The Transcript

Students had the opportunity last year to compost their food and paper waste in The Marketplace. However, this year that program has gone away due to location and inefficiency.

Student interns, juniors Ellen Hughes and Reilly Reynolds, and other volunteers sorted through the trash twice a week to make sure materials that were not compostable were removed.

The university would have been fined if there was non-compostable materials sent to the composting company, Eartha Limited, Hughes said. Most of the common items they had to remove were chip bags, plastic bottles and even metal forks and spoons.

The head of Eartha Limited said it was not efficient to have a lot of paper waste according to Gene Castelli, the resident district manager of Chartwells at Ohio Wesleyan. They wanted more organic food waste.

“It was great that we had a composting program at all, but it really wasn’t working that well by the end,” Hughes said.

The students used the garage in the lower level of Ham-Will as a home base to sort through the trash, but lost that space when the weight room moved there.

“They needed to put the weight room somewhere so we had no place to do it,” said Castelli. “Another side is the university didn’t like students picking through garbage.”

Even though this initiative ended, Dining Services still works to compost and eliminate waste behind the scenes in both The Marketplace and Smith Dining Hall.

They have two programs that aim to eliminate waste pre-production and post-production: Trim Trax and Operation Clean Plate.

Trim Trax occurs in the kitchens as they are preparing food, such as cutting up tomatoes. Instead of throwing away parts that cannot be used, they put them in certain Trim Trax containers that will then be compostable.

Operation Clean Plate occurs in Smith, in which they compost excess food from students’ plates when they return them to the kitchen.

However, this would not work in The Marketplace because they do not use durable plates and the students are responsible for throwing away their trash.

The majority of the waste in the food court is paper products, not food and so wouldn’t make too much of a difference said Castelli.

Some students are still contributing to the effort, however, especially at some of the Small Living Units (SLU). Reynolds, also the moderator of Treehouse, said her house has a composting pile in their backyard. It contains mostly fruit and vegetable peels and will turn into dirt overtime.

Reynolds advice was for students to be aware of what they are throwing away each week and to buy less packaged things.

Ohio Wesleyan faculty, staff, alumni and Delaware residents will honor Verne Edwards, the former  journalism professor who set higher standards for his students than many of their future editors, on Nov. 22 in the Benes rooms at Hamilton-Williams Campus Center.

Edwards, who died at 90 on Nov. 4, joined the OWU faculty in 1952, teaching courses and serving as The Transcript’s adviser until his retirement in 1986, according to a statement from University President Rock Jones. In that time he mentored many of the university’s most successful journalists, including Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award winners.

“If we judge educators by the success of their former students, then Verne Edwards stood at the top of his profession,” Jones wrote.

Edwards thought the best trained journalists should have “the broadest understanding of the world as possible,” said Tom Jolly ‘77, a former student of Edwards’s who is now an associate managing editor for The New York Times.

He was known to give his classes pop quizzes about current affairs — for example, asking them to name the Supreme Court justices, or the capital of a particular foreign country. If students failed, it wasn’t uncommon to see the same quiz again the next day.

That philosophy of broad knowledge continues to undergird the OWU journalism program today as it did in Edwards’ tenure. When Jolly was a student, he said, he took relatively few journalism courses for the major. Current journalism students must take at least eight courses of the 15.5 units required for the major outside of the department.

Edwards placed great importance on fairness in reporting without fear of offense or favor, a principle that influenced Trace Regan, whom he hired to the OWU journalism faculty in 1983. In working with Edwards, fairness became essential to how he dealt with students and what he taught them in the classroom until his retirement last year.

As The Transcript’s adviser, Edwards was famous to students for marking up each issue of the paper with a red pencil to point out mistakes, writing an “F” next to egregious errors. He was a tougher editor than any of his students would ever have, Jolly said, but with his high standards came invaluable lessons they would carry throughout their careers.

“He’s kind of that angel on your shoulder,” Jolly said. “He’s a presence reminding you what’s expected, what’s fair, what’s right, what’s wrong.”

Edwards was also an active and engaged citizen of Delaware, said University Chaplain Jon Powers. He served as an assistant to the publisher of the Delaware Gazette for 12 years after he retired from teaching, and would write “sharply focused” columns about local and national issues.

“He wasn’t a partisan,” Powers said. “He was more of a statesman.”

