Entries for June 2009

A conservative organization has threatened the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a lawsuit if the group's local chapter doesn't receive funding for the upcoming school year.

Last year, the university's Student Services Finance Committee voted to withhold funding from Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow, a group that argues against government involvement in environmental issues. The committee said CFACT didn't comply with some paperwork requirements, the Associated Press reports. But CFACT and some state legislators believe the decision was politically charged.

"We have a huge problem in society," Wisconsin state Sen. Glenn Grothman told the AP. "Too many of our universities hate any diversity of viewpoint other than that of the hard left. It's appalling."

Grothman, along with eight other state legislators, appealed to UW-Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin to reconsider her position on the issue. (Martin rejected CFACT's latest appeal for funding in April, saying that the clerical omissions warranted the committee's decision and that she had no authority on procedural issues.) CFACT wasn't the only group on campus that lost funding, the Wisconsin State Journal reports. Several other clubs lost money because of stricter criteria that require campus groups to benefit all students and not just particular groups.

The AP reported that, in past years, CFACT received between $130,000 and $200,000 in funding. According to its website, CFACT used that money to promote issue awareness, bring speakers to campus, fund internships, and rent office space.

"It takes time and money to organize a lot of these things," CFACT National Director Bill Gilles said. "There's absolutely no way we can maintain a 300-to-400-person internship program with no money."

An average of more than 2.75 million viewers tuned in for the championship series of the 2009 College World Series in Omaha last week. It was a 37 percent increase in viewership from last year, the Daily Texan reports.

Louisiana State University beat the University of Texas, 2-1, in the three-game title series, which produced three of the top four most-watched CWS telecasts in ESPN's 30 years of tournament coverage, the newspaper said. The third game had the highest viewership in ESPN's CWS telecast history, with a 2.3 Nielsen rating and an average of 3.16 million viewers.

In addition to the major ratings boost on television, more than 330,000 fans attended the tournament, breaking the previous record for the tournament's overall attendance. It was the second-to-last World Series to be held at Omaha's Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium. Starting in 2011, the CWS will be played at TD Ameritrade Park in downtown Omaha.

YouTube is going to get a lot more Web traffic from Provo, Utah.

Citing the increasing amount of educational material on the immensely popular video-sharing website, Brigham Young University has lifted its three-year ban on the Google-owned site, the Associated Press reports.

The Mormon school's administrators had contended the site contained too much questionable content, but a recent push from some professors to allow access to the website in classrooms played a part in changing the school's policy, Provo's Daily Herald reports.

"The overwhelming factor was the educational information and materials that are increasingly becoming available," Carri Jenkins, a school spokeswoman, told the Daily Herald. "I think there's no other way but to provide all of it."

BYU's student newspaper, the Universe, reported that many students were happy to see the ban lifted.

"I use it to catch up on TV shows and things like that, but I also use it for news," said one student. "I've used it a couple times to watch church videos."

To make students and others fully aware of the "dangers and pitfalls" of the Internet, including sites like YouTube, BYU launched a new site—besafe.byu.edu. The site details ways to avoid spam, viruses, phishing scams, and malware and provides resources for students if they have questions about Internet use.

The theft of a Cornell University-owned laptop earlier this month has left 45,000 members of the university's community at risk of identity and credit card fraud, the Cornell Daily Sun reports.

Files on the stolen laptop listed tens of thousands of names and corresponding Social Security numbers for Cornell students, faculty, and staff. Prior to the theft, a Cornell technical staff employee left the laptop in a physically unsecured environment.

New York State Police are investigating the crime, but State Police Investigator Aaron Lewis told the Sun Wednesday that the thief might not know the laptop contained anything out of the ordinary. "There is no indication that this is a sophisticated type of operation to steal people's identities," Lewis said. "It appears to be more of a crime of opportunity."

However, Lewis also said the thief might now know the stolen laptop contains sensitive information since the theft has been widely reported by the news media. The university plans to provide free credit reporting, credit monitoring, and identity theft restoration services for those affected by the security breach.

