The other idea that is kicking around and still bothering me is that women who go to top schools are traitors and resource squanders if they don't become law partner or doctors. My sister has a BA from Georgetown and a MA from Columbia. She's is not earning a salary at the moment. Who the fuck cares? When did our worth as people come down to our pay stubs?

Education costs money, and while the NYT-wedding-announcement crowd has always had access to it as both a meet market and a finishing school, we as a society don't actually profess to subsidize education primarily as a path to self-actualization. There's an essential conflict between capitalism and feminism -- at least the "difference" or"choice" variety of feminism -- in that tangible returns on investments are expected, and giving a slight edge to future offspring isn't all that concrete a goal. In all honesty, even an old lefty like me isn't particularly interested in helping middle-class women get degrees that might be of more practical use in lifting poorer women out of poverty.

A junior assaulted the Tufts University Police Department officer who tried to bring him into protective custody on the morning of Wednesday, Nov. 23. The student brought Officer Cheri Burton down to the ground in a violent fight and shouted racial epithets at her.

When other officers arrived, the student spat in their faces and used a variety of racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic insults

Burton and Officer Eric Morales, along with several officers from Somerville, responded to a disturbance report at 185 College Avenue early Wednesday morning at approximately 1:50 a.m.

The officers arrived to find two obviously intoxicated individuals standing at the opposite side of the street from the house. One of them was wearing only one shoe, and it appeared as if they had been in an altercation.

One of the individuals tried to leave the scene, and Burton, who was concerned about his intoxication level, followed him.



Burton made contact with the student at the blue light emergency phone on Lower Campus Road. He immediately began yelling and using profanity, and Burton decided to take the individual into protective custody.

When she attempted to handcuff the student, he turned around, grabbed her by the hair and began pulling on her shirt. Burton and the student went down to the ground, where the student began punching her. He also shouted racial epithets, including "n--r," at Burton, who is African-American.

Burton and the individual struggled alone for about 45 seconds to a minute before the other officers, whom Burton radioed, arrived to assist her. The student ripped entire braids from Burton's head, and Burton sustained injuries to the head, back and ribs.

"This was a violent attack on an officer," Tufts University Police Sergeant Douglas Mazzola said.




When the other officers arrived and assisted Burton in detaining the student, the student spat in a Somerville Police Department officer's face and employed a string of insults ranging from racist to homophobic. He called the officers "fat faggots" and "fat f-ks" and called individual officers many others, from "Jew boy" to "you fat Italian-American f-k."

The student is being charged criminally with disorderly conduct, assault and battery of a police officer, and resisting arrest, the latter of which is a felony. He also faces judiciary investigation by the University, and other charges are being considered, possibly under state hate crime law.




Judicial Affairs Officer Veronica Carter and Dean of Students Bruce Reitman would only confirm that they "did receive a complaint from the Department of Public Safety" about the student and his behavior.

Reitman said the two had met with the student, and that the student will be making a response to the Department of Public Safety's allegations. The Student Judicial Process will be followed, he said.

Reitman and Carter said they plan to proceed with the case depending on how the student responds to the accusations brought against him.

Associate Dean of Students Marisel Perez, the coordinator of the Bias Intervention Team, has also been informed of the incident but was unavailable for comment.

The University as Health Spa

The modern university is a relic that will disappear in a few decades. That prediction was made by Peter Drucker, the management genius who just died at 95 and usually got things right.

His words brought an uncharitable smile to my face as I recently strolled across the ivied campus of Brown University, in Providence, R.I. At the time, maintenance crews were busy removing leaves. Campus officials were still dealing with the aftermath of an especially drunken Saturday night. And most everyone was excited that the football team had taken the Ivy League championship.

No doubt, some education was going on, but the question nagged: Is this an efficient setup for improving young minds? Not very, according to Drucker. "Today's buildings are hopelessly unsuited and totally unneeded," he said. Satellites and the Internet can easily make classrooms obsolete.

We now read that professors at Purdue, Stanford, Duke and other universities are recording their lectures. Students download the talks on their iPods and listen to them whenever. The "whenever" can be while driving, lifting weights or between songs by Black Eyed Peas and the Pussycat Dolls.

The profs say that letting students hear the lectures on their own frees classroom time for penetrating discussions. The same conversations, however, could be held over the Internet — or, for that matter, in a room at the public library.

