College News Roundup: Buy Yourself A College!
Antioch College looking for buyers - for only $12.2 million! After negotiations with an alumni group trying to keep the school alive broke off, the school’s now up for sale - for anyone who can provide the money up front. The tiny, 200-student school is planning to close June 30 for at least one year unless a deal is reached that could keep the school open.
Plagiarizing a plagiarism code: At the University of Texas at San Antonio, students drafting the school’s honor code that forbids plagiarism plagiarized the honor code of another school, Brigham Young University, according to the AP. Cheating expert: “Students think of their computers as cut-and-paste machines.”
Senate kills campus gun legislation: The bill, which passed in the House, would have allowed veterans and others with weapons training to carry concealed weapons on campuses, with the logic that a Vietnam vet in every classroom will stop school shooters. Thankfully, this is dead.
Hostage incident teaches administrators to watch their wording: After the situation at the University of Kentucky at Louisville, where a mom killed her kids and then barged into the school’s health center with a gun, school officials unofficially revised their text message warning policy: make sure the message is clear. Many who received the message thought the incident was taking place at another health center miles away. Whoops!
Are more students abstaining from sex? Why?
The New York Times Magazine fronted a piece on Sunday about an emerging abstinence movement at Harvard. The organization behind the movement, True Love Revolution, led by student Janie Fredell, seeks to discourage safe-sex education sponsored by the university and promote abstinence until marriage.
The article explains that in a nutshell, abstinence during college isn’t just for religious students anymore - it’s philosophical, researched, sexy, trendy, and fun?
Apparently, not having sex is now a trend. A Newsweek article reports that college students are having less sex, the IHT reports that these abstinence clubs are “springing up” (pun unintended, I think) at elite universities across the East Coast, and a study by the American College Health Association found in a study that the number of sexual partners a male student had had dropped from 2.1 in 2000 to 1.6 in 2006. A CDC study in 2001 also found that “39 percent of freshman college women were virgins, and 31 percent of those women still hadn’t had sex by senior year.”
Why, exactly, are all these students not boning each other? I’ll let them explain.
Premarital abstinence, on the other hand, is held up by True Love Revolution as improving health, promoting better relationships and, best of all, enabling ?better sex in your future marriage.?
Those are good ideas, but all the same, we think putting sex on a pedestal might not be the best idea. Co-president Leo Keliher of True Love Revolution might have summed up why abstaining from a normal, post-pubescent can be a little creepy - from the NYT piece:
“He told me he struggles constantly against ?physical lustful temptation? ? that he can be aroused just by a woman?s touch, by even a look at a woman or at a photo or sometimes by ?thoughts that just come out of the blue ? basically pornography in my head.? They come to him when he?s merely walking around campus, or even when he?s alone in the library ? ?like a fly buzzing around.”
Dare I say it? This kid needs to get laid.
On the other end of the sexual spectrum are people like Lena Chen, Harvard’s sex blogger, who enjoys describing her numerous blowjobs in vivid detail on her notorious blog, sexandtheivy.com. In a recent debate with Fridell of True Love Revolution, however, she sought to find common ground, admitting that they were just students who were “both, in their own ways, advertising sex appeal.”
And in case you were wondering, CNN tells us why the few many college students who still have sex do it. The number one reason: because they were attracted to their partner. This, my friends, is stunning news.
Times columnist Nicholas Kristof to visit Ithaca, Cornell
Ithaca College and Cornell University will host New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on April 7th. Kristof will speak at Cornell in the Anabel Taylor Hall Auditorium at 4:30 P.M. and at Ithaca in Textor Hall 1o2 at 6:30 P.M.
Kristof and other speakers will talk about how China, as an economic powerhouse, can help to end the atrocities being committed in the Darfur region of Sudan through the country’s role as a weapons provider and major foreign investor.
The visit is sponsored by the IC student group Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND) and the Cornell group STARS, as part of a weekend of events entitled”Dream for Darfur,” a symposium on this year’s Olympics.
A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, according to the New York Times, Kristof has traveled extensively - he’s “lived on four continents, reported on six, and traveled to 120 countries, plus all 50 states, every Chinese province and every main Japanese island.”
