Entries for December 08, 2006

The Emory professor who called former President Jimmy Carter's new book on the Middle East biased and inaccurate is mistaken, Carter told the Emory Wheel in an hourlong interview Wednesday. His defense came just one day after the professor, Kenneth Stein, resigned from his post at the school's Carter Center , telling the Wheel he did not want to be associated with Carter's new work, called Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, "even in name." Carter said that while he disagrees with Stein, he still respects him. "I think he's a wonderful man," he said. Meanwhile, Carter may have bigger worries: Other Emory faculty and students are starting not to trust him either, the Wheel says.

PHOTO CREDIT: JEFFREY MACMILLAN FOR USN&WR
PHOTO CAPTION: Former president Jimmy Carter at a Rose Garden event at the White House.

Students who skip class to watch their football team take on Ohio State on January 8 will not get excused absences, the president and provost of the University of Florida decided Tuesday in a meeting. The national championship game in Glendale, Ariz., is scheduled for the first week of spring semester classes. That made one senior wonder where the president's and the provost's school spirit is. "No one's going to go anyway," she told the Alligator.

What do elite university students do at the library? More and more, the answer is: Post explicit, anonymous sex chat and other ephemera on school-specific websites built just for this purpose. The "Bored At" network of websites now serves nine schools with sites named after their most popular student libraries: NYU has boredatbobst.com, Stanford has boredatgreen.com, and Harvard has boredatlamont.com. A Harvard Class of 2006 graduate made the networks "to create a forum for truly free speech," he explained to IvyGate. "Taking away inhibitions results in a colorful display of extreme brilliance and extreme ignorance." Add to that: extreme sexual frustration.

The last time she played this game, Hadley Rush, a columnist at Boise State University's Arbiter, was "excommunicated by my sorority, attacked in a public restroom, denounced by all of my acquaintences [sic] and momentarily disowned by my best friend." But that didn't stop her from ending her column this semester with a final knock on sorority girls, who she previously declared were "good at a lot of things . . . Like oral sex, eating disorders and wearing matching shirts while singing off-key in unison." Her latest column presents the fable of Too Drunk Sorority Girl. It's kind of like O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi," except instead of a male and female couple, the main characters are a sorority girl and her car.

It's no secret that black men battle stereotypes. But at Howard University, male students say the stereotypes are coming from an unlikely place: their female peers. "We get a bad reputation for being cheaters undeservingly," one student told the Hilltop.

• The audience at a student play to debut at Brown University tonight will be very dazzled--and also swarmed by 30,000 fruit flies, the Brown Daily Herald reports.
• "There's not a lot of people who, if something happened to you, you would want them to raise your children," the Indiana University men's basketball coach, Kelvin Sampson, told the Daily Student. But that's the way Sampson feels about Tubby Smith, men's basketball coach at Kentucky, which his players will take on this weekend.
• Student athletes have long been under scrutiny--but now at Fordham University, administrators are checking the Facebook profiles of student leaders, too, the Observer reports.