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.
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.
The little college that could
An amazing story out in Ohio with Antioch College, the flagship institution of Antioch University that was facing closure until today. The college, which in June announced its plan to close by July 2008 for a minimum of four years to “Design [a] 21st Century Campus,” will stay open in the interim ? with a few ifs.
I’d been quietly following this story for the past six months, watching with fascination how the Antioch Alumni Association has been rallying to keep their college alive by contributing money to a College Revival Fund. So far, the Alumni Board has raised almost $18 million in gifts and pledges. Their motto for the revival, “Be ashamed to let it die,” is a fantastic reworking of the college’s motto, founder Hoarce Mann’s own words from his last commencement address in 1859: “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.”
The deal is a little tricky, because it amounts to (with the Board of Trustees’ supposed help) a series of payments, starting with $2 million in the next 10 days, another $4.6 million by Dec. 15, $12 million more by the end of May 2008, and two more payments in 2009 and 10. Of course, this is only the beginning: It looks like job cuts and demolition will also be on the way.
?An enormous amount of work remains to be done,? said Alumni Board President Crow, ?but we are energized and ready to rise to this challenge. Our goal is nothing less than the regeneration of Antioch College as a leader and innovator in liberal arts education.”
However, not everybody is glad to see this plan happen. In an article on Inside Higher Ed, sophomore Jeanne Kay, who is the co-editor of Antioch’s student newspaper The Record, found the agreement problematic. “I wish this announcement could be something to celebrate, but it’s not.” She laments the (while understandable, frustrating) lack of knowledge of how widespread these faculty cuts will be. “We are already running at minimum operations,” Kay said.
I can’t blame her for feeling this way. While I think the campaign to save is brave on the part of the alumni board, it appears to be a power-grab for the Board of Trustees. In their combined statement, the Alumni Board agreed to the plan for financial exigency, which will lead to job cuts (which could lead to the loss of entire departments because of such a small number of faculty) and the destruction of buildings. Even worse, the Board of Trustees is not making any attempt to recruit new students to the college despite a plan to keep the facilities open, citing the need to improve facilities and revamp curricula.
At the top, Antioch has had a lot of trouble too. Former college president Steve Lawry had only been on the job for 16 months before announcing his decision in July to step down in January 2008 ? and then left Antioch not even two months later. While Interim President Andrzej Bloch has over two decades of experience at Antioch, it’s an uphill battle. What’s worse, this may have a deeper impact on the Yellow Springs community. If you can find your way behind the pay wall, this in-depth analysis by the Chronicle from the end of June is really worth reading.
This little college still can, but they need a lot of help. Those who are there now should be thankful for their passionate alumni, who have already given a lot and will give a lot more before they let the college die. Still, at moments like these it feels like too little, too late.
Roundup: More McSwane; Good, Bad, and Dalai News
Collegian Chatter: There’s been some local reaction regarding the process McSwane went through and its aftermath. Denver’s alt-weekly Westword has a fantastic piece on the whole McSwane thing, looking at the College Republican’s involvement in this thing, and more importantly, journalism as a whole in the Colorado area, taking the local media to town about their ethics. On the other side of town, the Denver Post’s Diane Carman (who’s on her way out) wrote about McSwane, calling him “the future of journalism” ? I’m going to go out on a limb and say if he’s the future of journalism, then I’m really disheartened.
Speaking of Colorado… This actually has (almost) nothing to do with higher ed, but Miller and Molson Coors are merging to fight the good fight against Anheuser-Busch. There’s a joke there, and I was almost tempted to do the research about how students would be affected by this new alignment ? the “champagne of beers” in bed with Keystone Light? ? but you could always wait for The Booze News? (If more staff doesn’t resign I guess.) Or come up with your own jokes in the comments.
U of Memphis shooting update: Four men were charged with the shooting death of University of Memphis player Taylor Bradford. I didn’t report it at the time, but Memphis did a pretty good job controlling the situation, canceling classes ? but questionably not canceling their football game. It appears to be over money; the Commercial Appeal is reporting that one of the defendants arranged a robbery of Bradford. That defendant will be in court tomorrow; the other three in court today and will be back Oct. 23. Sounds like at least one will plead guilty: One lawyer of the students called his client “very remorseful,” saying the next step is finding out who did what.
