… [The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s] incredibly brief self-titled EP released in 2009 (which totals a whopping 34 minutes) reveals a hipster-glasses-wearing, library-sex-having, pulsing beat all their own.

… So what is close to the heart for these three from New York City? One of their cutely pun-titled songs, “Tenure Itch,” explores the story of a clandestine hook-up with a professor. Berman sings, “He says your thoughts need form / but your form’s not that hard to find.” Another song romanticizes sex in the stacks, and yet another adolescent incest…

A music review from the Cornell Daily Sun.

From the Washington College newspaper:

… [F]ish are not the only animals living on our campus. Junior Robbie Dinneen keeps two sugar gliders (a small marsupial) in his Talbot room named Jager and Maui. One is male and the other is female. Interestingly enough, these two have yet to mate. Dinneen said it’s really easy to take care of them. The most important thing is to give them a lot of attention because they can get depressed pretty quickly. He has never had any problems with Public Safety, and the majority of people really like the sugar gliders.

Another junior, who would like to remain anonymous, has a soft side for keeping rats. Last year he had two rats in his dorm on campus and this year he houses a whopping seven rats in his apartment off-campus. The seven rats are all girls named Peaches, Pumpkin, Bridget, Xing Xing, Mimi, Luffy and Panya.

Concerning difficulties with caring for them, all he said was, “It’s a bit tough to find supplies for them, especially now that the Pet Store is closed. Still, I try to load up on bedding and stuff whenever I go home.”

Luckily, he never had any problem with Public Safety. He did want us to know, “Rats aren’t as scary as movies and television make them out to be. When they’re healthy and happy, they’re actually more like little dogs than rodents. They make great pets!”

One senior girl agrees, who wishes to remain anonymous, but has joint custody with another girl on campus of two boy rats named Mator and Achilles. She said she opted to get boy rats because they are more social and friendlier.

“I think that having pets is a great thing,” she said. The problem is, she said, they can smell and it’s sometimes difficult to pay for food and bedding. But despite that, she said, “I think the no pets policy on campus is kind of ridiculous.”

Last year, I kept two pet rats in my on-campus room. I also agree that rats make fantastic pets. My roommate and I shared them, though she mostly took care of them. We never had any issues with Public Safety because we made sure not many people knew about them. Our RA knew we had them and assured us that as long as we kept them out of trouble she wouldn’t make us get rid of them.

My first year here at Washington College, I lived in Queen Anne dorm and roomed with a sophomore. I waited three days for her to arrive, and when she finally got here, the first thing she introduced me to was her pet hedgehog. Unfortunately, after a while word spread and Public Safety made her take the hedgehog home…

… to life as we know it on many American college campuses, but at UC Santa Cruz the smoking of dope has become such a big deal that the school’s making official efforts to suppress it.

Or at least to suppress 4/20 – the annual campus pot festival, where thousands of people – many not connected to UCSC – make a bright golden haze on a meadow.

If you ask UD, this sort of ritual is less offensive than football fans getting shit-faced and trashing main street. But the whole alcohol thing – the fact that many universities are surrounded by hundreds of cheap bars, for instance – gets a rise out of no one, while people believe toking erodes the foundations of the republic.

Having said that, UD has no problem with UC Santa Cruz sending a letter to the parents of freshmen asking them to discourage their kids from taking part in 4/20. The event is a victim of its own success, drawing such crowds that the national media’s paying attention.

It’s like the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. The event has gotten so big and so silly that it draws routine MSM ridicule.

Eventually a similar letter will go out to literature department chairs asking them to discourage new faculty from attending.

Four New York University freshmen reportedly have dismantled a secret marijuana den called “Narnia” that was entered through a hole in the back of a wardrobe.

By the time it was dismantled last week, hundreds of students allegedly had visited the den, crawling through a large hole carved in the back of a university-issued wardrobe placed to hide a doorway to an alcove, the New York Post reported Sunday.

