In Which The Chinese Were Angry, And Shots Were Fired
Chinese Students, As A Rule, Don’t Like Tibetan Monks: The NYT reports that Chinese students are angry with the apparent media bias against their home country, especially with the upcoming Olympic Games drawing scrutiny on the country’s involvement with Darfur and an occupation of Tibet. Last week, at the University of Southern California, they threw water bottles at a visiting Tibetan monk and accused him of lying. Here’s what one Chinese student had to say about the world’s view of China:
?I believe in democracy,? Ms. Jia added, ?but I can?t stand for someone to criticize my country using biased ways. You are wearing Chinese clothes and you are using Chinese goods.?
Now, Every Gunshot Shuts Down A University: When shots were fired at an on campus house party at Florida Atlantic University, police shut down the campus and began a massive search for the shooter, who has not been found as of yet.
NIU Scraps Plans To Raze Shooting Site: The plan now is to renovate Cole Hall rather than raze it, wasting a whole ton of state money destroying a perfectly good building in the process. The building was the site of the Valentine’s Day shooting spree where a former student killed five students in a lecture class.
One More Reason To Dislike Philosophy Majors: An NYU student brought a muffin filled with razor blades into his philosophy class as part of a class discussion of absurdism, a theory that holds that the universe is irrational and meaningless. Then someone took a bite out of it.? Luckily, he wasn’t hurt, but let this be a lesson, philosophy majors: leaving the cooking to someone else.
The Smiley Killer?
A Serial Killer For The Instant Messenger Generation? Two NYC detectives say they’re on the trail of a possible serial killer who targets only male college students and leaves behind a smiley face drawn near the crime scene. Most of the victims were killed or apparently drowned in Minnesota, although some are spread across the country.
The cops say - although it’s kind of hard to believe - that this killer could be responsible for the deaths of up to 40 academically gifted, well-liked young men enrolled in college. But don’t believe me or the cops: watch ABC Eyewitness News for yourself and decide.
Iowa State Peeved About New TA Satire Videos
In what’s pretty much a mockumentary on the state of affairs for graduate student teaching assistants, several Iowa State TAs have given fake interviews and say ridiculous things like “What can I write that will drive this kid to suicide?” in several videos posted to YouTube and Facebook recently.
The English Department TAs mostly complain about class size and work loads (something teachers never complain about) and do so in mostly humorous fashion.
The administration, predictably, isn’t very happy. They claim that instead of it being a legitimate expression of free speech, the videos are “offensive” and “undermine the credibility of instruction.”
They’ve also started calling students into private meetings to tell them to take the videos down, which sounds an awful lot like intimidation to me.
All this will do is just make the videos even more viral than they already are. Congratulations, English professors. You’ve discovered the power of the Internet.
Watch the first video here:
Roundup: Bad Deans, Grateful Dead Research?
Negative Exernalities, Anyone? Despite high-profile financial aid increases for needy/middle class students and families, percentages of those students enrolling in college has actually dropped. Whoops!
Deadhead University: The Grateful Dead recently donated 2,000 square feet of paraphernalia, posters and props to the University of California, Santa Cruz for a research center called “Dead Central.” No, I’m not kidding.
Bad Dean, No Pity For You: Dean of West Virginia U.’s business school resigns after panel declares he awarded the governor’s daughter a degree without earning it. Yup, that’ll get you fired.
Really? Writing tutors at Ivy League school Yale University “overwhelmed” by the amount of students seeking help with their essays, papers, reports. We wonder how they got into Yale.
Zebra Found On Campus; Looking For African Savannah And A Good Time
At around 8 a.m. a zebra was found in a residence hall at Emory University. No one has any idea how it got there.
It seems pretty happy, and has reportedly purchased a beer funnel, a thirty rack of cheap beer, and a table for beer pong, and wants to throw a totally sick party tomorrow night.
But in all seriousness, although officials described the beast as “friendly,” it took animal control officers 3 hours to get it out of the building.
Sounds like the zebra wants to stay for a little longer, guys.
Times Columnist Hit In Face With Pie During Speech At Brown
Political Activism At Its Best: A female Brown University student leaped on stage during a talk by NY Times Columnist Tom Friedman and hit him square in the face and chest with a lemon meringue pie. But this was no ordinary pie-throwing protest: the student, who was caught shortly after her sweet stunt, had thrown leaflets around the auditorium explaining that she had thrown the pie to raise awareness of what she saw as Friedman’s fake, facetious environmentalism.
The pamphlet declares “Thomas Friedman’s ‘Green’ as fake and toxic to human and planetary health as the cool-whip (sic) covering his face.”
That’s gotta hurt, Tom.
There’s an uplifting end to the story, though; ten minutes after the pie incident, Friedman returned to the stage sans Cool Whip and gave the rest of his talk.
Start Your Morning Right: Fires And Abortion Art!
Crazed Arsonist At Washington State: Two guys are wanted for setting three fires on campus in under an hour. Cop stunned one, the other got away, last seen heading toward the Burning Man festival with a blowtorch.
