Daily Dispatch: Wednesday, September 9, 2009

CUSHING OPEN HOUSE -- WNM -- KINDLING YOUR ACADEMIC FLAMES

By GREGORY W. WALLACE
dispatchesfromcampus.com

CUSHING CENTER OPEN HOUSE -- With shiny new offices and several new flatscreen televisions, Cushing is ready for an open house. It will be held today between 11 and 2. Games that probably will not be played: bobbing for random things George and Denise have in their lost and found, pin the tail on Cardinal Cushing.

MOCK TRIAL holds an informational meeting at 6 o’clock in NHIOP 4006.

ALPHA ZETA SIGMA holds an interest meeting at 7 o’clock.

HISTORY SOCIETY holds an open meeting at 8:30.

WEDNESDAY NIGHT MASS, tonight and every Wednesday at 10 pm.

FINALLY, A REASON TO VISIT YOUR MAILBOX -- From Deb: Visit your Campus Mail Box tomorrow. . . Find the red ticket. . . Fill in your name and box number. . . Drop the ticket at the service window. . . You could win one of four gift certificates to the Coffee Shop!!!’

E-TEXTBOOKS -- It was books on tape, then on CDs, but now a book you download from the internet could Kindle your academic flames. ‘This Could Be the Year of e-Textbooks,’ by Jeffrey R. Young for the Chronicle: ‘The trickiest part of teaching with electronic textbooks is getting everyone on the same page—or to the same part of the digital text. . . . There are no page numbers for books on the Kindle; instead, every passage has a "location number," which lets users jump to that section. Those numbers can be long, and it can be awkward to type them on the small keyboard. So when Ted Humphrey, the professor, asked students to turn to a certain passage in the Iliad, there were "some glitches," he says, as a few students mistyped the location number. . . . The increased awareness and availability of e-textbooks could make this a watershed year for the format—which has held only 2 to 3 percent of the market until now, according to the National Association of College Stores—as publishers learn whether or not enough students like the new titles and features to make them worth selling.’
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Year-of-e-Textbooks-/48305/

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT -- Are you planning on being wildly successful or important in the future? This is the time to start watching your words. Not only must students monitor the photos posted to Facebook, but the wise might hold their own academic tongue. After all, ‘What’s the statute of limitations on things we said when we were younger?’ From USAToday’s Kathleen Parker, ‘Plague of the Senior Thesis’: ‘Critiquing the college papers of politicians and their spouses recently has become custom, beginning with the 1992s presidential election when Republicans suddenly became fascinated with Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis at Wellesley College -- from 1969. Because Clinton had written about radical community organizer Saul Alinsky, Republicans were able to create the ever-lasting trope that Hillary was a socialist. This, despite the fact that she essentially disagreed with Alinsky’s tactics and has proved herself to be more Methodist than Marxist. . . . The only consolation for politicians and their spouses is that when an opponent comes for your college papers, it probably means you’re winning.’

HARVARD HAPPENINGS -- Letter from the Harvard Crimson president to readers: ‘In yesterday’s newspaper, The Crimson ran an advertisement that questioned whether the Holocaust occurred and which unsurprisingly angered many members of the Harvard community. We did not intend to run the ad—a decision we made over the summer when it was initially submitted. Unfortunately, with three weeks of vacation between submission and publication, that decision fell through the cracks. . . . We want to stress that we do not endorse the views put forth in any advertisement that runs in The Crimson, and this case was no different. That said, we do recognize that in our role as distributors we are responsible for the content that runs in our newspaper. And though we did seek to intervene in this case, we failed to see the process through to its conclusion.’
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=528828

THE GOAL OF COLLEGE IS TO GRADUATE -- That’s no news, but these national numbers from public universities are, and are surprising: ‘Ten years ago this month. . . roughly 94,000 students arrived as first-time freshmen at 21 American flagship public universities. Four years later, 49 percent of those students had graduated from the institution where they began. Two years after that, an additional 28 percent had done so, for a total six-year graduation rate of 77 percent. At less-selective public universities, the numbers are even worse. For one recent cohort, the six-year graduation rate at the University of Cincinnati was 46 percent, according to federal data. At the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, it was 51 percent.’

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