A commenter in the Cornell University newspaper welcomes another name to the pantheon.

From Cornell…

… to Kentucky.

… its $250 million remodeling of its on-campus football stadium, a project Business Week calls “the most expensive renovation of a sports facility in NCAA history.” (UW could instead use an already-existing stadium a few miles from campus.)

Without the new stadium, UW officials explain, “the tailgating experience would be compromised.”

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A recent article about tailgating, in the Duke University newspaper.

An opinion piece about tailgating in the Louisiana State University paper.

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A fourteen-year-old found, after the event, half-dead in a portable toilet.

Your campus running like a sewer.

You wouldn’t want to compromise the tailgating experience.

… At a time when LSU’s academic budget is being slashed, the fortunate athletic administrators received pay raises of better than 15 percent.

… [T]he scenario is nothing new in Louisiana. Sports and politics rule…

Police arrested Tiffany Lynn Gaubert, a 22-year-old unaffiliated with the University of 170 Constant Drive in Thibodaux, for disturbing the peace by intoxication after receiving complaints of someone overturning a motorcycle at East Campus Apartments.

The owner told police Gaubert tipped the motorcycle. Gaubert denied toppling the motorcycle and blamed it on a squirrel.

Gaubert, who police later learned was drinking vodka and Dr Pepper, said she was trying to feed barbecue to the squirrel when it ran off and knocked the bike over, said Sgt. Blake Tabor, LSU Police Department spokesperson.

She then became hostile toward the officers and was arrested and issued a misdemeanor summons for disturbing the peace.

From a conversation between two writers on the staff of the Cornell University newspaper:

… Faculty and staff ought to engage students, one on one, in a discussion that reaches far beyond careers and academics. Part of this involves the faculty realizing just how important a role they play beyond the laboratory and the lecture hall. They are mentors for all of us, and their efforts are part of a bottom-up approach to making Cornell not just a place of instruction, but a home.

… I attended a dinner late last week with the Board of Trustees where Susan Murphy gave the closing remarks. Tears came easily to her and the rest of the room — full of millionaire movers and shakers — in part for the loss of Matt, William and Bradley, but perhaps in greater part for the feeling of helplessness adults and outsiders must feel in their attempts to prevent future tragedies and ease our suffering. We, the students, know what’s up with our classmates (or at least more so), and everyone else is almost completely in the dark….

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I don’t say the following is beautifully written, but of all the stuff I’ve been reading in the last few days about suicide – in the wake of the Cornell story – it states most concisely the core facts of the phenomenon.

The clear persistence of suicide throughout history suggests that it is a part of the human experience. Until we live in a radically different time and consciousness, one where people are never driven by internal or external demons to look for a way out of intractable suffering, we are not likely to be effective at eliminating suicide altogether. However, because the act so powerfully prompts those of us left behind to reflect on the sacredness of life and the role we individually and collectively play in easing the suffering that results in suicide, it leaves in its wake a deep inspiration to act; to care; to create webs of support that might catch those among us whose suffering becomes intolerable. In this way, acts of suicide invigorate and inspire innovation and remind us all of what really matters in life.

Last year it was Caltech. This year, Cornell University is experiencing a string of student suicides. The number is in dispute — between three and five in the last few months. Security people have been stationed at the bridges over the famous campus gorges. Most of the suicides jumped into the gorges.

Suicide is frighteningly contagious. Suicidal students are obviously watching one another for ideas as to method. In 2005, William and Mary had the same one-and-right-away-another-in-exactly-the-same-fashion pattern that Cornell is seeing. At Caltech, two of the students used the same method: helium inhalation. In the last few years, three students at NYU have jumped from the top of the library’s atrium.

Yeah well. I just liked the word.

Here’s an excerpt from a nice bit of writing by a student at Louisiana State University.

His first class of the day is history. The class is mind-numbingly boring. Hardly anyone bothers to attend on a regular basis, and today isn’t any different. By 8:40 a.m., the classroom in Lockett Hall is only a third full.

