Entries for October 12, 2006

The group's chairman and adviser resigned this week, for reasons that are not clear. As he resigned, the adviser sent a letter urging local Republican officials to "sever all ties to this chapter of the College Republicans," the Daily Collegian reports. Officials who received the letter would not explain the former adviser's reasons. But the College Republicans plan to move on anyway; the group yesterday elected a new chairman, who said his "first order of business" will be to work with local Republicans. Maybe they'll have some advice about party unity.

Oates's fictional story, "Landfill," about a Michigan State student reported missing until he is found dead in a local landfill, is a lot like a real thing that happened at the College of New Jersey (TCNJ) last spring--when a freshman was reported missing and then found dead in a local landfill. Oates, who teaches creative writing at Princeton, another New Jersey university, apologized this week for any harm caused by the similarity between her October 9 New Yorker story and the real-life facts, the Princetonian reports.

A former TCNJ faculty member had told Oates her story "can only add to the overwhelming pain the family [of the murdered student] has already suffered."

After the NCAA declared the College of William and Mary's logo offensive to American Indians, the college announced it will ditch the two-feather graphic altogether, the campus newspaper Flat Hat reports. Meanwhile, the attorney general of North Dakota took the opposite path, filing a lawsuit Friday against the NCAA in an effort to keep the University of North Dakota "Fighting Sioux" nickname and mascot, the Dakota Student reports. That was just in time for the Columbus Day weekend.

Columbia students whose protest stopped a speech last week by Jim Gilchrist, founder of the anti-illegal immigrant Minutemen, could "face charges of rules violations." The Columbia Spectator printed a copy of Columbia President Lee Bollinger's statement.

Meanwhile, opponents of a different event, this one organized in part by the Muslim Students Association, seem to have found a new way to protest. The student group found critical press releases tacked on and around the doors of its prayer room yesterday, the Spectator reports.