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.
Back in action for a lil hometown love
Cornell University’s men’s and women’s basketball teams, defying some considerable history, made it into the NCAA tournament this year, and Ithaca’s pretty excited about it. Although the men’s team has a tough opponent in Stanford, a No. 3 seed compared to Cornell’s 14th seed ranking, the women’s team arguably has it tougher, facing the No. 1 seeded team, UConn.
Regardless of the outcome of the games, just getting into the tournament is a big accomplishment for the two teams - the men haven’t made it since 1988, and the women’s team has never been, until this year.
We’re rooting for you, Big Red.
Palestinian ambassador visits Cornell, makes camel jokes
Ambassador of the Palestinian people and the PLO Afif Safieh visited Cornell University last night, and spoke to the collected students and faculty about what he called the responsibility of the U.S. to help solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with its overwhelming political power.
Interspersed between his serious pleas for increased diplomacy, Mr. Safieh joked around a bit, saying that while most camels can work for ten days without drinking, most diplomats can drink for ten days without working. After the laughter died down, he assured the audience that he was, in fact, more like a camel.
He also poked fun at the U.S. for behaving like a powerless country when dealing with Israel, and urged the superpower to wage peace, not war, in the Middle East.
“We would be your consenting victims if America decided to wage peace on us,? he joked.
Mr. Safieh took a number of questions, many of which accused him of ignoring the Israeli side of the equation, or being irrelevant, seeing that the Gaza Strip was recently wrestled away from his party, Fatah, by the terroristic organization Hamas.
(Disclosure: Yeah, so I sort of wrote the article I’m linking to.)
College kids love - and hate - Internet gossip sites
It’s the latest college-themed site to make a splash, but unlike Facebook’s almost universal appeal, this one has been rubbing lots of people the wrong way. The web site is called Juicy Campus, and it markets itself as a place to spread “juicy” rumors and find secrets.
But nobody likes being gossiped about, never mind gossiped about on the Internet, where these things have a tendency toward permanency. There’s been considerable backlash to the site recently, which lets people post things like ?Who is the sluttiest girl????,? ?Hottest Cornell Sophomores,? and ?Biggest Cornell Cokeheads?? Today’s big topics include “ball-licking” and “anti-semitism - not cool. anti-asianism - totally acceptable.” It’s pretty much all the same on the site.
Here comes the backlash:
Not surprisingly, the Cornell Daily Sun isn’t so happy about this latest online troll-frenzy. A columnist there has suggested people stop writing but that most certainly won’t work, and in fact, it’ll probably drive more people to the site.
Facebook groups protesting the site have been started, college newspapers are writing, student governments are passing resolutions and pretty soon this whole thing is going to be huge, or people are going to decide to stop slandering their classmates online. I’m guessing it’s just going to get bigger. Remember ratemyprofessors? This is just like ‘rate my friends,’ but instead of rating, I’m going to accuse them of being a slut or a cokehead.
What can you do if you’re accused of being a slut or a cokehead on the site? Not much. They offer you the option of “giving a thumbs down” to the offending posts, but they aren’t willing to delete anything, administrators say.
We’re no strangers to campus gossip, either: College Ave. had a run-in with an anonymous blogger posting nasty things about nice people last semester. So how’d we deal with that situation? After we outed him, he quit. It works, people, it works. Just find these people and reveal them, and the world will be a less-gossipy place. Hopefully.
Financial Aid: The Opus
If you haven’t already, go ahead and read Munzer?s article in The Ithacan, and the editorial written today about the financial aid situation. Pay close attention to how tricky it is for a school like Ithaca. We?ll come back to this in a little.
We’ve seen a major financial aid overhaul get through Congress, and get signed by the President. It’s a nice idea, but it’s flawed. And it’s already a little too late, based on some recent announcements from big-name colleges. Its merits are good, no doubt. It attempts to add to the value of Pell Grant. (Although here?s an interesting question: Why are the funds authorized for 2013 only $105 million? By the by, over the 10 years there?s an average of $2.87 billion additional appropriated each year.) And it brings up this TEACH grant to help out current and prospective teachers.
Curiously, there?s nothing in there overhauling financial aid that will take care of the long (and largely unnecessary) process that is the FAFSA. In fact, the only time it?s even mentioned in the mile-long bill is under the College Access Challenge Grant Program, where help with the application is covered as a payment with the grant. Hm.
Odds & Ends: cult edition!
Join our club cult: Student members of a Korean sect of Christianity that worship a man named Ahnsahnghong as the embodiment of Christ have started using aggressive recruiting techniques at the University of Pennsylvania, even going so far as to follow some students to their classes. Religion prof at the school insists they are a cult. Creepy, regardless.
