Campaign contributions from Ithaca College donors
The New York Times has compiled an extensive database of individual campaign contributions on its Web site that’s easy to use and will divulge some pretty interesting stuff if you know where to look. You can search - by zip code - for any contribution of $200 or more donated by an individual.
So who’s donating in Ithaca? Ithaca College has very few politically generous folks, it seems: only three persons affiliated with the college have donated to a presidential campaign fund, according to the Times’ database.
They are:
- Adelaide Gomer, one-time member of the Ithaca College Board of Trustees and a current trustee of the Park Foundation - the philanthropic organization of the deceased, eponymous Roy H. Park, who funded the creation of the Park School of Communications. This organization also provides the money for the Park Scholars program. Ms. Gomer donated two separate sums of $2,300 to Democratic contender John Edwards’ campaign.
- Monica Anderson, a registered professor nurse at the Hammond Health Center. She donated $250 to Democratic contender Barack Obama’s campaign.
- James Rothenberg, an associate professor of sociology. He made five separate contributions of $100 to Democratic contender John Edwards’ campaign.
A notable Ithaca community donor was Michelle Berry, the alderperson of the city of Ithaca’s 2nd Ward, who’s stepping down next year. She’s been a very active opponent of the racial incidents in the Ithaca Central School District, and she was also Tompkins County’s Poet Laureate at one time. She’s also been an adjunct faculty member at Ithaca College before. Ms. Berry donated $250 to Democratic contender Barack Obama’s campaign. A number of professors and staff at Cornell University also donated money, but there are too many to list, so check out the database if you’re interested to learn more.
Overwhelmingly, donors in the 14850 zip code donated money to Barack Obama or John Edward’s campaign. Donations to Hillary Clinton came in a distant third.
Roundup: studying breakups, bad evangelicals, Australia
A research of love: It’s official, we have nothing left to research: a professor at the University of Arizona is studying how different language and word usage reflects a person’s ability to get over bad breakups.
While I think the idea of the study has merit, it seems like some of the findings are pretty obvious. A sampling:
- Women who cope poorly with a breakup tend to use more third person references like “him,” “her,” and “them.” They’re sooooo not over him.
- Women who have gotten over it “refer to their social networks more often.” Duh. They’ve got friends, they don’t need a boyfriend, damnit!
- And my personal favorite: Men in both categories used far more verbal non-fluencies, like “um” and “uh.” When do men not use the words “um” and “uh?” Um, actually we use them like uh, all the time.
Apparently the study will be used to help identify depressed college kids. Here’s my much simpler method: Play REM’s “Everybody Hurts” in a crowded room. Whoever starts tearing up by the second verse is obviously depressed. Now give them Wellbutrin. They will begin smiling immediately.
I want people to weigh in on this: what’s your favorite language to use when breaking up with someone? Is it the typical, “It’s not you, it’s me,” or is it the more obtuse, “I just need to be alone for awhile?”
A president abusing his power: The president of Oral Roberts University, an evangelical school, recently resigned after three former professors accused him of spending the university’s money on a $39,000 shopping spree for his wife, and a stable of horses for his children. The article quotes him denying all charges. Well, who wouldn’t? The twist to the story is that Richard Roberts, the resigning president, is the son of the university’s founder, the eponymous Oral Roberts. Well, Richard, good luck riding off into the sunset on one of the horses in that stable you bought for your kids. They must have been really good for Christmas.
“Sun, surf, and sex”: An Australian higher education research group says that the country’s universities (unis, in Aussie-speak) have been branded as more of a tourism destination for students studying abroad than an academic experience. This is so not true totally right on the mark. I studied very hard when I was in Australia, and almost didn’t have time to go to the beach or the campus pub, I was working so feverishly. Not. As the study says, there MAY have been a lot of “beer, beaches, sun, surf, and sex” on that trip. Well, not that much sex.
I think this picture sums up the quality of education in Australia pretty well: Everyone should go!
BREAKING: Stabbing at Moonshadows last night
From the thank-God-we’re-home-for-Thanksgiving -department: Last night a man was stabbed multiple times at Moonshadow Tavern on the Commons. It’s a college bar (popularly called “Moonies”) that’s usually packed with Ithaca College seniors vying for pitcher tokens and having a good time with friends.
