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Seven Days

Wednesday, June 13
Embattled UT administrator Pamela Reed resigns, even as newspaper reports carry extensive excerpts of her email correspondence with former UT President J. Wade Gilley—including several in which she proclaims her love for him. The whole queasy spectacle kind of makes you glad Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings lived in the days before the Internet.

Thursday, June 14
City Council approves Mayor Victor Ashe's new plan for Market Square. The first step: scrap the old new plan for Market Square, which Ashe presented to Council three years ago and has sat on ever since. As Dave Kenny* likes to say, "Now that's govertainment!"
*See Gamut story.

Friday, June 15
TVA officials reprimand 17 employees for running software on their screen-savers that helps process information for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project. Hey, if you worked for TVA bureaucrats, you'd be desperately searching for signs of intelligence too.

Monday, June 18
The History Channel's Great Race brings droves of drivers to Knoxville behind the wheels of classic automobiles. Sadly, it all turns tragic when one of the old cars parks in Fort Sanders and is promptly bulldozed and replaced with a shiny new Kia SUV.
On a serious note, Powell High School principal Vicki Dunaway died early this morning of cancer at the age of 51. She was a tough and smart administrator (as Powell High's first female principal in recent memory would have to be) with a rare and genuine enthusiasm for education and for her students. It is a loss to the entire community.

Tuesday, June 19
After four weeks of intense negotiations in the state Legislature on solving Tennessee's revenue problem, nothing happens. "There is no plan. There's nothing out there," says state Sen. Jerry Cooper. Maybe they should call those extraterrestrial intelligence guys from TVA.

Knoxville Found

(Click photo for larger image)

What is this? Every week in "Knoxville Found," we'll print the photo of a local curiosity. If you're the first person to correctly identify this oddity, you'll win a special prize plucked from the desk of the editor (keep in mind that the editor hasn't cleaned his desk in five years). E-mail your guesses, or send 'em to "Knoxville Found" c/o Metro Pulse, 505 Market St., Suite 300, Knoxville, TN 37902.

Last Week's Photo:
Memories are made of this, apparently—dozens of respondents correctly identified the old Park Theater on Magnolia Avenue. Some remembered going there as children. Others remembered its later days as the Studio One. Still others knew it only in its later incarnation as a carpet store. Most recently, it housed the Knoxville Gore-Lieberman campaign headquarters. Now, it appears to be completely empty. But if you stand there and close your eyes, you might hear the whisper of voices from the silver screen and catch the smell of fresh buttered popcorn in the air. The first right answer came from our esteemed colleague to the north, Halls Shopper majordomo Sandra Clark. We were hard pressed to settle on a prize for the H.L. Mencken of the Crossroads community—after all, what do you give someone who already has Halls? But we settled on some genuine plastic toy law enforcement badges. Like it or not, Sandra, you're now a Metro Pulse deputy.

Meet Your City
A calendar of upcoming public meetings you should attend

KNOXVILLE CITY COUNCIL
Thursday, June 21
noon
Duff Field
1.3 miles south of the Henley Bridge on Chapman Highway
Council will vote on Mayor Victor Ashe's proposal for up to $25,000 for improvements to Duff Field.

Knox County Election Commission
Thursday, June 21
4:30 p.m.
Knox County Courthouse
300 Main St.
The Election Commission is scheduled to vote on the certification of qualifying petitions for the city's Sept. 25 primary elections. June 21 is the qualifying deadline.

KNOX COUNTY COMMISSION
Monday, June 25
2 p.m.
City County Building
400 Main St.
Commissioners are expected to vote on two preliminary steps in the Universe Knoxville process: the format for the board of directors of the non-profit corporation that would oversee the planetarium project, and whether to require a county-wide referendum before approving the county's participation.

KNOXVILLE CITY COUNCIL
Tuesday, June 26
7 p.m.
City County Building
400 Main St.
Council is scheduled to vote on a resolution that would create a partnership between the city and the Knox County Development Corp. to further redevelop the former Coster Shop property.

After the Fall

Centers of Excellence on track at UT

J. Wade Gilley is gone, but the Centers of Excellence initiative he set in motion at UT still has momentum.

The university has just selected 15 new "small" centers (from among 67 proposals submitted) for funding in the six-figure range to complement the nine multi-million dollar "large" centers that were picked last fall. In sharp contrast with the large centers, the buzz words "bio" and "tech" don't appear in any of the small center plans, which are mostly in the humanities and the social or physical science fields.

