Around noon today, campus activists papered the campus with flyers. They were on the steps of Olin, on the wall in front of PAC, on the railings in front of Zelnick Pavilion, and on the bulletin boards of Usdan.
Here they are on the steps of Olin:
Tag Archives: Huffington Post
The College Bubble: A Higher Ed Round-Up
This past Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled to uphold a Michigan constitutional amendment that bans affirmative action in admissions to the state’s public universities. The 6-to-2 ruling allows for the passage for similar measures in seven other states. The New York Times has an informative set of infographics showing the effects of such bans on affirmative action for minorities throughout the country.
Highlighting the results from a recent study on public college finances, Slate explores the increasing privatization of public colleges. Today, public university students cover almost half the cost of their own educations, on average.
A Brown University student, Lena Sclove, has begun an activist movement to make the campus a safer space for her and other survivors of sexual assault.
The College Bubble: A Higher Ed Round-Up
The recent news that a Wesleyan student is suing Psi U due to rape allegations has sparked debate over the role of fraternities in sexual assault, and their presence on college campuses. Zach Schonfeld ’13 has written two in-depth articles on the matter. The first explores the history of various universities that have decided to get rid of their fraternities, and the follow-up wondering if Wesleyan will be the next to do the same.
A recent piece in The Nation explores the worrying fate of publically engaged academic intellectuals in the university system, reflecting on the recent firings of two Columbia professors.
The College Bubble: A Higher Ed Round-Up
Unless you shut yourself off from the world this past week, you probably read, or at least heard mention of, The Atlantic’s feature story on fraternities and their dangers, which highlighted Wesleyan University and Beta Theta Pi. The article explores the role of fraternities on campuses, especially in the crafting of party culture and the rise of sexual assault. The article is long, but well worth the read, and has reopened space for dialogue on these issues.
The College Bubble: A Higher Ed Round-Up
In the growing movement of campus fossil fuel divestment campaigns, not everyone is on board. James Lawrence Powell has written a piece on why rejection of such policies is so problematic, inspired by recent dismissals of divestment action from the presidents of Brown and Harvard.
The College Bubble: A Higher Ed Round-Up
This begins a weekly[ish] piece presenting recent articles on college and higher education news and issues.
Just in time for the return of ridiculously expensive trips to Broad Street, U.S. PIRG has put out a study revealing the adverse effects of high text book costs on students’ (especially low-income students’) course decisions, and subsequently, their grades. There’s no other way to say it – this is a f****ed up system.
Nussenbaum ’12 Urges You To “Move Where You Can Matter,” Including Maybe Detroit
Move over, “Michael S. Roth ’78”—the Huffington Post has a new Wesleyan representative in town, and it’s Max Nussenbaum ’12. Sometimes known for his “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?” cameo (phenomenal audition video included) and his desperate attempts to get Sylvie Stein ’12 to go to prom with him, Nussenbaum has spent the last eight months or so in Detroit, working for Are You a Human as part of Venture for America’s inaugural class. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to tell your Wesleyan friends and Wesleyan friends’ parents that you’re moving to Detroit after graduation, Nussenbaum’s compelling recent Huff Post piece, “Move Where You Can Matter,” is worth a look—as it is for anyone who’s ever felt the urge to resist the gravitational pull of the Wesleyan-Brooklyn Alumni Industrial Complex:
I talk to a guy who’s spending his next year volunteering in a Nigerian slum, and he asks me why I’d ever move somewhere as downtrodden as Detroit. Everyone makes the same dismayed face, asks the same incredulous question: “Why would you go… there?”
And “there” wasn’t just Detroit. At Wesleyan, my alma matter — like at most elite schools — “there” was anywhere that wasn’t a select handful of high-profile cities: the Bostons and New Yorks, the D.C.’s and L.A.’s. We were a cohort raised with tunnel vision, a graduating class who couldn’t find Ohio on a map and who thought “Oklahoma City” was an oxymoron. Don’t get me wrong, I was more than guilty of this myself: I heard Venture for America talk about underserved parts of the country and my first thought was Queens — you know, since everyone was moving to Brooklyn.
“Teachers Are Not Soldiers”: Tenured Radical on Sandy Hook, Wesleyan Shooting
In the wake of the Newtown shooting, should teachers be armed?
One week after the Newtown shooting, the NRA has ended its social media blackout and the national gun policy debate is as bitter as it’s ever been. Thousands of Americans are demanding gun control now, and if you’re reading Wesleying, chances are you agree. But on the gun-owning side of the lobby—the sort of people who follow NRA’s Twitter account in the first place—conservatives demand the opposite: more guns, more concealed carry, more self-defense. (Don’t believe these people are real? Read a few NRA Facebook comments. Go ahead; I’ll wait.) In one heated exchange, Larry Pratt of the Gun Owners of America appeared on Piers Morgan and suggested that gun control advocates are responsible for the massacre. “Since we have concealed carry laws in all of our country now, people can get a concealed firearm,” Pratt argued. “And yet, we have laws that say not in schools.”
Should teachers be armed in the classroom? Could guns in school have saved the lives of 20 children and six teachers? Should America combat guns with—err, more guns?
Over at Tenured Radical, in a post titled “Teachers Are Not Soldiers,” Professor Claire Potter has a response for the pro-gun lobby. In a phrase: “Uh, no.”
Professor Potter describes learning about the Sandy Hook massacre after having just read Jeffrey Goldberg’s December Atlantic piece in favor of more guns. The bulk of her argument revolves around an experience at Wesleyan following the shooting of May, 2009, when a gunman remained on the loose after murdering Johanna Justin-Jinich ’10 in Red & Black Cafe. Wesleyan’s campus went into lockdown, and Potter waited for hours in the Center for the Americas:
Nakhla ’13 Releases New Music Video, Signs “Charlie Brown”
Mark Nakhla ’13, ASL music video superstar, released a beautiful new video to Coldplay’s “Charlie Brown” yesterday.
It is the latest addition to his growing repertoire of artistically-composed videos. You may remember his interpretations of Drake’s “Headlines” and Jay-Z and Kanye’s “No Church in the Wild,” both of which went viral and have over 20,000 and 40,000 plays respectively. His “No Church in the Wild” video was featured on the Huffington Post, which also covered the criticism it drew from other members of the ASL community. The new video clearly pushes in a different direction, most visibly featuring Nakhla in a solo performance.
Nakhla notes how the criticism surrounding his previous video influenced his newest one on YouTube:
Balance Out of Life: Experimental Film by Hodgson ’14 Goes Viral
On Tuesday, the Huffington Post picked up on “Balance Out of Life,” an experimental film by Wesleyan’s own Wyatt Hodgson ’14. As the video’s premise, Hodgson took Godfrey Reggio’s film “Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance” and sped it up by 1552%—condensing an 82-minute movie into just five minutes. He also replaced the film’s original Philip Glass score with “The Holy Egoism of Genius” by The Art of Noise.
The sped-up footage ranges from scenic nature to bustling industrial powerhouses. From the Huff Post article:
The result is a five minute, fast-paced, non sequential portrait of the world 30 years ago. Hodgson’s piece is a surreal snapshot of an already surreal documentary about a time now long gone, but just as relevant today.
As Hodgson himself explains on Vimeo,