But the good times weren’t rolling last night, apparently: the victim, a 28-year-old Groton man, was stabbed in the back while in one of the bathrooms. Although he was able to walk to the stretcher he was carried out on, reports said he was bleeding “profusely.”
Two guys fled the scene before the cops arrived, so it’s anyone’s guess who did it. I think I’m going to stick to Second Floor from now on. Good thing I used up my last free pitcher token before break. Enjoy your Thanksgiving, and please, nobody do anything stupid and get stabbed, alright?
Wait, you’re NOT allowed to drink beer in class?
In what’s being called a “pour decision” (Ed: not funny) Boston University has canceled an advertising class as it investigates whether students were allowed to drink beers in the class.
Apparently, one of the class assignments was to create and market an imaginary beer. College kids will be college kids, though, and they went ahead and brought samples of beer into class to drink to show how they would use it in their advertising campaign.
Personally, I’m gonna go ahead and say that this is probably making a Big F****** Deal out of nothing at all. Kids drink in class all the time. (Ed: administrators, he’s totally lying) But hey, maybe it was a slow news day.
And on that note, dear readers, please enjoy your Thanksgiving Break. And for all you kids who don’t get your precious vacation time just yet, drink a beer for me. In class.
(College Ave. thanks Andy at The Big Spoon for the tip)?
Journalism professor in the hot seat for … plagiarism?
Oh, the irony.
John Merrill, a professor emeritus at the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Journalism School, recently admitted to plagiarizing content from an article in the student publication The Maneater.
In his offending piece, Merrill copied several quotes verbatim from The Maneater’s article which he used to “spin off” his own column in the campus newspaper The Missourian about a new women’s studies department.
OK, so quote theft isn’t the most evil of sins. But it’s still wrong, and especially if you’re a JOURNALISM PROFESSOR. Come on now. Quoting someone you didn’t interview without a nod to whoever did do the interviewing falsely represents your article as a more well-researched piece.
But Prof. John isn’t off the hook; although he admitted that it was wrong and has apologized to the newspaper, they decided to yank his column as punishment. But that’s not nearly as bad as the scathing journalism scandal media coverage that I’m directly contributing to. His reputation is down the drain.
So what’s his take on this whole situation, you might ask? Well, he first reiterates that he’s been a journalist for 60 years without any other bad behavior, and then he attempts to philosophically explain that the word “plagiarism” has no meaning in a rebuttal column he was allowed to write. But at the end of the column, he just gets all pretentious and insults the author of the article he plagiarized.
Those who know me know that I would not steal anyone else?s writing. First of all, I know it?s wrong, and secondly, I feel my own writing is probably much better.
It’s hard to feel sympathetic for a professor who insults student writing, dontcha think? But I kind of feel bad for the guy; at 83, he probably doesn’t have too much time left to repair his reputation. However, he has said he does plan on writing a book about plagiarism. Well, sir, in that case: I — and the rest of the journalism universe — look forward to checking your opus for plagiarized language.
(Full disclosure: I took the quotes used in this blog post from Prof. Merrill’s column. I was alerted to it via Jim Romenesko’s media blog. See? Not so hard.)
Roundup: Under Fire Edition
Presidents not doing so hot: Lee C. Bollinger and Richard Roberts, of Columbia University and Oral Roberts University, respectively, are not doing well by the eyes of the faculty they lead. For Bollinger, more than 100 faculty members signed a statement of concern raising issues with the way he’s running the school and that Iranian visit from September. Roberts had the faculty raise a vote of no-confidence ? especially troubling since he went on leave last month and is being accused of using the school’s money for political gain and gifts for his family. There’s also a dean at Washington University in St. Louis who the faculty is looking to remove.
More about presidents and their money: The Chronicle’s annual report on presidential salaries (”Executive Compensation”) is out, and it shows increases are bigger for the larger institutions. The median salary is above $500,000 for those at large, research institutions, and troublingly low sums for community college presidents. Again you may get rebuffed by the pay wall, but it’s worth it to make comparisons between different colleges.
As for Ithaca? Peggy R. Williams makes $254,040, and benefits raise the total compensation near $300K ($291,195). In comparison, the top earner, Boca Raton, Fla. Lynn University president Donald E. Ross makes more than $5.5 million, and Williams is nestled between presidents from Manhattanville College and Molloy College. Fun fact: Molloy College is running their own capital campaign! Their goal is much more modest, only between $7 and $10 million.