Mellencamp and the Jena 6: Jena’s mayor is pissed at the rock star for singing in response to the incident. Here are the opening lyrics from Mellencamp’s song, “Jena” (which you can listen to on his site):
An all white jury hides the executioner’s face
Is this how we are, me and you?
Everyone needs to know their place
And here we thought this blackbird was hidden in the flueOh oh oh Jena
Oh oh oh Jena
Oh oh oh Jena
Take your nooses down
Mayor Murphy R. McMillin called the song inflammatory and defamatory, and Mellencamp’s response on his website is a pretty clear defense. It’s a good song and has a good message. (Sorry to Wild Bill at Sharp Notes if I stole his thunder.)
Dalai’s here: The Dalai Lama is in town, just having wrapped up a speaking engagement at Cornell University. I wasn’t able to catch the live video Cornell put up, but Photo Editor Connor Gleason and Accent Editor Jamie Saine went over the hill to the event. I’m much more excited by tomorrow’s talk now. Jamie said “I love him and I want to be his friend,” and Connor said he was shooting with the likes of AP photographers (which doesn’t happen very often in Ithaca). If you’re not in the area (or couldn’t get tickets), take the time to watch these other ones online. I’m sure it’ll be worth it.
Hippies take to the trees at UC Berkeley
For the past 300 days or so, a “lovable bunch of nuts” has been living in a grove of 26 oak trees outside UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium. They’re living in about 10 makeshift aerial shelters to prevent the university from cutting down the trees and puting up a $125 million athletic complex in their place.
The story gets a whole lot more interesting. In a surprise move, the university put up a 10-foot fence around the whole area, ostensibly to keep rowdy football fans from heckling the protesters, but which also effectively cut off the tree-dwellers from their supply line.
As is often the case, this little maneuver didn’t work at all. Dozens of other protesters lined up and tossed supplies over the fence for the starving “Treewoks.”
Now the hippies are being accused of hypocrisy for damaging the trees by constructing shelters in them, and the university is attempting to cite them for safety violations because they were caught using propane tanks in the trees and spilling their excrement out of the branches.
Still, they remain, even amidst an investigation that one protester may have fire-bombed a police van. But their small protest might have been misdirected, as the university newspaper The Daily Californian is reporting. While the tree folk have been guarding the 26 oak trees really well, they’ve just been flanked by the university, which recently gained approval to remove 23,000 Eucalyptus trees from nearby the university to prevent wildfires really piss off the hippies. You’ll need a lot of protesters to sit in that many trees.
Well, I don’t really have anything else to say about this, except that man does it make for a great story. Good luck, Treewoks, and may your propane tanks remain ever full as you watch UC Berkeley mow down the 23,000 trees that you forgot to watch over.
(IC hippies take note: our very own Athletics and Events Center will probably require that a whole bunch of trees be cut down. Better get out your climbing gear and your protest signs now.)
Dean Lynch, take note: Even when you leave Ithaca for Berkeley, (College Ave. will miss you and your 30% tipping, btw) you’ll never truly be able to get away from the hippie folk. They’re everywhere.
Race protests in Ithaca and around the country
The Chronicle of Higher Ed is reporting that students at more than 100 colleges across the country staged walk outs and protests in support of the six black students charged with racial crimes in Jena, La. The case has been all over the news recently, but essentially, six black high school students have been charged with attempted murder for beating a white student after they were repeatedly harassed in December of 2006. On sept. 20, more than 10,000 people marched in protest of their imprisonment, but now the momentum has spread to campuses, apparently.
I say: Bravo, college students. Let’s kick start this whole protesting thing again and make the 60s protests of our dirty hippie parents look like a 3-year-old’s birthday party.
In more local news, Ithaca College students were doing some protesting of their own (with many others) on Monday. Their protest, however, was targeting the Ithaca City School District, which is being criticized for how it is handling a high school student’s case of racial discrimination. Watch the video accompanying my article, it’s a pretty harsh condemnation of the school district.
Ithaca High school student Thandi Farley speaks about racism in her school. here.
