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May 20, 2002

Borders cross at RTC	Singles bar for butterflies	A dedication to the past	Restoring poetic history
Human services in the city
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Borders cross at RTC

The April 3 issue of The (Tiburon) Ark featured a story on a delegation of 12 representatives from African and Middle Eastern countries who recently visited the Romberg Tiburon Center for Environmental Studies. The delegates are participants of the Cross Border Environmental Issues project. Alissa Arp, RTC director, and four faculty members spoke with the delegates about the Center and its marine research activities, especially as it relates to San Francisco Bay. The delegates also enjoyed a tour of the RTC research labs.

The last wild place to go in San Francisco may be McLaren Park. And through the month of May, it is at its wildest with the anise swallowtail butterflies doing their dance. "It's really a singles bar at the top of the hill," John Hafernik, professor of biology, said in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine in its "BayWrap" section on April 28. "The males fly up and wait for unmated females and then fly after them and court them."

In a moving ceremony to dedicate the Garden of Remembrance, SFSU President Robert A. Corrigan noted that the 19 Japanese American SFSU students who were removed from campus and interned during World War II now have a permanent place in the University's history. "We've gathered here to acknowledge the past, to honor those that our nation wronged, and to rededicate ourselves to a future in which things will never be repeated," President Corrigan told the Hokubei Mainchi in its May 2 edition.

The May 16 issue of The New York Times featured an article on the restoration of historic tapes of poetry readings at poetry centers across the country, including SFSU's Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives. The Center has sponsored poetry readings since the 1950s beat era and holds an extensive collection of readings from some of the world's most renowned poets. The University provided a new climate-controlled storage room for the archives in 1995 to prevent further deterioration of the old tapes. "We have tapes that we literally have to scrape to get the corrosion off, or bake and then dry so they can be played," Poetry Center Director Steve Dickison said. "Getting this room to preserve our tapes was very important. It prevented what could have been a huge crisis, and it allows us to preserve a resource that's immensely valuable to teachers and poets."

On the May 16 edition of KQED-FM's "Forum," Brian Murphy, executive director of the San Francisco Urban Institute, discussed the state of San Francisco's nonprofit health and human service providers. The Urban Institute recently completed the first-ever comprehensive survey of the city's nonprofit health and human service sector. The survey cites adequate funding as a major challenge facing nonprofits' abilities to fulfill client needs. This is especially urgent due to a projected $154 million shortfall in the city budget, a shortfall sure to impact the amount of money given to nonprofit organizations. "We were taken aback … by the simple magnitude of what this sector represented. That it represented 40 percent of all expenditures on human services in the city and county was fairly remarkable to us," Murphy said. "Second, we noted the lack of political organization. … Thirdly, if (the sector was) that big and they were not organized, what were the mechanisms through which they could be more integrated into comprehensive (city) planning?"

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Last modified May 17, 2002, by the Office of Public Affairs