Much of his recent reporting has been on the ethnic conflict genocide taking place in the Darfur region of Sudan.
Read this week’s Ithacan for more information.
Ithaca College to install public alert system, siren
Dave Maley, Ithaca College’s associate director of media relations, confirmed last night that the college will be installing two public address systems as an added precautionary measure in case of an on-campus emergency.
Maley said the public address systems will consist of two large speakers/sirens that will be installed on top of the Campus Center and on the Terrace Dining Hall. The college will be able to activate a loud siren noise, play a pre-recorded voice message, or simply speak to the campus through a microphone. It’ll be audible to students even in their dorm rooms.
Maley said this will allow the college to reach more people than it is currently able to with the text message/phone alert system.
According the the Chronicle, more than a dozen other colleges have installed sirens or announced plans to do so in the past year, citing the flaws in a text message or phone alert system. The systems cost more than $100,000 to purchase and set up, the paper said.
UPDATE 3/2: Cornell University recently installed 4 sirens on several buildings around its campus, at a total cost of $250,000. The sirens should be up and running by the end of this week, the Cornell Sun reports.
Roundup: More violence, unfortunately
Two students shot at Texas College: One was shot in the hand, the other in the abdomen, while they were outside their dorm.
Mom kills kids, threatens college with gun: A Kentucky woman killed her two young children, then went to the University of Louisville, where she attended school, and threatened employees in the school’s health center with a pistol. One of the staff counselors convinced her to give up the gun by the time the police arrived.
Colgate student arrested over JuicyCampus shooting threat: On the gossip web site, the student, George So, wrote, “I wonder if i could shut down the school… By saying I?m going to shoot as many people as i can in my second class tomorrow, I hope I get more than 50……….. For liability reasons and ip tracking I won’t leave it at that.” Creepy. He was arrested on Tuesday after a student researching on the site reported the entry to police.
A boom in Homeland Security Universities
Slate reports that since the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and a host of other disasters have struck America, colleges and universities are scrambling to put together disaster-response related majors and coursework.
Seeking to avoid more of the screw-ups that have plagued the Department of Homeland Security since its inception (’You’re doing a heckuva job, Brownie,’ anyone?), the agency has invested more than $300 million in terrorism and disaster related education.
According to the article, “more than 200 colleges have created homeland-security degree and certificate programs since 9/11, and another 144 have added emergency management with a terrorism bent.”
Everyone’s doing it - it’s the new English major!
Quidditch now being played on college campuses
I love Harry Potter enough to have finished all 759 pages of the last book in under nine hours (So no one could ruin the ending for me - you know how some people are.)
But not even love like mine could compare to the love that some Middlebury College students apparently have for the book/movie series about a young boy wizard, who happens to play a sport called Quidditch, which involves catching magic, flying balls while riding on a broomstick.
They liked author J.K. Rowling’s idea so much, in fact, that they created their own real-life Quidditch league in 2005, and now they’ve started promoting it at campuses all over. The team recently visited Princeton, where they soundly defeated the Tigers in two games.
The league has gotten around the problem of not having flying broomsticks, magic, or real-life Golden Snitches - the flying ball a player must catch to end the game - with a variety of creative rules. Wikipedia has an exhaustive list, but here’s my favorite.
Instead of being an enchanted ball, the Snitch is played by an extremely hyperactive player on each team, and the Seeker on either side has to catch this guy before the game can end. But it’s the Snitch’s job to make like a tree and get the fuck out of there so his team can’t lose. In the recent game against Princeton, Middlebury’s Snitch disappeared early, “finally reappearing carrying a bag of bagels from Panera.” Smart Snitch.
Well, good luck sorting out fantasy from reality later in life, guys. We hope you enjoy your Quidditch-ing. Maybe things like this will convince J.K. Rowling to stop trying to commit suicide. Go write more books, lady!
College news roundup - VTech consequences issue
Sound the alarm public alert system! After the Virginia Tech massacre and the communication debacle that followed, more than a dozen colleges have installed sirens or announced plans to do so in the past year, citing the flaws in a text message or phone alert system. The systems cost more than $100,000 to purchase and set up.
