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**
Harvard to subsidize (throw money at) rich kids
Are households with incomes of $120,000 to $180,000 still considered to be in the middle class?
Well, Harvard University thinks they are. In an effort to seem like they’re making college more affordable for the middle upper middle class, the university just announced that it will give the families of students who fall into this income category a huge break on tuition. Of course, students in families with an income between $60,000 and $120,000 will also get the tuition discount, but those kids actually need it.
Here’s my problem: the rich families will ALSO only have to pay 10 percent of their yearly income to tuition, so a family earning 120k would only have to pay $12,000 a year to send their child to Harvard, land of opportunity, secret societies and a $35 billion endowment, which is the reason they can throw money at well-off families and call it “making college more affordable.” That’s the equivalent of some state school tuitions.
Harvard also already waives all tuition costs for students whose families make less than $60,000 a year, so we can’t accuse them of not treating economically disadvantaged students badly, but I don’t think subsidizing wealthy families is any way to balance the scales. If anything, give that money somewhere that it’s needed.
Round-Up: You think you’re all big and bad?
Got told: The University of Wisconsin was quickly becoming the darling of the pro-piracy anti-RIAA crowd, since they were one of the few brave souls to ignore those pre-litigation letters. A U.S. district court judge decided earlier this week they must turn over the names. But because university refused to give the letters during the “pre-” part, any settlement made with the RIAA will not received the substantial discount (just the arm! you can keep the leg!) that those who got the letters on time had.
The eigth word? WQRI, the student radio station of Roger Williams University, fired two of their DJ for repeating the Offensive Phrase of 2007, “nappy-headed hos,” on the airwaves repeatedly. Dana Peloso and Jon Porter, the Imus’d DJs, are claiming their show was part of a political take-down in collaboration wit the administration. Peloso is the president of College Republicans on campus, who just happen to have Jason Mattera coming to speak. The CR at RWU have grabbed the media spotlight before with the “Whites Only” scholarship a few years back. The station’s manager, Mike Martelli, held a vote (at a staff meeting neither Peloso or Porter attended) and it was unanimously decided that the phrase would not be used multiple times on the air, thanks to the FCC license review WQRI is under. Martelli, apparently a former College Republican himself, wrote a response to the IHE story. (Scroll to the bottom. Uh, “free speach?” Dude: spellcheck.) It sounds more like a pissing match between DJs who think they’re above Martelli and a station manager who feels slighted than an actual attempt to silence speech. But I’m a little concerned that there was no dissent from the other student DJs about the phrase and this pervasive idea that radio has to be “a non-offensive product.” Just sayin’.
Where’s IvyGate when you need it? Director of the FBI Robert Mueller got heckled during his speech at Harvard last week, the Harvard Crimson dutifully reported. Also dutifully reported: two of their own editors were the hecklers. Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky and J. Claire Provost (those names exude Haaarvard) were chanting things like ?We will never forget the role of the FBI in McCarthyism!? and “Stop the unconstitutional repression of the environment!” (Most likely followed by snickering.) The term editor is misleading ? anyone from a writer to a photographer to graphics designer is an editor ? but it didn’t stop Romenesko and The New Editor working up a small lather over it.
Starting fresh: Here’s something you don’t see every 100 years: the newest university in the Georgia system started last year with 116 students and expects a whopping 3,000 to enroll this fall. Georgia Gwinnett College (”The campus of tomorrow” with a Web site from 15 years ago) expects to have 15,000 students by 2012, but for now they’re more concerned with making sure high school students in Gwinnet County even know they exist. Don’t worry, they’ve got plenty of hats, key chains and coffee mugs already made. But this is kind of a neat idea; the students get to make their own traditions, start their own student government, choose their own mascot. Hey, I hear one might be looking for a job.
How (not) to succeed without even going to college
If this was a LiveJournal, I would have to put that emoticon of some confused, floating kittie, ’cause I don’t know how to really feel about it. Marilee Jones, the dean of admissions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and someone very vocal about the reform of the admissions game, was very publicly outed as being a fraud. Jones had essentially lied about her three degrees from three different colleges. The only university she had attended was Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the ’70s but did not graduate.
Marilee Jones in happier times. This profile of her is still up on MIT’s admissions page.
Now, clearly this is a big deal in academia. Misrepresentation of the highest order (read: flat-out fraud), followed by the wringing of hands, gnashing of teeth, harumphing over how something like this happened and how FERPA has screwed hiring managers over.
The bitter irony here, of course, is that even though no college could vouch for her, her employer consistantly rewarded her for the apparently excellent job she did. And even more irony: she was actually good at her job, good enough to land nice profile pieces in the New York Times (and picked up on the wire by The Tech, MIT’s newspaper) and opinion pieces in USA Today, good enough to have a Amazon rank of #369 for her book quelling the fears of anxious high school seniors, Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond.
This, of course, is causing more harumphing on the comments of InsideHigherEd. While (everyone is quick to admit that) she should have been fired for her tardy-but-honest disclosure, what does it say about this job, and the entire industry, if the person is more impressive than her credentials but still does the job (presumably) better than someone with more, real degrees?
