Court throws out NYU Jell-o wrestling lawsuit
I thought the absurdities of our litigious society had finally played out after that lady who spilled hot coffee on herself sued McDonald’s. Thankfully I was so awesomely wrong, as this story proves.
In 2004, junior Avram Wisnia and his New York University dorm mates held a “Beach Bash” party. During the Jell-o wrestling segment (is that really beach-themed, guys?) poor Avram “shattered” his hip, which until now was something I thought exclusively happened to old ladies.
In 2005, he sued NYU for 1 MILLION DOLLARS, claiming that the school should not have allowed them to put on the event, or provided the Jell-o. The court threw out his silly little lawsuit - which was probably just a slick attempt to pay off his loans - and NYU had the last laugh:
“This case broke the mold, but in the end, justice was served sweetly,” said a spokesman.
Roundup: Old News and Newspapers
Sorry about getting back here so late! I’ve been working on a magnum opus of sorts for this blog, but in the meantime here’s some journalism-slanted higher ed. coverage:
How do you say “journalistic freedom” in Dari? An Afghan journalism student was sentenced to death last week after publishing a blasphemous article about the Prophet Muhammad. He apparently got the article from the Internet (which, not to make light of the situation, is a pretty clear sign), and added to it with some words about the prophet’s ignorant stance on women’s rights. Good news, though: He can still appeal to the regional and Supreme Court.
Speaking of journalistic freedoms… It looks like our favorite media overlord company, Gannett, is looking into a “strategic partnership” between its paper, the Coloradoan, and the Rocky Mountain Collegian of Colorado State. This isn’t the first time Gannett has looked into student-published news; the FSView & Florida Flambeau, the student newspaper at Florida State University, and the Central Florida Future, of the University of Central Florida, were snatched up last year by Gannett.
You might remember the Collegian from the infamous “Tase This” editorial fiasco in September. So of course editor in chief J. David McSwane is pissed about the idea of a Gannett takeover!
“They knew what I was going to say: That the Collegian has been here for 117 years, and it’d be a disgrace to be sold to a media giant,” McSwane said. “[CSU President Larry Penley] has screwed up by not letting students and staff take part in this discussion.”
It’s hard to understand what Gannett wants in student newspapers, but considering the sky is falling for newspapers, maybe it sees something I don’t. I just hope The Ithaca Journal isn’t looking up this hill too hungrily.
And more newspaper news! This one is more recent, I promise. The Montclarion, the weekly student newspaper of Montclair State University, had its presses stopped this week by the student government, forcing it to quit publishing until further notice.
So the story goes like this: The student newspaper hired an attorney last January, and he later advised them to go after SGA regarding a violation of the New Jersey Open Public Meetings Act (they apparently meet closed-session). In December, SGA president Ron Chicken (no I am not making that up) fired the attorney, and froze funding for a few reasons, the largest of which appears to be getting correspondence between the attorney and the paper.
The rest of the reasons smell funny ? an “unauthorized hiring” that was done under the tenure of previous SGA president Angelo Lilla and actually using those funds to pay the attorney ? you can read them in this PDF letter. The best thing, though? MSU’s administration is just letting them figure it out! I guess they call those “teaching moments.”
To me it looks cut-and-dry: Chicken is pissed that he was criticized, and used a loophole to try to silence the paper. Thanks to the wonder of the Internet, they won’t be silent:
This week, the SGA (one of the policy-makers we keep a critical eye on) took that voice away from your campus. In this case, not only does the newspaper lose (our advertisers certainly won’t be happy when they find out), but also every single person affiliated with the campus loses. In the balance hang the liberties that many of us often take for granted: those freedoms of speech, expression, assembly and press.
And now that The Almighty New York Times has published an article, I expect to see those presses humming. Chicken should be ashamed.
Roundup: an anti-condom crusade, racist crazyman
A Condom-nation: Members of the University of South Carolina’s Residence Hall Assoc. spoke out recently about a plan to place condom vending machines (yet another revenue stream) in public dorm bathrooms.
Their argument against providing the birth control devices? It would look bad to “families, friends, and prospective students.” Sure, and so would a high rate of abortions and/or students dropping out due to unplanned pregnancies.
