We’ll just come out and say it: university slogans are lame. Our brand new motto is hardly unique in its failure to resonate with students. Take this doozy from Stanford University: “The Wind of Freedom Blows.” Or Idaho State University’s decidedly uninspired “A Legacy of Leading”. Even Cornell’s brand, a quote from its founder, falls flat: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

In the words of George Felton, an advertising expert, author and professor at the Columbus College of Art and Design:

They sound like they were written by the admissions department or development folks on a Friday afternoon in a badly ventilated little meeting room.

But a new marketing strategy at a community college in Toronto bucks the trend. Centennial College’s advertisements, plastered all over local subway stations and bus shelters, look a little something like this:

Karen Birchard at The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

“We felt there was a disconnect with those traditional clean-cut images,” says Malcolm Roberts, of the ad agency Smith Roberts Creative Communications. “These ads say: We get you. We understand who you are. We know you can change the world.”

Surprisingly, most parents find the ads “reassuring,” says Mr. Roberts. “Parents have such high hopes for their child when they are young and then fear their teen’s look is the end of the dream,” he says. “There’s a huge sense of relief when they see these ads saying that we recognize the potential in every kid.”

While College Park had a violent weekend, sometimes more of a global perspective can come in handy.

Suffice to say, this is worse than a few shootings downtown. From The New York Times:

Mustansiriya University, one of Iraq’s most prestigious universities, was temporarily closed this month by the prime minister in an effort to rid it of a shadowy student gang accused of murdering, torturing and raping fellow students, and killing professors and administrators.

The gang, called the Students League, was apparently helped by their ties to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal Al-Maliki’s Shiite political party, Dawa, although officials deny that.

In Pakistan, suicide bombers attacked International  Islamic University, whose student body is close to 50 percent female and many students are foreign. The bombers hit a faculty building and the women’s cafeteria. 4 people died.

Going to college in the United States is a simple act. Elsewhere, it’s a brave one.

Quick Hits

• Only 25 big-time college athletics programs made money in the last fiscal year, according to an NCAA report.
• Maryland’s unemployment rate hit 7.2 percent in September, The Sun reports.
• The Federal Reserve issued new rules for marketing credit cards to students, Inside Higher Ed reports.

Keep your eyes on the sky tonight if you’re looking for a spectacular show: the annual Orionid meteor shower will send shooting stars across the heavens between 1 a.m. and dawn on Wednesday morning. Actually, the bursts of light – sometimes as many as 60 an hour, in recent years – are debris left over from Haley’s comet, which orbits the solar system every 76 years. For dust fragments that can be as small as a grain of sand, they sure go out with a bang when they vaporize in the atmosphere.

In other star news, Beyonce has cancelled a scheduled concert in Malaysia after protests from the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, the country’s largest opposition group. Leaders said the show would promote “Western sexy performances.” And they call themselves a party?

As for stars that aren’t quite so bright, Carrie Prejean (the former Miss California famous for her opposition to “opposite marriages”) is being sued by Miss USA officials. Over her boobs. Pageant suits want her to return the money she borrowed from them for breast implants before the competition.

Quick hits

• While we enjoy a tuition freeze, others aren’t so lucky: the cost of attending a public college rose sharply this past year, increasing faster than tuition at private colleges and the rate of inflation, according to a new College Board report.
• Pakistan will beef up security at schools and universities after two suicide bombers killed five at the International Islamic University.

Today, the University Senate’s Campus Affairs committee is meeting. Whether or not they’ll discuss a controversial proposal to ban smoking on the campus isn’t known yet, but new guidelines released Monday by the American College Health Association urge all of the nation’s colleges and universities to ban smoking across their campuses, both indoors and out.

365 universities nationwide ban smoking, according to the story on Inside Higher Education, and another 76 ban it except for in remote outdoor areas. The guidelines’ writers acknowledge it’s unlikely many campuses are going to implement smoking bans.

Jim Turner, president of the ACHA and executive director of the University of Virginia’s student health center, said the guidelines reflect policies that are “from a public health standpoint, what we all aspire to have for our campuses.”

He acknowledged the position statement “sets a very, very high bar for some campuses to get to,” but said that the members of the ACHA’s board, executive committee and Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs Coalition considered it “an important statement to be made” about tobacco use on campuses. “We may not achieve our total goal across the country but at least we can provoke a debate and get some movement on our campuses.”

