Canadian college students and academics are probably a lot like their American equivalents, except with a deep love for maple syrup, hockey, Mounties and universal health care. So imagine how liberal the average American student and professor are, and then move them a few notches to the left.

Of course these people should invite Ann Coulter to speak.

The extreme right-wing political pundit hasn’t even stepped foot on a Canadian college campus before she started clashing with the canucks.

Last Friday, University of Ottawa Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost Francois Houle sent Coulter a letter asking her to review the country’s hate speech and defamation laws before her speeches at three Canadian universities.
He wrote:

“Our domestic laws, both provincial and federal, delineate freedom of expression (or “free speech”) in a manner that is somewhat different than the approach taken in the United States. I therefore encourage you to educate yourself, if need be, as to what is acceptable in Canada and to do so before your planned visit here.”

He even went so far as to say:

“Promoting hatred against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges.”

Now it seems that Coulter is taking leaf out of the South Park book and, yes, blaming Canada.

According to The Globe and Mail, Coulter apparently told Newsmax in an email that:

“The provost of the u. of Ottawa is threatening to criminally prosecute me for my speech there on Monday – before I’ve even set foot in the country!”

Though the university’s request could come as a shock to our rogue, independent and free American minds, who can really blame them, when Coulter has said that Canada is lucky the U.S. lets it “exist on the same continent.”

“They’d better hope the United States doesn’t roll over one night and crush them. They are lucky we allow them to exist on the same continent,” she once said during a television debate, according to the National Post.

After nine days off for spring break, students will trudge back to classes today, on the heels of a heart-breaking basketball loss, just in time to be hit with a barrage of midterms. And that beautiful, sunny weather we had this past weekend? Gone, replaced by a relentless drizzle

Well, look on the bright side. You might be able to stay on your parents’ health insurance until age 26. That’s worth something, right?

Here’s what happening:

• In between designing the university’s new general education program and investigating the campus’ links to slavery, history professor Ira Berlin somehow found the time to write a book that The New York Times calls “majestic.”
• You are apparently a lot like the Maryland General Assembly, The Washington Post’s John Wagner writes:
  

  The Maryland General Assembly is a little like a college kid, partying and procrastinating through much of the semester until it hits home that finals are just around the corner. That seems to be the case again this year, perhaps to an even greater degree than usual. The reasons for that aren’t exactly clear — the parties certainly haven’t been any better.

  Wagner said this as explaining why, with three weeks left until the end of the legislative session, “virtually no bill of consequence has made it to the governor yet.”

• A report by the American Association of University Women says bias is the largest barrier to women’s success in math and science is cultural bias, contra Larry Summers.
• Nationally, salaries for mid-level college administrators held steady over the past year, the first without an increase since 1998, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports.

Quick Hits

• Maryland lawmakers have – in a very unofficial way – moved the state from the South to the Northeast.
• College freshman are much more supportive of gay marriage than the nation as a whole.

“If you learn anything at Cornell, please learn to ask for help,” pleads the administration of the Ivy League school to its student body, which just lost its sixth student this academic year to suicide.

Several students took their own lives by jumping into the area’s picturesque gorges that serve as popular swimming holes at the university’s upstate New York campus.

According to an article by CNN.com, Cornell has responded to the outbreak of suicides by reaching out to its student body via e-mail and advertisements in the student paper and by posting guards at bridges over the gorges.

After a widely reported series of suicides a decade ago, the school stepped up both its training for all faculty and staff to try and spot and help students who may be suffering from depression.

But a school administrator nonetheless told USA Today last week that “It’s well known that Cornell has a reputation as a ’suicide school,’ which is not consistent with the reality of the statistics.”

According to the CNN story, Cornell’s suicide rate is more than three times the national student average this year, but it’s offset overall by several years that were incident-free. The administrator, the school’s director of mental health initiatives, said it’s the public nature of Cornell’s suicides that draw attention.

“When a death occurs at Cornell in one of our gorges, it’s a very public experience,” he told USA Today. “It’s observed by people, many people hear about it.”

There has been just one suicide reported this school year at this university, but there may have been others that were not made public.