Furthermore, the professors could let non-students download their lectures and charge them royalties, just like the Black Eyed Peas. Ordinary folks already buy courses on tape or CD. For example, The Teaching Company is now selling a virtual major in American history — 84 lectures on 42 audiotapes — at the bargain price of $109.95. It covers everything from "before Columbus" to Bill Clinton, and the lecturers are top-drawer. Some of them teach at Columbia University, where a single history course runs you $3,207.

Herman Melville said that "a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." Melville didn't need college to write "Moby Dick." He needed to read and spend time in the world. Before sailing out on a whaler in 1841, he had already worked on his uncle's farm and as a cabin boy on a ship to England.

Peter Drucker urged high-school graduates to do likewise: Work for at least five years. If they went on to college, it would be as grown-ups.

You wonder whether colleges, stripped of their education function, wouldn't find other lives as spas, professional-sports franchises or perhaps lightly supervised halfway houses for post-adolescents. The infrastructure is already in place.

Over at Kenyon College, in Ohio, the students have a new, $60 million athletic center. The highlights include a 12,500-square-foot workout area and an indoor track with eight lanes just for sprinting. The pool has 20 short-course and nine long-course lanes. And, like any upscale health club, this one has a cafe.

Speaking of sports, colleges spend huge numbers of "education dollars" on keeping their football coaches happy. For example, the University of Texas is giving Mack Brown a compensation package this year totaling $3.6 million. UT's highest-paid academic, Steven Weinberg, earns about $400,000, and he has a Nobel Prize in physics.

The universities claim that football and basketball teams are profit centers that help pay for learning. In truth, few produce a surplus even for the sports programs. Athletics pay their own way at only about 10 colleges, according to Andrew Zimbalist, an economist at Smith College who specializes in sports.

And with all due respect to the Texas Longhorns, if they were such a fabulous cash machine, there would be no need for the Longhorn Foundation. The foundation, which raises money for UT athletics, notes on its Web site that revenues from ticket sales, television and ads cover less than half the operating expenses of the university's sports program.

University presidents, meanwhile, are working on their own pay packages. Several already make more than $1 million, which has become the new goalpost. Most justify their incomes by their ability to raise money for new buildings.

Of course, these are the buildings that will soon be relics, according to Peter Drucker. Look at these shining new facilities and think: What fine condos they will someday make.

[Admittedly it’s] not an economically rational act for me to give my few shekels to mighty, multibillionaire Yale. It would be far more rational for me to keep them myself or to give them to smaller charities. But not all decisions are rational. …

There are ties that are more than rational, more than sensible. They are the mystic chords of memory to which Lincoln referred. …I'll keep giving to Yale, and with a full heart... Not everything is about reason.

[Yale was] rigorous, mean-spirited and cold. I hated it. I got severe anxiety. I was wildly mistreated for anxiety symptoms at the Yale infirmary and got severe drug reactions. Then I got colitis and lost about 30 pounds in about six weeks. I was a wreck.

But some alumni, especially those who have pursued careers in public service, have echoed the message of Stein's first column, as they said they have been reluctant to give to Yale knowing that their money could have a greater impact on other institutions.

Emily Sachs '83, financial officer for a nonprofit organization in New York, said that while she has given to Yale in the past, she does not believe her philanthropy is meaningful for the University.

"When I look back at what paltry few bucks I have given and what they can do for the University, they can do more elsewhere," she said.

Sachs said she would be more likely to give larger sums to Yale if the University kept her better informed about where donated proceeds and funds are specifically used.

…Jennifer Hansell '86, the executive director of the North East Community Center in Millerton, N.Y., said she has had mixed feelings about donating to her alma mater, especially since she took over as the head of an organization dependent on donations.

"I've always debated in my mind [whether] I should give to Yale or not," she said. "But I feel now that my money is better given to other places. Yale is never going to care that much about the pennies I give."

Hansell said that though she maintains this general attitude about alumni giving, she does give to specific Yale groups she cares about, such as Dwight Hall and the Maya Lin Women's Fund. She said she would rather give her money to shelters for battered women or to community centers than to Ivy League institutions.

"I give my money to small local organizations instead," she said. "Places like Harvard and Yale can live forever on their endowments. That's probably not totally true, but it certainly feels that way."

