• SECC supports project for domestic violence victims
• Sliding scale for parking suggested
• 'Radiothon' to raise money for N.C. Children's Hospital
• Moeser reiterates stance on academic freedom
• Tuition task forces uses new strategy, has the same goal
• Moeser asks Broad to remember staff
• MyUNC to feature customized web pages
• Carbon copies evolved into best-selling fixture in American, British literature
• Carolina forms research partnership with NCCU
• University strives to meet HIPAA requirements

SECC supports project
for domestic violence victims

Valda Exum describes herself as an extremely private person, which is a big reason why she was willing to stay in a marriage as bad as hers for so long.

She didn't want anybody to know how often or how hard her husband used to hit her. That was her business -- and a problem she could figure out without anybody having to know about it.

What made her attitude all the more strange, she can see now, was that she was a social worker. "At Social Services, I could listen to other people's problems and forget my own. I used work like an alcoholic would use alcohol -- to hide in."

For the past year, she and her 10-year-old daughter, Carly, have been part of Project HomeStart, a transitional housing program for 15 homeless families in three separate buildings nestled together on Homestead Road in Chapel Hill. The building where Exum and her daughter are staying is reserved for mothers and their children who are homeless because of domestic violence.

The program is operated by the Inter-Faith Council For Social Services, one of the array of non-profit organizations that receives support from the State Employees Combined Campaign (SECC).

"Here, you can stay anywhere from 90 days to two years depending on your goals and how you are working on your goals," said Katie Lee, the director of Project HomeStart's domestic violence program. "A lot of times, women and children need that amount of time just to get back on their feet. That is what makes it so dynamic. Plus we look at every aspect of their life. We look at education,

finances, employment, housing, mental, physical, spiritual, health issues, and we also look at them to look at goals they would like to accomplish that they never had an opportunity to. So we kind of remove them from the real world and let them focus on what they really want to do for the long run."

Josh Diem, the director of Project HomeStart, said what makes the domestic violence project different from shelters is that it is designed to be a sort of laboratory where women can get the resources, support and time to reinvent their lives.

"I feel like one of the things we do really well is (that) we understand that everybody who comes here is going to be different and have different needs and different goals," Diem said. "We do a really good job of respecting each person and helping each person to get where they want to be."

People like Exum.

In October of 2001, Exum and Carly left their home and what Exum described as a "19-year abusive relationship" with her husband. They went to two other domestic violence shelters before arriving at Project HomeStart.

Exum is out of hiding now, so far out of hiding that she has agreed to requests from Diem and Lee to speak before various groups about what happened to her. Recently, she applied for a job at a local social services collaborative that provides children's services.

"I'm hoping to use my experience, as sad as it is, to help somebody else," Exum said.

Diem said the three shelters together operate on a total budget of about $500,000 a year, with about $350,000 of that money supplied by the U.S. Department of Housing and

Urban Development. The Inter-Faith Council for Social Services also receives support from the Town of Chapel Hill and Orange County and has received additional federal dollars through the state, Diem said.

The shelters also receive private contributions from congregations and individuals, as well as in-kind contributions from clothing to food to toys that have dollar values of between $1,500 and $2,000 a month, Diem said.

What is harder to put a dollar value on is the contributions of volunteers such as Ryan Barbaro, a Carolina pre-med student who started helping out as a freshman two-and-a-half years ago and will continue on until he graduates in three years this spring.

After receiving training at the Family Violence Prevention Center, Barbaro began leading group sessions with young children who had been abused to encourage them to talk about what happened to them.

Barbaro said the children talk about a range of topics, from what abuse is to the specific situations each has faced. By talking about it, Barbaro said, they learn that abuse is not just their own "dirty little secret" and that helps prevent it from becoming something that could eat away at them for the rest of their lives.

"We try to help them by bringing out the wounds so they can start to heal," Barbaro said.

Diem said it wasn't just the training that had made Barbaro good at what he does. He's good because he's committed -- and he's been around long enough for the children to see that he is.

"You can go to school and receive training and go to workshops, but there are certain kinds of people who can do that kind of work and there are people who can't," Diem said. "It was absolutely clear to me from the beginning that Ryan is somebody who can do the work.

"Above anything else, the kids know he cares about them. If you don't have that, nothing else matters."

Campaign ends Oct. 31

University employees still have until Oct. 31 to give to the State Employees Combined Campaign.