Senioritis is an ailment often associated with students completing their final year of high school or college, but the term applies to fourth-year medical school students as well, according to an article published Wednesday in the Academic Medicine journal.

The article's six coauthors, five of whom are medical school professors at the University of California-San Francisco, argue that students slack off during their fourth year of medical school because many universities' fourth-year requirements are not sufficiently challenging or robust, Inside Higher Ed reports. The article's authors also note that students spend much of their fourth year applying to and interviewing for residency programs throughout the country and that fourth-year grades are typically not included in the application process, two realities that exacerbate the onset of senioritis.

Primary study author Pamela Lyss-Lerman says medical schools should use their fourth-year curricula to give students a more "authentic role in patient care." Lyss-Lerman hopes schools will modify their curricula and put a greater emphasis on student learning through subinternships in internal medicine and rotations for critical care, ambulatory care, and emergency medicine.

"The problem of the fourth year is a pervasive one," says Larry Gruppen, a professor of medical education at the University of Michigan. "When students are interviewing for a residency, it's important, but schools see it as taking away from students' educations. It has to be done, but it gets in the way of medical school . . . It all contributes to a widely felt frustration."

An on-campus sexual assault counseling service at Harvard University will close for the month of July for financial reasons, causing concern among summer proctors at the school, the Harvard Crimson reports.

The Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, which was established in 2003, gives students confidential support, information, and referrals to survivors of sexual violence, according to its website. The service also handles harassment and other confidential cases, Christopher Queen, dean of Harvard Summer School, said. But because of ongoing economic stress, highlighted by today's announcement of 275 layoffs at the school, Harvard's summer students will have to go elsewhere for any of these services.

"It's a shame," said Queen, who estimated that more than 2,000 students will live on campus during Harvard's summer session. "That's a real shame because we rely on them in the summer. Obviously, [the students] will have other resources, but the loss of that program over this summer was a disappointment to us."

University Health Services Director David Rosenthal said he wasn't sure how much the university will save by closing the office, and the fate of the office's 24-hour hotline was still unclear. All calls to the center will be forwarded to the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, and University Mental Health Services and the Harvard University Police Department will handle all on-campus responsibilities that OASPR would normally handle.

"Perhaps the resources will be sufficient, but I do think it's the college's responsibility to provide sexual assault response resources, and I don't think that should be outsourced," one summer proctor said.

OASPR's director, Sarah Rankin, said that she understood the reasoning behind the decision, but she added that the office has never had a summer when no one used it. According to a fact sheet on OASPR's website, an estimated 84 students used the office during the 2007-2008 academic year, and Harvard police reported 60 "forcible sexual offenses" from 2004 to 2006.

University of Pittsburgh students expecting their diplomas in the mail will have to wait a little longer. The papers that symbolize their achievement were ruined by floodwaters that inundated Thackeray Hall, a campus building where diplomas awaiting delivery are stored.

Heavy rains hammered Pittsburgh last Wednesday, leaving several buildings severely damaged, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports. The diplomas were on the ground floor of Thackeray Hall when the building was flooded.

Pitt spokesman John Fedele said that the delivery of the diplomas will be delayed 10 days. The university must double-check names before mailing the diplomas out on July 2. Commencement was held on April 26, and diplomas, which aren't given out at the ceremony, are usually mailed the following weeks.

Fedele, who said an incident like this has never happened before at Pitt, did not reveal the cost of the damage or of the printing and delivering of the new diplomas. But the Utah-based Michael Sutter Co., which isn't working with Pitt, told the Tribune-Review that the process could cost the school from $9,000 to $21,000.

Michigan State University's board of trustees voted Friday to allow community members with concealed weapons permits to carry weapons on campus grounds, the State News reports. Weapons are still not allowed inside campus buildings, but those with permits will no longer be in danger of a citation for having weapons with them on campus.

The rule, which previously banned weapons from campus altogether, now adheres to state and county law, Michigan State spokesman Kent Cassella said.

