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lol UTSA
Continuation thread. The other one is too big.
Thanks.
lol UTSA
utsa > itt tech
im applying to grad school so i got all those college magazines and i read that utsa is a tier 4 university
lol utsa
Devry > UTSA
lol utsa
lol utsa
Aveda Ins ute > UTSA
Lol utsa still sucks chodes
lol utsa
utsa > everything
Why can't we have "Official UTSA sucks chodes thread (2)" like the Quattro?
Someone should make that thread and we can pretend like this one was never here.
hi
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/edu...bout_UTSA.html
hen safety workers at the University of Texas at San Antonio found elevated levels of toxic arsenic in a campus greenhouse in 2006, the damage control began.
“I can imagine a disgruntled student or employee reporting that the facility is contaminated to one of the TV stations and finding one of their live-cams parked outside the greenhouse during sweeps week,” an associate dean in the College of Sciences wrote in an e-mail. “If our students, faculty or staff are exposed to contaminants like lead or arsenic, there is some risk of civil action to recover damages related to health.”
The latter fear came to pass last year, when former doctoral student Rob Wayne sued UTSA, claiming his exposure to arsenic in the greenhouse caused a bout with cancer. Turns out, the greenhouse was just one incident on a list of crises plaguing UTSA's earth and environmental sciences department.
Do ents generated from Wayne's lawsuit and from open records laws reveal years of infighting, dysfunction, and a lack of money and know-how needed to run the graduate programs key to UTSA's transformation into a premier research university. The general tumult — which included accusations that UTSA staff planted the toxic arsenic to sabotage a professor — nearly crippled the fledgling doctoral program in environmental sciences and engineering and led to dissolution of the earth and environmental sciences department.
With legislators dangling millions of dollars in front of emerging research universities to help them gain national stature, the episode raises questions about UTSA's ability to successfully compete for that money.
For example, the doctoral program of which Wayne was a part was supposed to be a “trial balloon” for how UTSA planned to achieve premier research status, according to outside consultants who evaluated the program in 2007.
“Unfortunately, it is not a good example at all,” the consultants wrote. “The program is rife with problems including inadequate student funding ... a lack of leadership ... and grossly unprofessional faculty interactions.”
David Gabler, a UTSA spokesman, said he could not comment on Wayne's lawsuit. But he said the consultants' report was “very useful and the statements generally accepted by UTSA. As a result, the department was dissolved.”
'Embarrassing' problem
Wayne's saga began in 2003, when he joined the first cohort of students in the new doctoral program in environmental science and engineering. He studied allergy-inducing cedar plants common in the Hill Country and shared the university's West Campus greenhouse with students growing plants in arsenic-laced soil, part of a federal grant aimed at remediation of polluted Superfund sites.
According to Wayne, the students frequently left soil on the ground to dry, rinsed soil from plant roots into a sink that drained outdoors and allowed planters to leak liquid onto counters and floors. Once, the students dumped so much dirt on the floor that Wayne was engulfed in a cloud of black dust.
The students were wearing gloves and masks; Wayne was not.
“I was told the experiments were being conducted safely and that contamination should not be a concern,” Wayne said.
Rupali Datta and Dibyendu Sarkar, two former UTSA professors who led the grant-funded projects, said they trained their students to work with toxins but had no control over other students sharing the greenhouse.
“We did everything by the books,” Sarkar said.
But in June 2006, a student complaint prompted staff at UTSA's safety office to take samples from in and around the greenhouse. Lab reports from Alamo Analytical Laboratories showed arsenic levels in some spots exceeded acceptable background levels set by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
Raymond Baird, senior associate dean of the College of Sciences, was tapped to handle the situation.
In a November 2006 e-mail to his boss, Dean George Perry, Baird said the contamination “raises the specter of an embarrassing public relations problem” for the university.
Baird suggested quickly removing any contaminated soil, getting rid of wooden tables inside the greenhouse, doing safety training for all greenhouse users and installing a card-key lock that records visitors.
Despite Baird's urgent tone, his suggestions took nearly a year to implement.
Though Datta now says the arsenic levels were too low to have caused cancer, she pushed hard for the cleanup and sent e-mails to administrators scolding them for delays.