The 10-by-8-foot alcove on the seventh floor of the Hayden Hall dormitory was decorated with Christmas lights, a set of bongos, a stuffed raven and a poster of Narnia’s Prince Caspian, the Post reported.

Narnia is the kingdom in the C.S. Lewis novel “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” in which three children enter an enchanted land through an old wardrobe…

… and St. Olaf College won the annual Rube Goldberg Machine contest.

The annual competition aims to bring to life Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Rube Goldberg’s drawings of complicated machines and gadgets that accomplish simple tasks. Using as many whimsical, counterintuitive steps as possible, the machines must complete a task determined each year by contest organizers.

This year’s task was to replace an incandescent light bulb with a more energy-efficient light-emitting design, and the Oles designed a machine that broke a light bulb and replaced it with 150 light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that spell out “St. Olaf.” They began working on the machine in September as part of a course taught by Assistant Professor of Physics Jason Engbrecht, and devoted thousands of hours — and almost every weekend this semester — to preparing it for competition.

… Team members built a record player from scratch that, as it spins, allows lasers to fire through pre-drilled holes. The lasers are picked up by light sensors, which trigger several other steps and eventually enable a gate to open and release a ball.

The team also constructed a Gauss rifle, a mechanism that uses a magnetic chain reaction to launch a metal ball at a very high speed, and a simple harmonic oscillator, a system that employs simple harmonic motion and magnetic induction to trigger the start of a car moving along a track. They even turned an ice auger into an Archimedes’ screw that caught pool balls and took them from the machine’s lower level to an elevated track…

… what they seem, sings Buttercup in Pinafore.

And ain’t it the truth. He’s a resident assistant in a Hofstra University dorm; she seems a nice Jewish girl. But he assists students in buying drugs, and she’s a gangster’s moll.

You’re missing a lot if you don’t occasionally troll Rate My Professors.

The Columbia News Service thinks so.

From an article by Danielle Friedman about the advantages and disadvantages of Gmail’s chat function:

For Margaret Soltan, an English professor at George Washington University, Gchat is wonderful for connecting with students outside of class.

Over the years, the tech-savvy teacher has accumulated dozens of students on her Gchat list, and she chats with them frequently. While not all realize that she can “see” them until she pings them for the first time — which, to be sure, can catch some off guard — she occasionally uses the tool to coordinate conferences or discuss letters of recommendation when time is tight. It’s convenient, she says.

Soltan also likes perusing students’ status messages. “They give me a little window” into them, she says. “They are like little mini-diaries of student life.”

Sometimes Soltan takes her observations a step further: When she spots a misspelling, she isn’t shy about pointing it out. “I’ll Gchat them and say, ‘Revise your message!’” she says, laughing. She tells them she’s joking a few seconds later — but they’re usually apologetic and a little embarrassed.

“I suppose you’re vulnerable to this kind of thing,” Soltan says. “Your crazy English professor bursts in and tells you to fix your spelling error!”

UD’s not feeling too sanguine about Peter Singer’s efforts to get American university students “adequately informed about world poverty, its consequences, and the ways in which it can be reduced.” Even our best universities don’t seem to be conveying very much along these lines. Take this Yalie.

A Yale University student from Ohio has filed a lawsuit seeking $1 million from US Airways for a video game console he says was taken from his luggage.

Twenty-one-year-old Jesse Maiman alleges that during a flight from New Haven, Conn., to Cincinnati in December, his Xbox 360 with a specialized hard drive disappeared from his luggage.

Maiman says he got what he called “an unconscionable run-around” from the airline. He’s asking $1,700 for the loss of the gaming system and for the maximum damages allowable, or $1 million.

Maiman filed the suit Monday in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court.

A US Airways spokeswoman said the airline was unaware of the suit but noted that the government limits liability for lost luggage to $3,300 per bag.

Unconscionable!

Which is why this little essay in the Washington Post, whose author prides himself on his radicalism and chides current college students for their quietism, fails.

He, a product of the sixties, still “care[s] about literature,” while today’s “narcotized” students read “inferior literature.”