Cornell playing catch-up: The “hottest “Ivy has just followed the lead of other elite, wealthy schools like Harvard and Yale in announcing vast changes to their financial aid programs intended to help middle class families afford college. After two years, “the program will take full effect by eliminating need-based loans for students from families with incomes up to $75,000, and capping annual loans at $3,000 for students from families with incomes between $75,000 and $120,000,” according to The Ithaca Journal. If only some of these aid packages were retroactive, and applied to Ithaca College. Damnit.
Democracy Now Later! Students at Washington University in St. Louis are pissed after their school recently prohibited presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama from speaking. The administration’s reasoning? A visit by a candidate would disrupt academics and open the door for other candidates to visit the campus. How is this democracy thing disruptive? The campus paper ironically notes that although the school feared losing its tax-exempt status if it only allowed one candidate to speak, “Brown University, Wellesley College and Boston University have hosted presidential candidates and have not lost their tax-exempt status.” Owned.
Kevin Bacon plays “Six Degrees” of beer pong: After giving a talk at Dartmouth College and receiving the Dartmouth Film Award, actor Kevin Bacon got down with his college self and played some pong with students in a dimly lit basement. Follow the link for pictures of the celebrity beer pong goodness.
Getting naked … for the environment? Students in an environmental group at Northern Michigan University graphically protested a nickel and copper mine near their school by printing a black-and-white calendar of nude group members posing at the site of the proposed mine. The calendar will be sold to “raise funds” for the group. Sure.
Is Ithaca one of the nation’s ‘ugliest’ colleges?
OH NO YOU DIDN’T! Ithaca College just got some Hate-erade dumped all over it.
Some dinky blog called the Campus Squeeze, which proudly describes itself as “not just any college Web site,” has pronounced our admittedly aesthetically-challenged campus the 17th ugliest of any college in the United States. Now, I don’t have any serious issues with this proclamation, because let’s face it, there are some uggggly buildings on our pretty ‘lil campus.
But these guys obviously didn’t look at every single school to make their decision - they just decided to check out some colleges’ Web sites, asked students to bash colleges on their message boards, and then made a blanket, uninformed statement about beauty, which as we all know, is a very subjective thing. Then they wrote it all down in a big, annoying list.
The dude who writes the piece says that he’s “extremely unimpressed” by our campus and that it “pales” next to Cornell. Yeah, sure, we’ve got a lot of gray, brick-shaped buildings, but c’mon, at least we’re trying now. I blame 60’s architecture, personally.
(College Ave. thanks Tipster Krar for the link. )
Capital Campaign Envy
When it comes to capital campaigns - a lovely euphemism that disguises institutional panhandling so well - Cornell University is Ithaca College’s giant white elephant in the room.
Sure, it’s not fair to compare CU and IC. One is a monolithic research institution, the hottest school in the Ivy League, and a powerhouse of student - and alumni - money with 20,638 current students. South Hill’s little college that could, in contrast, is a private liberal arts school, 6,498 strong, famed for fit students, a pretty big football game - for D3 - and lots of heady nugs pot smokers.
Normally no one would compare totally different schools, but because the two are barely miles apart, I think I’m allowed a little geographic leeway.
So when it comes time to juxtapose the fundraising efforts of Ithaca’s two ivory towers, you can pretty much already tell whose capital campaign is bigger.
Yup, you were right. Cornell is whupping ass. The Ithaca Journal reported Friday that after a “bonanza of $71.5 million” in gifts, Cornell has passed $1 billion, and is now sprinting toward its overall goal of **drumroll, please** $4 BILLION DOLLARS!
Now, back to South Hill, where the largest comprehensive campaign ever organized at Ithaca is slowly creeping to its pittance of a goal. Almost to $115 million, guys! $112 million is a lot, right? Don’t quit now! So what’s my favorite part of IC’s innovative fundraising technique? President Peggy Williams asking students for money!
“If students wanted to give $10 or $25 to the campaign, it would be a very good way to start to acknowledge how these improvements come to be.”
There’s been only one response to this statement that I’ve ever heard: you mean you charge me more than $40,000 a year to go here, and now you want my beer money too??!?
So what’s my point in making all these biased, ineffective comparisons? Hear me out, Office of Institutional Advancement: instead of Ithaca recruiting its own alumni - except Bob Iger, he’s kind of a big deal, keep squeezing him - we need to start recruiting the trust fund babies over at Cornell.
Feed for College Ave.