Trolling elsewhere? Treasure Troll, the former Ithaca OTR blogger is out. It was his decision to go after the mess I started, and it appears a lot of what I linked to is now dust in the wind. I hope he’s moving over to Buzzsaw’s blog, which covers an interesting array of topics but has been MIA for a while.
Congress throws money at the piracy problem
At first glance, the The College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007 seems like a pretty good thing. And don’t get me wrong, it is. Mostly.
The 747-page bill (a much quicker summary here) is intended to make college cheaper by streamlining the FAFSA process, keeping student lending practices honest, and creating more need-based aid. It also provides incentives to colleges to keep down costs, makes a half-hearted attempt to make books cheaper (try Half.com instead) and plans to forgive $5,000 in loans to students who enter public service jobs (Here’s to wishing that protecting democracy journalism was considered a public service). It’ll also provide money to help disabled students go to college and in case of a disaster will provide money for schools to rebuild.
So, all in all, sounds just peachy, right? Well, not if you read between the lines, or more specifically, just pages 411-412. Practically buried in Congressional jargon and verbosity is a lovely little section entitled CAMPUS-BASED DIGITAL THEFT PREVENTION.
Essentially, any college or university accepting any money under the auspices of the bill must:
“develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity.?
It also authorizes the Education department to offer all-purpose, monetary grants (read: free cash) to colleges who pledge to “eliminate the illegal downloading and distribution of intellectual property? on campuses through the use of technology and other policing methods.
Well, the stick didn’t work, so now they’re trying the carrot, I guess. But this bill, with its promise of easy money, could potentially pit colleges (or their internet providers) against students illegally downloading music and movies, when in reality, it’s not their job to hunt down students trying to grab “Crank Dat” off LimeWire.
Guess who’s loving this, though: the people whose job it is to police illegal downloading. Here’s an adoring statement from the MPAA:
?The MPAA commends Chairman Miller for taking this step to protect intellectual property on college campuses,? said MPAA Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman. ?Intellectual property theft is a worldwide problem that hurts our economy and costs more than 140,000 American jobs every year. We are pleased to see that Congress is taking this step to help keep our economy strong by protecting copyrighted material on college campuses.?
Oh, and while researching this, I found a funny little thing on the RIAA’s homepage: featured prominently in the menu on the side of the site is a link called: “For Students Doing Reports.“
Apparently they get so overwhelmed with questions from college students writing research papers about downloading music illegally — while probably simultaneously downloading the top 500 rock songs of all times off Bittorrent — that they’ve put together a special page summarizing their views on music piracy for those adorable little college kids who just want to learn more about the enemy, essentially.
Thanks for being interested in the music industry and our positions on various issues. We get many requests from students and others for information for papers and other research needs.
So what are its views on illegally downloading copyrighted materials, you ask? PIRACY: BAD. PAYING US: GOOD.
Sounds like a great start for a research paper to me.
The trouble with blogging anonymity
There’s this new “network” of student-written blogs about campus. Called College OTR (too cool to spell out On-The-Record, or just figure people wouldn’t write it out), it allows students to blog about their campus. They have more than 30 colleges as part of their network, ranging from the Ivies to big schools like Penn State, and schools that have rich students, like us.
The feel of the site is very wannabe-Gawker media, except for students who don’t necessarily know they aren’t snarky. There are tons of problems with this model, mainly stemming from a lack of control over who’s writing. They allow not just anonymous comments, but anonymous bloggers too. In fact, I was alerted ? via our campus OTR, “Ithaca OTR” ? that a student at the University of Michigan was forced from his post at the Michigan Daily because of his anonymous blogging on the site.
As a sidenote: If you’ve never heard College OTR, it makes sense. We only have one person on our campus blogging there (good news: you can join, too!).
But oh that one blogger.
I’ve been reading Ithaca OTR for a couple of weeks; it got on my radar during the Dean Lynch thing. Going by the handle Treasure Troll, the blogger wrote scathing reviews of some Ithacan articles, the Ithaca Cheesesteak Emporium, and worked some snark on our fabled Intercom Roundups. My thought was that I’d let yipping dogs lie ? despite him calling The Ithacan’s blogs “lame” ? and hoped it would kind of blow over.
I was also hoping someone would get to the bottom of this and identify the blogger. There were some clues about who it could be ? someone obsessed with Park (writing about and putting down the dean) ? but no leads.
