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The student government at the University of West Georgia is looking to cut funding to the school’s student newspaper in retaliation for an opinion piece that mocked fraternities.
The day after the West Georgian ran a column called “Join a Frat with Buck Futter, Jr.” student body president Alan Webster — a fraternity brother himself — introduced a bill that would freeze the paper’s funds on a “temporary yet immediate” basis while the university explored alternative ways to “allocat[e] institutional funds to extend interesting, informative, accurate, and responsible information in a manner that sheds a positive light on the University.”
The bill was passed by the student government and is being reviewed by university lawyers prior to implementation.
The offending column described frat members as “over-aggressive alcoholics that have no sense of responsibility,” and said that the university repeatedly lets “frats off the hook despite their incessant rule-breaking and idiotic antics.” It claims that frat members keyed the word “FAG” into the finish of a Resident Assistant’s car, and went unpunished “because University Police never actually investigate any crimes against students.”
It also suggests that UWG fraternity members regularly have sex with each other and rape passed-out female students.
Perennial presidential-campaign asterisk Alan Keyes was one of twenty-two anti-choice activists arrested on the Notre Dame campus yesterday. The group, which included Operation Rescue founder/sleazeball Randall Terry, was protesting President Obama’s upcoming commencement address.
The group was arrested for trespassing — Notre Dame policy allows only “student-led protests” on campus, and apparently this group couldn’t (or didn’t care to) find any student supporters.
But that’s not my favorite part of the story. My favorite part of the story is this: When Keyes walked onto campus, he was pushing a blood-spattered doll in a stroller…
A Spongebob Squarepants stroller.
Update: Photo from here. Note that the doll was so small and unobtrusive that the (“pro-life,” but disgusted anyway) blogger who posted it thinks that Keyes was pushing a bloody Spongebob doll in the stroller. Note also that commenter Leslie Hanks actually approves of parading around with bloody Spongebob dolls as an anti-abortion tactic.
Eight Venezuelan police officers have been arrested in connection with the shooting death of student activist Yuban Ortega Urdaneta two weeks ago. The charges against the officers include homicide.
Ortega, a supporter of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and the president of the student association of the University Technical Institute of Ejido, was reportedly shot in the forehead during a campus protest against university corruption on April 28. He died of his wounds three days later.
The shooting of Ortega sparked three days of student riots in the city of Mérida, just north of the Ejido campus. In a television appearance after Ortega’s death, president Chavez said that “the full weight of the law must fall” on whoever was responsible.
On the subway home from this meeting, I sketched out the skeleton of a post riffing on the conversation we had there. I just came across those notes again, and though I don’t have time right this minute to write them up into a full essay, I figure I might as well put them out there anyway. I welcome comments and questions, and if you’d like to see the longer version, feel free to prod me.
How are students brought into a movement?
- By being met where they are.
- By being given a sense of the possible.
- By feeling their power.
- By confronting their powerlessness.
- By experiencing a one-to-one connection.
- By experiencing community.
(This is really less a set of six principles than three sets, each made up of two principles in tension with one another. As the physicist Niels Bohr once said, “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”)
It seems like every month or so there’s a big media buzz around another deeply flawed study that claims to confirm negative stereotypes about American college students. In February it was the one that explored students’ supposed “sense of entitlement” in the classroom, in March it was the one that claimed that students spend more time drinking than studying.
In April it was the one from Ohio State University researcher Aryn Karpinski that found that Facebook users have lower grades than students who aren’t on FB. It was only a draft paper, based on a small group of students from one college, but it made a huge splash all over the world.
And now it turns out that it’s pretty much worthless as scholarship.
A new response from three scholars in the field (Josh Pasek, eian more, and Eszter Hargittai) looks closely at the Facebook study, and finds it incredibly weak. In comparing the grades of students who use and don’t use Facebook, for instance, one needs a substantial number in each category, but this study’s sample only included 15 non-FB undergrads. It also found major differences in Facebook adoption across majors, but made no effort to determine whether it was those population differences, rather than an actual tie to Facebook use, that was responsible for grade variation.
At least as important, the response looks at data obtained from three large studies, and found no significant connection between Facebook use and low grades. Indeed, one set of data suggested that Facebook use was, as the authors put it, “slightly more common among individuals with higher grades.”
As for Karpinski, despite the fact that she was quoted as saying that there was a “disconnect between students’ claim that Facebook use doesn’t impact their studies, and our finding showing that they had lower grades,” and despite the fact that she invited administrators “to find ways to limit access [to Facebook] … resulting in better academic performance,” she now says her findings were just “exploratory,” and that she never intended them to be seen as conclusive.
“People, she says, “need to chill out.”
Afternoon update: In the interest of fairness and completeness, here’s a link to Karpinski’s original conference presentation and to her rebuttal to the three scholars’ response to it. (She argues that their study has “serious methodological and statistical flaws” of its own.)
Late afternoon update: And here’s a link to Pasek, more, and Hargittai’s rebuttal to the rebuttal, courtesy of Hargittai.
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