Yet no sooner had the gift to the school of music been announced than The Yale Daily News published a series of articles in which students questioned whether so much money for music was warranted at a time of great need around the world, including the parts of northern Pakistan and Kashmir recently devastated by a major earthquake. The donors "could have given $20 million to the school of music," one student was quoted as saying, "and still helped a lot of students with their tuition while giving $80 million to other causes."

The Truth About Elite Women

Half the wealthiest, most-privileged, best-educated females in the country stay home with their babies rather than work in the market economy. …The number of women at universities exceeds the number of men. But, more than a generation after feminism, the number of women in elite jobs doesn’t come close.

…Princeton President Shirley Tilghman described the elite colleges’ self-image perfectly when she told her freshmen last year that they would be the nation’s leaders, and she clearly did not have trophy wives in mind. Why should society spend resources educating women with only a 50-percent return rate on their stated goals?

…Educated and affluent reader, if you are a 30- or 40-something woman with children, what are you doing? Husbands, what are your wives doing? Older readers, what are your married daughters with children doing? I have asked this question of scores of women and men. Among the affluent-educated-married population, women are letting their careers slide to tend the home fires. If my interviewees are working, they work largely part time, and their part-time careers are not putting them in the executive suite.

…Every Times groom [Hirshman followed couples who appeared in the New York Times wedding announcements] assumed he had to succeed in business, and was really trying. By contrast, a common thread among the women I interviewed was a self-important idealism about the kinds of intellectual, prestigious, socially meaningful, politics-free jobs worth their incalculably valuable presence.

[To begin solving this problem, women] must treat the first few years after college as an opportunity to lose their capitalism virginity and prepare for good work, which they will then treat seriously.

…At marriage, [the women featured in the New York Times wedding pages] included a vice president of client communication, a gastroenterologist, a lawyer, an editor, and a marketing executive. In 2003 and 2004, I tracked them down and called them. I interviewed about 80 percent of the 41 women who announced their weddings over three Sundays in 1996. Around 40 years old, college graduates with careers: Who was more likely than they to be reaping feminism’s promise of opportunity? Imagine my shock when I found almost all the brides from the first Sunday at home with their children. Statistical anomaly? Nope. Same result for the next Sunday. And the one after that.

Ninety percent of the brides I found had had babies. Of the 30 with babies, five were still working full time. Twenty-five, or 85 percent, were not working full time. Of those not working full time, 10 were working part time but often a long way from their prior career paths. And half the married women with children were not working at all.

…This isn’t only about day care. Half my Times brides quit before the first baby came. In interviews, at least half of them expressed a hope never to work again. None had realistic plans to work. More importantly, when they quit, they were already alienated from their work or at least not committed to a life of work. One, a female MBA, said she could never figure out why the men at her workplace, which fired her, were so excited about making deals. “It’s only money,” she mused.

…The family -- with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks -- is a necessary part of life, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government. This less-flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally unjust. To paraphrase, as Mark Twain said, “A man who chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man who cannot read.”

……A good life for humans includes the classical standard of using one’s capacities for speech and reason in a prudent way, the liberal requirement of having enough autonomy to direct one’s own life, and the utilitarian test of doing more good than harm in the world. Measured against these time-tested standards, the expensively educated upper-class moms will be leading lesser lives.

….The privileged brides of the Times -- and their husbands -- seem happy. Why do we care what they do? After all, most people aren’t rich and white and heterosexual, and they couldn’t quit working if they wanted to.

We care because what they do is bad for them, is certainly bad for society, and is widely imitated, even by people who never get their weddings in the Times. This last is called the “regime effect,” and it means that even if women don’t quit their jobs for their families, they think they should and feel guilty about not doing it.

…As for society, elites supply the labor for the decision-making classes -- the senators, the newspaper editors, the research scientists, the entrepreneurs, the policy-makers, and the policy wonks. If the ruling class is overwhelmingly male, the rulers will make mistakes that benefit males, whether from ignorance or from indifference.

BENNINGTON, Vt. --The school superintendent whose district includes Mount Anthony Union High School has labeled "inappropriate" and "irresponsible" an English teacher's use of liberal statements in a vocabulary quiz.