Well, he’s been identified. An anonymous commenter posted identifying information about the blogger on his own blog ? the gall! ? and forced him to come out. Who is it? Senior Mike Berlin. Don’t know him? He’s an editor at Buzzsaw Haircut and (perhaps more importantly) Fuse, the propaganda prospective student quarterly.
So here’s the thing. I don’t really care that he bashed The Ithacan. It comes with the territory. My immediate thought was this: Will he continue to cut down everybody? Or is it all about to get really tame?
High-profile anonymous bloggers have been unmasked before. Most famously, Fake Steve Jobs turned out to be a Forbes reporter, and in the case of Fake Steve, he keeps on rolling despite everybody knowing the true persona. That’s gutsy, but not everybody can do that.
Can Berlin do it? It looks already like he’s lost his bite. He avidly promoted Buzzsaw, and probably wants to keep that gig with Fuse.
Oh, and as for Berlin being recognized at some party? I was there; my sources tell me it was nobody special, just some lame blogger.
Oberlin College paying students to poop
THIS JUST IN: Oberlin’s environmental studies program is sponsoring a pooping project. It’s called the Low on Cash, High in Fiber Bash. As long as you poop in the environmental studies building, you can get 25 cents per poop until the end of the week! Awesome!
Words just plain escape me when I read things like this. These are your tuition dollars at work, Oberlin students.
In case you don’t believe me:
Summary: Poop in the Adam Joseph Lewis Center toilets anytime between Saturday, November 10 and Friday, November 16 and sign up to receive a quarter per poop.
Of course, this whole thing brings up lots of hazy ethical questions. How will the environmental studies program know if you’ve truly pooped or not? Is there a limit on how many times you can poop in a day? Does size matter? If you clog the toilet, do you get like, $1 instead?
And, maybe mostly importantly, what’s the point all of this? I mean, if making a point about sustainability is your goal, why not make everyone poop in a big compost heap and then use that to fertilize your garden or something. Wouldn’t that be more, I don’t know, environmentally-sound gross?
(via Gawker)
Roundup: Oops! edition
Suing a master: So MIT is suing Frank Gehry, claiming flaws in the $300 million Stata Center have caused mold to grow, allows snow to block emergency exits, and injures small children invites leaks. I’ve never seen this except in pictures, and while it looks pretty beautiful to me, it’s also fairly obvious that there could be some design issues that might cause things like leaks and the dropping of snow (Globe architect critic Robert Campbell echoes these thoughts). Boston University president emeritus John Silber, who’s quoted in the article calling the building “a disaster,” wrote a book about how much he hates it … and maybe Gehry too? ? “Architecture of the Absurd: How ‘Genius’ Disfigured a Practical Art.”
On one of the Chronicle’s blogs, there’s a comment from an MIT faculty member who is enamored with the building despite its flaws. And there is also concern from architects about what good suing an architect will do. The article in The Chronicle (behind the pay wall) also brings up the classic debate of boring yet functional vs. inspirational but problematic. (I’d say hello, anybody ever hear of Louis I. Kahn? Beautiful yet functional.)
On this campus I’d say we have a bit of a bias towards boring buildings, or maybe just ugly buildings. I think it’s starting to change with this new business school (that I’m personally coining Dotty Hall) and maybe the fieldhouse Athletics and Events Center.
So about saving Antioch… Some of the alumni are not too happy about that deal they struck the other day to “save” Antioch College. In a not-so-surprising move, alumni are claiming (Chronicle ? watch that pay wall) the Board of Trustees made out like a bandit with their vague wording. It sounds like the alumni were hoping there’d be some changes and a lot more control than they are getting, particularly in a new governing board. So they’ll sit on their money until they see something real happen. Makes sense to me.
Oh, and apparently Antioch is using some of the money to repay other universities in their system instead of making the college better? So they’re not happy about that either.
Average Sophomore = DRUNKEN MESS: No comment.
Your turn to Oops! This is completely unrelated to the previous briefs or higher education in general ? except for maybe higher-order thinking ? but a new collaborative weather site has been launched. It’s called cumul.us, and it lets you predict the weather. Very neat concept. I’m thinking about joining it (what’s yet another social network when Facebook is shilling you out?), and if you’re from Ithaca here’s the link ? but you should be able to change it wherever you are.
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