UD is striving to create a diverse community where no one feels confined to a lower standard.

In making sure this happens, the Biased-Related Incidents Team (BRIT) was created to ensure a consistent, comprehensive, and fair response to hate crimes and biased related incidents on campus.

"Our goal has been to propose a policy and set of procedures that faculty, staff, and students not only perceive as fair but, also, provide opportunities for nurturing interpersonal growth, tolerance, and respect for our differences," says Ronald Katsuyama, who chaired the committee in charge of preparing and writing the draft policy.

"Biased Related Incidents are not crimes, but acts of discrimination," Katsuyama says "it represents a hatred… it’s direct to a person because of who they are."

Following the success of a pilot mentoring program held during 2003-04, the Women’s Center is re-launching the program for the 2004-05 academic year.

This program, coordinated and supported by the Women’s Center, is designed to involve women faculty and staff in a formal relationships with appropriate mentors - either women or men.

Along with this initial training session, additional meetings will be scheduled about once a month for the group as a whole. Other time requirements for meetings are left to the discretion of the individual mentor-mentee pairs.

Yes! Women’s Studies has a new major! Thanks to the heroic efforts of the Women’s Studies Committee and the tireless assistance of Sarah Gallo, we were able to get our proposal for a new major and a change to the minor approved last April.

Four new courses – WST 150: Introduction to Women’s Studies; WST 310: Feminist Theory and Methods; WST 390: Service Learning in Women’s Studies; and WST 490: Senior Seminar in Women’s Studies – form the cornerstone of the program.

The remaining 24 credit hours are to be drawn from existing courses from other departments already approved for the minor.

Majors choose from these disciplinary courses to fulfill a range of area requirements and must also fulfill 3 credit hours with a global and/or multicultural perspective.

We have designed the program so as to facilitate double-majoring, and we anticipate it will also lead to the development of a variety of new disciplinary and interdisciplinary courses across the curriculum in the next few years. WST 150 will be offered for the first time in January.

In mid-August we moved to Alumni Hall 208—a suite of two offices embedded within the Women’s Center. We are thrilled with our new digs, which bring us more space, adjoining offices, a more central and visible presence on campus, ease of access to Women’s Center meeting rooms, and a physical proximity to Lisa Rismiller and Pattie Waugh, hence facilitating our growing collaboration.

We are grateful to Lisa and Pattie for warmly welcoming us into their neighborhood! Sarah also deserves special thanks for her work on the move. Please drop by the new office to chat or check out our resources

As you can see, it promises to be an exciting academic year in Women’s Studies. My semester as Acting Director was a great transition (and something of a trial by fire!) and, in my new position as Director, I am looking forward to building on the initiatives we established last Spring … and on the past 26 years of Women’s Studies work on this campus.

These are just a few of the honors Gayatri Gunda has received during her career at the University of Dayton.

Gayatri was born in India and lived there until her family moved to Oman when she was 10 years old.

At fifteen, she and her family moved to the United States for more economic opportunities, and she came to the University of Dayton as an undergraduate in 2000.

In 2003, Gayatri won an award from the Cordell W. Hull International Fellows Fund for her research in

Madrid, Spain. For this research project, Gayatri traveled to Madrid to compare the United States’ middle school mathematics education to Spain’s.

Toward the end of her junior year, Gayatri began working on a research project with Dr. Aparna Higgins in the math department.

This research was in the area of Pebbling, and was part of her Berry’s Scholar Thesis. Pebbling is a new area in mathematics only around since the 1980’s, so it has not yet gained much recognition.

Gayatri presented a paper of her findings at the Undergraduate Mathematics Day Conference, where people from all over the country come to present their research. It was refereed, accepted, and published in an online publication. In honor of her research, Gayatri received the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Award in April 2004.

"I’m very grateful to the honors program for giving me this opportunity to do research. Without them I don’t think I would have gotten any opportunities to do any research at all," Gayatri said.

Gayatri graduated from UD in August 2004 as a Chemical Engineering and Math major. Now, in her first semester as a graduate student, she is taking business classes to prepare her for her future career in the field of dentistry. After graduation, she is hoping to one day open her own practice.

Gayatri has chosen to follow a career in dentistry because of direct interactions she will have with her patients. As much as she enjoys doing research, "there’s not that personal satisfaction of helping someone directly."

When asked why they made the decision to attend UD, so many students report the supportive atmosphere and friendly community environment. With over 95% of students living on campus, UD is our neighborhood, our home, our family.

These sentiments make UD an amazing university, but they often leave us with a false sense of security as well. Even the best of communities are subject to crime, and ours is no exception.