"I wish Bush would be (coherent, eschewed) for once during a speech, but there are theories that his everyday diction charms the below-average mind, hence insuring him Republican votes," said one question on a quiz written by English and social studies teacher Bret Chenkin.

The question referring to the president asked students to say whether coherent or eschewed was the proper word. The sentence would be more coherent if one eschewed eschewed.

Another example said, "It is frightening the way the extreme right has (balled, arrogated) aspects of the Constitution and warped them for their own agenda." Arrogated would be the proper word there.

Chenkin, 36 and a teacher for seven years, said the quizzes are being taken out of context.

"The kids know it's hyperbolic, so-to-speak," he said. "They know it's tongue in cheek. They know where I stand."

He said he isn't shy about sharing his liberal views with students, but invites vigorous debate in the classroom.

There was an incredible amount of diversity even within the groups [that had booths at Cornell‘s recent Diversity Fair], such as the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. It is not necessary to be either Hispanic or an engineer to join. “Our name deters people,” lamented Kathya Chiluiza ’05, a member of this networking group.

Locally, yokel Ed Swan made headlines this past week when he claimed to be discriminated against by the Washington State University's College of Education for his "socially conservative" beliefs.

As the WSU College of Education places a particular focus on a teacher's ability to recognize and embrace diversity, and compassionately teach students of all walks of life, Swan's beliefs that "diversity is perversity" (found to be scribbled inside a book of his) as well as his own slights at diversity training and education, caused the College to threaten dismissal from the program.

Swan fired back with support from a so-called "educational freedom" group and the school backed off.

Student life deans are investigating student groups that organized last weekend's events, an ad-hoc committee will be created to review social event policies, administrators will review which types of events are suitable to be held in Sayles Hall and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior Nancy Barnett of Brown's Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies will lead a review of the University's alcohol policy.

After facing days of withering criticism, University of California leaders promised Wednesday to disclose more information about how much they pay employees.

"I believe we must stay competitive for the best people," said UC President Robert Dynes, who oversees the 10-campus university system. "But we also may be able to do a better job of telling people how we're doing that."

Specifically, Dynes said UC planned to make a number of immediate changes and form a task force to consider other reforms.

The changes come just days after The Chronicle reported that UC routinely pays employees far more than is publicly reported. In addition to salaries and overtime, UC spent $871 million last fiscal year on bonuses, relocation allowances, stipends and an array of other hidden cash compensation. And that doesn't include fringe benefits.

"As a public university, transparency and disclosure are very important," said Gerald Parsky, chairman of UC's governing body, the Board of Regents. "The ability of the public to support this university and the ability of the regents to support this university depend on a knowledge base, and it is important that we understand everything that is going on."

Specifically, Dynes promised that UC would:

-- Step up random audits of accounts used by Dynes and other senior administrators for travel, entertainment and other expenses.
-- Post more details online about raises and other salary actions, shortly after the regents approve them.
-- Give regents a summary of a person's entire proposed compensation package -- not just expected base pay -- when the regents are asked to approve a salary.
-- Provide regents with a summary of UC leaders' total compensation once a year, including outside income. Dynes said he wasn't sure whether that information would be released to the public.

"I don't know," Dynes said. "We haven't thought about that."

Dynes also said he had asked Regent Joanne Kozberg and Bob Hertzberg, a former speaker of the California Assembly, to head a committee to examine whether other policy changes need to be made to improve disclosure.

"This is a step forward," said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. Callan said the proposals sounded constructive, though he said UC must still answer other questions about its pay policies.

Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, an ex-officio regent, said he had asked the legislative analyst's office for more information about UC's finances in the wake of The Chronicle articles that ran Sunday and Monday.

"There is a dark cloud over the university that we really have to reckon with, and it speaks to the question of transparency and honesty," Núñez said. "We have to ask the university system to take a closer look at what it does."

Meanwhile, some UC faculty have begun circulating a petition to ask the regents to appoint an independent investigator to examine the findings in The Chronicle series.

"There is a lot of outrage," said Bruce Fuller, professor of public policy and education at UC Berkeley. "Is the quality of the university really tied to attracting managers, or is it tied to attracting top faculty?"

The UC regents also received an earful of complaints at Wednesday's meeting that UC is awarding lavish compensation packages to administrators, while raising student fees 8 percent Wednesday and not giving raises to rank-and-file staff members.