This year's theme is "Hope. It's all some people have ..." Organizers of the local campaign hope to raise $1.1 million for local, state and national non-profit organizations.

For information about making a gift, see www.unc.edu/secc.

Sliding scale for parking suggested

A panel advising Carolina administrators on transportation and parking issues at the University has endorsed a sliding scale for parking permit prices that would take effect next year.

Under the Advisory Committee on Transportation (ACT) recommendation, permit prices would be tied to salary levels, with employees who make more money paying higher annual increases over the next five years.

The breakdown would be:

• Employees making less than $50,000 (and students) -- annual increases of no more than 5 percent.

• Employees making from $50,000 to $100,000 -- annual increases of no more than 10 percent.

• Employees making more than $100,000 -- annual increases of no more than 20 percent.

The ACT recommendation, which panel members reached by consensus, will be part of a five-year parking and transportation proposal that will go to University vice chancellors. The University Board of Trustees will have final approval over what emerges from the vice chancellors' deliberations.

Derek Poarch, director of public safety and ACT chair, said his department and ACT see the scale as a "worst-case scenario" for possible fee increases.

"We will certainly do everything we can to keep them lower than the committee recommended if this plan is approved by the vice chancellors and trustees," he said.

The need for permit increases is being driven by the amount of funding needed to pay for parking, parking decks and park-and-ride development over the next five years, Poarch said.

After those five years, he said, planners "anticipate being able to return to lower and more normal rate-increase growth."

ACT is a campus panel of faculty, staff and students charged with advising administrators on strategies for achieving convenient, safe and easy-to-use transportation to campus. ACT is also helping the Department of Public Safety craft the five-year transportation and parking plan.

Kimley-Horn and Associates Inc., a Raleigh-based transportation consulting firm, is also helping develop the five-year plan, which officials will present to the Board of Trustees for adoption in January 2003.

'Radiothon' to raise money
for N.C. Children's Hospital

The N.C. Children's Hospital will reach out to millions of people across the country on Nov. 20 in a live "radiothon" fundraiser.

That day, crews from radio stations owned by Raleigh-based Curtis Media Group will

air the radiothon from the children's hospital lobby. The radiothon, which begins at 5 a.m. EST and continues until 1 a.m. on Nov. 21, is being staged under the title, "N.C. Children's Promise: Twenty Dollars for Twenty Hours."

Listeners will be asked to contribute $20 each. In addition to phoning in a gift, donors will be able to make contributions through the UNC Health Care and Curtis web sites.

The Curtis stations, headed by Carolina alumnus Don Curtis, reach more than one million listeners in central North Carolina. In addition, the radiothon will be carried by select stations throughout North Carolina which broadcast the syndicated "Bob & Sheri" morning program, based in Charlotte and hosted by Bob Lacey and Sheri Lynch.

The radiothon also will feature a live performance from the children's hospital stage by country vocal music group Diamond Rio.

The idea for the radiothon grew out of a realization by UNC Health Care staff, as construction of the children's hospital neared completion, that "we now had a physical structure to show, and that it was time to tell our story," said Lynn Wooten, assistant director of Public Affairs and Marketing.

The Chapel Hill advertising agency Jennings & Co. introduced UNC Health Care to Curtis Media, and the two organizations found in each other a good match.

"The Curtis Group has devoted nearly its entire staff to this for Nov. 20," Wooten said. "Their corporate commitment is extremely generous, and we really appreciate the extent to which they're willing to help the children's hospital."

Curtis began his career in 1957, when he was just 15 years old, by selling advertising time for radio station WKMT in Kings Mountain. Now his company includes North Carolina's largest network of radio stations and more than 30 web sites. Last April, he was inducted into the North Carolina Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame.

Curtis insists that credit for the radiothon plan properly belongs to Phil Zachary, executive vice president of Curtis Media.

According to Zachary, Curtis Media wasn't sure at first they would throw their support into a fundraiser for the children's hospital. "We get requests like that all the time," he said, and the company wanted to make sure that the children's hospital was a proper focus for its philanthropic efforts.

Next, 15 people from Curtis came to Chapel Hill for a tour of the children's hospital.

"We learned up there that this really was the children's hospital for all the children of North Carolina," Zachary said. "No one was refused, no one was turned away, and they were really doing miracle work there. We came away with a genuine sense of humility and awe as to what they were accomplishing in Chapel Hill."