UD Public Safety bulletins have warned recently of several occurrences of public indecency and of students being harassed. What all of these incidents have in common is that the victims were women.

We’ve all heard one statistic or another, such as the fact that 1.3 women are raped every minute in the United States or that one in every four college women has been the victim of some sexual assault.

The goal is not to instill fear, but to make people—and especially women—aware of the dangers that they face. Being aware and prepared for any danger is the biggest key to avoiding becoming a victim.

According to many statistics, freshman women during their first semesters are the individuals most vulnerable to crime on college campuses. Many freshman women and other new students here at UD simply aren’t aware of the dangers they face and don’t know what they can do to protect themselves.

We all know that our beloved Ghetto is far from the crime-filled streets of New York or Los Angeles, but keeping safe is important no matter where you are. To see what other women on campus do to keep safe, we asked what they themselves wished they had known about Ghetto safety coming to UD…

Make sure you and your roommates or housemates lock the doors when you leave, so you don’t have to worry about coming home to an unlocked house.

Emily Kohrman

Jen Campbell

Never walk alone and don’t walk through the alleys. If you have to, make sure someone knows that you are coming or leaving. We also have a Women’s Self Defense class, which I didn’t know about until I signed up for it.

You need someone with you at parties who makes you think twice before deciding to go home with a guy, or to really go anywhere with a guy for that matter. When you’ve been drinking, you can’t really make that kind of decision.

Piercing has certainly gotten very popular, with all varieties of body parts involved. Any time you break the skin, there is a chance for infection. And when you leave a foreign body (something not part of your own body, like an earring or dumbbell) in place this increases the chances that germs can get into the wound and start an infection. If you’re really careful to clean your hands whenever you touch the new piercing, and do the required cleaning of the area every day, the chance of infection is fairly low. And early infections usually respond well to treatment.

One area that I wouldn’t recommend piercing is the cartilage of the ear. This is the middle and upper parts of the ear that are firm like cardboard. This area has a very poor blood supply, and even a mild infection here can cause death of the cartilage, leaving a really deformed upper ear. Multiple piercings in the soft fleshy lower part of the earlobe are fine, but you’re safest to stick to an ear cuff if you want to adorn your upper ear.

Dr. B

With beautiful weather and scenery all around, 2,000 survivors of breast cancer, current fighters of the disease and those who have lost love ones, all gathered in Shakopee, Minnesota on September 10, 2004.

They were beginning a 3-day walk, which would prove to be both mentally and physically tiring, but rewarding at the same time.

UD’s University Archivist, Kerrie Cross, and former UD employee, Sue Polanka, both participated.

"It was tough sharing and hearing stories of loved "It was tough sharing and hearing stories of loved ones who have battled with the disease," Cross said. "And physically, it was hard walking, roughly, 30 miles a day for 3 days; though, the scenery from the beginning to the end of the walk was breathtaking."

At the end of the nearly 30 miles a day, Cross said, the walkers would pitch tents and sleep outside overnight, until they were to begin their next round of walking come the following morning.

When the walk finally ended in St. Paul on Sept. 12, the walkers had raised $5 million, which will help in finding a cure for breast cancer.

President’s Office Executive Director Lynnette Heard organized a diverse – in many ways - contingent of UD women to attend Can We Talk? All those who attended agreed it was a unique and worthwhile experience, providing a rare opportunity to "walk in another woman’s shoes."

Through a series of speakers, plenary sessions and small group discussions, approximately 250 women of all ages, ethnicities, faith traditions and personal and professional experiences heard about each other and shared of themselves.

This question of, "Which comes first, race or sex?" was just one of many raised. Participants were asked, when you get up in the morning, are you first and foremost a woman, or are you Black, White, Latina, Asian, etc.?

This question came up again when the UD contingent gathered recently to debrief our experiences at Can We Talk? Those present agreed that answering this question for themselves brought revelation for some, simply more questions for others.

The one thing we all agreed on was that we wanted more opportunities to continue answering the questions raised by Can We Talk? We decided to form a reading group around the book, Our Separate Ways: Black and White Women and the Struggle for Professional Identity, and to begin asking ourselves and each other even more probing and perhaps painful questions, all with the goal of creating understanding, compassion, and respect for each other while building one small community of UD women.

It is our hope that this "experiment" might become another mechanism for improving the climate for diversity and inclusiveness at UD. If it is successful, we may try to expand it to include more UD women. Like ripples in a pond when a pebble is dropped, we’re hoping Can We Talk? will create a disturbance – albeit a positive one – among UD women.