June 24, 2009

Culinary Institute Fails to Provide Alcohol-Free Alternative, Student Says

A student at the Culinary Institute of America says a required course in which students drink wine, and the institute’s unwillingness to come up with an alcohol-free alternative, is frustrating his efforts to remain sober.

The student, Jeremy Umansky, who is 26, filed a complaint in March against the institute with the New York State Division of Human Rights.

He says the institute failed to offer him an alternative to the required three-week wine course, even after he provided doctor’s notes saying that alcohol and Mr. Umansky don’t mix, The New York Times reported today.

Mr. Umansky, who has been sober for seven years, told the Times that he has “an unhealthy mental obsession with alcohol.”

“Being in a room with that much alcohol is not healthy for me,” he said.

Tim Ryan, president of the institute, told the Times that while he could not comment on Mr. Umansky’s situation, students can graduate from the institute without ever tasting or smelling alcohol, regardless of their reasons for abstaining. Students could videotape the wine lectures, he said. —Austin Wright

May 4, 2009

Frugal Festivity Substitutes for Inaugural Gala at UNC-Greensboro

Recessions tend to temper ambitions, and it appears that even inaugural ceremonies may be on the chopping block at some colleges. The galas can be lavish, sometimes running up tabs of more than $200,000. But the University of North Carolina at Greensboro is getting creative to keep the cost of its coming inauguration down to just $22,000.

Linda P. Brady, the university’s chancellor, will be formally installed tomorrow morning. Citing the economy and systemwide budget cuts, Ms. Brady asked Erskine B. Bowles, the system’s president, if the university could do without the festivities, according the Greensboro News & Record. Mr. Bowles decided the ceremony was important for the university, so they opted to let the show go on, but with an eye toward thrift.

According to the newspaper, those cost-cutting measures include:

• The campus cafeteria is making the cake.

• The student government is handing out daisy seeds, the school’s flower, rather than commemorative tchotchkes like mugs.

• The buffet lunch was nixed in favor of punch and light desserts.

The Greensboro campus is not the first to take a pass on a big-spending inauguration. For example, Jo Ann M. Gora marked her 2004 arrival at Ball State University by taking money the university would have spent on an inauguration and using it instead for scholarships for 25 high-school students.

Another cost-conscious college chief is Joe Gow, who ponied up the entire $8,000 price tag for his 2007 inauguration as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse. Mr. Gow also pitched in with the entertainment, singing Frank Sinatra’s “Luck Be a Lady” at the ceremony. —Paul Fain

April 7, 2009

Swedish Technology Institute Conducts Math Exam Worthy of Kafka

The customary presumption that problems on a test can be solved proved the undoing of some students in an advanced mathematics course recently at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology. The episode turned an optimization-theory examination into an exercise in existential angst when several of the questions turned out to be insoluble, according to The Local, an online newspaper.

“One thinks as a student that it is you that is wrong and the exam that is correct,” The Local quoted one student, Emelie Baedecke Yllner, as saying. “I was counting away like a madman, but it just wouldn’t work,” she said.

Anders Lindquist, chairman of the institute’s math department, acknowledged today that typographical mistakes — a plus instead of a minus sign in one case, the number 1 instead of the number 2 in another — had rendered three of the examination problems impossible to solve.

He pointed out that the approximately 120 students who took the exam were informed of the errors midway through the five-hour test. But more important, he noted, even in the realm of hard numbers, trying to solve insoluble problems can be worthwhile.

“When you go out in the world, you find lots of problems that don’t have solutions, so even with errors like this, you can still find out what a student knows,” he said. “In fact, I don’t think it is so serious. Students should be able to detect if a problem has a solution. You’re still testing the students.”

Mr. Lindquist, who holds the institute’s chair of optimization theory, hastened to add that “I didn’t write the test and I certainly didn’t read it. It is not my job to check typing errors.”