Today’s topic has something to do with the Great Depression. It’s a topic everyone should probably care about — especially in light of today’s economic climate. Unfortunately, the professor is an old curmudgeon with absolutely no technological understanding. He even takes pride in the fact he doesn’t know what the devil this “Moodle” thing is. There’s no PowerPoint. No overhead. Just little old Mr. Magoo, droning away.

Half the students are snoozing. The other half are surfing the Internet, either updating their Facebook statuses or watching the latest Youtube hit. And, of course, there’s the creepy guy in the back corner of the room, glaring at his laptop intently. His enormous headphones are sagged around his neck, and his right hand is conspicuously submerged within his tattered corduroy pants, tugging ever so gently.

… At 9:49, after making the marathon walk from Lockett to Patrick F. Taylor, Saul walks into his accounting class. The professor is a young guy — probably a grad assistant. He’s the complete opposite of Saul’s last professor. A total tech geek. He even attempts to make a joke about Saul showing up late and walking right in front of the PowerPoint projector. A few brownnosers awkwardly chuckle.

For the next 30 minutes, Saul’s accounting professor steamrolls through more than 59 extravagant PowerPoint slides without giving any sort of coherent explanation. Saul can tell the guy feels a bit embarrassed about his lack of teaching ability. He even tries to cover it up by making a few jokes at his own expense.

But these self-deprecating jokes start getting a little depressing after a while. The insecurity is palpable. He might as well just ask, “Do you guys like me?”

Finally, Saul makes his way into his last class of the day — biology. His professor is a middle-aged woman with a load of personality. But her PowerPoint prowess leaves a lot to be desired. And so do her explanatory skills. It’s obvious to Saul this professor was forced by her department to utilize PowerPoint, even though it’s way out of her comfort zone.

As the last few seconds drain off the clock, Saul begins to reflect on what he’s learned today. The answer is a bit depressing — nothing. Absolutely nothing.

… a few riled Cornellians aren’t such a big deal.

The hot Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, fond of mid-rise buildings with holes in them, designed the CCTV Tower annex (headquarters of Chinese tv) in Beijing,

and now that it’s up, hundreds of millions of Chinese think that if you really look at the primary tower and the nearby annex, it’s obvious that together they “were meant to look like a penis, next to a bent-over woman.”

Here are a couple of

efforts to make the case.

Koolhaas has had to give an interview denying it all, etc.

Meanwhile, his design for new architecture workspace at Cornell has annoyed many faculty there, who think it’s too expensive, and insufficiently environmentally minded. A government professor writes to the campus newspaper:

This $55-60 million building project comes at a time of deep cuts to core academic programs in many other departments… It is not fancy buildings that attract people to a university. It is faculty, research funding, graduate stipends, library collections. And ideals … like a genuine commitment to sustainability… The architect Rem Koolhaas has made no secret of his contempt for sustainability… He belongs to that old fraternity of starchitects who brook no human or natural interference with their artistic ‘vision.’ So we will get an absurd set of glass boxes projecting forward and backward (because the projecting glass box is this architect’s signature), instead of a future-oriented building of the sort other Ivy universities are building, at LEED platinum standards, beautiful to look at and work in, and concordant with the movement to fight climate change.

[SOS says: Lose the contemptuous quotes around vision. You’re attacking Koolhaas for being contemptuous; you shouldn’t be contemptuous in return.]

Having looked at all sorts of images of Milstein Hall [click on the images for a slide show], UD would have to agree that it ain’t pretty. To her eye, it looks like an awkward over-sized fill-in (the task was to connect established buildings and close a gap).

UD‘s got nothing against its break from the historical context of the buildings around it. Rather, it’s the severely flat-topped, too-big feel of the thing she dislikes.

As for the overhang – UD‘s spent decades driving under (being driven under) the Kennedy Center overhang, and it’s just deadly. Dark, loud, creepy. Why do it if you don’t have to?

… [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 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.

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