Entries for December 06, 2006

Jakob Stiles, a sophomore and winner of the school's "Mr. University" competition, was found dead in his Sigma Alpha Epsilon frat house Saturday. SMU police and SAE's national headquarters are both conducting investigations into the cause. "Preliminarily, there seems to be no signs of violence or suicide, but we'll really have to wait for the medical examiner," SMU's vice president for student affairs told the Daily Campus.

"Practicing journalism with strings attached isn't really practicing journalism at all," a group of 18 college newspapers declared yesterday, protesting the University of Southern California's move to block the student paper's editor-in-chief from continuing to serve next semester. In an editorial published first in the Daily Trojan and 17 other papers yesterday, the students condemn USC's administration for censorship that "diminishes the role of student journalists across the nation."

Columbia University's Bwog points out that its school's daily paper, the Spectator, is "notoriously absent" from the list (the only other Ivy League school not on the list is Dartmouth, which the Bwog notes currently is not publishing. The Bwog did get a statement from the Spectator opinions editor explaining why ("as journalists, we don't think it is responsible to sign our name to an opinion written in the words of someone else," she explains).

Today will be the fifth day that activists live in oak trees surrounding the site of a stadium to be built on UC-Berkeley's campus, the Daily Californian reports. The activists, including one recent Berkeley alum, told the Californian that they'll stay in the trees despite a statement yesterday from the California Board of Regents vowing to support the new center. Kingman Lim, the recent alum who's been sitting in the oak trees, said the experience was "fine, if a little cold."

"Most of the time," writes the columnist in today's San Diego State University Daily Aztec, "people should know better, unless they were raised by wolves."

Salisbury University will become the first state school in Maryland not to require standardized test scores for admission, the state's Board of Regents decided last week. "There are issues about the SAT and its fairness--there's certainly a coordination between success on the SAT and family income," University System Chancellor Brit Kirwan told the Diamondback. "I think we all know students who retake the SAT--which is not a cheap test--and get a better score." The plan will go into effect next year, beginning a five-year test period. If the test goes well, the regents could expand the policy.

• A discrimination suit on behalf of minority students seeking higher education in Alabama has finally been settled--after 25 years, the Crimson White reports .
• Nebraska, the birthplace of the Reuben sandwich, still has good Reubens, the Daily Nebraskan reports.
• A Kansas senior living with HIV tells her story to the Daily Kansan.