The group decided during its trip back to Raleigh that they wanted to create a fundraiser for the children's hospital that would be really special.

"Too many of these appeals are long-winded and laborious and fatiguing for everyone involved," Zachary said. "So we felt that if we concentrated in one short burst, and asked for an amount of money that almost anyone could contribute, and that if we made it easy to remember, that we would have a real chance of being successful."

Moeser reiterates stance
on academic freedom

Professors, by nature, tend to be questioning sorts, suspicious of authority and reluctant to give or show unqualified approval to the people who hold it.

An Oct. 11 Faculty Council meeting proved to be an exception.

When Chancellor James Moeser finished remarks reaffirming his commitment to free speech, faculty members stood and burst into spontaneous applause. And when the clapping ended, there was not a single question asked.

On Oct. 7, Moeser was among 300 higher education officials whose names appeared in a full-page ad denouncing anti-Semitic actions on college campuses. The American Jewish Committee sponsored the ad, which ran in "The New York Times."

When signing it, Moeser said, he made clear that he believed the statement was far from complete. On this campus, an atmosphere free of intimidation should be afforded not only to Jews but also to Muslims, Christians, Hindus and non-believers alike. In addition, no group or individuals should be harassed or intimidated as a result of their sexual orientation.

"We are prepared to defend academic freedom wherever it is attacked -- from the right or from the left -- and to maintain the essential objectivity and neutrality of this University itself in national and international partisan affairs," Moeser said.

Moeser said campus faculty representatives of a national campaign have written him recently to advocate that Carolina divest any endowment funds with companies that do business with or sell weapons to Israel or that otherwise support the occupation of Palestine. He rejected the idea, he said.

"The issues of human rights in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are far too complex for a simplistic, bumper sticker solution," Moeser said. "While I find the occupation of Palestinian lands reprehensible, so do I find the suicide bombings of innocent civilians equally abhorrent."

Moeser cited Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who labeled the divestment initiative against Israel at his campus as a new and subtler wave of American anti-Semitism.

At the same time, Moeser said, Carolina is one of 21 universities listed on a controversial web page called Campus Watch. Created by a pro-Israel think tank, the page monitors and critiques Middle East studies activities by faculty on U.S. campuses.

"I object in the strongest terms to the attempts of Campus Watch to identify people on our campuses who teach and write about the Middle East and critique their work and statements for evidence of bias or errors," Moeser said.

Moeser said it was appropriate for the University to defend faculty members who held controversial teach-ins critical of American foreign policy in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks.

This summer, it was appropriate to defend the choice of the Quran as a text for the Summer Reading Program. And it was appropriate for the University to consider, as seriously as it did, the possibility of establishing a branch of the Kenan-Flagler Business School in Qatar.

The country appears to be on the brink of initiating a pre-emptive and possibly unilateral military strike, Moeser said, a situation that will no doubt provoke the kind of fierce debate and polarization that the country has not seen since the Vietnam War.

"Already on many campuses across our nation we are seeing groups militating against one another, reminding us that history is cyclical," Moeser said. "Let us resolve to deal with these issues in a distinctly different way -- respecting those with whom we disagree, including their right to speak and be heard, and encouraging honest questioning and inquiry. I call on everyone at Carolina to protect a culture of robust but respectful discussion and advocacy and dissent."

In other matters at the meeting:

• Executive Associate Provost Bernadette Gray-Little solicited opinion about a proposal that has been under study to hold a separate hooding ceremony for Ph.D. graduates.

Gray-Little said faculty members have expressed a range of opinion on the subject. Some argue a separate ceremony would elevate the status of the ceremony to the level befitting the occasion. Others worry holding a separate ceremony would marginalize it, Gray-Little said.

Another concern was attendance of faculty members. If a faculty member attended a Ph.D. ceremony on Saturday, would he or she be willing to attend the undergraduate ceremony the next day in Kenan Stadium? Sparse attendance for the Kenan Stadium commencement is already an issue that the Faculty Council has yet to solve, even after the impassioned pleadings from faculty leaders and administrators alike.

Moeser said he is an unabashed supporter of holding the separate Ph.D. ceremonies. Moeser said he witnessed how well this kind of ceremony can work at the University of South Carolina, the University of Nebraska and the University of Kansas. The ritual of ceremony is important in that it accords the proper weight to such a high achievement, he said.

