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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 18, 1984)
Need a place to sit or sleep? Help yourself! By Scott McFetridge Of the Emerald Do you find yourself looking around a bare room? Maybe a table from mom and a poster that you bought in eighth grade are all you see. Does your voice echo inside empty walls when you talk on your telephone? Buying new furniture to outfit your home can indeed be ex pensive, but don’t give up hope; there are options. A drive around the area on most Saturdays will reveal that “Eugene is the garage sale capital of the world,” says Carl Falsgraf, a University graduate student. Falsgraf moved into a vacant house in Eugene from Japan this fall. He says he found a cabinet, clothes, kitchen utensils and chairs at garage sales. His best buy, however, was a $25 Panasonic stereo. “You can find anything in a garage sale,” Falsgraf says. “And it’s a lot nicer than Fred Meyer. You get to talk to peo ple,” he says. But Falsgraf has a backup ap proach to furnishing his home when garage sale merchandise doesn’t appeal to him. “I built a lot of my own fur niture,” he says. “It’s actually very easy in Eugene to make your own furniture because of the cheap lumber.” Torkjell Djupedal, a graduate student from Norway, also found that building his own fur niture could save money. He says he bought table legs at a yard sale for $2 and then made THE EHD 15 HEAR Come into Earth River Records & Tapes before Sunday flight to sign up to win YOUR WEIGHT in RECORDS and catch Eugene's largest selection of new records and tapes all at $1 OFF the regular price! Campus Location 770 W. 11th. 342-2088 Downtown 62 W. Broadway the rest of the table himself. And for $5 he purchased a rock ing chair that needed only minor repairs to the seat, he says. Some people, however, don’t have the time to shop at garage sales or the skill to craft their own furniture, and for them outfitting a house may mean paying the price for new fur niture or being happy with what they can get. “My house came with an ugly couch, an ugly chair and a dresser that works,” University senior Kelly Hunt says. Although she isn’t especially happy with the decor of her house. Hunt says that for the moment she and her roommate will make do. Lisa Gates, a resident of the famed Animal House, also is settling for less than the best. She bought a dresser, a bed and wall hangings from home for her room, but for the rest of her living quarters she had to adjust to the furniture that was already there. “The furniture looked like it might have been left over from the movie (Animal House),” Gates says. Meanwhile, Stephen Chrisman, a third-year architec ture student, moved into an empty, seven-room house last year. With no money and no ambition to buy furniture, he and his roommates did the best with what little they had, he says. “We all had stuff for our bedrooms, but the rest of the house was pretty bare,” Chrisman says. "One of the guys brought a kitchen table from home, but all we had for the living room was lawn chairs. It wasn’t that comfor table, but it worked." Some people are lucky enough to find furnished apart ments, but some household necessities still are required, says Mark Bernheimer, a junior studying telecommunications. Bernheimer says he bought a couple of plates, a napkin holder and a shower curtain with a matching checkered towel for his apartment. "The formica-topped table came with the place,” he says. However, some furnishings (>raphi«. by Rob Kraft — regardless of price — are ir resistible, says sophomore Jill Keith, who found a chair she liked at Import Plaza in Portland. "It’s just like when you see a shirt and buy it,” Keith says. "I saw a chair and bought it." Gift rekindles humanities study By Michael Doke Of the Emerald Humanities — defined by a University official as the study of human action — is making a comeback at the University, thanks to a three-year, $300,000 grant from the National Endow ment for the Humanities. And Humanities Center direc tor Don Taylor says humanities enters into every subject, in eluding science and philosophy. “Humanities study anything human beings do,” Taylor says. “While science studies subjects and laws, the humanities study human action in particular, such as the rise of science. “The Humanities Center tries to make available for all students what the Honors Col lege offers only a select group,” he says. The center is offering seven courses this term, costing an average of $3,750 each, Taylor says. Almost 175 students have enrolled, and the average class size is 25 students. The center offered 13 courses last year, the first year of the N.E.H. grant. Faculty members in political science, English, German, music and history departments will offer seven classes during the winter term. Between 80 and 90 percent of the work jn a humanities course is discussion and analysis, Taylor says. Students have to work harder in the class and take an active role in the educa tion process, he says. The class size and humanities’ goals mean fewer objective tests, more writing by the student, more class discus sion and closer faculty scrutiny of written and oral work, .he says. Students have more responsibilty to learn in a humanities course compared to the larger lecture class, he says. ‘‘There’s very little of the professor-up-here, student down-there feeling in the humanities class.” says history Prof. Ray Birn, who team teaches a humanities rare-books course with rare-books librarian Martin Antonetti. ‘‘Everybody participates with each other because students make the atmosphere conducive for this.” "We’re conducting a course of a high scholarly level,” An tonetti says. “The humanities emphasis of education con fronts the total person. It seeks to change the person on many levels — socially, intellectually, psychologically and spiritual ly,” he says. Bim adds that in the rare books course “not only are we studying books, we’re studying a lot about people: who wrote the book, who made it and who sold it. It’s the humanistic ap proach. The grant encouraged us to develop the course. It gave us the inspiration,” he says. Emmeli Adler, a humanities senior enrolled in the rare books course, says “There is a much closer contact with pro-' fessors. He’s making his point right there in front of you. “There’s the opportunity to take more advantage of their ex pertise — an opportunity lost in huge lecture classes,” Adler says. Studying the humanities and having a broad education is the only way to get the entire ex perience out of college, she says. “What else is there? That's what education is.” she says. “What is it you come to college for? Job.training seems to be the ' case more and more, but you come to get an education.” Teaching the humanities is at least as expensive as teaching in science and professional pro grams. Taylor says. For every dollar available for humanities research from public and private sources, about $100 is available to the sciences and social sciences, he says. “You can’t put a dollar value on the humanities like the • sciences or computer sciences.” Taylor says. “But what would society be like without a humanistic understanding? Citing an example. Taylor says the scientist, as a profes sional, is not expected to think about the consequence of his ac tion. As with Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project, the scientists’ goal was to develop the atomic bomb. The conse quence of this was not discovered until the explosions on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Scholars of the humanities try to understand and discover what men and women have dono, Taylor says. They raise the understanding and value of such actions by adding the com ponent of interpretation and analysis to help form opinions for the individual, he says. “Education may be profes sionally oriented, but humanities generally are the core of the University,” Taylor says.“No one here wants to see the University become an in stitution of technology. The N.E.H. grant expires in September 1986, Taylor says. But he says he hopes the pro gram will be successful enough by then to be maintained.