"I have a child in community college, and I cannot send her to the institution where I work 40 hours," said Stephanie Dorton, a clerical worker at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law. "We are the backbone of the institution, and if you don't pay attention to the people who keep this university running, it will stop running."

UC for the first time Wednesday provided a breakdown of the $871 million in other compensation that it awarded last year in addition to salaries and overtime.

The biggest chunk, $343 million, was earmarked for employees at the medical schools and teaching hospitals from clinical revenue. Another $172 million went for relocation allowances, fellowships and temporary work outside of employees' normal duties. The rest was split among a variety of other types of pay, including extra teaching and research ($147 million), severance pay and accrued vacation ($54 million), bonuses and incentive pay ($39 million), stipends ($30 million) and housing and auto allowances ($4 million).

Saturday night's party followed several fistfights on the campus green and gunshots fired on the streets in the early morning hours after a fraternity party Friday night. Brown's public safety department said no injuries were reported. In addition, residents have complained to the university this fall, saying students throwing loud parties, yelling late at night and fighting in their neighborhood have disrupted their quality of life.

How did Tufts learn he was available? They read it in his blog.

[A]cademic blogging represents the fruition, not a betrayal, of the university's ideals. One might argue that blogging is in fact the very embodiment of what the political philosopher Michael Oakshott once called "The Conversation of Mankind"—an endless, thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of our culture. Drezner's blog, for example, is hardly of the "This is what I did today …" variety. Rather, he usually writes about globalization and political economy—the very subjects on which he publishes in prestigious, peer-reviewed presses and journals. If his prose style in the blog is more engaging than that of the typical academic's, the thinking behind it is no less rigorous or intelligent. …So, might blogging be subversive precisely because it makes real the very vision of intellectual life that the university has never managed to achieve?

If anything, [emerging peer-review] blog-influenced practices … might reclaim for intellectuals the true spirit of peer review, which, as Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters has argued, has been all but outsourced to prestigious university presses and journals. Experimenting with open-source methods of judgment — whether of straight scholarship or academic blogs — might actually revitalize academic writing.

To lure and retain economics faculty members, the University has begun to offer additional benefits [to this department] not available to the faculty at large… . One such change includes cutting the teaching load from four courses a year to three because professors are attracted to the opportunity to do more research.

Cutting teacher course loads creates an additional strain on the number of students who are able to take economics classes.

In order to make up for fewer classes taught by full-time faculty, the University has adapted by bringing in adjunct professors... .

University of California President Robert Dynes and his wife live in one of the East Bay's most impressive homes, a 13,239-square-foot mansion in Kensington with 10 acres of land, gorgeous Mediterranean gardens and sweeping views of the bay. An extensive staff meticulously maintains the estate at a cost of close to $300,000 a year.

The best part for Dynes: like many other university presidents, he doesn't pay a cent.

For all the attention paid to university salaries, some of the biggest perks at the university are noncash items, such as free housing. At UC, the system spends about $1 million a year to maintain spacious homes for Dynes and the 10 campus chancellors.

"I think taxpayers would be outraged to discover the nature of this extraordinary perk," said Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers' Association. "We certainly do not expect a university president who has substantial responsibility to be living in a very modest home. But does it take a $10 million mansion requiring this much maintenance to attract a competent UC president?"

...
[A spokesman] said the homes are important to help chancellors cover the high cost of living in California, where many chancellors otherwise wouldn't be able to afford homes on their university salaries.

Public records show that many of the chancellors already own their homes, sometimes close to campus. And at least two chancellors earned tens of thousands of dollars in extra annual income by moving into university-owned residences and renting out their own nearby homes.

In financial disclosure forms, UC Davis Chancellor Vanderhoef reported he earns between $10,000 and $100,000 a year by renting out a home he owns in Davis. Similarly, UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale reported renting out his Los Angeles home and earning between $10,000 and $100,000 a year in rental income.

[A] Texas physics professor who grew up in the Bronx, taught at Harvard and won the Nobel Prize in 1979, [Weinberg was] wooed to Texas three years later in one of the university's most famous hires this side of Darrell Royal.

He is the best-selling author of "The First Three Minutes" - a chronicle of life after the Big Bang - but that doesn't make him an outsider in a state ribboned by Christian conservatism.