• Chapel Hill Mayor Kevin Foy spoke about the evolving relationship between the campus and the town. It is axiomatic to say that the town and campus are inextricably linked, Foy said.

Both will continue to grow, he said, but in some ways, both have grown apart in ways that should be acknowledged.

The Town of Chapel Hill is no longer the sole focus of a University with a reach to influence the state and, increasingly, the world, Foy said. Conversely, it can no longer be said that everyone who lives in Chapel Hill has a direct connection to the University. Many choose to live here because of the quality of life it affords them, a quality of life that includes, but it is not limited to, the array of amenities found on campus.

There are problems that both must address together -- from traffic congestion to quality public schools to stormwater management to the chronic shortage of affordable housing. All of those issues will be magnified in importance in the next few years as the main campus continues to grow and plans begin to take shape for the development of Carolina North off of Airport Road.

"I think we need to manage the changing nature of the relationship in order to alleviate the tensions that will inevitably result," Foy said.

Foy invited faculty members to participate in community discussions with the same vigor and passion as they do discussions involving the campus.

"You are uniquely situated to offer a critical eye and a critical voice in the way decisions are made," Foy said. "We need you. We need you to be engaged. We need you to be informed. Please participate. Chapel Hill is your town and its future, in part, is your responsibility."

Tuition task forces uses new
strategy, has the same goal

Rebekah Burford, a Carolina junior majoring in political science, is one of the handful of holdovers from the Student Tuition Task Force from a year ago and the only returning student.

At the third meeting of this year's task force, held Oct. 10, Burford made a suggestion on how the group should go about deciding the size of increases for a multi-year tuition plan that it will recommend to the University Board of Trustees.

The previous task force, Burford said, was given a menu of options to pick from regarding the size of the tuition increase. Pick a $400 increase, and here are the things you can get for your money; pick a $600 increase, and you can get this much more.

A better way to do it, Burford suggested, would be to start with what you want to accomplish with the added money, then set a schedule of tuition increases over the next three years that would be high enough to garner the amount needed.

The task force already has reached informal agreement about the three areas that additional revenues should be used for. The first is improving faculty pay. The second is raising stipends for graduate teaching assistants. The third is lowering class size.

The task force agreed to Burford's suggestion to first assess needs, then set priorities and then come up with the tuition increases to meet them.

The process may, as Burford suggested, be better. But it may not prove to be any easier.

The reason is that closing the gap in all these three areas would require huge tuition increases that not even task force members could accept.

Trustee Richard Stevens emphasized the important first step in the process is to collect the necessary data to find out how far the University is behind its peers in these three key categories. With this data in hand, Stevens suggested, the task force could direct more money to areas where the gaps are widest and need the most money to narrow if not close them.

At the next meeting on Oct. 31, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Robert Shelton is expected to present an array of comparative data to show how much effect the past three, consecutive campus-based increases of $300 have made in narrowing gaps with peer institutions in these key areas of faculty pay, teaching-assistant stipends and class size.

Jen Daum, the student body president who co-chairs the task force with Shelton, said the consensus among students she has talked with is that additional tuition revenues should be directed to raise salaries of the best faculty members in order to keep them from leaving. On the other hand, students are against the idea of using money to increase the number of positions, she said. That is money the N.C. General Assembly should make available.

Last year, for example, within the College of Arts and Sciences alone, 80 faculy members

received outside job offers. Of these, about half of them left. Having a bigger pot of money available to fend off such outside offers could increase that ratio, task force members believe.

The $300 campus-based tuition increase that went into effect this year generated $6 million, of which $1.8 million was used for faculty pay raises, Shelton said.

Deans and department chairs parceled out raises as they saw fit, but the average raise for faculty this year will be 1.2 percent, Shelton said.

That's not much, Shelton said, but the symbolic value of the raise may count for more than the actual money faculty members received. Without the tuition increase, faculty would have received no raises.

The tuition revenues also generated $1.4 million to pay for 14 new positions -- 11 in Academic Affairs, three in Health Affairs, Shelton said. Finally, $390,000 of tuition revenues was used to improve teaching assistants' salaries.

This money represented only 60 percent of the total revenues generated because 40 percent was set aside for student need-based financial aid.

Steve Matson, chair of the biology department, stressed the importance of raising stipends for graduate students in order to attract and keep the best of them. Many biology professors, he said, would be willing to forego raises for themselves to make a significant difference in stipends for their graduate students.

