In competition for control with Apple’s board of directors, Jobs left the company in 1985 and went on to establish NeXT, a high-performance computer company. Although the company was too expensive to become extensively popular, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist developed the World Wide Web with a NeXT device, according to history.com.

As if Jobs hadn’t already been successful enough, he began working at a small computer-graphics studio, discovered by filmmaker George Lucas, that he later fixed up and renamed Pixar Animation Studios. Later on down the road, Disney purchased Pixar for about $7 billion, and Jobs was named the largest Disney shareholder, according to history.com.

After Jobs had left Apple, the company began to plummet. In 1996, states history.com, Apple offered to purchase NeXT and employ Jobs as an advisor of the company. Nearly bankrupt at the time, Apple transformed into a newly successful company after Jobs was named the interim CEO in 1997, and in 2000, he was named the permanent CEO, launching a variety of new events and devices.

Whether it was the iPod, iPhone or iPad, Jobs was said to have the rare ability to know what people wanted before they even actually knew it in themselves, as stated by history.com.

Additionally, Bloomberg News reported, “He had no formal technical training and no real business experience. What he had instead was an appreciation of technology’s elegance and a notion that computers could be more than a hobbyist’s toy or a corporation’s workhorse. These machines could be indispensable tools,” and they couldn’t have been more correct.

Jobs was the CEO of Apple until August of 2014, when he stepped down. In 2004, he received surgery to remove a pancreatic tumor and in 2009, he got a liver transplant.

Six months after he stepped down as CEO, the father of four died in his home.

Throughout his lifetime, he racked up a net worth of over $7 billion and will continually be known as one of the greatest businessmen of this time. According to Walter Isaacson, a biographer, “History will place him in the pantheon right next to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.”

All facts and information from this article was obtained by history.com.

Jessica Ricard can be contacted at jricard@kscequinox.com

With the loading of campus-wide budgets, faculty and staff have come to react in different ways; although many departments expected to see a massive decrease in funds, the impact was not nearly as detrimental as expected.

Although most departments faced a decrease in funds, some have had to make more significant cuts than others.

The Lloyd P. Young Student Center’s budget for Fiscal Year 18 (FY18) has decreased 4.11 percent from Fiscal Year 17’s (FY17) budget.

Director of Student Involvement Jen Ferrell said that they are trying to avoid making cuts that will drastically affect students.

“You may not have noticed some of the ways we were challenged because of the way we’re doing things,” Ferrell said.

Ferrell said a few areas being reduced because of the decreased budget include student labor dollars, Night Owl Cafe hours and Student Center Administrative Office Suite hours.

“These are ways that we’ve been really thoughtful and creative at managing the decrease in funds in order to still provide the key services that students need while figuring out how to sort of make up for those differences,” Ferrell said.

While the Young Student Center has made cuts in hours and labor dollars, the journalism department at KSC is making most of their cuts in repairing and replacing their necessary technology.

Department Chair of Journalism, Multimedia and Public Relations Dr. Chad Nye said it won’t be a problem in the short term, but if this same budget continues a few years down the road, the technological equipment students use will need to be repaired or recycled out, which would be difficult to do given the funds we currently have.

“The college supplies the computers in our lab, but we have to, as a department, pay for whatever software we want to put on there [such as Adobe Creative Cloud]…and our cameras, and any improvements we want to make to studio equipment,” Nye said.

From FY18 to FY17, the journalism department’s budget decreased by 18 percent, according to Nye, and at the end of FY17, the department had about 10 percent of their money left over.

“So we felt like in 2017, we were a very fiscally responsible department. We had X numbers of dollars; we spent all but about nine to 10 percent of that, so we technically gave money back to the institution,” Nye said. “So based on what we actually did spend and then to have that reduced about 18 percent, that’s not an insignificant number.”

On a more positive note, Nye said the department is still able to offer all the courses they need to and will have the ability to fix minor breaks and losses in equipment.

“We should be able to cover it [minor repairs in equipment] based on past practices, but it’s not going to leave us much wiggle room for anything else,” Nye said.

While trimming budgets can be a burden, Dean of the School of Sciences and Social Sciences Dr. Gordon Leversee said he enjoys finding creative ways to do things.

The target this year, he said, was to reduce about three percent of what they spent last year.

“We’ve done that,” Leversee said, “and we’ve got a budget that comes in where it needs to come in and I think probably there are some additional savings in there if we are careful.”