"I think it's hard to say that our day-to-day work in research and teaching is hurt by the football program, but at the same time, I have to say I find it somewhat embarrassing," Weinberg said in a telephone interview yesterday. "I love this university; and the universities with which I'd like to have us compared are places like Harvard and M.I.T., not the ones at the top of B.C.S. rankings."

This protractor across the bow is dead on. But boosters don't line up to buy No. 1 foam fingers to salute overachieving mathletes. Instead many donate tax-deductible millions into boutique-style giving: athletics only, please.

"It's argued that football makes money for the university and the large sums paid for coaches and facilities are more than earned back by ticket sales and television rights," Weinberg said. "I'm a little skeptical." [Along these lines, see UD on Portland State.]

The skepticism is valid. Odd how university officials happily itemize what their football programs make but rarely what they spend. How much to house a 90-man roster in five-star hotels the night before a game? Sometimes, as has been the case at the University of Colorado, it's a home game.

Last spring, the total price tag was $235 million, but now the university says the delay has added $13 million to the total cost. The state's contribution remains at $7 million a year, but that price is coming under greater scrutiny.

…Sen. Sheila Kiscaden, IP-Rochester, said some of her constituents are concerned about the state's share, which works out to about $1 million for every home game.
"A million dollars a game, $7 million a year, for 25 years," Kiscaden said. "And with the economy not in the greatest shape, energy prices going up and property taxes going up, people aren't as persuaded as the alumni are that this is absolutely necessary."

…Some lawmakers object to giving the stadium a corporate name [The bank that’s putting up a lot of the money wants to have the thing named after it -- like Enron Stadium]. State Rep. Tim Mahoney, DFL-St. Paul, said he'll push to change the name to "Veterans Memorial Stadium." The university had a Memorial Stadium for 68 years, before it was demolished.

Caving willingly to pressure, Wesleyan College’s imprimatur has been accorded to a group that wants to educate professors and incoming freshmen on the use of the transgendered pronoun “ze” and its possessive “hir.”

Perhaps what’s most disconcerting about all of this, however, is not the impact these new terms are having on everyday life or mainstream academia—for most people, overtly or quietly, recognize the gay rights movement’s latter-day silliness.

Rather, it’s the prospect that a community whose goal has so long been “acceptance” is isolating itself and alienating others by creating a separate body of knowledge that only they appear to care about or know. Of those transgender terms, BGLTSA’s Noa Grayevsky ’07 is quoted in last week’s Fifteen Minutes, “People that are either queer or educated on this topic use [‘ze’ and ‘hir’] pretty widely.” And, of course, no one else does.

“I began receiving two or three e-mails a week accusing me of being published at Iowa only because I let Jorie Graham publish her friends at Georgia…”

I have formally accepted an offer to be an Associate Professor [with tenure] of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, starting in the summer of 2006. Next year at this time, I will be teaching students pursuing a M.A.L.D. (Masters of Arts in Law and Diplomacy) or a Ph.D. at Tufts University in Medford, MA.

… I received a number of inquiries ... from academic and non-academic institutions -- the latter including government, think tank, and publishing opportunities. This was both gratifying and useful. Gratifying because it's always nice to be wanted. Useful because it gave me the chance to ponder whether the academy was for me. In the end, Fletcher was the best choice for a combination of personal and professional reasons.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the French interior minister, called on Friday for rapid reform of the underperforming universities system as a crucial step in boosting France's economic competitiveness.

"We cannot be satisfied that the leading French university ranks 46th internationally," he said. "To resolve this situation we must have better financed universities that are truly autonomous and better managed."

His words were an attack on university management, in which professors are members of the civil service and decision-making is shared between students, teaching staff and managers. Power-sharing was established as the result of the national student rebellion of 1968, the memory of which still inspires fear of education reform in government circles [again, for UD's take on this, after teaching for a semester at the University of Toulouse, see my Monday, February 23, 2004 post, "Journaux Universitaires"].

The lack of managerial autonomy to raise finance and compete for teaching staff internationally, along with a reluctance among unions to allow universities to select students, is widely blamed for France's poor performance in tertiary level educational rankings.

Development, reconstruction, bad situations I find very exciting. What I'm fascinated by is development in the sense of reconstructing a broken something.

sent out a firm edict this week to university deans to canvass their faculty and see how many called off Wednesday classes in anticipation of the two-day break and the annual Georgia-Florida football game in Jacksonville last weekend.