"We are not competitive -- and we are not competitive by a lot," Matson said.

Nancy Suttenfield, vice chancellor for finance and administration, added a new wrinkle to the discussion: the possibility of using some of the tuition revenues to offer staff pay raises.

"Could that or should that be a part of the discussion?" Suttenfield asked. She noted that all staff employees will receive no pay increase this year after getting only a flat $625 pay raise a year ago.

A day later, at the Oct. 11 Faculty Council meeting, Chancellor James Moeser echoed those same concerns about staff pay and said getting the state legislature to address the issue would be one of his highest priorities next year.

Moeser asks Broad to remember staff

Chancellor James Moeser has sent a letter to UNC President Molly Corbett Broad urging that her office push for better salaries for UNC system employees.

The Oct. 7 letter comes against the backdrop of no raises this year for Carolina employees and just a $625 increase from the state last year. Moeser also sent the letter to the chancellors of other UNC system schools.

"As we consider the expansion budget, I believe that we need to make a strong statement with regard to salary increases not only for our faculty, but for the staff as well," Moeser wrote. "I'm increasingly concerned about the decreasing morale of our staff, who have now faced essentially no salary increases for the last two years, while their health insurance and other out-of-pocket costs continue to grow."

While recognizing that salary increase recommendations for SPA employees are handled outside the expansion budget, Moeser wrote that "it is critical for the (UNC system) to make a strong statement that salary increases for staff must track that which we provide for our faculty.

"Otherwise, I fear we create a divided culture within the (UNC system), and one that will not be to our benefit."

Moeser also wrote that the he does not believe the system can successfully argue for giving UNC schools more management flexibility "without at the same time making an equally passionate argument for appropriate salary support for our staff."

Tommy Griffin, chair of Employee Forum, called Moeser's action "great news."

"I know that (Moeser) cares a lot for all the people on campus, but to put it into writing really means so many things," Griffin said. "He knows that the staff are working below market value and our benefits have taken a downward plunge in the last few years.

"When you see such a letter of this magnitude, you know that we are being heard and that people in high places do care about the staff and their needs. The more interaction that I have with the chancellor, the more I know he really cares about the staff and their needs."

Council to discuss raising staff funds

The Faculty Council plans to discuss at its next meeting, Nov. 1, whether Carolina faculty members might raise money to help supplement salaries of University staff employees, Faculty Chair Sue Estroff said.

Estroff said the council will take up the issue in recognition of the state giving no pay raises this year.

MyUNC to feature customized
web pages

How would you like your computer to bring you the information you want and give it to you in one place?

That vision is already possible at Carolina, thanks to a project called "MyUNC" being developed by a broad range of campus units. Now in a pilot phase, MyUNC lets faculty, staff and students have their own Internet "portal," which users can fill with links to what they want to know, be it last night's box scores or next week's weather forecast.

And because users log in with their ONYEN, the portal recognizes their Carolina affiliation -- faculty, staff or student -- and automatically provides tabs that takes users to information that's particularly relevant to them. Students, for example, can go to their class schedule; faculty and staff can find the latest news from Human Resources about personnel benefits.

The idea is to pull together information from both on and off campus that is customized to match the user's interests, then package it in a single, easy-to-navigate location, said Lori Casile, director of special projects for Information Technology Services.

Based on feedback so far, it seems to be working.

"THIS IS GREAT!!" a student wrote in an e-mail message. "This page pops information up that I would otherwise have to go all over to get! I can find my books loaned out and get my grades, etc. all in the same site! What a time saver!"

Another benefit students already have reaped from MyUNC is the ability to use the portal to order textbooks from the University bookstore.

Project designers encourage employees and students to try out MyUNC during the pilot phase by logging on at my.unc.edu and creating their portal. The portal includes a feedback form that people can use to let project designers know what they think of MyUNC. Feedback also can be sent to uncportal@unc.edu.

"This is a service for employees and students, so we want to hear from them about what improvements we can make to best fit their needs," Casile said.

Along with giving people the chance to try out MyUNC, the project's pilot phase is providing Carolina units the chance to become content providers for portals. Content providers are especially needed for items of employee interest.

"Our focus has been on getting the student side under way, and as a result our content for faculty and staff is relatively light," she said. "We really want to beef it up."