“By not taking timely measures (the contamination was identified more than a year ago), UTSA is potentially exposing the people working in the greenhouse to serious health risk,” Datta wrote in a June 2007 e-mail to Baird. Datta also accused workers from UTSA's safety office of deliberately planting arsenic in the greenhouse to sabotage her because officials considered her a troublemaker.
“It was done to malign me because UTSA was trying to fire me and some other professors,” Datta said in an interview. An internal investigation found no evidence of sabotage.
Dissolving a department
E-mails and other do ents hint that UTSA officials did consider Datta and Sarkar troublemakers.
Datta and Sarkar filed numerous grievances against the university and accused other professors of making false allegations against them and discriminating against them because they are from India. After one verbal dust-up at Broadway Daily Bread, Sarkar and another professor refused to be in the same room together.
Despite the drama, the award-winning pair accounted for nearly 60 percent of all publications and research dollars generated by the earth and environmental sciences department's 15 professors.
In March 2007, Dean Perry gave a group of outside consultants the task of examining the department.
Their report depicted a department suffering from a lack of leadership, no shared vision, appalling faculty behavior and meager resources. Blame went all the way to the top of the university, consultants said.
In the doctoral program, for example, money adequate to support 10 students was being shared among 32, most of whom did not even have a desk. Also, the program touted an engineering component but only required students to take one engineering course, misleading employers about the depth of graduates' skills, the report said.
For these and other reasons, graduate students “expressed a latent sense of animosity toward UTSA,” the report said.
To defuse tensions and salvage the doctoral program, UTSA took the consultants' advice and dissolved the department, allowing other departments to absorb faculty and students.
Datta and Sarkar were not reassigned and floated without a departmental home. They issued a rebuke to the report, calling it biased and incorrect.
“The whole thing was done to kill the environmental science program,” Sarkar said.
This past August, UTSA paid Sarkar, a tenured professor, $127,000 to drop his complaints against the university. Datta said she declined a settlement offer. Both found other jobs out of state.
According to spokesman Gabler, there are no plans to reunite the department.
The doctoral program moved to the civil and environmental engineering department and is “making progress,” according to an outside review in April. But the program still lacks senior leadership, and professors do not generate enough research money to support more students, the review noted.
Cancer diagnosis
Rob Wayne finished classes at UTSA in 2006 and went on to do postdoctoral work at Trinity University.
Throughout the summer of 2007, he struggled with a persistent rash and congestion. In September, doctors diagnosed him with lymphoma and began chemotherapy. An avid bike rider and healthy eater, Wayne researched possible causes for his lymphoma and found studies linking arsenic exposure to cancer.
In December 2007, Wayne told UTSA officials about his diagnosis and filed a workers' compensation claim, which was later denied by the UT System.
As soon as Wayne complained, UTSA shuttered the greenhouse for another round of testing. This time, they tried to re-create Datta's and Sarkar's experiments and measure airborne toxins. The tests, done by the Rimkus Consulting Group, found that arsenic and lead levels in all but one sample were within acceptable limits but that longer-term air monitoring was needed to determine if sustained exposure could lead to potentially dangerous levels.
This past August, Wayne sued for unspecified damages, claiming UTSA officials knew of the contamination but failed to tell users about possible health risks or report it to any regulatory agency.
“I really believe my condition is related to contamination. ... And I think UTSA should demonstrate some responsibility,” Wayne said. “My biggest concern is medical coverage in the future.”
Andrea Morrow, a spokeswoman for the TCEQ, said that even though UTSA found elevated levels of arsenic in the greenhouse, the university cleaned it up and was not required to report it to the state agency.
The greenhouse has reopened, Gabler said, and a biology professor is using it for research.
Regardless of the lawsuit's outcome, Wayne hopes the events will force the university to become more vigilant.
“I want UTSA to be a successful university, I would like to see them become a flagship ins ution,” he said. “I think they have the ability to do it; they just need to make sure they maintain the highest standards possible to control research.”
lmao utsa
shhh laughing to loud
lol utsa
lol utsa
lol utsa
shh laughing to loud
UTSA = Auto-Erotic Affixiation
Wtf are you spoting incarnate word?
I never even heard of that until I saw it on the college team's list.
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