The vote was not unanimous. One trustee voted against the measure because she feared the university was losing its independence from the state. She noted that campus police were torn between enforcing state law and the campus ordinance that banned weapons altogether. The prosecutor who handles crime at Michigan State does not prosecute people who violate the school's ordinance, instead following state law, which prompted the board's vote to change policy, the trustee told the newspaper.

Concealed-weapon permits have cropped up during campus safety debates since the shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 and Northern Illinois University in 2008.

The State News reported that reactions to the change at Michigan State were mixed.

"I don't really feel too great about guns in general, but I feel like people have a right to defend themselves, especially women, so whatever makes them feel safe is OK," one student said.

More students are seeking admission to the nation's three major military academies because of the recession, declining levels of violence in Iraq, and new marketing strategies, the New York Times reports.

The surge in students' interest is most notable at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., where the number of applicants for the class of 2013 reached about 15,300—a 40 percent increase from the number of applicants for the class of 2012 and the highest number since 1988. Applications to the Military Academy at West Point and the Air Force Academy rose by 9.6 percent and nearly 10 percent, respectively.

At a time when layoffs and unemployment are the norm for many families, it seems logical that more students would express interest in colleges where tuition plus room and board are covered completely and students receive stipends of a few thousand dollars each year. But officials from the academies say that students who apply often have very personal reasons for doing so—like patriotism or parents who have served before them—and that the country's deep recession cannot be solely responsible for this surge in interest.

"You find in most of the people who apply, this is a process that starts several years in advance," says Joe Carpenter, a spokesman for the Naval Academy. "The process itself is much more involved and lengthy and often involves a congressional nomination, which is not something you do on a whim.

Carpenter added that the Naval Academy started recruiting more heavily in urban areas like New York two years ago. Today, the Naval Academy receives increased numbers of applications from these urban areas, especially ones submitted by minority students. Applications to the academy from minority students rose by 57 percent this year compared with last year, he says.

Parents and students who visit colleges campuses will most likely retreat to the bathroom at some point during their stay, and first impressions, even about the look of a sink or the feel of a toilet, are important. This truth led higher-ed marketing firm TargetX to hold the TargetXBowl, a competition among colleges and universities across the country to see who had the best campus restroom, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

TargetX announced the contest on its blog last month and asked schools to send in photos of their prized restrooms that clearly display special features like monogrammed towels, free amenities, or elaborate fixtures. Alabama's Birmingham-Southern College won in the best small college category, and the University of Delaware won the award for having the best bathroom at a large university. The men's and women's bathrooms at Birmingham-Southern College are stocked with lotion, toothbrushes, toothpaste, mouthwash, and deodorant, among other amenities, while the visitor center bathroom at the Delaware school is large and made of marble.

"I can't say our bathroom has led us to getting more students, but we see that those products are being used pretty frequently and that people enjoy it," says Tyler Peterson, Birmingham-Southern's director of recruitment.

It's a quarterly tradition at UCLA, but the "Undie Run," in which hordes of students run around campus in their underwear, may be causing more headaches for campus police than ever, the Daily Bruin reports.

Last Wednesday, an estimated 10,000 students took part in the most recent installation of the run, which some students say provides a mental release during the stress of finals week. University officials said the event is getting out of hand, with increased property damage and alcohol abuse and large numbers of nonaffiliated students participating.

After a reported 21 arrests over the past four years, the University of Florida's football team has been invited to get a new perspective on the cops through volunteer ride-alongs. The school's University Athletic Association and the Gainesville (Fla.) Police Department have teamed up to show Gators football players what the other side of law enforcement is like, UF's Independent Florida Alligator reports.

Players are invited to ride alongside officers on the night shift (5 p.m. to 4 a.m.), Gainesville Police Department spokesman Mike Schiubola told the newspaper. Schiubola added that athletes don't necessarily get arrested at a higher rate than regular students but said that they receive more attention when they do get in trouble, especially during the summer.