Brown U. Math Profs Duped: A colleague sent them an intricate e-mail explaining that the school would move toward a new “merit-blind” admissions policy, where 20 percent of the incoming class would be chosen at random. Profs serious considered the implications of this policy before realizing they’d been punk’d. Oh, Academia.
Are Induced Abortions Art?? A Yale student’s video art project depicting her forcing herself to have an abortion has gotten a lot of people and school officials up in arms over the limits of artistic and academic freedoms. Here’s the thing: she says they were her real babies she was pulling out of herself, Yale says they weren’t. I’m inclined to side with her. I mean, she was there.
Oh No, Poor Investment Bankers: New hires at Bear Stearns, the investment bank that recently collapsed, have all lost their jobs, and now have to look for new ways to work 12 hour days and bring home $100,000 a year. **Tear**
In Remembrance Of The Victims At Virginia Tech
One year ago today, a Virginia Tech student shot 32 of his peers and teachers in an act of violence unprecedented in its scale. It was the most horrific and deadly shooting on a college campus in our nation’s history, and the students there are still healing.
I think that like the events of September 11th and the Princess Diana’s death (and Bambi’s mom’s!) we will always remember where we were when we heard the news. I was in Tasmania, glued to CNN and other American television stations, extremely glad that I was in a foreign country. Even there, in an island off the coast of the most isolated continent in the world, the papers were filled with the news for days afterwards. I hope that never happens again.
We are with you, Virginia Tech.
Roundup: Threats Force 4 Schools To Close
Four Schools Closed after Threats: Chicago’s Malcom X College closed after a note was found on a bathroom wall; Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina closed after a fatal shooting near campus; graffiti threats at another Chicago school, St. Xavier University, prompted police to shut the school down; and yesterday, Detroit-area school Oakland University was closed after threatening graffiti messages were found in three bathrooms.
A Pillow-fight Flash Mob: Thousands of students gathered in NYC’s Union Square for a massive pillow fight. Awesome.
Head of the Green Division? A growing number of colleges and universities are appointing “green czars” to oversee their sustainability projects and efficiency efforts. Nice.
Screw you, Juicy Campus: Students at Princeton University responded to hateful gossip web site Juicy Campus by creating a ‘love wall,’ with positive statements signed by the people who wrote them, in contrast to the nasty, anonymous statements about other students often written on the site. Cute.
Clinton and Obama Spoke at VERY Conservative School: They spoke on Sunday night at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, an evangelical school which lumps homosexuality in with adultery, stealing and sexual abuse. The college also encourages gay students to learn new behavior that stops them from acting on their homosexual ‘impulses.’ Not a good place to stop - even for a bite to eat - if you’re a democratic presidential candidate.
Wine Education @ Cornell: The Ivy University recently announced plans to build a 2,400-square-foot teaching winery this fall. Looking for one more class you should take, Cornell students? That one.
Stay Out, Men! Nine female students at Randolph College in Virginia are suing the school for allowing men to enroll at the college starting last year. The women say that the school falsely promoted itself as an all-women’s school. I wonder why any men would want to go there witha bunch of other crazy fun women like that.
The Apocalypse, or How To Waste More Time On Facebook
So you thought checking away messages and buddy info on AOL Instant Messenger was a complete waste of your time?
So you thought stalking the profiles of people who you want to make out with on Facebook was a complete waste of time?
Forget, for a second, gentle readers, how many hours you’ve wasted away doing both of these things. Forget those effervescent seconds you’ve whittled away from your life while playing Scrabulous. Think for a second about how much more time you’d waste on the infernal site if those two things were to merge. It’d be exponential.
It’s an apocalypse-waiting-to-happen.
And that’s just what is happening, starting this month, with Facebook’s new Chat service, which will allow you to chat with your friends who are online within your browser, for an entirely new, self-destructive level of procrastination. I expect to see people stop eating and start strapping their laptops to their chests when this thing breaks. You won’t even need a cell phone pretty soon; you can already leave video messages on people’s walls, talk with people in real time, and it just seems inevitable that you’ll soon be able to video chat through the social networking site. And never leave your house.
Facebook says (like it always does) that you’ll have complete control over everything. I don’t buy that for one second; there’s no way they can control a nuclear holocaust caused by the complete death of real socializing.
Conversations are one-to-one, completely private, and only between Facebook friends. The message history is saved from page to page, and even between login sessions, but it is not logged permanently. Should you wish to clear out the history immediately, there’s a link provided in each conversation to do so. If you don’t want your Mini-Feed stories embedded into your conversations, you can turn off that feature from either the Mini-Feed privacy page or the Chat settings panel. As Chat grows and evolves, we’ll continue to make sure that you are in control.
I’ll believe that when I see it. In the meantime, I’ll be stocking up canned food, flashlight batteries, and a real Scrabble board in my bunker out back. I’ll see you when the dust settles.
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