In the sciences, Leversee said they have about half a million dollars in the National Institute of Health (NIH) Research Training grant that they can rely on to fund student research opportunities.

Additionally, Leversee said the school has been sharing resources across different departments to save money.

“We’re talking to each other, so I know there was one department that needed some of these laboratory gloves that they use in the lab, and while we were waiting for the budget to be loaded, it was hard to process the purchase orders, it turned out another department had a lot of gloves. So they decided to just share those gloves,” Leversee said. “I think people are probably going to find ways to help each other out.”

Have the departmental budgets been cut evenly though? Leversee believes the departmental budgets  have been cut “pretty proportionately.”

Leversee explained, “I think we’ve tried to be sure that everybody experiences some reductions so it feels equitable, but clearly some departments have a little more that they could contribute to the savings than others….I think it’s like a diet, you know, with any kind of budget, you have to tighten your belt a little bit.”

Although all departments are facing cuts of their own, the Dean of the School of Professional and Graduate Studies (PGS) Dr. Karrie Kalich said they aren’t fully feeling the affects.

“So there are definitely budget cuts, but they don’t feel as intense, especially when we look at the programmatic side of the house as I think when you hear the total number. There’s no secret of the fact that we’ve had a decline in our enrollment, so that also decreases the work a bit,” Kalich said. “I mean certainly we would rather have more students and a higher budget, but I think I have no concerns that we are going to be able to deliver a quality experience for our students.”

At the end of last year, 11 faculty and staff in PGS retired from the program. However, PGS only hired back four of those positions.

With decreased enrollment this year, Kalich said there is no need for all the positions to be filled. This will save PGS some money.

“I would say in many ways, we’ve been able to keep our department budgets, when you look at their supplies and equipment budgets, they’ve really stayed untouched. It’s really been in our staffing lines in that when people leave, we don’t hire as many back and there’s a lot of savings,” Kalich said.

The Interim Dean of Arts and Humanities Dr. Kirsti A. Sandy was contacted by The Equinox for an interview, but did not respond.

Jessica Ricard can be contacted at jricard@kscequinox.com

Alexandria Saurman can be contacted at asaurman@kscequinox.com

Whether it be tennis, field hockey, or intramural sports, Keene State athletics were a triumphant success in the Sept. 28, 1982 edition of The Equinox at Keene State College.

While tennis and field hockey were doing quite well, the same could not be said about the men’s soccer team at the time. After playing Plymouth State College, now Plymouth State University, and losing, KSC Head Coach Ron Butcher said he was unhappy with the team’s performance so far throughout the year.

Instead of getting excited when goals were scored, said Butcher, team members appeared smug and dissatisfied with their accomplishments.

In reference to the game, Butcher said, “We played very bad, downright lousy….To lose and play well is one thing, but to lose and be humiliated is another thing….We have players with the ability to win big games, but you can’t win games with an attitude of selfishness and big egos. That’s where Keene soccer is right now.”

After the game, Butcher relieved the team captains and reassigned roles based on previous games’ performances.

Oppositely, KSC women’s tennis team remained undefeated and the victories from the weekend had improved their record to 3-0.

Tennis Coach Buddy Walsh said he was “pleased by this team’s determination and noted that Keene State ‘dug deeper and pushed harder, when it counted, to come out on top,’” as stated in The Equinox in 1982.

Additionally, Walsh praised his athletes for their “hard serving, constant pressure and aggressive net play” during their performances.

Although Keene State doesn’t currently have a tennis team, there are tennis courts available for use on the Joyce Fields at the college.

The KSC field hockey team excelled as well, sweeping four games during the week and holding a record of 7-1.

In addition to a successful tennis and field hockey team, 1982 was the year KSC’s Intramural Sports program became so big that the on-campus facilities couldn’t handle it any longer and neither could the budget.

Intramural/Recreational Sports Director Paul Keenan said overgrowth was the biggest problem the program was facing at the time; with 1,800 intramural sports entries in 1981, he suspected approximately 2,000 in 1982.

Reason for the growth, he suspected, was because of the introduction of three new programs: softball, frisbee golf and a “Hot Shot” competition, which was created to replace one-on-one basketball.

To solve the overgrowth problem, the college purchased a 103-acre portion of land, what is now the Owl Athletic Complex, which was meant to remedy field scheduling issues, Keenan said.

Throughout the 2017 fall season, KSC athletics statistics can be found on keeneowls.com.

Jessica Ricard can be contacted at jricard@kscequinox.com