Mace said his interest was piqued Wednesday morning when, on a walk across campus, he noticed fewer students than usual.

"The campus was basically dead," Mace said. Later he learned that some student employees of the university were working all day because their classes had been dismissed.

"Fall break begins Thursday," Mace said. "I'm going to be very hard-nosed about this."

As of Wednesday of this week, few departments had complied with Mace's request, and at least one dean reported that he was having trouble getting the information from faculty members.

Some couldn't resist poking fun at the issue.

In an e-mail to faculty members asking whether they had canceled classes, one dean compared Mace to Dean Wormer, the malevolent presence at the fictitious Faber College in the movie "Animal House."

"There is something in his request that has that 'Animal House' flavor," the dean wrote, knowing that faculty would bristle at the directive. "Remember, Dean Wormer?"

Arthur E. Wise, president of NCATE, said that the complaint was a “fabrication” about his group. Wise said that the “dispositions” requirements reflected the need for education schools to know how their students would perform as teachers. NCATE needs to know that there is a good system in place, he said.

“We mean that students, when doing their student teaching, are judged that they will do no harm to students,” he said. “Our guidance to institutions is to evaluate behavior in context. We do not encourage or invite colleges to examine the beliefs of students.”

COLLEGE TOWN STRIVES
TO CORK FLOW OF BOOZE

Andrea Jones
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 11/01/05

Statesboro — The trembling Georgia Southern University freshman arrived an hour late for Laura Milner's English composition class this summer.

Tearful and smelling of alcohol, the 18-year-old metro Atlanta native told Milner she'd blacked out after a night of downing free liquor at Ladies Night at a local dance club. Had she been raped? Sexually assaulted? She didn't know. She couldn't remember.

Shocked, Milner took the student to the counseling center and, soon after, started asking questions around campus.

In the months since, the professor's quest for answers has put binge drinking on the front burner at this school of 16,000, pitting local officials and university administrators against college students, many of whom insist they are mature enough to make their own decisions about alcohol. At the center of the storm? A local politician who owns two of the most controversial establishments in town.

Today, Statesboro's City Council will vote on stringent new amendments to the local alcohol ordinance that include banning happy hours and drink specials at all restaurants and limiting to one per customer at a time the number of drinks that can be ordered.

'Dangerous drinking'

This is not the first time students and city officials have clashed over alcohol policies in Statesboro. The city began allowing liquor by the drink less than 10 years ago, and the surrounding county of Bulloch still bans liquor sales in stores.

Nancy Waters, chairwoman of Statesboro's alcohol control board, which drafted the amendments, said the city owes the changes to Georgia Southern parents — many of whom are from metro Atlanta — who expect that their children will be protected when they drop them off at school.

"The goal is to curb this kind of dangerous drinking," Waters said. "Someone has to look out for students."

Waters said the board did not set out to punish law-abiding restaurants, and in a meeting last week recommended that happy hours be allowed from 5 to 7 p.m. That option will be considered at today's council meeting in addition to the board's original proposal for a total ban on happy hours.

'Date rape night'

The push to change Statesboro's alcohol policies began in earnest in September, after Milner showed a standing-room crowd at a City Council meeting poster-sized pictures from "Ladies Lock-Up" night at the Woodin Nikel, the club where her student blacked out.

A bartender wearing a black contraption on his back resembling a giant bug sprayer funneled neon-green liquor directly into students' mouths. Milner, who went to the club with a fellow professor and two students, said she saw underaged freshmen, including some of her own students, drinking. Some were chugging alcohol as club employees chanted and encouraged them to drink more. The women inside drank free liquor for two hours before the doors opened at 11 p.m. to a line of men waiting to pay a cover charge to get inside.

"Some students referred to it as 'date rape' night," Milner said. "It was unbelievable."

The owner of the club? William Britt, a 30-year-old Georgia Southern graduate and member of the City Council.

The city has since yanked Britt's alcohol license at Woodin Nikel and at Legends, another establishment he owns near campus, for failing to prove at least half his profits came from food, a requirement for all Statesboro restaurants with liquor licenses. The alcohol board is also auditing seven other establishments to make sure they meet the 50/50 requirement, Waters said. So far, only one has turned in paperwork.

