Caught drinking? Tell us about your sex life!
Administrators at Susquehanna University have found a novel new tactic for learning about the sexual activity of their students.
Whenever students there are caught drinking on campus, they’re required to fill out a survey called The Brief Sexual Behaviors Survey that asks them about their sexual habits. Here’s the Catch-22, though: If they don’t fill this survey out, they aren’t allowed to proceed with alcohol counseling and must pay a $50 fine.
The following are examples of some of the prying questions the survey asks, in the words of one of the students forced to take the questionnaire. Keep in mind that you’ll have to answer these, and then your alcohol counselors will have all this information at their fingertips during your sessions. Creepy, intrusive? yes.
“The first section [of the survey] was asking about my sexual behavior, like ‘What gender do you have sex with?’ and how many people I had sex with in the past three months and what my chances are of getting AIDS — completely irrelevant of getting caught drinking in a dorm,” the student said.
“With how many different people have you had sexual intercourse in the last 3 months?”
Fight back, students. Make up the most ridiculous answers you can think of. That’ll teach em.
iPhones for ACU freshmen - I’m jealous now
Abilene Christian University in Texas will begin giving its freshman class iPhones and iPod Touches next year.
A study there found that iPhones can be helpful in a variety of ways - helping remind students about homework, taking surveys for classes, finding their way around campus, and figuring out meal balance information.
No word yet on how they’re being paid for, but I expect to see a $499 increase in tuition. There’s no way they’re giving those out for free.
Shooting-related news, what a bright subject!
After shooting, hall to be destroyed: Cole Hall, the building at Northern Illinois University where a gunman killed five others almost two weeks ago, will be torn down, according to officials at the university. Apparently the building was due for major renovations anyways, so after the massacre they just decided to take the whole thing down.
Report of gunman locks down Va. campus: Ferrum College was locked down for a day on Tuesday after a housekeeper said she saw a man carrying a gun. No weapon was found, even though multiple police agencies “combed” the area. Interestingly, the school is only 45 miles from Virginia Tech. That probably had something to do with the response.
Student shot outside theater: On Wednesday, while walking down a sidewalk at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, a student was shot by two suspects who are not in custody yet. Classes were canceled as a precaution, and the emergency notification system was used.
YES, THAT WAS THE DUMBEST IDEA EVER
Here’s a quick quiz for college administrators: about a week after NIU was shot up by a crazed gunman, is it a (a) good idea or (b) bad idea to hold a security response drill and have a mock gunman enter a classroom without the knowledge of the students or teachers, point a gun at the teacher, lines students up against the wall, then tells them that he is going to kill the kid with the lowest GPA first?
I think you all know the answer. The incident, which happened at Elizabeth City State University, has been widely criticized for scaring the crap out of a bunch of innocent students. Although real campus police arrived ten minutes later and then announced that it was a drill, thinking that you’re going to die for ten minutes is a pretty excruciating thing (I would imagine).
University officials have already apologized, but the damage (or at least the role-playing damage) has already been done. Students in other classrooms, alerted by text messages, were blocking the doors with furniture and preparing to jump out windows. Students in the class texted their parents and told them there was a gunman at school.
The professor, who had no idea what was going on, bravely tried to reason with the fake gunman (actually a campus police officer), but said later that he was just about sh***** his pants.
“I was prepared to die at that moment,” he said.
This will probably take the top prize at the “Worst Ideas Ever” competition. Congratulations. There go all your alumni donations, ECSU.
Brown drops tuition for the poorer folks, too
Harvard did it, then everyone else did it: Now Brown is the latest school in the long, long falling domino line of elite schools offering tuition cuts to middle class students and their families. It’s about time. Families making under $100k a year won’t be expected to take out loans, and families earning less than $60k won’t pay a thing.
NIU resumes classes: Ten days after a gunman shot and killed five students and then himself in a lecture hall at this Illinois university, students are finally returning to their classes. One student called it a “lean on me” kind of day. In less happy news, after the shootings, 12 states are now considering allowing concealed handguns to be carried on their campuses for greater protection in case of another shooter. Bad idea? BAD IDEA.
Facebook dying, maybe? The incredibly popular college social networking site recently saw its site hits level off and even decrease by 800,000 individuals in January. I blame all those goddamn invitations to start “biting chumps” and “comparing what movies I like.” I hate that shit.
38 lacrosse players sue Duke University
Yup, 38 of them.
The lawsuits allege that during the infamous rape case of almost two years ago, in which all were acquitted of any wrongdoing, the school mishandled the incident and turned its back on the players.
According to the lawsuit, the players are seeking “undetermined monetary damages against the university for injuring their players’ reputations and causing them emotional suffering.”
Good for you, guys.
Odds & Ends: in which more dominoes fall
Everybody’s doing it: Yesterday Stanford University became the latest elite school to kill tuition costs for middle class undergrads. Next year, families of students making less than $100k a year won’t have to pay tuition, and those making less than $60k won’t have to pay room and board, either. Now, if only I got into Stanford…
Following suit: Washington University also declared a similar plan yesterday, only they’re not super rich, so they’ll only be replacing loans with grants for families of students making less than $60k. I’ll still take it.
NIU shooter destroyed his hard drive: No one still has any idea why Steven Kazmierczak came back to his alma mater to shoot five other students and then himself on Valentine’s Day. And we’ll probably never know for sure - although he was off his meds for three days - because he destroyed his computer’s hard drive, and his cell phone memory chip.