For those who may be interested in smoking something with a bit more potency, a Gallup poll has found support for legalizing marijuana to be at an all-time high among Americans. 44 percent support legalization, with 54 percent opposed. But the trend is good for drug policy reformers: support was at a mere 31 percent only nine years ago, and before that had been stuck around 25 percent for years. And this shift in public opinion probably has something to with the federal government opting to ease off on prosecuting medical marijuana patients. Attorney General Eric Holder’s move is interpreted by some advocates as the first step towards legalization, Carrie Johnson reports in a freshly redesigned Washington Post.

Quick Hits

• The Anne Arundel County Council continues to delay voting on whether to allow slots in the county, The Sun reports.
• A Georgetown sophomore is looking for a personal assistant, taking “premature self-importance to a whole new level,” Vox Populi reports.
• O’Malley was on Bill Maher this Friday (and on a Diamondback editor’s plane during the trip to California), and went “overtime” defending Barack Obama’s economic policy. He also got compared to, of all people, Glenn Beck.

Shakira dressed up as a boy to attend University of California, Los Angeles during the summer of 2007, she told The Guardian this week. The Colombian pop sensation said she needed a break after her almost two-year-long Oral Fixation Vol 2 tour.

“The universe is so broad, I cannot be at the centre of it,” Shakira told the British broadsheet. “So I decided to go to the university and study history for a summer course, just to kind of switch gears, taste the student life.”

Shakira took a history course and dressed in men’s clothes and used her middle name as a disguise.

“I used to wear a cap and a big backpack, I looked like a boy,” Shakira said. “I didn’t get recognised. Some people looked at me very suspiciously, a few people asked me, but I told them my name was [middle name] Isabelle.”

She wolf or she man?

The newest gossip on Shakira’s foray into menswear comes as a stark contrast to the recent controversy over her nearly nude “She Wolf” music video in which she dances provocatively inside a golden cage. The singer wears only a nude-colored leotard (in a shade shockingly close to that of her skin), a black belt and spiky black heels while she bends, twists and stretches her body in ways most people would never consider attempting.

So, while no one knows exactly what Shakira learned in her college courses, we are pretty certain that it takes some smarts to successfully morph from a frumpy male student into one of the hottest female temptresses in music. And the hype-creating, stark gender switch-ups? Pure genius.

Robbers beware: Prince George’s County cops have been involved in three shootings in our area over the weekend.

On Friday, a man who tried to rob an armored car with an automatic rifle was involved in a shoot-out when he barricaded himself in his home in Beltsville. That same day, an off-duty officer shot two men dressed as women as they dragged him in their getaway car after shoplifting from Rugged Warehouse on Route 1. Then on Sunday, a cop shot and killed a man attempting to hold up the 7-11 on Route 1 with a knife.

Other campuses across the country are drawing an entirely different kind of fire. Articles in humor publications at both Reed College and Lewis & Clark College in Oregon have become the source of national outrage for featuring anti-Semitic jokes.

“LC students kill Jewish people,” was the headline for an article that appeared in the Leaphlette, a student humor publication at Lewis & Clark College.

The article went on to say that students asked the chemistry department for a chemical to conduct “Jewsperiments” and that there was now a “towering crematorium” where the library once stood.

The editor of The Pamphlette, Glenn Harrison, 21, said the article was supposed to have been a response to a prior article in Reed’s student newspaper criticizing an earlier Pamphlette spoof of Anne Frank’s diary as enabling “real genocide.”

Harrison said that they found the assertion in the Reed’s student newspaper so absurd that their goal with this article was “to satirize this notion by driving it to its logical extreme.”

The uproar over what was intended to be a spoof is only gaining speed after it was revealed that swastikas were drawn on the walls of a Lewis and Clark school bathroom, which the editors of the humor publications said they were not aware of.

A separate incident at the all-male Morehouse College in Atlanta also happens to involve cross-dressers. Morehouse officials, as part of a crackdown on inappropriate campus attire, have banned students from wearing dresses, heels and makeup. Lateef Mungin of CNN reports:

The dress-wearing ban is aimed at a small part of the private college’s 2,700-member student body, said Dr. William Bynum, vice president for Student Services.