Edwards’s memorial service is set for 2 p.m. on Saturday in the Benes Rooms of the Hamilton-Williams Campus Center.

Starting this year, the treasurer for the Wesleyan Council of Student Affairs (WCSA) will be appointed by current WCSA members, instead of elected by the student body.

Sophomore treasurer Sam Schurer said the change was made because an election was “a little bit too risky.”

“We wanted to avoid anyone being elected that wasn’t necessarily qualified, and so this is just kind of another level of security,” Schurer said.

Junior Emma Drongowski, newly elected vice president, said the treasurer needs to have special knowledge of the software WCSA uses and know general accounting. In the past, treasurers have not always had the necessary expertise and “the position suffered for it.”

The decision to make treasurer an appointed position was made about a month ago during a full body meeting, though the idea was “tossed around” for awhile, said senior President Lauren Holler, who was the treasurer two years ago.

She said having to run in an election can be intimidating for students, and in past years sometimes only one person ran for treasurer.

“Seeing that there’s not a lot of candidate turnout for that position, generally we thought it would be better to make it an application so that maybe more people would be encouraged to apply,” Holler said.

Typically, WCSA members hold their positions from January to December. Schurer said he was appointed at the end of last semester because the previous treasurer, Connor Latz, is not on campus this semester.

Holler said having to replace Latz halfway through his term did not really impact WCSA’s decision to appoint treasurers from now on and said she believes Schurer has done a great job as treasurer.

She said having a treasurer who has experience with making budgets is important because WCSA has three different budgets to make: one for clubs and organizations, one for special initiatives, and one for WCSA’s operational expenses.

“We would really like to just get cleaner, more precise budgets,” Holler said. “We feel that if there’s someone who was appointed who has different qualifications or better knowledge of excel, or things like that, they might be able to do that.”

Schurer said it is becoming even more important that WCSA funds be handled properly.

“The number of students we have is going down, so the amount of money we have to work with is going down,” Schurer said. “Meanwhile, the number of active clubs on campus is going up, and so, especially with that tightening, we wanted to make sure everything is being done responsibly.”

Schurer said WCSA had been considering developing an internship for someone who would “handle everything on more of an accounting end” but they decided to not do that this year, so the WCSA treasurer remains an unpaid position.

The application for WCSA treasurer can be found at wsca.owu.edu and should be submitted to wcsaexec@owu.edu. The deadline is Nov. 21.

The Issue: ISIL

Over the weekend, the Islamic State released a video showing the beheading of Peter Kassig, an American aid worker. He was the fifth Western hostage the group has killed and the third American, according to the Washington Post. The New York Times reported he was beheaded in retaliation for airstrikes carried out by the United States in Iraq and Syria. President Barack Obama and the United States government confirmed the identity of Kassig and the authenticity of the video. “Mr. Kassig was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group,” Obama said in a statement.

Kassig was captured in eastern Syria in October 2013 while traveling in an ambulance, the Washington Post reported. During his captivity, Kassig converted to Islam while sharing a cell with a devout Syrian Muslim and changed his name to Abdul-Rahman. Kassig founded an aid group to help Syrians that were in the middle of the country’s civil war, according to the Associated Press.

The AP also reported Kassig served in the U.S. Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment and was deployed to Iraq in 2007. He was captured doing relief work with  Special Emergency Response and Assistance, a group he founded after his discharge from the Army.

Now, the BBC reported, “Western intelligence officials are trying to identify Islamic State militants seen in the video…using facial recognition software to identify those involved in the mass beheading, matching their real names and origins to their adopted battle names.” It’s reported one of the militants is French and another is British.

The Islamic State is currently holding two women, one a 26-year-old American, according to the Washington Post.

The Issue: Japan’s Economy

While the rest of the world is recovering from the devastating 2008 recession, it seems as though Japan has unexpectedly fallen back into one in the third financial quarter, the New York Times reported.

Japanese cabinet officials said the economy shrunk by 1.6 percent in the three months to the end of September, compared with a year earlier, the Washington Post reported, the second straight quarterly drop. “Economists had been expecting the statistics to show that the economy had grown by 2 percent in the quarter.”

There is a possibility of an economic stimulus package, according to Reuters, but Japan’s Economy Minister said it would “be heard to craft an exceptionally big package because of the need for financial discipline.”

Reuters also reported some economists are thinking growth could improve in the October-December quarter.