Today, as many of you know, marks the twelfth annual Day of Silence, which aims to combat homophobia in schools and commemorate those who have lost their lives to anti-gay violence.
A reported 6,500 schools are participating in this year’s festivities, which also honors slain 15-year Lawrence King, so you can be sure the event’s big news. And Michigan’s local CBS affiliate fumbled in their coverage, says gay activist Sean Kosofsky.
To deal with obnoxious students who text message during his class, Syracuse University prof Laurence Thomas has a strict policy: If he catches a student doing it, he will end the class immediately and walk out. He’s been making good on his playbook, staging brazen walk outs on his own course after catching students SMSing.
Naturally, parents and students aren’t digging his policy, complaining about the $30k they spend to be consumers of education, and how Thomas has a duty to pay up. The scandal has even reached the student newspaper! (Where we used to work!)
To Thomas, it’s a matter of respect; students need to show some.
So when he caught a student in the front row of a large lecture hall sending a “where r u?” last week, he up and left, and then sent students, the chancellor, and his dean an email about the incident, where he noted the offending student is Cuban and that last year, two Latino students started a game of tic-tac-toe during his class.
You see, white students are also mischievous, but to Thomas, who is black, minority students should have a better understanding of respect. Even if their cell phones are 3G and tricked out with 5 megapixel cams.
After a three-year reign, New York University is no longer the No. 1 dream school for college-bound kids. Harvard, Princeton and Stanford are all ahead of it. Even Columbia dropped two spots. New York is over. [NYP]
What does Section 494 of the College Education and Affordability Act contain? Probably four people know, ’cause that thing is like 747 pages long. (Actually, it is 747 pages long.) But tucked in there is a provision – some might call it an earmark – from the RIAA and MPAA that would require any university receiving federal funding to install filters deterring copyright infringement on college campuses. The American Council on Education sent its own letters to Congress, arguing Sec. 494 would require undue financial burden on institutions of higher learning that are busy either giving tuition away for free or pinging students with erroneous fees like “science laboratory use fee” when they’re art majors. [THR Esq.]
“Teen admits sex with teacher 1 or 2 times.” Awesome? Maybe not. We hear those “1 or 2 times” just happened to coincide with the student’s worst grades of the entire semester. And we heard it from our cousin’s best friend, who swears someone in her younger brother’s gym class knows someone who recognizes the kid from study hall. So there. [CNN]
Did you know med school is totally overrated? After all, everyone “in the know” sees PhD’s are yours for the asking. Just think! While those suckers are shelling out a couple hundred grand, memorizing a bunch of boring medical jargon and spending a couple years working crazy 100+ hour shifts under the tutelage of “trained medical professionals,” you could get the exact same degree delivered without even getting up from your couch!
Order a PhD.
Your new Diploma! No examinations! No classes! No textbooks! Call to register and receive your qualifications within days! 24 hours a day 7 days a week!
On another note, we think we’ve finally figured out what to give our Jewish mother for the holidays this year.
Sixty-one small relatively obscure American liberal arts colleges have reportedly opted out of U.S. News & World Review’s annual rankings of higher education, in what Bloomberg News is calling “the biggest protest yet.”
Although, top-ranked schools (like Williams, Amherst and Swarthmore) have expressed “concern[s] about the survey’s fairness,” those concerns seem to be largely outweighed by the satisfaction of being rated the highest.
Meanwhile, those (safety!) schools joining the rebellion against U.S. News stand by their decision to boycott the “reputational survey,” explaining that they’d simply prefer to “sit around in patchouli oil-stained bohemian clothes, sipping green tea and eating organic ramen noodles out of dye-free handcrafted porcelain bowls while listening to Rufus Wainwright on their iPods or writing touchy-feely essays about ‘The Feminist Mystique’ instead.”
Last week, a substitute teacher in a Wisconsin school district was fired for allegedly initiating a sexual relationship with her daughter’s 13 year-old boyfriend.
And, while the teacher’s name has not yet been released (due to the pending police investigation) it’s safe to assume that she, like her predecessors Debra Lafave and Amber Jennings, is both deeply disturbed and outrageously hot.
Although no pictures of the offending woman are currently available, we do have an exclusive video dramatization of the local Wisconsin police department responsible for the woman’s apprehension and subsequent arrest.
The highly educational footage, after the jump.
First they agree to restrict access to certain sites just to do business in China, and now Google is getting all up in our ability to cheat on college term papers? So much for that “don’t be evil” mantra. Beginning next month, the search giant will stop accepting advertisements from essay-writing services (or, as they’re more realistically known, essay-downloading services). Naturally, your college professor – the asshole who signed up for Plagiarism.org when it was in beta – is pleased by the news. And so is the nerd down the hall, whose thesis writing fee just tripled.
