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Jacob Blumenfeld, a member of the New School In Exile activist group, was arrested outside the home of New School president Bob Kerrey at 3:55 am on Thursday morning. Blumenfeld had allegedly been spraypainting the words “Bye Bob” on Kerrey’s front door.
Sarah Paley, Kerrey’s wife, said that Blumenfeld and two other individuals had attracted police attention because they wearing ski masks in mild weather. Blumenfeld, the only one of the three who was apprehended, is reportedly facing five criminal counts.
The New School In Exile announced in February that they would “shut down” the university on April 1 if Kerrey and New School vice president Jim Murtha did not resign by that date. Their deadline is now sixteen days away.
A Friday morning post on the NSIE blog made the following declaration: “We stand together, We have Solidarity, We do what we do because of love for each other and love for our future.”
A fake news story claiming that herpes was being transmitted via beer pong on college campuses migrated from a student newspaper to a national student news service to local television to Fox News before coming to rest on the Colbert Report last night.
On February 11, the Ohio State University Lantern ran an article speculating that playing beer pong could transmit mononucleosis and herpes. That piece was picked up by the national campus media service UWire, inspiring similar stories at other campus papers. One of those stories, an article in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, added the false claim that the Centers for Disease Control consider “unprotected beer pong play … nearly as dangerous as unprotected sex.”
It was at about this time that the story made the leap from campus newspapers to local TV news, who — like the Daily Collegian — integrated “facts” from a humor article posted last July at BannedInHollywood.com, into their reporting. KNBC in Los Angeles not only passed on the claim that the president of Arizona State University is distributing germ-free beer pong cups in ASU’s dorms, it reprinted Banned In Hollywood’s fake CDC list of “safe pong” tips. Another station led with the tagline “it’s all fun and games until someone gets herpes.”
From local television, it was a short leap to Fox News, whose morning show Fox and Friends ran a segment in which the show’s anchors discussed the dangers of beer pong while playing beer pong with a doctor in a minidress, as can be seen in the Colbert Report clip.
Juicy Campus, the internet gossip site, went dark this morning.
Founder Matt Ivester said yesterday that the site’s “growth outpaced our ability to muster the resources needed to survive this economic downturn,” and that in recent weeks both ad revenue and venture capital had dried up. He posted a FAQ on the shutdown on the JC blog in which he left open the possibility of re-launching in the future.
We covered controversies surrounding the site here and here last semester. Inside Higher Ed has a good overview here.
A few days ago we linked to a story (and video) about a snowball fight at East Carolina University that ended in an arrest and the use of pepper spray by campus cops.
Now the East Carolinian, ECU’s student newspaper, has its coverage up, and their piece is a well-written, thorough one. Ties up a lot of the loose ends that the national media left hanging.
I know it’s a small story, but this piece really is a reminder of what the student press is for.
Campus cops at East Carolina University tackled and arrested one student and used pepper spray on others while breaking up a snowball fight earlier this week.
Several hundred ECU students joined the melee after a freak snowstorm hit the Greenville, NC campus on Tuesday, and the cops attempted unsuccessfully to reach dormitory staff and team coaches before intervening directly.
The arrested student had apparently hit a police officer in the back with a snowball.
(Hat tip to Joey Coleman, who passed along the story via Twitter.)
Update: Video of the arrest has found its way to YouTube:
studentactivism.net 
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