Ahmadinejad visits Columbia, debates in front of sold out crowd of people who hate him
Ahmadinejad live @ Columbia: Yesterday Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the sixth president of Iran and a man noted for his government’s frequent human rights abuses, visited Columbia University’s campus for a debate. Just outside, behind barricades, a huge crowd protested his visit on the grounds that leaders who execute minors and don’t think the Holocaust happened shouldn’t be allowed to speak. (Some people were also just putting up absurd posters.)
Watch President Lee Bollinger’s vicious introduction to Ahmadinejad’s speech here. Money quote: ?Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator.?
Mahmoud’s response: ?In Iran, tradition requires when you invite a person to be a speaker, we actually respect our students enough to allow them to make their own judgment.” BAM!
In general, people were undecided on whether or not Bollinger’s introduction was too harsh for a terrorism-sponsoring dictator.
Here’s a reaction piece (via IvyGate) from a student at Columbia that pretty well lays bare the absurdity of the situation. A full transcript of the debate is available here at the Columbia Spectator’s Ahmadineblog.
Mean girls: She doesn’t look like any sister of mine
With a front-page expos? in the New York Times, 
the DePauw University chapter of Delta Zeta is facing harsh criticism from pretty much everyone. After struggling with an image problem ? a survey found students labeled them ?socially awkward? ? and some disapproving stares from national leaders questioning their commitment to DZ, 23 of the sisters were “granted them alumna status” (code for inactive) and unceremoniously evicted from the chapter house. The problem? All of the them fell into neat, if not imprecise, categories of fat, brainy and/or a minority. The remaining 12 were popular, pretty and white ? perfect for the social mixers. 6 of the dozen remaining DeeZees had the good sense to leave in protest.
Cindy Menges, executive director of Delta Zeta, said the women did it to themselves; they were not committed to recruitment, to the centennial year of the chapter’s founding, to the ?enrichment of student life at DePauw.? Oh, wait. Turns out they were, but the national leaders themselves pulled a wicked-stepmother move and locked the unsavory-est sisters upstairs in their own chapter house:
Robin Lamkin, a junior who is an editor at The DePauw and was one of the 23 women evicted, said many of her sisters bought new outfits and modeled them for each other before the interviews. Many women declared their willingness to recruit diligently, Ms. Lamkin said.
A few days after the interviews, national representatives took over the house to hold a recruiting event. They asked most members to stay upstairs in their rooms. To welcome freshmen downstairs, they assembled a team that included several of the women eventually asked to stay in the sorority, along with some slender women invited from the sorority?s chapter at Indiana University, Ms. Holloway said.
The article has the delicious revenge one of the protesting sisters pulled on them and how they rallied on campus to find out the truth.
Everyone’s backpedaling to soften the blow. DePauw’s press release is quick to point out President Robert G. Bottoms two-page (!) reprimand (PDF) of DZ, which basically says, uh, thanks ladies, we weren’t expecting to house this many homeless ex-sisters. It also tsk-tsks them for sending the letters out a week before finals, which caused many an angry phone call from parents. (Bottoms at least expressed slight disgust at the audacity of the DZ pooh-bahs in the NYT article.)
The National Office of Delta Zeta offers a prim well-I-never response to the article, pointing wildly to their Constitution that bans outright exclusion based on race (ahem) and mischaracterizations about just how diverse they all are. The removal of the sisters seemed to be the lesser of two evils from their perspective: if the house had chosen not to rush as the chapter had voted, the house would have been closed and not guaranteed a spot back in the Row, and since everyone loves anniversaries, it was in the best interest to keep the house open for their 100th pledge class in 2009 and “reorganize.” [Click the t-shirt to get the full effect of what their history seems to suggest.]
Greek life hasn’t been anywhere close to a bastion of fairness and inclusivity on college campuses, but it’s important to not condemn all fraternity brothers and sorority sisters, lock up their column-lined Rows and make them either accept everyone ? or worse, no one. But the idea of image and power getting in the way of their stated objectives outside of the camaraderie of the chapter house is nothing new, as USC freshman Elizabeth Kenigsberg. “[T]he process begins with appearance,” she writes in the Daily Trojan. “Sometimes, though, sorority members get too preoccupied with reputation and forget why they joined a sorority in the first place: for sisterhood.” Brave words, even if she now has to worry about her own possible eviction letter.
