This year’s winner of the

Princeton snowman competition
reminds UD that she’s
been meaning to review the
subject of squirrels on campus.

Tame, rampant, clever, and
occasionally threatening squirrels
are a big feature of a lot of
campuses. Students get
particularly excited about them
if they’re black or if they’re white.
Gray does little for them.

Mary Baldwin College
has a squirrel on its seal.

Kent State has a Black Squirrel Festival.

Sarah Lawrence’s many black squirrels
are the college’s unofficial mascot:

When St. Norbert College’s
albino squirrel died, it was
buried with full honors.

University of Texas students
believe that if you see an albino
squirrel on your way to a test,
you’ll get an A.

Universities tired of squirrels
chewing through their electrical
systems sometimes secretly
try to kill them. Or not secretly.

But you have to be careful.

… One of my colleagues attended a media conference in Algiers last April, where post-graduate female students from the university acted as interpreters. These women, who were Muslim, were asked not to wear headscarves by the state broadcaster running the event, because it was felt they would send an anti-progressive signal to international delegates.

The young women complied, but were jeered at by men on the street as they walked bare-headed from the campus to the conference centre. Were they angered by these hecklers? On the contrary, their indignation was directed at the organiser for asking them to leave off their veils, thereby laying them open to taunts…

Martina Devlin, Independent

***************************

Meanwhile, in Iran:

Last October Iranian police in the north-eastern town of Bojnourd launched a new crackdown on attractive mannequins in clothes stores and the main bazaar, confiscating about 65 ‘hijab-less female mannequins.’

“The use of vulgar mannequins – whether male or female – is an affront to public morals and is considered to be a crime,” said an Iranian official, adding that the display of properly veiled mannequins which adhere to the national dress code would not be considered a crime.

A University of Manitoba professor is alleging a doctoral candidate twice failed his comprehensive examination, then appealed to be reinstated on the basis that he suffers from the disability of extreme examination anxiety.

The professor — who asked not to be named — said he has filed a complaint to the U of M senate alleging a senior administrator reinstated the student into the doctoral program and ruled that the student’s PhD be determined solely on the basis of his doctoral thesis…

At first it looked like an open-and-shut case of two female basketball players beating up on a male cheerleader who complained about their noisy partying.

Now it looks as though they were all friends and all partying together when a fourth person complained about noise, and things somehow got out of hand.

I mean, the details aren’t clear. They rarely are when everyone’s drunk as a skunk. But the guy’s nose is definitely broken. And everyone’s been suspended from their team or their squad.

*************************

UD thanks David for the Smoking Gun link.

… is featured in Politico today.

… The 19-year-old sophomore at George Washington University has become the Washington press corps’ independent fact checker, copy editor and link distributor extraordinaire. His e-mails almost always lead off with a soupçon of praise, such as “In your excellent article today,” followed by a link to the story and polite notification of a mistake, anything from a broken hyperlink to a misspelled name. He offers the correction — “It’s ‘Haass,’ not ‘Haas,’” he wrote in regard to the president of the Council on Foreign Relations — and often a link as proof. He signs off coolly: “Best, Daniel.”

… On an average day, Lippman says he’ll read about 80 articles in just a couple of hours — which seems like a conservative estimate. He’s quick to note that he does not let this interfere with his studies. To that end, he decided not to bring his laptop to his classes this year, as it was becoming a distraction.

His connections to professional journalists began a couple of years ago, when he started firing off e-mails with corrections to The New York Times. For a while, Lippman kept tabs on his successes by bookmarking them on his computer.

“I like accuracy a lot,” he says…

******************************

Not bringing your laptop to class, eh?

A distraction, eh?

On the Northern Virginia Community College Woodbridge campus, a student in a math class took out a high-powered rifle and shot twice at his math professor.

The teacher saw the gun, yelled for her 25 students to duck and then hit the floor herself. The student missed, put the gun down, sat on a chair in the hallway and calmly waited for police to arrest him.

Jason Michael Hamilton of Baneberry Circle in the Manassas area was charged with attempted murder…

Roughly 10 to 20 people, including several University students, were involved in a “large fight” on Saturday evening at a dance hosted by the Caribbean Connection at the Carl A. Fields Center, Deputy Chief of Public Safety Charles Davall said in an e-mail to The Daily Princetonian.
The conflict escalated until Borough Police sprayed the crowd with pepper spray, Davall added.

Around 1:20 a.m. on Sunday, Public Safety officers received several calls from party attendees who said a fight had broken out in the dance venue.

One Public Safety officer had been assigned to security detail for the event because of its size and nature, Davall said, adding that three officers were on scene when the fight broke out because of an earlier confrontation around midnight at the same event.

At the time of the incident, around 200 people were present, and about 10 to 20 of them were “pushing, shoving and punching each other,” Davall added.

Though two officers tried to stop the violence, the large crowd pushing toward the fight prevented them from calming the situation and separating the combatants.

