Roundup: Get your Atkind gear while it’s hot!

PrincessGate will never get old: Thanks to the magic of Internet?, jokes can turn from a simple news article to a a blogpost (complete with anti-Semetic jokes/prison rape jokes abound) to an ironic T-shirt quicker than you can say “Duke Lacrosse Witch Hunt.” My personal favorites from the “store”: the terrorist pack of playing cards featuring cute puppies instead of dictators (oh no! not Precious!) and the Atkind/Cheney ‘08 ticket tossed in for good measure. I guess torture is torture is torture. [Thanks, Cornell Justice!]

Tough noogies: You go to a college that costs almost $40K, and you just got slapped by the RIAA. What are you going to do now? Complain to the dean, apparently, and Ithaca College’s Dean Dianne Lynch has little to no sympathy for you. She basically told them to cough up the $3,000 bucks to avoid facing litigation at the price of $750 per song and an less-than-clean criminal record. Sure it’s a publcity stunt ? I’d call it slow-motion mugging ? but she says the alternatives (like, gulp, trying to apply for a job with a record) are worse. Commenters are taking her to task, incorrectly, about the lack of protection other schools give their students. Maybe we should add a legal primer class to the majors?

Roundup: Meet the new boss

Score for press freedom: College Publisher, the way most people read most (but not, ahem, all) college newspapers, backed down on a little-known and never-enforced clause in their contract. In exchange for providing newspapers with the back-end management of their website, the students were barred from writing disparaging remarked about College Publisher and its owner (drumroll, please!), Viacom, the owner of pretty much any channel a college student would watch. Ka Leo, the student daily out of University of Hawaii at Manoa, refused to sign their CP contract based on those grounds, and College Publisher relented. Now if only college presidents would get off our backs. [Via The Wired Campus]

A man of his word: New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is filing a suit against Education Finance Partners, claiming those kickbacks he promised earlier are real. What I found most interesting was Texas Christian University using the old those-aren’t-kickbacks-those-are-like-scholarships-for-students routine. A likely story, you silly horned frogs.

bilde.jpgPrincessGate update: America’s favorite dog torturer, Alex Atkind, will face felony charges of aggravated cruelty to animals if Tompkins County DA Gwen Wilkinson gets her wish. His bond, set at a princely $20K, is bad enough, but being quoted as pleading to your mom “Get me out. Get me out. Today.” can’t help his case here. Especially not with the commenters on Elliott Back’s blog. Prison rape jokes? Sheesh.

Less like a blog, more like a bathroom stall

When you work for a college newspaper or write for a blog, you’re practically begging for junk email. I got ? and promptly trashed ? one last week telling me about LoudCampus.com. The site was launched and certainly looks and smells like Web 2.0: bright colors, oversized text, gradients, tiny and unreadable icons, and of course social networking.

Since Loud Campus content can only be written by students at your school, you know that the content is 100% real… real students… real discussions… real reviews.

What they don’t say is that the discussions can also be anonymous, which leads to some interesting comments. On their blog, Loud Campus says anonmity keeps things “vibrant,” but it also keeps things more raw and potentially libelous. Sample sparkling-dinner-style discussions include:

Now, far be it from

You’ll have to pry this Dave Matthews discography from my cold, dead hands

riaa.GIFWell, it was bound to happen. The RIAA finally sent out over 400 of their latest round of “pre-litigation settlement” letters, and 20 of them were lucky enough to hit Ithaca College. Both the Mothership and the Ithaca Journal have some information, but Dave Maley, the associate director of media relations, is keeping mum on the who, when and where for now. The Journal also is smart to point out that it could be either students or staff, which makes things a little more interesting.

We’re in good company: heavy hitters like Boston, Columbia, Dartmouth, Purdue, uh… Drexel? The University of Wisconsin-Madison already said it wouldn’t act as the lackeys for them, but the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has a different problem: they have no idea where to send the letters. Their system resets the IP address ? the only way the RIAA knows their John/Jane Does ? every time the computer logs on, and the records are only kept for a month. The RIAA is not amused, but unless they can magically pluck the remaining 27 swashbuckling students, Nebraska says they can’t help.

Beat a dog, get google-bombed?

bilde.jpgDisgusting news out of Cornell: Alexander H. Atkind, mugshot at right, allegedly beat his roommate’s dog Princess, poured bleach and laundry detergent into her eyes and exposed skull and burned cigarettes into her back. All of that over some chewed up speaker wire. He ended up being arrested for drug possession in a neighboring county, but he had already admitted to his roommate that he had attacked the poor pooch but claimed that Princess was fine. After watching this video, I can’t imagine how he would think that she was fine. The university is outraged but also says since the incident happened off-campus, they can’t talk about him at all.

Of course, he also was “cocky and arrogant” and said he was above the law and he’d torture the dog again ? statements he made, of course, in the presence of his lawyer. He went on about an ACD (adjournment in contemplation of dismissal ? legalspeak for I’m-important-so-I-don’t-get-in-trouble), which seems to have drew the most ire from AutoAdmit.com, a message board for law students, since everyone in those posts were sure to spell out his whole name comma dog torturer. Hooray for Googlebombs?

Let’s, just for a moment here, think about what happens to a guy like this. The story about the abuse ran in the Ithaca Journal on March 16. Cornell blogger Elliot Back picks up on the story that night and pulls up his Facebook profile (birthday: August 31, 1983), his Cornell directory information (cell phone is a 617 number), and jabs at him for:

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Round-up: Making college loan-free

(Sorry for the spring break hiatus; College Ave. is back to work. Send any tips to collegeaveblog@gmail.com.)

debt.jpgEasing the costs: Davidson College, a small liberal arts in South Carolina, made a step towards making college debt-free. Starting next year, any student who qualifies for need-based aid will receive a financial aid package with part-time work studies and grant money ? no student loans. While they aren’t the first (there are about a dozen other schools nationwide), it is encouraging to students and their parents who skip over Davidson and its $40K+ sticker price. (Ithaca College: I’m looking at you.)

Battle royale: New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo issued a scathing press release accusing banks and universities in being in “an unholy alliance” over student loans:

The financial arrangements between lenders and these schools are filled with the potential for conflicts of interest. In some cases they may break the law.

The offenses he’s found run the gamut of corruption: kickbacks for loans, slush fund junkets, credit lines for colleges to get the “preferred” stamp of approval, etc. Dallas Martin, the president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, fired back, claiming that no one in the NASFAA takes bribes or any other shady practices. Martin also chides Cuomo for trying to “inflame rather than to inform? and asked for a formal apology. [Via InsideHigherEd]

Harboring pirates? The RIAA ranked the major universities with the naughty, naughty students downloading the latest Nelly Furtado album, but number 10 on the list, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, decided not to send out the scare tactic settlement letter from RIAA over students on their campus downloading music illegally. They did, however, send out a hey-guys-cut-it-out email to everyone hoping that would be enough to stop the major offenders in addition to the (compulsory) cease-and-desist letters. Anything is better than directing them to the settlement website to cash out; some of those settlements have hit $7,000 smackeroos. Maybe they could get Ruckus and be done with it.