Entries for January 24, 2007

Maybe it was the Year of the College Blog after all. In 2006, college papers (and national papers) were filled with months'-worth of headlines about rape allegations against lacrosse players, plagiarism accusations against a Harvard novelist, and investment-banker ridicule of a very ambitious Yale student for whom "Impossible Is Nothing." But college bloggers at Wesleyan University, a travel columnist and an editor at the University of Southern California, and a bow-tie loving university president in Nashville were the more worthwhile college stories in 2006--at least according to our sort-of scientific contest.

So while Ivy League students may have nominated themselves for the most awards, vanity does not equal newsworthiness according to Paper Trail readers. Which is just the way we like it, actually. Help us stay on top of your campus's news in 2007 by continuing to send tips and feedback to papertrail~at~usnews.com.

Joe Horton spent last spring traveling Europe, and then he spent the fall writing about it. From the sunny Los Angeles campus of the University of Southern California, he described a search for gay life in the south of France, two days of downpour in Berlin, and a case of mistaken identity in Medina in which a little kid believed he was the real Charlie Brown. Horton writes about American destinations with equal awe: at Texas A&M, he was "a stranger in a holy land" and in Washington D.C., he felt awkward "going commando." In fact, after reading his columns, it's both easy and hard to imagine Horton feeling out of place. This is the same guy, after all, who defended his choice to cut class with a nod to Mark Twain: "To travel is to see the grandest classroom imaginable, to see the world is to kneel at an altar of knowledge so broad and so deep that you cannot help but feel a little sad when you open your apartment door at the end of a trip, gather your books and head off to a lecture."

Horton's column continues this semester, with some updates on Europe he never got to last semester--and some more stories from the foreign parts of the United States, too, including his latest dispatch on a trip to Wales.

Here are the percentages we got yesterday after the poll had closed. View poll results

The staff of Wesleyan University's blog, Wesleying, only learned about this contest by spotting something unusual on their site's traffic report: a flurry of visitors navigating via Columbia University's Bwog.net. Curious, they visited the site. Soliciting votes, Bwog had written: "Just please don't let us get beat by Wesleyan."

"There's like this Ivy League hostility to the fact that we're a small liberal arts school, and we've done something better than them," says Holly Wood, a Wesleying editor with a sweet name.

This semester was supposed to be Zachary Fox's revolution. The former editor in chief of the University of Southern California's Daily Trojan had a long list of all the changes he wanted to make at the paper. Above all, he wanted to bring financial independence and transparency to a newspaper whose finances are controlled by the university it's supposed to report on. But then Michael Jackson, the university's vice president of student affairs--not the oddball popstar--blocked Fox from returning to the E-I-C position for a second term, angering college newspaper editors across the country.

"I should almost thank Michael Jackson, really," Fox told Paper Trail yesterday. "These first two weeks of school have been incredible. It's such a change to not have to worry about the paper every second of your day." Fox hasn't quit the Trojan--or journalism--for good, though; he's got a profile of the USC president in the pipeline, and he's taken on a new extracurricular job at the university's Center for the Study of Journalism and Democracy. He also plans to help the Trojan continue to advocate for independence. "The University of Southern California has a university paper," he says. "It needs to have a student newspaper."

View poll results

The Wall Street Journal may have been preparing to publish a long front-page tell-all on his wife's alleged drug habits, his personal chef, and his $1.4 million annual compensation package. But that did not stop Vanderbilt University President Gordon Gee from hosting a bow-tying lesson on his Alumni Lawn just a few weeks before--and picking up an honorable mention for Paper Trail's Blingingest man on Campus Award in the process. When the Journal finally did come out with its anticipated report, Gee gentlemanly responded with three acknowledgments: "Yes, I am the highest-paid university president in the country . . . yes, we live in a very big home, and we do a lot of entertaining," he told the Hustler newspaper. And finally: Yes, "we have raised lots of money and the university is doing incredibly well."

Add to that: Yes, Paper Trail readers think you're ... interesting.

It was a squeaker. Gee beat Vayner by just two votes. View poll results