University Students

When it comes to on-campus housing, Towson University students are learning a hard lesson in economics: Supply doesn't always equal demand.Unable to cram the more than 3,400 students who want on-campus housing into the available beds -- and expecting an enrollment boom -- the university has started the first housing lottery in its 133-year history, hoping to guarantee beds for incoming freshmen and newer students.First-come, first-served didn't seem quite fair to freshmen, campus officials reasoned.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court, taking on a major issue that divides college campuses, agreed yesterday to rule on students' right to prevent the use of their activity fees to fund groups whose views they oppose.The outcome of a case from Wisconsin could determine not only how student fees are spent at state-run colleges and universities, but also might settle whether universities simply give up subsidies for student groups to avoid the controversy, forcing those groups to raise their own funds.

Loud beer parties, public urination and trash strewn everywhere.Bobbie Smith's logbook and photos record the times and places. It is documentation, the 49-year-old Baltimore resident says, of what Towson University students brought with them this summer when they moved into her tiny neighborhood north of Northern Parkway, blocks from the city-Baltimore County line."

BEIJING -- In a televised address to students at China's top university, President Clinton told the nation's future generation of leaders that political freedom and human rights are essential to China's success -- contradicting the position of the Chinese Communist Party.Speaking at Beijing University, the Chinese equivalent of Harvard, Clinton said that "certain rights are universal" and that China's success lay in its people's hearts and minds."It is profoundly in your interest and the world's that those minds be free to reach the fullness of their potential," Clinton told an audience of more than 800 people on the campus in the capital's northwestern university district.

Busy signals should soon be history for Towson State University students trying to surf the Internet.Thanks to a $2.2 million deal with Comcast Cablevision of Maryland, TSU's 3,000 dormitory residents will have almost instant access to the Internet and World Wide Web by May, say university and cable officials.In an agreement approved in January and to be unveiled today, TSU will become the first university in Maryland -- and one of just a few in the country -- to offer high-speed Internet services in its dormitories, using the same cable that brings in television channels.

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton has proposed a tax-credit plan to help pay for higher education because he thinks every American ought to have a chance for at least two years of college.The idea has rekindled opposition from people who ask whether college education ought to be diluted to the point where everybody can get some of it.A bold experiment began 26 years ago. The City University of New York. opened its doors to virtually all New York City high school graduates: to a four-year college for students averaging 80 or better, to a two-year community college with a 70 average.

In the fall of 1994, Lisa Bowes, now a graduate student at the University of Maryland, decided to give up her computer.As an undergraduate in California, she'd spent so much time chatting with strangers on the Internet that she made close friends in places as far away as Sweden and Germany. And a man from Pennsylvania she met on-line came to visit her, with romantic intentions she did not reciprocate.Nearly all of her free time -- up to seven hours a day -- was spent with the computer.Enough was enough.

The participants of the Teach Baltimore program actually choose to be in a place most students want to avoid during the summer months. School.The brainchild of former Johns Hopkins University students Matthew Boulay, 24, and Fekade Sergwe, 25, Teach Baltimore seeks to match city students who want to continue learning with university students who want teaching experience. The pair said they conceived the program four years ago in response to what they see is a "public education crisis" in Baltimore City.

WASHINGTON -- Amid an intensifying political debate over equal access to public benefits and public places for religious ideas and practices, the Supreme Court promised yesterday to decide what the Constitution will allow.The justices voted to take on a case from the University of Virginia that has implications for public colleges and universities across the nation, and perhaps far beyond the college scene.It involves a request by a religious campus publication for a portion of student-paid activity fees to cover its costs.

Seeking more independence and cheaper rent, Towson State University students are checking out of dormitories and moving into off-campus rental housing.Their departure -- combined with that of students who have moved back home to save money -- has helped to empty almost 730 beds in university dormitories and apartments this year. As a result, a one-time campus housing shortage has turned into a costly glut.The popularity of off-campus housing has also led to lifestyle clashes between the residents of neighborhoods near TSU and the students who have moved in among them.