It soon became clear that the officers and combatants were both in “jeopardy of significant harm,” and other attendees were being hit as well, Davall added.

The crowd dispersed quickly, though, when a Borough Police officer patrolling the area arrived on the scene and sprayed pepper spray over the crowd. The police sprayed the crowd twice before the combatants stopped fighting, Davall said…

The Daily Princetonian

Sign in the University of Michigan dormitories:

Here

are

three

articles from three universities about the class on Wednesday before Thanksgiving controversy.

(Very pleasant, thank you, and I hope yours was too. Highlight: Playing Rock Band, UD‘s sister on drums, La Kid on guitar, and UD warbling into the mike. We did all these songs I sort of know… sort of know the chorus, maybe… Ramblin’ Man, Kids of America, American Woman… Started mentally ramblin’ during Ramblin’ Man… I was thinking Allman Brothers didn’t Cher marry one of them Sonny always seemed dumb named one of his kids Chesare because you couldn’t expect people to figure it out if they named him Cesare…)

So here’s my take on Should we cancel Wednesday classes before the holiday.

***************************

What’s happening, most broadly, at the American university right now is what UD calls Invisibility Drift. Classes used to meet three days a week; now most meet two. There used to be very few holidays and cancellations; now there are gobs. Official cancellations and particular professors cancelling for this and that reason. Some class sessions you just watch a film, which you can do anywhere, at any time, and there’s nothing class about it… I mean, no one’s up there teaching you something; there’s no discussion going on. The classroom, the professor, other students, the university — all incidental. I’ve read more than one Rate My Professor complaint about professors in courses like these turning out the lights, starting the film, and leaving. See you next Tuesday! Enjoy the show.

Add to this high levels of class skipping among students (I did plenty when I was an undergrad), high levels of watching tv shows on your laptop or texting while you’re in class, high levels of guest lecturers instead of the ostensible professor teaching the class, high levels of blowing the course off and looking at downloaded stuff in your dorm…

You get the idea. The university as a physical location where professors and students interact in real, flesh and blood time and place vanishes. Does your professor look at you and talk to you and think in front of you? Do you look at the professor and listen to her and take notes? Do students look at each other and talk to each other? Bring books and look at the places in the books where the professor directs their attention?

No. Ain’t much attention going on in the vanishing classroom. People are absent — physically or mentally.

So look at it this way. Administrators are aware that at $50,000 a year or so they need to, well, pay attention to the fact that their enterprise as more or less originally conceived and priced is vanishing. At least at British universities, where you seldom see a professor or take a class, they don’t charge much of anything. Here in a quintessentially postmodern transaction you pay immense sums of money for white noise. (Let’s not even talk about the Human Kinetics and Leisure Studies major you’ve chosen.)

Am I saying it’s all evaporated? No. I’m talking about a trend. I’m talking about administrators’ awareness of a trend.

******************************

So slot this into yet another canceled day — the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. And keep in mind that when you cancel the Wednesday you also basically cancel the Tuesday and eventually the Monday — There’s some psychological principle going on here, I guess… a kind of infinite regression principle in which once you cancel Day Z, Days X and Y are imperiled…

You can see, I hope, why universities are reluctant to do this particular deal. I mean, think about it from the perspective of the many schools like Auburn and Georgia where classes are further dumped left and right because of football games … It begins to look as though we might as well forget classes for the entire months of November and December.

Many universities are therefore doing nothing for the time being about the Wednesday. They leave it up to the professor, who tends to cancel classes. Over time, so many professors will cancel as to make it impossible for the few professors who hold Wednesday class to do so. Everyone will be gone. Professors will lecture to a whistling nothingness.

**********************************

Me? I hold class. Quite a few students showed up in both classes, and we had relaxed, excellent discussions (of Kafka’s A Hunger Artist and DeLillo’s Underworld).

(I mean, I thought they were great.)

UD too hastily judged the Duke lacrosse team when some of its players were accused of rape. She never said “They’re guilty.” But her initial commentary had an accusing tone.

She does not intend to make that mistake in responding to this story.

The attorney for a Sacred Heart University lacrosse player charged with helping two teammates sexually assault a woman says the accusations are a gross exaggeration of alcohol-fueled hijinks.

Wayne Keeney, who represents 19-year-old Timothy Sanders of Ashburn, Va., says Sanders and the 18-year-old female student were having consensual sex when two teammates sneaked into the dorm room as a prank.

But he says the other two students — 19-year-old Nicholas Travers of Smithtown, N.Y., and 18-year-old Zachari Triner of Marshfield, Mass. — had no sexual contact with her. She has said Sanders held her down while the other two raped her.

Police say all three were charged Sunday with conspiracy to commit first-degree sexual assault. Sacred Heart officials declined to comment, but Keeney confirmed all three have been suspended from school and the lacrosse team.

… writing from a Brown University student, as he struggles with his sense of implication in the suicide of an NYU student he didn’t know.