Total funding of $3.6 million for the 15 newly selected centers falls far short of the $20 million that Gilley had been heralding earlier this year. But Acting Vice Provost Anne Mayhew, who served on the selection committee, says, "By the time we got around to working on this we were told we might have up to $5 million derived from streamlining. But then other costs, such as heating bills, were going up which cut into it."

The two proposals that drew the most funding, at $500,000 each, are an interdisciplinary study of global environmental change and equipment to support the study of archeometry and geochronology. The faculty member involved in both of them (along with different collaborators) is Claudia Mora, associate professor of geology.

The study of global environmental change will concentrate, in academic parlance, on "fundamental, cross-disciplinary research that will address environmental change and its consequences for people and our planet, on local to global scales, across the modern landscape and through geological time."

Archaeometry is the study of the materials and composition of ancient artifacts, sediments, etc. Geochronology refers to a body of physical/chemical techniques for determining the absolute ages of various organic and inorganic substances.

Among the other proposals selected for funding are:

Initiatives in computational ecology that assertedly "will help UT become foremost in the nation in this field." The initiator is Louis Gross, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, who has developed modeling methods for analyzing the impacts of human actions on ecosystems. Most of his $300,000 allotment will go for post-doctoral fellows to support his research which is presently focused on the Everglades and the Smoky Mountains.

Medieval and Renaissance studies that build on UT's claim to be "one of the few universities in the world to offer a full undergraduate program in medieval studies." English faculty members Laura Howes and Robert Stillman and historian Thomas Burman are spearheading the effort to incorporate Renaissance studies into this interdisciplinary program, for which $225,000 has been provided.

A digital library that would include acquisition of digital collections, digitizing of unique research materials and facilitating integration of digital resources into core teaching and learning—all to the tune of $431,500.

The now notorious Center for Law, Medicine and Technology whose $400,000 budget may be headed for termination along with its ousted director Pamela Reed was not among the 67 proposals submitted for selection as Centers of Excellence. "We never saw that proposal and had nothing to do with it," says Mayhew. Lamentably, the selection process is tainted by the fact that someone else did.

—Joe Sullivan

Beyond the Bush Leagues

Drinks with dinner move out to the sidewalk cafe

Without incident, Macleod's restaurant received permission to use the space in front of its downtown location for public dining (translation: serving drinks) at last Tuesday's City Council meeting. Though not indicative of a sea change, the Macleod's agreement was at least a sign of shifting currents in the city's attitude toward public consumption of alcoholic beverages.

"It'll be a tremendous boost for us, now that people can sit outside and drink," says Hershal Earls, proprietor of the successful little year-old pub adjacent to Market Square. The agreement grants the restaurant an easement along the sidewalk at Union and Market, contingent upon the establishment's demarcating the area with a rectangular fence and leaving at least five feet of pedestrian walking space between barrier and street.

But local attitudes toward such service weren't always so progressive. It was only recently that such easements have been considered, and Macleod's is the first establishment to avail themselves of the privilege along a city street. Near-neighbor the Tomato Head obtained a special beer permit for outdoor serving on city property in 1997, but that restaurant is located on Market Square.

The first steps were shaky ones. Tomato Head experienced some resistance when owner Mahasti Vafaie pushed for her easement in 1997. And more recently, the establishment was warned by police when patrons of the restaurant carried beers onto Market Square during Thursday night Sundown in the City concert events; although other beer is sold legally on the square those nights, the restaurant's permit is considered a separate contract, thereby disallowing the "intermixing" of the square's official Budweiser by-the-cup sales and the Head's domestic and import bottles, which admittedly present a glass hazard.

One area business owner says such zealous enforcement reflects the city's "regressive" attitude towards the issue and downtown renaissance as a whole. "We don't have a clue."

But the easement agreements do explicitly place the burden of enforcement squarely upon the shoulders of the business owners. ("The Lessee shall ensure that beer or alcoholic beverages served in the sidewalk dining area are not removed from the premises by patrons.") And at least for now, the prospects look just a little bit brighter for restaurant owners who wish to lure downtown traffic with the heady promise of beer and breeze on a warm summer night.

—Mike Gibson