“We are talking about five students who are living a gay lifestyle that is leading them to dress a way we do not expect in Morehouse men,” he said.

Bynum said the policy comes from the vision of the college’s president, who wants the institution to create leaders like notable graduates Martin Luther King Jr., actor Samuel Jackson and film director Spike Lee.

J.J. Rousseau: “Women in general do not love any art, are not knowledgeable in any and have no genius.”

Aristotle: “The male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled.”

F. Nietzsche: Women have “delayed human development.”

M. Astell: “If all men are born free, how is it all women are  born slaves?”

You’ve most likely heard of the first three philosophers, even if you rarely manage to drag your ass to a class. The last one you probably don’t recognize, and for good reason: she’s a woman.

Female thinkers have been all but excluded from the canon of philosophy, part of a host of problems that have lead to shockingly low numbers of women with philosophy degrees, argues Regan Penaluna in the Oct. 11 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Despite what Aristotle might say, it certainly looks as though these women have a thought in their pretty heads

National statistics from the 2006-07 academic year show that women garnered only 31% of bachelor’s degrees in philosophy, compared to 45% in mathematics, 60% in biology and 69% in English. The number drops even lower for doctorate degrees: women earn a mere 27% of them. And to top it off, women account for only 21% of professional philosophers (as for what, beyond being a professor, makes a philosopher a pro, I’ll leave that for brilliant minds to decide.)

At our very own department of philosophy, women account for 5 positions of 20 core faculty members. And out of 4 or 5 philosophy graduate students each year, it’s rare to find more than one female, if that.

Penaluna admits that history, English and science also have male-dominated canons, but that academics in those departments have taken steps to combat that effect by analyzing critically patriarchal texts, as well as calling attention to literary works and historical contributions made by women. But as for philosophy, she writes:

It is also important to keep in mind that sexism in the canon has the potential to affect philosophy students to a far greater degree than those of other disciplines. (…) Consider that the virtue of a philosophy student is how well she is able to think through the arguments of a given philosopher; we would say that a student who is able to follow the logic of Aristotle has gone far in developing as a philosopher. his helps explain why there are so few women in philosophy: Where is the pleasure in identifying with a thinker who has exceptionally low expectations for you?

At least our philosophy department seem to be already aware of the problem. A section on their admissions page reads: “The Department especially welcomes applications from women and members of minority groups that are under-represented in the profession.”

Apparently, funding political science research leads to war crimes.

That was the ridiculous implication made by U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) during a debate over a science appropriations bill yesterday. Coburn, who is not known for playing well with others, is the main sponsor of an amendment that would end federal funding for the National Science Foundation’s political science programs, which he says are unnecessary and wasteful. From The Chronicle of Higher Education’s story, which was written by David Glenn (emphasis ours):

He concluded with a lengthy condemnation of the federal deficit. “It is deeply personal with me,” he said. “I have five grandchildren. I look in their eyes, and I see the potential of their lives and all the other children who are out there. … You know what—we are going to waterboard them. That is what we are going to do. We are going to waterboard them. We are going to flood them with debt.”

At the same time, Senator Coburn said in passing that he believes the National Science Foundation’s overall budget should increase by 12 to 15 percent this year, rather than the 8 percent provided in the appropriations bill. Such a large increase would dwarf any federal-deficit reduction that might come from eliminating the political-science program, whose $9-million annual budget is a very small fraction of the NSF’s spending.

According to an award search NSF’s website, three political scientists at the university have received grants from the foundation since 2006. Johanna Binir received $169,774 to fund a study “Minorities at Risk: Addressing Selection Bias Issues and Group Inclusion Criteria for Ethno-Political Research” in 2007. Earlier this year, Karen Kaufmann received $219,479 to for a “multi-city study of contextual influences on group relations and voting behavior in urban mayoral elections” and Paul Huth got a cool $255,386 to look at “Guerilla Insurgencies: The International and Domestic Sources of Resource Mobilization and Coercive Bargaining.”

However, Maryland’s senior senator, Barbara Mikulski, was there to step up and defend the funding for the political science program. The fate of the amendment hasn’t been decided yet, because debate on the bill has been suspended.