UPDATE: According to the Washington Post’s 44 blog, the resolution honoring the Terps passed the House today, but an astounding 132 members – all but two of them Republicans – voted against it. Symbolic bills like this one generally pass without opposition. Hoyer’s office told the Post this was another example of Republican obstructionism:

“Republicans are staying true to their ‘Party of No’ doctrine: Whether it’s health care, job creation, or basketball, Republicans aren’t for anything,” said Hoyer spokeswoman Stephanie Lundberg.

U.S. Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) doesn’t Fear the Turtle.

Yesterday, a resolution sponsored by House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a university alumnus who represents College Park, was scheduled to be heard on the House floor. The bill would have honored the Terp men’s basketball team for having the ACC Player of the Year in Greivis Vasquez, ACC Coach of the Year in Gary Williams, for co-winning the ACC regular season title and for making the NCAA tournament.

Resolutions honoring athletic accomplishments by constituents are heard all the time on the House floor, and they are generally passed without much controversy. These bills are generally heard and passed under what’s called “suspension of the rules,” which limits the amount of debate that can be heard on them and allows them to pass via voice vote instead of a formal roll call vote. However, any member of congress can gum up the works by calling for a roll call vote.

That’s what Campbell did, preventing the Terps from formally being honored by the U.S. House. Why would a congressman from California prevent the Terps from being honored? Perhaps lingering bitterness about the Terps’ smackdown of the Cal Golden Bears in the first round of last year’s NCAA Tournament? Nope.

Last October, the University of California-Irvine men’s volleyball team won the national championship. Campbell sponsored a resolution honoring them. But, due to what The Orange County Register says was Campbell’s refusal to support a water project U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) wanted, Hoyer pulled that resolution from the house floor.

So Campbell got his payback. But he had to go further. He first complained that unlike the fearsome Anteaters (yes, that’s their nickname) of UC-Irvine, the Terps merely had qualified for the “playoffs.” (Who calls the NCAA tournament the playoffs?) He asked where resolutions honoring the other 64 teams in the tournament were.

And just to really dig in the dagger, he pointed to a study highlighted by The Washington Post claiming the Terps have the lowest graduation rate of any team in the field of 65. Let’s hope he and Gary Williams never run into each other. Things could get ugly.

Campbell’s objection forced the House to delay voting on the measure. But being the alma mater of the majority leader has its benefits. According to the schedule posted on Hoyer’s website, a vote on the resolution could happen as soon as today.

Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas is frustrated that the pressing crises of our time, like the economy, terrorism and health care, are overshadowing real talk about education. He worries, as he told PEOPLE Magazine, that “we could have a nation full of dummies.”

That’s why he’s bankrolling the college education of four friends.

Will.i.am, whose real name is William James Adams Jr., did the calculus after deejaying a party and realized he could put three people through school with his earnings. Combined with his belief that real success is marked by lifting up others along with you, and the star who never went to college himself decided to create the i.am scholarship fund.

But a free education isn’t the only boon for the four freshmen: they also get to join the Black Eyed Peas backstage at concerts; they will each land an internship at Will.i.am’s social networking site Dipdive.com, and a guaranteed job there upon graduation; and if their grades stay good, they get to pick a country anywhere in the world each year for the next four years to visit with the band.

These days when he hears a Black Eyed Peas jam, scholarship winner Elijah Williams thinks of hitting the books instead of the clubs.

“I think I should go do homework or something,” the Wilmington University freshman said.

Don’t phunk with that GPA.

An Ohio State employee shot at co-workers this morning, killing one and wounding another.

The employee opened fire in a maintenance building and university officials say that the incident only involves the facilities department.

No students were hurt in the shooting and classes are being held as scheduled.
Two workers were hospitalized, one of which is the shooter. The third was pronounced dead at the scene.

Quick Hits:
>>Students rose up against Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli after he sent a letter to the state’s universities last week calling for them to disclude sexual orientation from their nondiscrimination policies.

>>Officials have arrested a group of California sham test-takers that helped Middle Eastern students obtain visas by taking English proficiency exams for them. The ring would then take college courses and exams for the foreign students, as well.

>> Couples in D.C. are headed to the chapel this morning to become among the first same-sex couples to be married in the district.

Your grades are getting higher.

