University Of California At Riverside

Bill T. Jones was dancing and talking at the same time, in a way that made everyone watch attentively. Later, he would say how much he wanted dance to have the power that poetry and politics have to change the world. But this Sunday-evening event was just the first in Jones' weeklong residency as the 1996 Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Riverside. For now, it was enough to get a taste of the personal charisma and ideas sparked by the artistic director of Bill T.

In the latest in a series of protests on college campuses after the passage of Proposition 209, about two dozen students took over UC Riverside's administration building Monday, chaining the doors from the inside and interrupting university business for six hours. Twenty students were arrested on suspicion of trespassing and failure to disperse and were released within hours, officials said.

In a sign of things to come, some UC Irvine students soon will share professors by teleconference with students at two other University of California campuses, officials said Monday. The universities at Irvine, Riverside and San Diego will offer a common program to teach the classics to graduate students who will share teachers in topics ranging from ancient art history to Latin prose.

Burroughs High senior center Suzy Babko made a commitment Wednesday to play basketball at UC Riverside, turning down offers from Cal State Northridge, Oregon, St. Mary's and Cal Poly Pomona. Babko averaged 15.0 points, 7.3 rebounds and 2.4 assists per game last season for the Indians. She was a second-team Times All-Valley selection. Alemany midfielder Tammy Alderman has verbally committed to play at Loyola Marymount.

Two months ago, the outlook appeared bleak for UC Riverside. Seven players had left the team for a variety of reasons and Coach John Masi was concerned about putting together a competitive squad. But things turned around with three consecutive victories in the California Collegiate Athletic Assn.

Before last Saturday's West Regional Division II cross-country championship, UC Riverside junior Danny Reed worried that he would not be able to run because of stomach flu. "I had to be real careful with what I ate because when it hit me on Thursday, I couldn't keep anything down," Reed said. "I felt a little better on Saturday, but I was still very, very weak. I ran because I didn't want to let my teammates down."

The next chancellor of UC Riverside will be Timothy P. White, a physiologist who has been president of the University of Idaho for the last four years, the UC Board of Regents announced Thursday. White, 58, emigrated as a child with his family from Argentina to Canada and later to California, where he earned degrees at Cal State Fresno and Hayward and then a doctorate at UC Berkeley. An expert in human bio-dynamics and aging, he taught at UC Berkeley and held administrative posts at Oregon State University.

Federal agents arrested a UC Riverside administrator Tuesday on suspicion of bribing a general contractor in charge of building the school's new psychology building, authorities said. Theodore Chiu, 53, of Riverside is accused of soliciting a $50,000 bribe from Irvine contractor FTR International Inc. last Halloween.

When it was time for Woodrow Curry to decide where to go to university, he had several choices. An African American with good high school grades and test scores, he was accepted by UC Berkeley, among other schools. But Berkeley is not where he ended up. Spurning one of the nation's premier public universities, he picked UC Riverside. Although Riverside is sometimes scorned as the lowliest of UC campuses, it offered Curry something that Berkeley did not: a place where he felt welcome.

A UC Riverside administrator was indicted Wednesday on federal charges of soliciting and receiving several bribes from the contractor in charge of constructing the university's psychology building. Theodore Chiu, 53, an associate director of the Office of Design and Construction, solicited a $50,000 bribe from Irvine contractor FTR International Inc. on Oct. 31, according to the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles.