United States-Canadian border: Massena High School, Salmon River High School, and two
Canadian schools in Ottawa and Cornwall.
"Pit" T-shirt.
Depicting two brutish men dragging a woman off by her hands, the "Pit" T-shirt
became the center of a controversy. Because it had been around for over a dozen years, this
shirt design was reordered to fill 500 requests. Once it appeared on campus in the fall, however,
area residents complained to the University officials.
A letter sent by the Affirmative Action group at St. Lawrence University listed reasons
why the Resident Director of Hamlin-Powers dormitory and his staff should be sued for sexual
harassment on the grounds that it violated the sexual harassment policy of the University. Dean
Mike Cooper responded by strongly encouraging that the shirt be withdrawn from sale, and that
the negative images about sex that it portrayed be discussed as issues of communication
between genders and acquaintance rape in the required freshman personal wellness course.
Student reaction to the removal of the shirt was mixed. Some saw it as a violation of
their rights of property and felt each had the right to wear it or not as he or she saw fit. Others
felt it was "an act of censorship of the worst character." Most laughingly ignored the
controversy.
Ethernet Installed.
Over the Christmas break, the Computing Center installed a new
interconnecting link between the ERC terminal room and the terminals on the downtown
campus. This new system enabled students to pick up distribution software, or to e-mail an
assignment to a professor. The old system ran at 4,800 baud (the number of bits of information
passed per second), whereas the new system runs at an estimated 10 million baud. A campus-
wide hope was that eventually all the dormitory rooms would be interconnected so students
could communicate electronically with one another and with professors directly.
"Clean Room."
In July 1989, the Center for Particulate Control in Process Equipment opened
its doors to identify and research ways to control microcontamination. Funded primarily by
IBM, this $300,000 "Class 10 Clean Room" focused on the problems of contamination of
silicon wafers by deposits of particles which are invisible to the eye. Any particles landing on
the chip in its manufacture could interrupt or short the circuit, making the chip useless.
These wafers are used in the manufacturing of memory chips, logic chips,
microprocessors, and other kinds of computer chips. Processes undertaken in this new room
strive to remove particles measuring less than one micron in size (one-millionth of a meter).
This room is the only one of its class at a university in the United States that will be
used for microcontamination research. Being classified as Class 10 means that there are no
more than 10 particles which are larger than one-half micron in a cubic foot of space. By
comparison, a clean surgical room in a hospital is only about a Class 10,000.
Gender Issues.
Scheduling March as Women's Awareness Month, the newly formed Gender
Concerns Committee took a major step in addressing women's issues on campus. This Faculty
Senate committee was formed to consider gender concerns on campus, and to provide programs
to combat problems faced by women. Committee Chairman Mary Theis, Director of
International Students and Women's Programs, stated that this new group has a second purpose:
the raising of men's awareness to the problems facing women.