In places this opinion piece gets too highfalutin. But who cares. It’s that rare bit of writing which sheds protective covering and just says it.

With full awareness of the mystery of the act in general, and his distance from this person in particular, the Brown student makes two suggestions:

… The first line of business I’d proffer would be Brown’s departure from the heinously overrated U.S. News and World Report rankings, with a clear statement from President Ruth Simmons that Brown is withdrawing to fight the elitism of Ivy academia. Expressing to the general public that higher education is not about exclusion would reshape the expectations of parents and students, almost certainly alleviating academic pressure.

Another measure would be an encouragement of student-faculty relationships. Bringing undergraduates closer to professors would assist in augmenting self-confidence and inclusion. My thinking is faculty dinners and coffee dates funded by the University (I do know that Brown-RISD Hillel has begun something like this through Shabbat dinners). In these more intimate settings, we can emphasize community…

Although I think the student’s right that isolation and pressure play into some university suicides, I don’t think statistics support the idea that there’s something special about the Ivies, and similar places, like NYU. The two most recent student suicides both happened at St. Cloud State University. It’s true that Caltech has had three suicides in the last few months, all Asian-American males; but my sense of the situation, from covering these events for many years, is that a feeling of intense academic and social pressure can be experienced on any campus.

The faculty-student relationships idea seems to me a good one; it’s likely that greater warmth from professors would make students happier and give them a boost. But administrators have lots of worries about inappropriate closeness; the writer’s language (“intimate settings”) might well scare them. And professors worry about fairness. If I take this bright, fascinating, charming, student in my class out to lunch, will it seem favoritism …?

… Brooke Magnanti, a cancer specialist at a university in western England, unmasked herself in a British newspaper as the woman behind “Belle de Jour,” the salacious online diary of a high class call girl.

… The 34-year-old said she became a call girl in 2003 to support herself in London while completing her doctoral thesis after realizing she had no qualms about being paid for sex…

St. Norbert College bid farewell to its unofficial campus mascot, an albino squirrel named Snowy, with a memorial service on Tuesday afternoon.

The squirrel gained popularity with students this academic year, with a Facebook group dedicated to the animal drawing the interest of 131 members.

Students organized the event after finding Snowy apparently had been struck by a car on Third Street on Sunday.

The service was held at the St. Norbert College Townhouse Village Square. In lieu of flowers, organizers asked guests to bring a canned food item for the Townhouse Village Thanksgiving Food Drive.

The service included music, a eulogy, poetry readings and prayers…

From an article called The Urge to End It All, in the New York Times:

… What makes looking at jumping suicides potentially instructive is that it is a method associated with a very high degree of impulsivity, and its victims often display few of the classic warning signs associated with suicidal behavior. In fact, jumpers have a lower history of prior suicide attempts, diagnosed mental illness (with the exception of schizophrenia) or drug and alcohol abuse than is found among those who die by less lethal methods, like taking pills or poison. Instead, many who choose this method seem to be drawn by a set of environmental cues that, together, offer three crucial ingredients: ease, speed and the certainty of death.

… [The] tendency toward impulsivity is especially common among young people. … In a 2001 University of Houston study of 153 survivors of nearly lethal attempts between the ages of 13 and 34, only 13 percent reported having contemplated their act for eight hours or longer. To the contrary, 70 percent set the interval between deciding to kill themselves and acting at less than an hour, including an astonishing 24 percent who pegged the interval at less than five minutes.

… In September 2000, Kevin Hines, a 19-year-old college student suffering from bipolar disorder, leapt from the Golden Gate. ..[He]… is one of only 29 known survivors of the fall.

… “I’ll tell you what I can’t get out of my head,” he told me in his San Francisco living room. “It’s watching my hands come off that railing and thinking to myself, My God, what have I just done? Because I know that almost everyone else who’s gone off that bridge, they had that exact same thought at that moment. All of a sudden, they didn’t want to die, but it was too late.” …

My point is that NYU’s Bobst Library, like the Golden Gate Bridge, has unfortunately become a suicide beacon. Its creepy design, and its critical mass of student jumpers (they find attractive its high atrium overlooking a large lobby), have given it a charisma and renown.

Suicides can happen in clusters, and students sometimes imitate the methods of other students — often with striking exactitude. (Here’s a recent example of this sort of precise copying.)

If the New York Times article is right about the nature of these youthful impulsive suicides, the main thing NYU can try to do is not only make it impossible to jump from the atrium’s heights (they made it difficult, but, as this latest jumper demonstrated, not impossible), but also somehow (who knows how?) decommission the building, if you know what I mean… Do something more to its outside and inside so that it doesn’t look so much like a place you’d go to commit suicide…

… a writer for The Daily Beast reviews some of the larger reasons it’s hard to keep university students from killing themselves.

But there are subtler reasons. When UD finishes today’s teaching, she’ll write about some of them.