Tag Archives: Princeton

FEATURED
The College Bubble: A Higher Ed Round-Up

Back in 2014, ztevenz, a blogger before my time, started a series of posts entitled “The College Bubble: A Higher Ed Roundup” which gave digests of recent news events that happening at college campuses nationwide. Several events in the past two years, most notably the anti-racist demonstrations begun by Concerned Student 1950 at Mizzou and the nationwide sanctuary campus movement orchestrated by Movimiento Cosecha, have generated talks of rebooting the feature. And now it’s finally happening! So here’s a roundup of things that have been going on recently at various colleges and universities:

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EVENT
Ajùa Campos Presents: The “Illegal” Scholar

Zaida Garcia ’15 wants you here: 

Princeton Salutatorian.
Oxford Scholar.
Undocumented Immigrant.

As a child, Dan-el Padilla Peralta left the Dominican Republic to come to the US. He grew up in homeless shelters in New York City. Currently, he is researching ancient classics for his PhD at Stanford.

The unpaved road to academia was hindered by his undocumented status, yet he continued to push forward and achieve academically what many of us strive for. Come hear Dan-el’s thoughts on childhood poverty, academic passions, the dehumanization of “illegals”, and the DREAM Act. Professor Maria Ospina will be facilitating.

Co-sponsored by Invisible Men and the Latin American Studies Committee. Light snacks will be provided. All are welcome!

Date: Wednesday, November 14
Time: 7 pm – 8:30 pm
Face: book.
Place: Usdan 110
Cost: Free

Princeton in Asia Recruiting Event

Tryna teach English in Asia next year? Ari Wolfe ’03 dares you to prove it:

Calling all seniors! What are you doing next year? Come out to the Princeton in Asia info session to learn about the possibilities of
having an adventure in one of 18 countries around Asia. No previous language experience necessary to apply! Bring your questions and your sense of adventure.

Date: Tuesday, September 18
Time: 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Place: CRC
Cost: Free

EVENT
Princeton’s Stephen Kotkin on Old-School Russian Tanks and Stuff

Yoooooooooo! I hope you folks aren’t getting too drenched out there, but then again, this is perhaps the best way for a straight-haired dude like myself to get mah frizz up.

Anyway.

There’s this talk goin’ up tomorrow, which you should really go to. It’s a keynote address given by Princeton’s Stephen Kotkin (who wrote Armageddon Averted: Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000, if that means anything to you) entitled

“Surprise, Surprise: The Misunderstood Soviet Military Industrial Complex”

The lecture is the opening act of a Wesleyan academic workshop that’s going on called “What was the Soviet Union? Looking Back on the Brezhnev,” which is being organized by Government professor and professional chill-dawg Peter Rutland (or as some people like to refer to him outside of class as “P-Rutz”) as well as Russian History professor Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock, who has yet to develop a gangsta-rap nickname.

Go check it out – it’s cool shit.

Date: Tomorrow, Oct. 20
Time: 8.00 PM
Place: PAC 001

Princeton Student Attempts to Troll Student Election, Fails

Speaking of WSA election season (yes, it’s too late to vote), check out this Princeton application for 2012 Class Secretary, which the Princeton University Press Club has declared the “Best Student Government Application EVER!” Princeton’s UPC has perhaps never visited Wesleyan, where trolling a WSA election is as common as reading Kant or getting naked in Olin.

Still, this anonymous student’s application (IvyGate has decided on the pseudonym “Steve Holt,” which provides an amusing coincidence for Wesleyan) offers a few laughs, most notably in Holt’s ideas for how to make class government “unforgettable”:

  • Build a giant straw man effigy of Dean Malkiel on Poe Field. Place Dean Malkiel inside and burn said straw man to the ground in a sacrifice to the GPA Gods, so that we might be blessed with our pre-grade deflation GPAs.
  • Reinstate the nude olympics. And by “nude” I mean naked and covered in fluffer nutter and by “olympics” I mean a tribalistic orgy of trance-inducing chanting charged with a shamanistic flow of hallucinogen-fueled energy, taking place in Tilghman’s office.
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Harvard and Princeton To Restore Early Admissions

A brief glimpse outside the Wesleyan bubble (maybe we could all use one of those right now?), courtesy of the Huff Post: Harvard and Princeton have announced plans to restore their nonbinding early admissions programs, which both schools discontinued a few years ago “out of particular concern for students at under-resourced high schools who might not be able to access the early admissions process.”

More from Harvard president Drew Faust:

“We piloted the elimination of early action out of concern that college admissions had become too complex and pressured for all students, and out of particular concern for students at under-resourced high schools who might not be able to access the early admissions process,” said Harvard President Drew Faust in a statement.

“Over the past several years, however, interest in early admissions has increased, as students and families from across the economic spectrum seek certainty about college choices and financing. Our goal now is to reinstitute an early-action program consistent with our bedrock commitment to access, affordability, and excellence,” she said.

Full article here. I can’t fathom how early admissions programs favor the affluent any less now than in they did in 2007, but then again, I also can’t fathom how they get the chocolate into those chocolate croissant things at Pi Cafe. What do I know?

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Princeton Student from Middletown Commits Suicide

The Daily Princetonian reports that 27-year-old Middletown native Bill Zeller, a Princeton grad student, passed away on Wednesday after attempting suicide on Sunday.  The 4,000 word suicide note he left cited repeated sexual abuse as a child that he could never forget, and states that he thought about suicide for at least a year.  Graduating from Middletown High School and then Trinity College, he was considered programmer of notable talent.

In contrast to the troubled person portrayed in the note, those closest to him remembered Zeller as a brilliant programmer, talented chef, devoted Boston Red Sox fan and someone who put his friends first. […]

Zeller completed several high-profile projects. He and Felten published research exposing serious security vulnerabilities of websites such as The New York Times, YouTube and ING Direct. Zeller also co-authored an influential paper arguing for increased government transparency online.

When asked to discuss Zeller’s work, however, colleagues focused on the dozens of smaller projects that he completed in the past few years, which ranged from the practical — such as Graph Your Inbox, a tool to analyze and visualize Gmail activity over time — to IsItChristmas.com, which reads “no” 364 days of the year.

You can read his final letter after the bump.  He goes out of his way at the end to urge people to repost the letter in its entirety so that people can draw their own conclusions and so that he isn’t censored by his family.

He is being remembered at the site 1000Memories.

As Joel Johnson from Gizmodo noted in their coverage, “You can talk to people.  You really can.”

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Anonymous Email at Princeton

Princeton’s student government introduced anonymous email so students can communicate their, um, ideas to their professors.

“You can write stuff like ‘I think you use PowerPoint too much’ or ‘I think your lectures would be more interesting if you asked for questions at the end,’ ” USG president Rob Biederman ’08 said. “We trust and hope that people will not abuse the system.”

While the system seems to screen for abuses, one could imagine the potential if such a thing were instituted at Wesleyan. Oh the things we could find to bitch about…

(via The Paper Trail)