The problem lies in the writer’s conflation of radical writing and superior literature. While some of the writers he admires – Ginsberg, Lessing – are indeed both artistically impressive and politically radical, others — Plath, Nin — are not political. Yet others – Mary Daly, Robert Pirsig, Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver, Germaine Greer – write broadsides and not literature; and while some of these people (Greer, for instance) are powerful prose stylists, others (Daly) are almost unreadably bad.

The category confusion in the essay, its facile generalities — “The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.” — and its willingness to overlook the importance of writers like David Foster Wallace and Toni Morrison and Don DeLillo to this generation of college readers, makes the piece more emotive than polemical, the expression of a certain contentment with one’s own cherished forms of radicality. Note that the writer doesn’t even have time for the wildly popular Chuck Palahniuk, whose work is without much literary merit, but has the exact same transgressive thing going (he’s best known for Fight Club) as many of the not-well-written works the author of the Post piece cites.

… to criticize the Bobby Knight of Connecticut.   Throw a chair at her!

So the latest thing is that students on certain exercise machines at the university gym are generating energy:

The gym at Oregon State University offer elliptical machines for college students to work out on, and the motion they create helps to generate heat energy in the same process.

Oregon State University (OSU) is located in Corvallis, Oregon and has been offering this capturing of energy to any college student wanting to add to the power gathering.

… The hardware used to capture this energy is installed on 22 of the elliptical machines and can save the college about 3,500 kilowatt hours per year. That’s enough power to help support a small energy efficient house.

The hardware is set up so that more machines can be fixed to the power grid in the future and adds to the harvesting of other people’s energy workout. OSU is now known as the college that is turning other people’s workouts into usable energy…

Take it a step further. In hard economic times, offer
students Green Galley Scholarships, in which the
university covers their tuition in exchange for, say,
twenty hours a week on the elliptical.

From Louisiana State University’s newspaper.

University professor William Rowe was like any other student in his 375-person class when, a few years ago, he invited a guest speaker to one of his freshman-level geography classes. He found an open seat in back of the classroom and sat down to listen to the 30-minute presentation.

While taking in the lecture, Rowe saw most of his students paying attention. Some were even taking notes on their laptop computers. But one student’s activity on a laptop immediately caught his eye.

“One guy was perusing pornography, which was causing a bit of a disturbance around him,” Rowe said.

… Tracy Rizzuto, assistant psychology professor, recently instituted a “laptops in first row” rule. She’s been teaching at the University for four years.

“I don’t have an attendance policy — I don’t require people to come. But if they’re one of those people who are surfing the Internet or doing distracting things while taking notes, I want to be able to keep an eye on that behavior,” she said. “It’s easier to monitor what people are doing on their laptops if they’re sitting in the front row.”…

I know what you’re wondering: What if the student perusing pornography who you’ve put in the front row ejaculates on you while you’re teaching?

Here’s what UD recommends. In her day, guys used to go to seedy porno cinemas where they’d be given empty, bottomless popcorn containers along with their ticket. When a professor sees a student masturbating, she should issue him one of these, along with suggestions on how to direct his flow.

——————————

UPDATE: Some context. Feinberg’s famous A Ride on the Bus.

… and a diplomat on his first mission, has been killed in Ethiopia.

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

A commenter points me to an excellent article about Adkins in the GW newspaper.

At least two people were arrested as Chico police broke up a crowd of several hundred that had gathered around a bonfire on a residential street.

One woman was treated for minor burns after the drunken disturbance early Friday near California State University, Chico.

Authorities say 200 to 300 people gathered around the fire at Sixth Street before midnight Thursday, adding a couch and other items to the blaze.

Police blocked off several streets, but the crowd refused to leave, throwing rocks and bottles into the street. The area was quiet by 1:30 a.m. Friday.

It’s unclear what prompted the gathering. Some witnesses said nearby house parties may have spilled into the street, while others say it was to mark the first week of the new semester.