In today’s newest Times exposée, we learn that Ivy League rejects from coast to coast are being forced to focus their sights on (gasp!) second-tier colleges. And, once they get over their initial horror/humiliation of being waitlisted at Brown, the underachieving pre-frosh are actually kinda psyched about settling for their safeties!
Turns out their name-dropping parents aren’t quite as good at coping, though.
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Steve Kmetko is leaving the confines of E! for the more riveting realm of … academia. The openly gay (because that’s always important to mention!) news anchor has been with the network for something like a decade, where he came over after an 11-year stint at KCBS in Los Angeles. Now he’s taken up an invitation from alma mater Columbia College in Chicago to begin teaching in the school’s television department.
Because when you try and fail to hit on Mark Malkin, the only logical recourse is to hit up the new batch of frosh.
Sometimes, we like to make fun of the Grey Lady. Because, like most old people/things, the NYT occasionally sounds awkward or out of touch. And because, from time to time, their trend pieces sound less like actual trends and more like “things a couple of eccentric rich people are doing.”
But today, we have to applaud them. Because today, they reminded us why a rolled up New York Times, tucked tidily under one’s underarm, is the only appropriate choice for the discerning bathroom reader.
We are referring, of course, to the praiseworthy headline in today’s Education section, which is equal parts accurate, informative and mildly condescending regarding the throngs of disappointed would-be Ivy Leaguers.
The headline?
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Know what most schools are desperate for? Classroom materials. Know what many Americans think their children should be taught to care about? The environment. Know what schools are rejecting because the National Science Teachers Association has a policy against endorsement? Fifty thousand free copies of An Inconvenient Truth.
“I never in a million years thought this would happen,” says David, a well-known environmentalist. “It made no sense to me.”
So David wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post in which she notes, among other things, that the NSTA has accepted contributions from ExxonMobil, Shell and the National Petroleum Institute. The teachers association even distributed a Petroleum Institute video called “You Can’t Be Cool Without Fuel,” which David calls “a shameless pitch for oil dependence.”
Well, it’s also a lesson in how to fit in with the cool crowd, and is Al Gore’s DVD really offering that? Doubtful, as we never heard of anyone in the Environmental Club getting laid. The assholes promoting gas guzzling? They got mad chicks.
Remember yesterday’s report about Natalie Portman dropping in on a Columbia University class to guest teach? Turns out professor Stuart Gottlieb and his Terrorism and Counterterrorism class was merely part of an “underground” publicty tour for her upcoming V For Vendetta orchestrated by MTU-U, MTV’s campus network.
Thankfully, there’s a student in attendance with a blog.
It turns out that Ms. Portman’s cameo in Professor Stuart Gottlieb’s Terrorism and Counterterrorism class was part of a MTV-U promotion for her latest flick, V for Vendetta, in which her character mounts a revolutionary campaign against a totalitarian government and generally blows shit up.
A sampling of the truths Ms. Portman imparted in the 20-minute Q&A session following a somber Frontline documentary on Al Qaeda, Guantanamo and the CIA’s counterterrorism tactics:
- “My immediate reaction is that torture is wrong.”
- “I don’t think it’s right to take down the Twin Towers.”
- “Censorship is bad.”
In other news, the Bwog suspects Ms. Portman and Prezbo share the same hair stylist. Her hair. never. moved.
Glad we’re reinforcing such commercial marketing values among our undergrad population. We hope Jonathan Antin has time in his schedule to lecture a Art History class on the importance of bangs in the 17th century Baroque era.
Breaking News: Natalie Portman at Columbia [The Bwog]
Earlier: Natalie Portman hands out gold stars at Columbia University
Straight off the success of her Saturday Night Live digital short (and straight off the success of NBC’s ability to pull it from YouTube), Natalie Portman’s continued her New York press tour with at stopover at – of all places – Columbia University. The V For Vendetta star’s classroom appearance on Monday is being labeled as a “stand-in professor” gig, where we imagine topics ranged from “How to shave your head without looking like a bull dyke” to “It doesn’t matter if your big budget movie performance was shitty; It’s all about the paycheck.”
The Cold Mountain star made quite an impression on students at Columbia University in New York when she went along to work as a stand-in professor on Monday. The pretty performer is no stranger to the goings-on of a college campus, however, as she studied for her own qualification at Harvard between 1999 and 2003.
Casually dressed in blue jeans and a loose-fitting top, Natalie looked rather less intimidating than her shaven-headed character in latest movie offering V For Vendetta. The actress, who says people took her for a troublemaker while she was sporting the skinhead look, has since grown her brunette locks back.
With Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen effectively abandoning New York University’s campus, it’s the least Hollywood can do for academia in lil’ ole New York. Now, with midterms coming up, expect Kiera Knightley to stop by CUNY to discuss Scarlett Johansson’s pasty ass and Emma Watson to drop in on Marymount for a lecture on binge drinking.
In a world where privileged teens get their own nightclub, the idea that senior prom has turned into a contest to see who’s dick is bigger should surprise nobody, let alone a Catholic school. (Have they not learned that young boys of any age enjoy a good romp? Okay, we went too far there.)
A second Long Island high school announced it was canceling prom because the year-end event was no longer about “togetherness and farewells,” but about who arrives in the biggest limo, who’s dress broke five figures and which after party has the purest coke.
Now let’s listen to Chaminade High School president the Rev. James Williams spin his decision:
Williams admitted that many students expressed disappointment when the announcement was made. But he said students seemed to have accepted the school’s position, and many even agree with its arguments.
Both Chaminade and Kellenberg have encouraged students to develop alternative ideas to celebrate the year’s end.
Sure, there are the obvious carnivals, charity fundraisers and haute couture runways shows that could be organized instead, but our faith in the credit card caste of kids leads us to believe they’ll just start their prom night with the promiscuous sex and lines of coke instead of waiting till the spiked punch runs out.
It was only Tuesday that we were half-heartedly bowing down to college newspapers with budgets the size of Caroline Rhea’s droopy cleavage. UPenn’s The Daily Pennsylvanian was one paper in particular, with an annual budget of $1 million, that we’re particularly jealous of, especially when our own budget is decided by how many free subways swipes we can score.
And then, on this morning’s Drudge Report, we get a look at exactly what that $1 million is being used for: Showing college students fuck in the dorms.
If you actually want the context of the photo, click below. For now, we’re going to relax, comforted to know we can peddle porn with the big guys.
Student In Trouble For Posting Naked Dorm Photos [NBC]
Photo of students having sex [Daily Pennsylvanian]
Earlier: At college newspapers, ‘C’ is for cash
Having worked at a college newspaper (and even snagging an award for editorial writing — so stop mocking us) we know how many hours student broadsheets can vacuum from your social schedule just to meet those silly things called “deadlines” or play beer pong in the basement (true story).
But maybe we would’ve worked harder, cared more and considered graduating as a sixth year senior if our student daily had the budget of, say, the Daily Pennsylvanian. Its $1 million annual allowance is nothing to scoff at, and neither is its 200-person staff — and UPenn doesn’t even have a journalism program! (Okay, they have a comm department, big deal.)
(Interestingly, our newspaper, Syracuse University’s Daily Orange, was comprised mostly of non-Newhouse/communications students.)
While national newspapers are seeing their staff slashed and budgets cut while circulation spirals lower, college papers are doing more than just fine, hiring “design consultants,” buying “color presses” and acting like the elitest media professionals they aspire to be.
But hey, if we were registered as a non-profit, out bottom line would look impressive too. Alas, it doesn’t, which gives us room to complain.
But with all that cash in their coffers, we’d like to officially end the debate on whether college newspapers and their writers are garnering too much Romenesko exposure. With all that money and sought after readership, they deserve some media criticism, if only Jon Friedman creampuff kind.
College Papers Grow Up [Newsweek]
Related: College is where you drink, screw and write articles you’ll regret
Jim Romenesko, the brass-knuckled blogger? That’s what Slate’s Bryan Curtis is claiming in Jimmy’s treatment of college newspapers, where – thanks to this era of digital-giz-techno-net everything – students’ mistakes are on full display for all to ridicule.
Having been both a columnist and editorial editor at our student newspaper, we know the pitfalls of work being published online. Like, it can even get syndicated.
But isn’t university supposed to be a place where overambitious comm students can fuck up? Certainly, college newspapers must be the place to egregiously support underage drinking, racially offensive frat theme parties and a call for the chancellor to resign. Because if they’re not, we’re going to have to own up to the fact that student newspapers are just a grand excuse to print comics and crossword puzzles to complete during lectures.
The fear is that with the attention of big media, ambitious collegians may be tempted to skip ahead. They will put aside the date-rape and cafeteria stories and move too quickly into the dreariness of the “adult” world: COLA adjustments, forged National Guard documents, and so forth. The cherished intimacy of college journalism will give way to the partisan stew of the rest of it.
Though we like to think we can rest on the laurels of student apathy to keep that world far, far away from campus.
Having added 74 new schools this year, New York City welcomes back its 1 million-plus students today. Granted, kids aren’t exactly our target audience or reason enough to warrant editorial, but we’re plenty pleased we can now shout “Shouldn’t you be in school?” at the kids overflowing our parks.
And feel justified.
Editorial Director