According to project designers, it's easy for units to make their information available via a portal. The software that renders the portal can be programmed to "grab" information from an existing web page and display it as a "portlet," or portlets can be created specifically for MyUNC.

And the information can be made available to all MyUNC users or a targeted few. For example, an academic department may want the entire campus to know about its lecture series but only its majors to know about a deadline to enroll in a certain class.

"The beauty of this is that units can customize who gets their information in the same way that users can customize the information they get," Casile said.

During the pilot, any unit with content that it would like to have included in MyUNC should contact uncportal@unc.edu. Campus technicians implementing the project will then train groups on "portalizing" their content.

Work on MyUNC started in 2001, and the project got a boost with a Distance Education Steering Committee grant from the provost's office. A broad range of Carolina units have lent their expertise to the effort. Along with Information Technology Services, campus libraries as well as a number of academic and administrative departments have been involved, and an advisory committee of faculty, staff and students has helped guide the work.

Planners wanted campuswide participation in MyUNC to make sure that the project was driven as much by the content users want in front of them as the technology found behind it.

"It really has been a collaboration, and I think we have a better service as a result," Casile said. "We've learned a lot from each other -- it was really great to see the light bulbs going off in people's heads as they shared ideas and showed each other different ways to do things."

Planners hope that the teamwork that went into developing MyUNC will become a model for future projects.

Carbon copies evolved into best-selling fixture in American, British literature

When William Harmon, James G. Hanes professor in the humanities, decides that he -- and the world -- need a new word, he doesn't run to the dictionary or thesaurus as most people do.

He just makes one up. Outrageous? Maybe so, but at one time or another, someone had to make up every word in the English language. And in every other language ever spoken or written on the planet too.

Besides, as a poet, Harmon has a bona fide poetic license to do whatever he wants with words. And as longtime editor of the best-selling "A Handbook to Literature," who's going to stop him?

Prentice Hall recently published the ninth edition of his handbook, which over 66 years has become a fixture not only in libraries around the globe but also in the personal collections of countless serious students and professors of British and American literature. Various earlier editions have sold more than 1.5 million copies.

"As far as we know, this book started out in the early 1930s as a mimeographed or carbon-copied item in the English Department at UNC," Harmon said. "That was because the faculty believed undergraduates, and graduate students especially, arrived at the University without much background in the particulars of grammar, versification, rhetoric and so forth."

That handout became so popular with both instructors and students that English professors William F. Thrall and Addison Hibbard published it as a book in 1936. Since then, first C. Hugh Holman and later his friend and colleague Harmon edited subsequent editions. The latter has been the sole editor of editions five through nine and is now working on the 10th.

The book -- a dictionary of literary terms -- has never been out of print. It covers the word waterfront, so to speak, from Ireland's "Abbey Theatre" to filmmakers' "zoom shot" with more than 2,000 stops along the way. Want to know about accents, braggadocio, chanteys, doggerel, existentialism, iambic pentameter, pulp magazines, rhymes, romanticism, yellow journalism or zeugmas? They're all included. Other popular features are complete lists of Nobel Prizes for literature and Pulitzer Prizes for fiction, poetry and drama. Amazon.com reviewers consistently give the handbook five stars.

"Like my predecessors, every time I've had a pass at it, I've enlarged it with terminology people might find interesting -- including words from printing, bookselling, newspapers, computers and the like," Harmon said. "If a term conceivably relates to something someone possibly could want to know about, I have left it in. A few I have dropped over the years."

Harmon said working on the book has not just been a mechanical academic exercise some would see as drudgery. It also has been a surprisingly creative effort.

"I've published books of poetry, and this is about as much fun as a matter of expression and creativity as anything," he said. "Even my family has been closely involved. My daughter Sally has been an editorial assistant since her pre-teen years and also, I'm proud to say, furnished the jacket design for the ninth edition. My son Will, who is 28 now, has helped out with it since he was 11 years old."

Sally Harmon also contributed many of the terms related to graphic arts, video and the Internet. His wife Anne helped enormously as a reader and sounding board.

One of the included definitions is for "Hobson-Jobson," a term Will discovered to describe the process of transforming less familiar foreign terms such as the German "Tannenbaum" in the Christmas song into something more familiar such as "atomic bomb." Another example of such was playwright Tennessee Williams having one of his characters in "The Glass Menagerie" convert the medical term pleurosis" into "blue roses."