Britt said the city just hasn't accepted the fact that Statesboro is a college town and that students like to have a good time.

"If you took the college out of Statesboro, there'd be nothing left," he said. "Instead of allowing business owners to address issues, they're just making decisions that hurt everybody."

Amendment vote tabled

Britt said his staff checked IDs and used wristbands to separate the over-21 partiers from the underage ones.

"But if someone buys a drink and hands it to someone who is underage, it's very difficult to catch them," he said.

After the revelations at the September meeting, the alcohol board made its recommendations for amending the city's ordinance. The City Council was scheduled to vote on the amendments at its October meeting but tabled action after hundreds of students and townspeople showed up to voice their opinions.

Britt will be banned from participating in today's discussion and vote because of a potential conflict of interest, said George Wood, Statesboro's city manager.

Paul Ferguson, director of Georgia Southern's Health Services, said he's not out to ruin anybody's good time. But college students — especially freshmen away from home for the first time — don't always make the best choices.

"We have an obligation to take care of them and protect them," Ferguson said.

In recent years, Georgia Southern has seen a major influx of students from Atlanta. Now, 40 percent of students on the campus, which boasts white-columned brick buildings set amid rolling hills, hail from the metro area.

Georgia Southern has long had a party-school reputation. The university recently received a grant from the state Office of Highway Safety for an alcohol education program and seed money to start a safe driving program that would offer students rides home from local establishments.

Waters said the support of Georgia Southern's senior administrators has been a key to the fight to curb drinking. The university's attorney, Lee Davis, spoke in favor of the amendments at the October board meeting.

"We have never had an administration so committed," Waters said.

Students oppose changes

Ferguson, who has been at Georgia Southern for about a year and a half, is a fatherly figure around campus. Student workers in the health clinic routinely stop him in the hall for a chat, a hug, a handshake or a request to borrow his minivan for the weekend.

Last month, he spent six hours on a Sunday matching student health reports with establishments the students had been to earlier in the night. Of three reported sexual assaults from July to October, all were underaged women who had reported alcohol abuse at the Woodin Nikel. Of the seven concussions, six had been drinking at either the Woodin Nikel or at Legends, and five of those were underaged.

"You can have all the anecdotal evidence in the world, but the numbers don't lie," he said. "This was just plain wrong."

Ferguson said shutting down those two clubs was the first step to curb binge drinking. Some students say they will just turn to more house parties, but Ferguson said the pressures to drink hard liquor without eating tend to be less in those situations. The key, he added, is educating students more to avoid dangerous behavior when they drink.

Meanwhile, hundreds of students have signed a petition opposing the additional alcohol amendments. Georgia Southern senior Nathan Queen, the general manager of Retriever's, another popular bar and grill across from campus, has led the effort. Queen offers drink specials and happy hours at his restaurant and said the amendments are too strict and that the city should just enforce its existing ordinances instead of creating more.

"Why should a bunch of 50-year-olds be deciding what 18- to 24-year-olds need to do?" he asked. "It's not fair."

The students who were lined up Thursday night outside Retriever's in flashy tank tops, ball caps and fashionable jeans tended to agree.

Katie Rushing, a 21-year-old pre-pharmacy major from Statesboro, sipped on a free rum and Coke at a table with her friends. It was Ladies Night, and women paid a $5 cover for a plastic cup they could refill with liquor drinks until 11.

"If one bar messed up, that doesn't mean everybody should get punished," she said. "If people want to drink, they're going to no matter what."

An Oxford University student died when he was flung 30 metres through the air by a catapult as a stunt, but instead of landing on a safety net he only clipped it before striking the ground, an inquest heard yesterday.

Kostydin Yankov, 19, a member of the Oxford Stunt Factory, had paid £40 to be launched from a trebuchet, a copy of a medieval siege weapon adapted to throw people rather than stone missiles.

…The machine was designed and built by David Aitkenhead and Richard Wicks in April 2000. Mr Wicks' partner, Stella Young, a human resources manager, told the inquest how she had broken her pelvis while being catapulted by a prototype of the trebuchet in May 2000. "I hit the net, bounced in and bounced out, breaking my pelvis in three places. I would tell jumpers what had happened to me and how lucky I was. It is a very, very dangerous thing to do," she said.