Jones is refusing to do interviews during what is obviously a very stressful and personally devastating time for her.? Her career ? regardless her intelligence, her wide respectability in the field, well-selling book, her crusade of common sense and striking reform in a field marred by overzealous elites manipulating the system to reap the rewards of a broken system in one of the worst-kept secrets of what’s wrong with universities today.
But all things considered, she did blatently lie not only to her employer but the entire world and profited both in wages and book sales and discredits the entire sanctity of the admission system that condemns r?sum? fluffing and cover letter plagarism. As David Null, retired professor and Amazon.com book reviewer pithily says: “No wonder Jones recommends not stressing out about being admitted to college. Follow her example and just lie about it.” The stain of this may be big, but is it worth her very public termination and crucifcation? For my general feeling, I say:
Round-up: Making college loan-free
(Sorry for the spring break hiatus; College Ave. is back to work. Send any tips to collegeaveblog@gmail.com.)
Easing the costs: Davidson College, a small liberal arts in South Carolina, made a step towards making college debt-free. Starting next year, any student who qualifies for need-based aid will receive a financial aid package with part-time work studies and grant money ? no student loans. While they aren’t the first (there are about a dozen other schools nationwide), it is encouraging to students and their parents who skip over Davidson and its $40K+ sticker price. (Ithaca College: I’m looking at you.)
Battle royale: New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo issued a scathing press release accusing banks and universities in being in “an unholy alliance” over student loans:
The financial arrangements between lenders and these schools are filled with the potential for conflicts of interest. In some cases they may break the law.
The offenses he’s found run the gamut of corruption: kickbacks for loans, slush fund junkets, credit lines for colleges to get the “preferred” stamp of approval, etc. Dallas Martin, the president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, fired back, claiming that no one in the NASFAA takes bribes or any other shady practices. Martin also chides Cuomo for trying to “inflame rather than to inform? and asked for a formal apology. [Via InsideHigherEd]
Harboring pirates? The RIAA ranked the major universities with the naughty, naughty students downloading the latest Nelly Furtado album, but number 10 on the list, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, decided not to send out the scare tactic settlement letter from RIAA over students on their campus downloading music illegally. They did, however, send out a hey-guys-cut-it-out email to everyone hoping that would be enough to stop the major offenders in addition to the (compulsory) cease-and-desist letters. Anything is better than directing them to the settlement website to cash out; some of those settlements have hit $7,000 smackeroos. Maybe they could get Ruckus and be done with it.
Roundup: Pay attention to the man behind the curtain
They’re people, too: Applying for college is probably as stressful as high school gets. Daniel Creasy, an employee in the admissions office at Johns Hopkins, is using the internet to do more than just let people check on the status of their application. He’s showing the human side, handing out tips and tricks to calm the (ir)rational fears seniors have and joking about his dog having to help sift the mountain of what-changed-my-life essays on his blog, Hopkins Insider. As someone who was in the maw of the machine four years ago, this is a great use of the technology. Let’s restrain ourselves, however, before we start seeing Facebook pokes from the bursar office. [via Washington Post]
But they’re not perfect people: NPR has an ongoing series, The College Admissions Game, and the second part of seven took on the admissions process’ biggest elephant in the room: national magazine rankings. Every college president hates them but no college can get rid of them (imagine being the first one to jump off that cliff), causing what they call a “growing disconnect between admission practices and educational values.” Some of the observations can be problematic; Christian Brady, the dean of Schreyer Honors College at Penn State, points out in his blog that even though the increase of merit-based scholarships often comes at the decrease of financial aid, being smart and having financial need aren’t mutually exclusive. The rest of the series, especially Friday’s segment about historially black colleges and universities falling out of favor for numerous reasons, is a great listen.
And now, something completely different: While College Ave. may be too straight and narrow of a street for this kind of thing, my blogging brother Andy at The Big Spoon will be liveblogging the Oscars today starting at 7 p.m. Pull up a chair, drink some bubbly (if you’re into that sort of thing) and get ready for the ridiculousness.
From South Hill to Sweden. Plus, broken images!
This blog isn’t about Ithaca College, but it’s been making a few small waves in the blogging world. The Park School of Communications has made a big push to study where traditional media and online innovation intersect. Professor Kim Gregson’s class studying Second Life (read The Ithacan story about it) has been leading the way. Our school has it’s very own island and a sister island for our Independent Media Center (which is coming soon in First Life), and we’ve been getting people to virtually-visit the vector version of school. Thank goodness our school isn’t decorated like that in real life! Gregson has her own blog keeping tabs on the rest of the class’ progress.
But people are noticing. Rasmus Karlsson, a graduate student in Sweden, flew over to the island, got his requisite freebie shirt and posed for a group picture. He seems impressed with the idea ? like a lot of people in academia ? about the idea of introducing an educational aspect to what is essentially the world’s largest virtual chatroom classroom.
Second Life aside, however, it appears like Ithaca hasn’t gotten all the kinks worked out of their online presence. William, a high school student from Queens, has been getting the typical barrage of brochures and emails from colleges trying to woo him to apply. Ithaca, in it’s we’re-so-hip-to-this-internet-thing-attitude, bashed all those other colleges with paper viewbooks (which, um, still work pretty well for them) and bragging about how they offer video and 360 degree views. Then they had a broken gif image in the email. “If this is the cutting edge,” he blogged, “then there must be a better knife out there somewhere.” Ouch.
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