Four men forced their way into a party in North Baltimore and robbed more than a dozen people late Thursday, city police said. The robbery happened in the 400 block of E. Lake Ave., about three blocks west of York Road, shortly before midnight, police said. The home had been rented to four Towson University students since September, according to the home's owner, John Komsa III. Reached by phone yesterday morning, Komsa said he had not been told about the home invasion at his property.

Baltimore city homicide detectives were hoping yesterday to question a man from the New York area in connection with last week's fatal shooting at an off-campus apartment complex occupied by Morgan State University students. "There are several people who they are interested in talking to, including one suspect from the New York area," said Sterling Clifford, a Police Department spokesman. Clifford said that no arrests had been made, and he declined to provide details on whether the suspect is a Morgan student or has ever attended the university.

Even as federal agents continued their nationwide hunt to arrest and possibly deport his students, the president of Egypt's Mansoura University was preparing yesterday to send two more students to study in the United States - his sons. Two of 11 Mansoura students who violated their student visas were captured this week in Dundalk, but five others remain unaccounted for, authorities said. President Magdy Abou Rayan said the failure of the students to show up to a one-month academic program at Montana State University had damaged his plans for a burgeoning cross-cultural exchange, but pledged to continue promoting American culture to Egypt's rural Nile delta, where he said the incident has triggered a backlash against his university's exchange program in the fundamentalist Muslim press.

Mike Ertel says he expects tonight's meeting between Towson community leaders and Towson University's president to be cordial. But one of the topics up for discussion -- off-campus student housing -- has long been a source of town-and-gown tension. And the university is expected to grow significantly in the coming years. "I don't think there's the major animosity between residents and the university that some people perceive," said Ertel, the new president of the Greater Towson Council of Community Associations.

Towson University students will have a harder time getting around this year. The school has severed its ties with the Baltimore Collegetown Network shuttle, a service that carried thousands of Towson students to five other area schools and to Towson Town Center, because the university was unwilling to pay the nearly $30,000 annual fee. Towson has participated in the program since 1999, but school officials say they are trying to cut expenses because the...

As Morgan State University students and officials organized candlelight vigils last night to remember a senior slain at a nightclub during the weekend, police in Baltimore and New York searched for the former student accused of the crime. Rashed Z. Tolliver, 21, who would have graduated next month, died Saturday morning at Maryland General Hospital. A first-degree murder warrant has been issued against Damon Anthony Williams, a frequent campus presence known around area nightclubs as DJ Action.

Dr. Bettye Floyd, a former campus counselor upon whom generations of Towson University students came to rely for straightforward advice, died of cancer Feb. 8 at St. Joseph Medical Center. She was 74. Born Bettye Zane Alexander and raised in Kannapolis, N.C., she graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in English and Spanish from Wake Forest University in 1949. She earned a master's degree in counseling and guidance in 1961 from the College of William and Mary, and her doctorate in counseling and human development from George Washington University in 1993.

TEHRAN, Iran - A student demonstration in support of a popular reformist professor who has been sentenced to die for blaspheming Islam turned bloody yesterday when extremists supporting Iran's theocracy clashed with the students at Tehran's Sharif University. One student speaker suffered a cracked skull and cuts and was carried off by friends during the attack by roughly 500 members of the hard-line militia group Ansareh Hezbollah, or Friends of the Party of God, witnesses said. A number of other students also were injured.

"TYING ONE ON" will take on a new meaning at Carroll Community College this week as students, faculty and staff members commemorate National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week with a variety of activities. The week, sponsored by BACCHUS groups at schools across the country, is meant to help college students think before they drink or use drugs. BACCHUS - an acronym for Boosting Alcohol Consciousness Concerning the Health of University Students - enlists students to help educate their peers about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court, taking on a major issue that divides college campuses, agreed yesterday to rule on students' right to prevent the use of their activity fees to fund groups whose views they oppose.The outcome of a case from Wisconsin could determine not only how student fees are spent at state-run colleges and universities, but also might settle whether universities simply give up subsidies for student groups to avoid the controversy, forcing those groups to raise their own funds.