Living on campus is, to say the least, a unique experience.  You pay a small fortune for the right to live in a 10-foot-by-10-foot concrete cell with a gross roommate, and to have idiots down the hall scream at 3 a.m. every Tuesday night. And why are those darn marijuana sanctions so strict, anyway?

We all have a lot of questions about living on the campus, but fortunately the Residence Hall Association was able to gather the directors of the departments of transportation services, Dining Services, Resident Life and Residential Facilities in the Stamp Student Union so RHA senators and executive board members could get some answers.

Home Sweet Home
Paraphrased explanations from Director of Resident Life Deb Grandner and Director of Residential Facilities Jon Dooley.

Deb Grandner

Why are the marijuana sanctions so strict in the dorms?

Despite  overwhelming student support for softer marijuana regulations, Grandner said sometimes student safety must trump student opinion. Although students and administrators continue to talk, Grandner said she personally believes decreasing penalties for drug violations will lead to increased violence in the dorms by causing more drug deals to take place in campus housing.

Why does it sometimes take a long time for the water to heat up in dorm showers?

Dooley isn’t sure, but he thinks it may have to do with a new plumbing code that limits the temperature circulating in pipes to 110 degrees. Facilities previously used 120 degree water. A 10 degree decrease could impact the speed at which the water heats to your desired level, especially if you’re the first person to use the shower in a while.

Transportation woes
Paraphrased explanations from Director of Transportation Services David Allen.

Why are parking tickets so expensive?

Simple answer from  Allen: They aren’t meant to be affordable. If they were, they wouldn’t serve as a deterrent to parking illegally. The bigger the offense, the bigger the fine, the less Allen wants you to do whatever you did to earn the ticket.

Why do the buses run when and where they do? How can students impact bus routes and schedules?

Routes are based on what students want and what they’re willing to pay for, Allen said.  Contact your RHA representative or Allen himself if you want a route to change or be added.

Dining Matters
Paraphrased explanations from Dining Services Director Colleen Wright-Riva.

Colleen Wright-Riva

If she had her way, Wright-Riva would also close The Diner on North Campus for an hour or two each evening. Having a break between normal dining hours and late night helps reduce the chaos that occurs while closing some dining stations and switching between different foods at other stations as regular dining hours end and late night ones begin. It also gives Dining Services time to switch out staff or provide breaks for employees.

Why is there not a larger selection of fruits and vegetables in the dining halls?

Since fruits and vegetables are seasonal items, it’s not cost-effective to transport a wider variety of fruits and vegetables from far-away locations.

What happens to the compost in dining halls?

Currently, compost is trucked away and used by a third party. But Dining Services is evaluating ways to use the compost on campus, either for irrigation or for mulch.

Why are the organic food options limited in the dining halls and campus shops?

Money again.  When choosing between a cheaper non-organic food item and a more expensive organic item, students will choose the least expensive option, making it impractical for Dining Services to stock up.

How much food do the dining halls buy from local farmers, and how does dining services define local?

Wright-Riva estimates that 15-20 percent of the food in dining halls is bought locally.  Though the exact amount fluctuates from day-to-day, it includes “big ticket” items like milk and chicken.  Another official defined local as within 250 miles, a necessarily large radius since the university is located in an urban area.

Amanda Pino is The Diamondback’s Residence Life beat writer. She can be reached at pino@umdbk.com.

A.J. Jacobs, a journalist for Esquire, once wrote that half his job is spent getting people to tell him information they don’t want to share. In my four years writing for The Diamondback, I have found this statement to be true — maybe an exaggeration — but true nonetheless. As a reporter, it’s your job to dreg up to unknown facts, to unearth the unmentioned truths that explain society. It’s not always an easy job, and normally when you land one such savory morsel of fact, it’s a big deal. It’s a hot-story, a scoop or at least something that goes into a story.

But last week, after the University Book Center’s manager Mike Gore gave me hot details about the bookstore’s slumping sales, they didn’t make it into my story. The day after I interviewed him, he called me to tell me that Barnes and Noble College Inc. had become a publicly traded company a few days earlier. He said that meant he wasn’t authorized to release the numbers he gave me. He said they weren’t even accurate in the first place.

Normally, I’d be suspicious, but Gore seemed sincere, and the numbers weren’t essential to the story. We didn’t run them, and I think we did the right thing.

This reporter learned about Doing The Right Thing from Spike Lee.