Students who demonstrated their grasp of the material were credited accordingly when the exam was graded. Those who still failed to make the grade will have an opportunity to take another exam in June. With luck the preparation of the test will this time be fully optimized. —Aisha Labi

Brigham Young U.'s Student Newspaper Is Pulled After Embarrassing Typo

The student-newspaper staff at Brigham Young University removed some 18,500 copies of the paper from the campus yesterday, and reprinted nearly the entire press run, because an embarrassing typo in a front-page photo caption appeared to offend key leaders in the Mormon hierarchy, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.

The caption described a photograph illustrating the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ General Conference, and it referred to the group’s “Quorum of Twelve Apostates” rather than “Apostles.”

Rich Evans, editorial manager of The Daily Universe, the student paper, told the Tribune it was “the worst possible mistake.” BYU is owned and run by the church, as the Mormon Church is formally known.

The error was an accident: A student had misspelled the word “apostle,” and the article’s editor chose the wrong word from among the options offered by spell-checking software.

The newspaper was reprinted with a correction, and its staff issued an apology to the apostles of the Mormon Church. —Beckie Supiano

April 2, 2009

Politics Beats Porn at U. of Maryland

In these uncertain times, it’s good to know that you can still count on some things. Like that some politicians cannot resist making a big fuss over a little pornography.

The University of Maryland at College Park today canceled a screening of a XXX-rated movie after some state legislators threatened to cut the institution’s funds, The Baltimore Sun reported. A student programming committee had chosen the movie, Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge, which was scheduled to be screened at the student union this weekend.

But at Maryland’s State House today, the movie caused minor tremors. Senators debated “the evils of pornography” and the First Amendment for much of the morning, The Sun reported. “That’s really not what Maryland residents send their young students to college campus for, to view pornography,” said the Senate’s president, Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., a Democrat. Another legislator suggested amending the state’s budget to deny funds to any public college that showed a XXX movie.

Following “behind the scenes” negotiations between state officials and the university, College Park’s president, C.D. Mote Jr., decided to cancel the movie, according to The Sun.

Pirates II, released in 2008, cost $10-million to make — an industry record. Its marketing slogan was “Proceed at Yer Own Risk.” —Eric Hoover

April 1, 2009

College of Wooster President Fights Satire With Satire

April Fools’ Day issues of campus newspapers have been around for as long as student journalists have been mangling facts and misspelling names. But here’s a twist: a president who responds in kind.

Following this morning’s online posting of The Wooster Voice’s annual spoof edition, The Wooster Vice, President Grant Cornwell sent out a letter to students and employees claiming that the paper’s editorial staff had started a free laundry service for use by anyone at the college.

“Student newspapers have always taken pride in uncovering and airing a college’s dirty laundry,” Mr. Cornwell wrote. “Now the editors of the Vice have decided to take the logical next step, and return it clean, static-free, neatly folded, and with a hint of springtime freshness.”

The president, who tools around the campus on a Vespa scooter, was the target of at least one joke in the Vice, an article asserting that the college would give out tartan-plaid Vespas next year to Wooster seniors, a nod to the Ohio institution’s Scottish tradition. —Don Troop

March 16, 2009

2 Top Officials at Columbia College Chicago Shed Clothing at Rally

It wasn’t quite a wardrobe malfunction, but a recent garment-shedding incident involving two top officials at Columbia College Chicago has nonetheless gotten the campus all atwitter.

The administrators — Mark Kelly, vice president for student affairs, and Eliza Nichols, dean of the School of Fine and Performing Arts — doffed a button-down shirt and a bra, respectively, during a kickoff rally last month for Manifest 2009, a student-arts festival, The Columbia Chronicle reported last week.

According to a tape of the rally, Mr. Kelly told the crowd assembled for the event that he was “not feeling quite comfortable,” and then removed his shirt and changed into a Manifest 2009 T-shirt. Ms. Nichols then stepped up to the podium, removed her bra from underneath her blouse, and held it up, saying, “This is the Manifest color this year… Mark didn’t give me a T-shirt.”

Mr. Kelly later told the newspaper that he was simply trying to get students “into the spirit” of the arts festival. “I was just the coach putting on the jersey,” he said. “That’s what I was trying to do.”