But even if the national office made the wrong call, was it for their own personal hate of the non-bubbly, non-white, non-generic sorority stereotype? For one DZ alumna (a real one), the answer is no. It’s all DePauw’s fault; all of the men who played hot-or-not with the new pledges, all of the women who avoided DZ to ensure their place in the popular sororities, and for all the DZ sisters who obsessed about breaking those images, even at the cost of their own personalities. The national office only did what the campus wanted.
At least, unlike a real family, you can choose your sisters.
That dog won’t hunt
By now, the hunt for some dude wearing a nametag claiming he’s an illegal immigrant is well underway. Media gasping, Facebook groups forming, protests ensuing, blah, blah. NYU’s College Republicans are pulling the same stunt played round the country, but the media are zeroing in on the idea that ? omigosh ? it’s not just people in the South who are affected by this! Can it actually be that people in the enlighten Nor’east think that it’s okay to parade around granting prizes to people who rustle up (fake) border crossers?
The obvious story here is: … Wait, there is no story. This is a stunt. It’s not meant to bring about dialogue. It’s not meant to just “ruffle their feathers” and then get people to reasonably discuss or even read a damn pamphlet. It’s a stunt of the grossest order: The College Republicans are trying to legitimize their own existence and (inflated) oppression by delegitimizing, oppressing and dehumanizing an entire sub-sect of society. Washington Square News sums it up nicely:
Yes, we recognize that most students here are liberals, as are a majority of professors. But that is something different from the liberal tyranny College Republicans think goes on here. It rarely does, yet the College Republicans overcompensate for this imagined oppression by staging excessively bombastic events.
This doesn’t do anything to advance discussion of conservative ideas, but it does make for sexy news stories - stories that unfortunately reflect poorly on NYU as a whole.
The editorial goes on to poke chuckling Democrats and any other finger-wagging groups on campus in the ribs with a don’t-expect-support-if-you-try-somthing-stupid-too (even-though-we-might-agree-with-you).
The price of academic freedom
How much would you pay to have a classroom free of liberal bias indoctrinating our free thinkers in higher education? Free of women’s lib classes that ask men to wear high heels and dresses to understand what women go through? For the Arizona Senate, they’re not asking the students to pay for the, um, freedom from hearing what professors might actually think. They’re fining the professors.
If you are a professor at a public or community college (but it does apply to K-12 teachers as well) and SB 1542 (n?e SB1612) goes through, you could very well be have to pay the Man for doing things like: endorsing or opposing any candidate for any political office; having an opinion on any pending legislation; merely talking about any current decision in any court, unless you talk about them in a non-positive/non-negative way; or, my personal favorite, advocating ?one side of a social, political, or cultural issue that is a matter of partisan controversy.?
If a professor is found spouting off anything perceived as partisan (the Arizona Daily Star suggests things like “evolution, global warming, foreign policy, voting rights, education policy” but really, the list could be twisted to include anything), the proposed legislation states that they could face up to $500 dollars and for higher offenses flat-out termination. The Arizona Republic calls it what it is: unconstitutional.
Sen. Thayer Verschoor, the Republican majority leader, spoke out about why exactly he thinks crumbling our shadow universities with this legislation is necessary. The cross-dressing lesson was “peculiar” to him, but this gem from Inside Higher Ed is too good not to quote:
In another case, he said, his comments offended a professor?s political sensibilities. While Verschoor did not remember the specifics of the political exchange or the class, he said that the professor accused him of being ?a political plant? and then said that ?plants are to be urinated on.?
He reads and hears about the problems all the time ? we can only guess which sources ? and says the bill isn’t designed to create academic freedom ? at least the perversion of the term by the likes of David Horowitz. For the record, Horowitz does not agree with the legislation for higher ed but is cool with it in K-12.
Horowitz is at least half-right here. College students are adults and if they cannot engage in intelligent, civil and reasoned debate about so-called controversial issues with their professors, and fellow students, what are they doing in college? Conservatives shouldn’t be silenced, just like liberals shouldn’t be fired, but this is the wrong way to do it.
Feed for College Ave.