Don’t feed the crazies: A North Dakota man notorious for mass-mailing racist letters hit Notre Dame this week, filling the mailbox of every student in three dorms with a one page manifesto arguing that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites and should not be allowed to attend school.
Officials warned students to throw the letters away and ignore their hate-filled message, but explained that because they were legally mailed, the postal service was required to deliver them. Curiously, neither the newspaper nor the university would release the name of the man, who politely signed each one of the letters. That’s a poor decision, I think: a little bit of hate mail back his way might just be appropriate.
Roundup: Frat boy edition
Update: While the Yale frat guys with the “WE LOVE YALE SLUTS” sign are most certainly idiots, an attempt by the Women’s Center - in front of which they posed - to sue them for sexual harassment would be even dumber than what they did, according to a letter sent to the Yale Daily News.
“The day we start monitoring thought in this way is the day everything this country stands for dies,” the writer, John Loser (real name), says. More on this story as it develops.
Frat boy punches chick in the face: Yup, that’s all there is to it. A female student at the University of Utah was punched in the face during a party at the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity house. She approached her attacker “only 15 seconds earlier” to inquire about her missing cellphone. Then Wham! Bam! she was on the floor, bleeding from the face. Curiously, no one at the party stepped up to identify the anonymous puncher, who the victim described as a 6 ft. tall, 230-lb man. He probably threatened to punch everyone in the face, I’ll bet. The only motivation for his attack? The victim said she heard a rumor going around that she was using racist language, but denied that she had said anything like that.
And now, something a little lighter: CollegeHumor.com used to be funny, then stopped being funny, and seems to have recently become hilarious again. Here’s a funny take from the site’s video team on how a frat boy-turned-father would act around his wife and children.
Yale frat caught posing with a “WE LOVE YALE SLUTS” sign
During a typical Zeta Psi frat initiation scavenger hunt over at Yale University, a group of smart little frat boys posed for a picture in front of the Yale Women’s Center with a typed sign that read, in capital letters, “WE LOVE YALE SLUTS.” I’m guessing that this is just your typical frat initiation garbage, and that it probably happens all the time. This time, however, was different.
Someone posted it on Facebook.
It quickly made its way around the university, and finally officials at the women’s center saw it. They’re now threatening to sue, meeting with college administrators, and you can be sure that they’re going to make life difficult for these confused, misogynistic pledges.
Even better: in a television interview with a local affiliate, the student holding the sign, Giovanni Christodoulou ?11, said he didn’t even know what was written on it.
“I never even read the sign,” Christodoulou, a wide receiver and defensive back for the Yale football team, said in the interview. “They gave me the sign, and I held it up.”
Not such a great excuse, dude. You would think that smarter kids than this would get into Ivy League schools.
Senate to wealthy colleges: stop being stingy
The Senate, concerned with the huge growth of the endowments of wealthy, elite universities, demanded information this week about endowment spending from the 76 colleges and universities in the United States whose endowments have surpassed $1 billion.
?Tuition has gone up, college presidents? salaries have gone up, and endowments continue to go up and up,? said Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the committee. ?We need to start seeing tuition relief for families go up just as fast.?
It seems like the government has finally caught on to the fact that maybe these super-rich colleges should be providing some serious tuition assistance to their students. Although in the past few weeks/months many schools, including Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth have replaced loans with grants and basically thrown money at their students, the Senate has said with such huge endowments (Harvard’s is $34.6 billion), huge tuition assistance should be the norm across all levels of higher education. However, for those of us with smallish endowments (Ithaca College’s is $237 million, for perspective, and the endowments of all the colleges in New York state combined do not equal Harvard’s) this kind of sweeping tuition assistance would cost millions that smaller colleges just can’t afford.
While we applaud this move as it pertains to wealthy universities, we hope that the federal government can do something to help students at all other universities (read: 99% of us) afford our increasing tuition.
Professors discover everyone is a Valley Girl
Once upon a time, when people wished to quote a person in conversation, or in writing, they might say (or write) “he/she said…” This time is no more.
In place of this “he/she said” construction, two professors have discovered what everyone else already knew (Ya gotta hand it to ‘em). Instead of using said, as in, “He said I was fat” in both their IM conversations and increasingly, their real life ones, teens (and, yes, college students) are using “was like” to indicate a quote from another person. As in, “He was like, you’re fat.”