The incident, which spurred a public apology from the college’s president, Warrick L. Carter, is still under review, and no disciplinary actions have yet been taken. —David Shieh

March 11, 2009

Syracuse's Ernie Davis, Now Depicted With Historical Accuracy

A statue at Syracuse University of a former star running back, Ernie Davis, has lost its Nikes, according to The Post-Standard, a local newspaper.

The statue of Mr. Davis, the first African-American winner of the Heisman Trophy, was unveiled last September, but it was soon noted that the sculpture had been crafted with historically inaccurate clothing and cleats. The helmet was also an anachronism.

The bronze figure wore Nike cleats and had a Nike swoosh across its chest, but the sportswear company did not yet exist when Mr. Davis won the trophy, after the 1961 season.

A revised statue, now more historically correct, was returned to its pedestal on Tuesday, during spring break at the university. —Steven Bushong

March 7, 2009

The Undead Soul of Today's College Best-Seller List

College students’ reading habits ain’t what they used to be, laments Ron Charles, a senior editor at The Washington Post’s Book World.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s monthly list of best-selling titles on college campuses, Mr. Charles notes, has lately been dominated by the vampire tales of Stephenie Meyer and the inspirational stories of Barack Obama. Forty years earlier — amid the passion of civil rights, Vietnam, and the women’s movement — student tastes ran more along the lines of Howl, Soul on Ice, and the poetry of Sylvia Plath.

Today “we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they’re choosing books like 13-year-old girls — or their parents,” he writes. “The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.”

Not everyone shares his alarm, reports Mr. Charles. Mike Connery, who writes for the Web site Future Majority, says that the top titles are simply what people are reading to escape. They absorb their politics through blogs and social networks, he says.

Mr. Charles isn’t buying that argument. “For the Twitter generation, the new slogan seems to be ‘Don’t trust anyone over 140 characters,’ he writes. “What you see at the next revolution is far more likely to be a well-designed Web site than a radical novel or a poem. Not to be a drag, but that’s so uncool.” —Don Troop

March 6, 2009

Plagiarism in Science Research Is Often Ignored, Studies Find

Shock. Denial. Disbelief. Sadness. Regret. Embarrassment.

Those, according to a commentary published today in Science magazine, are some of the reactions from both scientists and science journals when they are found to be involved in cases of potential plagiarism.

The commentary was offered by researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, who used a computer-based text-searching tool to analyze millions of randomly selected research abstracts.

The analysis of Medline, a database of biomedical research articles, found 9,120 entries “with high levels of citation similarity and no overlapping authors,” including 212 pairs of articles “with signs of potential plagiarism,” the researchers wrote.

The lead author, Harold Garner, a professor of biochemistry and internal medicine at the medical center, said he and his colleagues then conducted a survey of the authors and journal editors, promising them anonymity. The survey responses, Mr. Garner wrote, included explanations, denials, embarrassed apologies, and some retractions. Among the original authors, he wrote, 93 percent were not aware of the duplicate article.

Mr. Garner also wrote an article for Nature, published in January 2008, titled “A Tale of Two Citations,” that reported a similar finding: His computerized search of several million scientific-journal articles revealed thousands of cases in which one article had large similarities with another article.

Both of Mr. Garner’s articles were based on research involving the Medline database and UT Southwestern’s computer-based text-searching tool, eTBLAST. And in both articles, Mr. Garner suggested that the size and severity of this problem continued to be ignored by publishers.

The Nature article warned against both plagiarism by another author and “self plagiarism,” in which the same author or authors present duplicate findings to different journals.

Mr. Garner nevertheless said that his Science magazine report represents a significant advance over his earlier article in Nature. The survey published in Science, while anonymous, prompted 83 internal investigations at scientific journals, which in turn led to 43 cases in which an article was retracted, he said.

That compares to only 17 such retractions last year, which is a more typical annual figure, he said.

Such a case of plagiarism or duplication can have serious medical consequences, Mr. Garner said, as it could lead a doctor who is investigating a patient’s condition to believe a scientific finding is more recent, or perhaps more reliable, because of its repeated appearance in medical journals. —Paul Basken