Among words Harmon coined are "hieronymy" and poikilomorphism." The former is the idea of sacred names and naming, while the latter refers to rare cases of poets' preserving rhythm, meter and stanza length while changing the rhyme scheme from stanza to stanza.

He also gave a new meaning to the word "promotion," which results from a writer's assigning stress to a syllable in a song or poem that would normally go unstressed, such as the final syllable of the phrase "Sweet land of liberty."

Like the most famous English lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, who defined "lexicographer" in part as "a harmless drudge," the English professor tries when possible to give his definitions personality.

Consider, for example, the first half of his entry on "Byronism": "Even during his lifetime (1788-1824), Lord Byron provoked the coining of such terms as `Byronic,' `Byroniad' and `Byronism' -- all in recognition of his unique electricity. He was fabulously wealthy as well as fabulously handsome; he possessed extraordinary charm and wit; he was a genuine peer, a genuine patriot and a great sinner; he was a charismatic hero or villain -- and he was a literary genius of the first order.

Catching the first full tide of modern journalistic celebrity and publicity, he was capable of touching modesty and self-mockery.

He was -- or invented -- a model of the mysteriously brooding, bitter, vaguely northern loner, sexually polymorphous, reckless and doomed, and always dangerous."

Carolina forms research partnership with NCCU

The University will share in a $7.5 million grant that North Carolina Central University (NCCU) has received from the National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities (NCMHHD).

Intended to strengthen the infrastructure for research and training related to minority health concerns at the Julius L. Chambers Biomedical-Biotechnology Research Institute (BBRI) at NCCU, it marks the largest single research grant that university has ever received.

The grant will support research related to cardiovascular disease, drug abuse and addiction, and cancer. The institute will be expanding its research partnerships with Carolina's Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center as well as with Duke University Medical Center's Department of Human Genetics and Wake Forest University School of Medicine's Department of Pharmacology and Physiology.

This grant also will support the development of new grant research initiatives with the Department of Psychology at Carolina and the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at Duke.

The grant does not mark the first such collaboration between Carolina and NCCU. In July 2001, it was announced that the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center and BBRI had received a $2.5 million five-year partnership grant from the National Cancer Institute.

That grant was to be used to develop programs to promote collaborative research focusing on reducing the excessive minority cancer rates and deaths in North Carolina and to increase the number of minority scientists engaged in cancer research and other cancer-related activities.

NCCU and University scientists were to embark on a combined program aimed at population studies of the risk of prostate cancer in African-American men. Experts representing health education, epidemiology nutrition and genetics at both universities were to be involved.

University strives to meet HIPAA requirements

The University is making progress on complying with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), a federal law that includes provisions strengthening privacy and security of protected health information.

Developments in the past few weeks at Carolina include:

• Appointment of privacy and security officers for HIPAA implementation and compliance. Adrian Shelton, research compliance coordinator, and Joanna Carey Smith, associate University counsel, were appointed as co-privacy officers. Jeanne Smythe, director of computing policy for the Academic Technology and Networks, has been appointed security officer. Their duties involving HIPAA compliance will be in addition to their other responsibilities here.

• Creation of a University HIPAA project web site. The University's HIPAA effort will be aided by the development of a web site specifically for issues concerning the implementation of and compliance with HIPAA. The URL for the web site is www.unc.edu/hipaa/. This site is still being developed and will include more information as the University's efforts continue complying with HIPAA.

• Development of a HIPAA Policy & Procedures Manual. Carolina's HIPAA Implementation Committee is developing a Policy and Procedures Manual, which will assist campus schools and departments with the HIPAA compliance. The manual will address how patient health information is to be maintained and how it may be disclosed. Other areas covered by the manual include maintenance and accounting of patient information and training for employees that deal with these issues.

HIPAA was enacted in 1996, but many of its privacy measures will first become mandatory in April 2003. Compliance is a serious matter -- penalties for failing to do so range from fines of $100 to $250,000 per person per violation and/or imprisonment of up to 10 years.

At Carolina, HIPAA applies to health-care providers or anyone who -- as part of work being done on behalf of the University -- obtains protected health information from any health-care provider for research, fund raising, marketing or use other than health care.

According to Carolina staff working on HIPAA implementation, there has been some confusion concerning the School of Medicine's participation with HIPAA compliance. Because of its close association with the UNC Health Care System, the School of Medicine -- both clinical and research components -- is part of that system's HIPAA process and not part of the campus HIPAA process.