Stimulating work study

The Fine Arts Center business office is located in the Curry/Hicks building on the UMass campus.

At the University of Massachusetts, bills for tuition, housing, fees, and other expenses can seem overwhelming. With the current frozen state of credit, students will take any money they can get to complete their degrees. The recent implementation of a $1,500 fee increase – even with the promised rebates – does nothing to help the case for optimism.

With all the money pumped into the economy by the recent economic stimulus package, working college students may wonder if any is dedicated specifically for them for them. According to the “Education for the 21st Century” section of the American Recovery and Investment Bill, $200 million will be set aside for college work-study. If used correctly, this money will help massive budget cuts from slicing student jobs.

According to Ed Blaguszewski, Director of News and Information at UMass, “The university has committed to maintain, and, in fact, expand its commitment to financial aid for the coming year now matter what happens with stimulus funding.”

He continued, “The trustees have approved a fee increase, and they have said that depending on the amount of stimulus money coming to the university, they will rebate all or some of the fee increase in the future.”

Recently, Governor Deval Patrick spoke about the federal stimulus money coming to Massachusetts schools. In an e-mail sent to members of the UMass community, Chancellor Robert Holub announced Patrick's plan to put $81.6 million in the UMass system. Approximately half of this total will go directly to the flagship Amherst campus.

Christine Texiera, technology manager for the Fine Arts Center at UMass, is also worried about these budget cuts: “I'm hoping they don't make me get rid of my students.”

Christine Texiera's office, where she works on computers and helps FAC employees over the phone.

She currently has five students working for her, and they perform a multitude of tasks that would make her job very unproductive. She works on things at a very high level – attempting to block hackers from crashing the servers, managing the website, account information, yearly technology upgrades, helping other FAC employees with computer problems, etc. Her students handle print jobs on posters, assist in designing the website, get rid of viruses, pick up and drop off equipment at hardware support, deal with simpler computer problems, recover data from hard drives, etc.

If all of these responsibilities fell on Texiera alone, nothing would get done: “There would be way too much for me to do on my own. Once I got done with the small problems of the day, there would be no time for any long term projects that I do now.”

Without an effective technology department, the FAC would, “Basically fall apart.”

The jobs are important to the students, as well. With pay starting at $8 an hour and increasing based on computer knowledge and the benefits that come with adding this position to a resume, employment here is very desirable. There is also the very rare quality these students have compared to most work-study jobs – working on something they like to do.

When loans and grants fall short, work study can play a crucial role in a student's finances. One of the students working for Texiera received $4,500 per semester for work study compensation – a total that is not guaranteed, but rather a maximum amount of what the student can make. The student is required to find a job and work enough hours to reach this sum. With the possible loss of jobs at UMass, the stimulus money becomes vital.

The part of the office where students work is always full of broken computers.

Sophomore Jake Tavares has been working with Texiera for over a year now: “I like this job a lot. I'd be very disappointed if budget cuts made me lose my position here.”

He continued, “Both the money as well as the experience this job provides are important to me. It'll look really good on my résumé, and it's nice to be able to have some independence with the biweekly paychecks. I'd much rather be doing this than delivering pizzas.”

"Hope" for Fair Use

Image obtained using Google Image Search. (Please don't sue me!)
Copyright issues are very prevalent in today's legal world. Unlike most teenagers who download music illegally, however, Shephard Fairey has the law of fair use to back up his possible infringement.

When looking for inspiration, Fairey did what most people would -- he typed in "Barack Obama" in a Google image search. When I searched for the same image, I did not find it among the first 500 results (out of almost 25 million). I imagine it would have been a lot easier before he became President, but the point remains the same -- the image was legally obtained on a computer, and no exact copy was ever produced or sold.

The law of fair use understands that, "there is no such thing as a completely original thought or idea and that all artistic and literary works are to some degree derivative of previous works" (Foust, 221).

The image of the President of the United States is probably the most widely-circulated image of a living individual in the world. Could Fairey not use any image he has ever seen? Even if he were to attend a rally, get his own photo or mental note, would it not be similar to another that already exists? If you were asked to draw a picture of Barack Obama right now (and it wouldn't end up a stick figure), would it not be similar to an image of him you have in your head? Guess where that image came from -- TV or photographs.

This is not Vanilla Ice stealing the bassline of "Under Pressure"; this is everyone using the same chords as in Pachelbel's Canon in D. The only way to avoid infringing on a copyright someone owned at some point would be to not ever produce anything new. Everything is derivative of something else, and if it's not an exact copy or used to try and steal credit, there should be no legal ramifications.