U.S. proposes to update student privacy laws: After Virginia Tech’s fatal shootings last year, the Family Education Rights Privacy Act (Ferpa) is due for an update. Lawmakers hope to give administrators “more latitude in sharing information about a student.” Expect more letters home, kids.
Obama, Ron Paul to visit Penn State: Lucky Bastards. Obama will speak this Sunday, and Ron Paul’s scheduled to visit April 11th. Ron Paul has campus libertarians practically peeing themselves with joy, and Barry O’s visit is a direct result of students at Penn registering more than 7,000 students to vote in the Pennsylvania primaries. Well, I guess they deserve it.
Howard University suspends student newspaper from publishing: Says the Hilltop is in debt. Editors’ (meager) salaries will continued to get paid, and it will publish online.
University techie finds widespread porn use: After alerting administrators to the fact that over 300 university employees at the University of Texas Health Science Center were surfing porn sites, she was pressured to leave her job. Only 10 people caught surfing porn received any punishment. That’s justice for you. No more porn at work, profs!
Higher-ed in China “not delivering results”: Only 16 percent of Chinese students say they’re satisfied with their educational experience, and have received a quality education that prepares them for the workplace. Administrators blame an exam-based system.
No one likes a gossip site: New Jersey is subpoenaing the site, Juicycampus.com, student councils are crafting resolutions (this is huge lame) and students vilified on the site are protesting.
And now for something completely different: The NYT says running can get you high. Throw out those drugs, and go for a jog, kids.
Congress sets record for higher-ed earmarks
These earmarks might actually be a good thing.
For almost as long as they?ve been around, earmarks, the cute name for senators’ home state projects - like Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens’ Bridge to Nowhere,” have long been decried in Congress and by the President as wasteful. (So is a war in Iraq, but who’s counting?) Yet however much our politicians talk about how bad they are, they never seem to really go away.
But when the earmarks go to furthering higher education, we’re inclined to be a little more lenient about them. And last year, Congress spent a record $2.3 billion on pet education projects that include “research on subjects like berries and reducing odors from swine and poultry,” according to the NYT.
It’s not only the dollar amount that’s skyrocketing upward (your tax dollars at work!) it’s also the amount of earmarks: according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Congress approved 2,306 earmarks last year for higher education, compared with 223 in 1990.”
The schools that made out the best in Congress’ Big Give:
- University of South Alabama - $30 million
- Mississippi State University - $43 million (for more than 30 projects)
- The University of Mississippi - $37 million (from 27 earmarks)
Critics - and of course there are critics - say that these earmarks provide institutions and researchers money without requiring them to apply for grants and other federal aid that everyone else is forced to do.
While it’s painfully obvious that earmarks are very wasteful, at least there’s a pretense of nobility by giving it to colleges and universities. At least they’re going to education and scientific research, not bridges to nowhere.
Let’s just see to it that all that cash gets spent on students who need it, not fat cat administrators, alright guys?
Harvard wiping out tuition costs for law students
Let’s play How Much Money Can Harvard Give Away: The Ivy League university’s law school recently announced that third year law students who pledge to go into public sector jobs for at least five years will receive as much as a $40,000 break in tuition costs.
Although Harvard already had a generous loan forgiveness program, this new policy of just giving away money is an attempt to send Harvard educated lawyers into jobs like public defenders, positions usually reserved for students who graduate from crappier law schools.
But it’s obvious that the choice for lawyers who graduate with a Harvard degree is still pretty clear - according to the Times, first year lawyers can still earn $100,000 a year starting out in a law firm. Being a hot shot, well-paid corporate lawyer sounds much more tempting than clerking for a judge in some rural county in upstate New York. But that’s just me.
Here’s another question to ask: do we really want lawyers from one the most elite, prestigious institutions in the world representing murderers and child rapists? I, for one, would rather they serve the interests of the people, meaning they should be figuring out how to merge giant multinational corporations in order to better capture markets and further enslave the working class. Again, that’s just me.
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