Don’t read the writing on the wall: St. Peter’s College was shut down for a day after officials found a 15-word note taped to a bathroom wall referring to the Virginia Tech shootings. Nothing happened, but the 3,000 student campus was evacuated as a precaution. I’m guessing the prankster referenced VTech because he couldn’t spell Kazmierczak.
Obama makes me cranky: After an Obama rally at Youngstown State University, students complained to the newspaper that there was “no parking” and classes “should have been canceled.” Give me a break - skip class and then park on the sidewalk, and stop whining. It’s what all the cool kids are doing.
Strict, or just like everyone else? Muslim student associations across the U.S. can’t decide what’s worse - letting Muslims smoke pot, or letting Muslim women wear skirts. C’mon, folks, 21th century here. Make way for inclusivity -and hot pants !
But it is practical: Students in a Practical Botany class at the University of Michigan are in a little bit of police trouble after campus security found 11 ?very small plants that appear to be cannabis? in the greenhouse. Whoops! You caught us. We should have used the basement, I told you guys.
Odds & Ends: Journalism is doomed
OWNED: A student newspaper columnist at Northwestern’s Medill school of journalism recently investigated his dean’s suspicious use of anonymous quotes, and found that they were most likely made up. After the resultant media-media frenzy, the faculty there are pisssed. Here’s their letter to Dean Lavine. What’s it say? Show us what you got, or quit. Good thing our dean isn’t lazy, and knows how to identify her sources.
Please God, No: Some abstractly-thinking-person who just happens to be in charge of the University of Minnesota’s “new media” program (I hate that term, very hard) has come up with a modified version of the fantasy role-playing game Neverwinter Nights to teach students how to become journalists. Apparently real life experience just don’t cut it anymore. Forget those internships, journalism students. Just boot up the ol’ laptop and log some serious video game hours. This is ridiculous. I’m currently shedding a salty tear for my profession.
And now, regular college news, in bite-size form:
Bye bye, hippies: UC Berkeley has started removing the houses of the hippie protesters who, for more than a year, have been living in a grove of trees scheduled to be destroyed for the creation of a new stadium. As much as I support their grass roots (tree limb?) cause, I still think this latest development is hilarious. Poor hippies.
Libraries are not for masturbating: The scene is the Tufts University library. A female student is studying in the periodicals section. On the library’s main floor. Dude comes up, opens a magazine, starts jerking off (clothes on), while staring at the girl. “Frequently,” the article says. Guy caught; police can’t prove anything. The mad masturbator is loose!
Harvard’s got a new gym policy - no boys allowed: For six hours every week, Harvard’s QRAC gym will only allow women to work out, in order to accommodate women whose religion prohibits them from letting men see them in Spandex and booty shorts. Sad, this is. Really. Calling the policy “Pareto inefficient,” The Harvard Crimson is rather cranky about this. Like they actually work out.
Poor people still poor, NYT says: There’s been little or no increase in social mobility for those in society’s lowest strata, the NYT reports, citing a new study by the Brookings Institution. Hispanics and blacks are finding it harder to get a college degree and enter the middle class. The good news: college helps you get a better job, the study says. The bad news: even with the Ivy’s new aid policies, less poor minorities will be able to even afford to go. Well that’s just awesome really really bad for society.
After NIU shooting, guns on campus suddenly a good idea
In the aftermath of the terrible shooting at Northern Illinois University last Thursday that left six students dead and numerous other injured, the media’s discussion has inevitably turned to opining about how to best prevent something like this from happening again. This, of course, only after first discussing at length how the campuses are coping with a tragedy very similar to the massacre at Virginia Tech in early 2007.
CNN asks how safe other campuses are, and finds that no, in fact, college campuses aren’t very safe at all. We’ve got blue light phones, and that’s about it.
But a far more terrifying suggestion that’s been raised by numerous people, media outlets and even the state of Arizona is that students be allowed to carry concealed weapons on campus. The logic here is that if a person with a gun started taking potshots at your classmates in history class, you could whip out your Glock and return fire, taking cover behind the dead bodies of your classmates (presumably). This, my friends, is horrendous logic. First off, what happens when police arrive at the scene of the firefight? Who are they going to shoot? Probably both the gunman and the vigilante student packing heat.
Plus, it’s very unlikely that the typical hung-over college student sporting sweat pants and a bad attitude will have it together enough to return the gunman’s fire, dive for cover, and avoid hitting fellow students along the way. This is why we have the police, so regular citizens can concentrate on other things besides shooting people.
As columnist Lucia Bill notes,
“When you have a semiautomatic pointed in your face, the grand visions of pulling a Vin Diesel in Organic Chemistry are worthless.”
Some students are now protesting the prohibition of handguns on campus and wearing empty gun holsters to class, Fox News is reporting. This is scary. I do not want anyone on campus but police to have guns.
Let’s leave it at that. Too many cooks in the kitchen nutjobs carrying guns on campus and you’ll ruin the meal someone’s bound to start shooting sooner or later.
Tel Aviv University finds link between cell phones, cancer
According to JTA, the world’s Jewish press service (something that I had no idea actually existed), a Tel Aviv University scientist says he has discovered a possible link between cell phone use and cancerous tumors.
The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology by Dr. Siegal Sadetzki, an epidemiologist and lecturer at TAU, found that heavy cell phone users were subject to a higher risk of both benign and malignant tumors of the salivary gland.
The article says that she and her colleagues investigated nearly 500 people who had been diagnosed with these tumors.
It seems legitimate, guys. Turn off those cell phones, then, and start using the portable phones again!
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