Discovery News notes that the
“practice is commonly known as “Valley Girl speak,” but linguists refer to it as “be + like” or “quotative like.”
So what does this mean? Well, for one thing, it means our language is changing to reflect what we want to say. As the article explains, the “was like” construction allows us to inject our own conception/thoughts of what was actually said into what someone did say. It’s a bit of inflection that isn’t possible in English without writing something like “he said snarkily/crabbily” which is just awkward. In order to express the idea that someone was rude to you, you can say, “He was like, so rude,” or you can say, “He was basically like, you’re such a bitch.”
The meaning in both of these is much clearer than simply saying, “He said I was a bitch.” Who knows what that means? I say kudos to you teenagers, for knowing what you want to say, and then changing the language so you can say just that.
(On a related, hilarious note: the two anthropology professors who performed the study had to analyze 33 face-to-face conversations and 132 IM sessions to come to their conclusion that teenagers talk funny in both real life and online. That’s gotta be painful to do.)
Studying abroad as a freshman gains popularity
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article about the increasing number of students who choose to study abroad even before they start attending classes at their own college.
Although only 4 percent of study-abroaders are freshmen, the Journal justifies its trend story by noting that this paltry figure has doubled since 1995. However, most students who study abroad are still, unsurprisingly, juniors in college.
The article also bemusedly outlines some of the “challenges” young students studying abroad may face, like a weak dollar (all those tourist trinkets ain’t cheap) and more surprisingly, “easy access to alcohol, [and a] lack of supervision.”
I don’t see how this is any different from the Freshman Experience at any college in the U.S. besides maybe Bob Jones University, and I definitely don’t see how this is a challenge for freshmen. The students probably see it more as a grand opportunity which turns into a complete disappointment when they discover they can’t go on pub crawls back in the U.S. of A.
The RIAA lied about the campus piracy problem
Back in 2005, the Motion Picture Association of America - Hollywood’s lobbying organization and a general nuisance to college students around the country - commissioned a study which found that 44 percent of the industry’s domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students. At the time, pretty much everybody accepted their numbers. The MPAA went on to lobby Congress to force colleges to stop their students from illegally downloading movies, based largely on this figure of 44 percent.
Turns out, their study was off by 29 percent! How could that happen, you ask? “Human error” was the reason they gave to the Associated Press. Sure. I think it was the fact that 44 percent sounds a lot more damning than 15 measly percentage points. Honestly, I’m pretty upset with my demographic, guys. Can’t we be doing more than just 15 percent of the country’s movie downloading? Let’s pick up the pace.
However, the study, which was performed by a research firm called LEK, is apparently still correct with their finding that worldwide, Hollywood has lost more than $6.1 billion to movie piracy. At least it’s not all the fault of college kids anymore.
Student athletes, meet Big Brother
Student athletes have long been told by their athletic departments to watch what they post on Facebook, Myspace, Webshots, etc. To be fair, they’ve got a pretty bad track record of posting incriminating hazing and drinking photos on the internet that are eventually found and exposed by websites like BadJocks.com.
Now the athletic departments have another option in their fight to keep jocks from embarrassing themselves and their schools, most of whom have strict hazing and drinking policies for teams. It’s a social network monitoring service called YouDiligence, which promises, for a price (about $250 a month, according to InsideHigherEd.com), to search athletes’ profiles for potentially risky postings or photo captions.
College athletic departments can plug in key words for it to search for (ie: hazing, drinking, partying, drugs) on athletes’ profiles, and are alerted by e-mail if any of those terms show up. However, it’s unable to search photos for hazing or other inappropriate behavior, and only works for Facebook and Myspace, at least for now.
So will this Big Brother program ever really catch on? So far, no athletic departments have signed up for the service, but maybe some will in the future to take the responsibility and policework off the backs of the coaches and assistants in colleges’ programs. There’s also no explanation of how the program works its way around the sites’ privacy controls, so that could limit its effectiveness.
Finally, at least according to the athletes I’ve talked to, most are aware by now that posting incriminating pictures or messages online is just stupid.
So until this catches on, student athletes, post away, but make sure your privacy settings are as good as they can get.
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