Well, maybe not your grades, but according to a studypublished in last week in Teachers College Record , college students’ grades have shown a persistent increase since the 1950s. Then, the mean G.P.A. at U.S. colleges and universities was 2.52. By 2007, it was 3.11.

While it’s impossible to say for sure what’s behind the increase, Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, the study’s authors, put forward three possible factors that could be driving it.

1. It’s in universities’ self-interest to issue higher grades. If a university graduates a raft of 4.0 students, it will have more alumni in top graduate programs and jobs. The bottom line: more donors and a better reputation.

2. It’s in a professor’s self interest to issue higher grades. After all, professors aren’t the only ones who give out grades. Students evaluate their professors every semester, and since the advent of such evaluations, the grades professors have handed down have increased steadily.

3. It’s in a student’s self interest to get higher grades — and increasingly they’ve come to college with higher expectations. With the cost of college shooting through the roof, students have become higher education customers. And even when it comes to grades, the customer is always right.

But as Linda Perlstein of the National Education Writers Association notes one hypothesis behind the great grade inflation was conspicuously left out of Rojstaczer and Healy’s calculations.

What about the idea that students might be doing better? Just saying!

Maybe it’s just because we’re all college students, but here at The Diamondback, we tend to think that there’s a lot of merit to Perlstein’s point. Since the 1950s, nationwide education funding has increased, Communism has died, and the advent of Wikipedia has made learning random facts fashionable.

In conclusion, a highly scientific poll of The Diamondback’s newsroom showed that we’re all smarter than our parents — other than baseball beat writer Mike Lemaire, whose dad graduated valedictorian from Brown University. So there you have it. College students’ grades have increased because students are getting smarter. Now if we could just figure out how to bring up our own grades…

Everything seems to be shrinking today.

• Your professor’s salaries. More than one-third of all college professors nationally had their pay cut last year, with the average pay cut totaling 3 percent, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports. The drop comes after two consecutive years of four percent increases.

• Protections for gay college employees in Virginia. Actually, those aren’t merely shrinking. They could disappear entirely. Newly elected Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II sent a letter to the state’s public colleges and universities, ordering them to drop the protections against discrimination for gay employees they’ve adopted, The Washington Post reports. He argues only the state General Assembly can grant those protections, which the colleges adopted unilaterally.
• How much student loan reform would save. Earlier, the Congressional Budget Office had estimated President Obama’s proposed student loan reforms would save $87 million. Their new estimate? $67 million. Student loan providers, who vigorously oppose the bill, eagerly cited the new figure, The Chronicle reported. Inside Higher Ed reports Democrats may now turn to the legislative tactic called reconciliation to pass the bill.

Quick Hits

The university administration is hyping their fancy new budget central website, which debuts today. It has budget fireside chats with President Dan Mote and other new features. Look, it’s shiny!

Do you goof around on Facebook in class? You, too, can be a member of the Maryland General Assembly. The Post’s Ashley Halsey III reports a majority of the members of the House Judiciary Committee were playing on their laptops, three of them looking at Facebook, during a hearing in which relatives of drunk driving victims were weeping while telling their stories. You stay classy, state legislators.

Political prognosticator extraordinaire Stuart Rothenberg has downgraded Gov. Martin O’Malley’s chances at re-election from ‘Safe’ to ‘Narrow advantage,’ due to the likely forthcoming entrance of former Gov. Robert Ehrlich to the gubernatorial race.

Instead of paying his son’s $3,000 dorm bill, an ex-Philadelphia cop threatened to reveal Harcum College’s “illegal firearms” and “rampant drug use” to the district attorney, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

Whether you call it a riot or just an exuberant celebration, this student body’s reaction to the Terp victory over Duke last week attracted a multitude of cameras to Route 1.

The quality of the resulting videos that have appeared around the Internet varies wildly, from professional footage aired on CBS to a collection of blurry colors that appear to be shot with camera phones after a great deal of alcohol.

And anyone from outside of College Park who saw these videos may have noticed the “David’s Shoe Repair” and wondered whether they were looking at the set of a 1920s movie.

A cross section of these videos appear below. If you were at the College Park riot/celebration March 3, you may very well recognize yourself here:

Video by The Diamondback’s Adele Hampton (who got a face full of pepper spray to bring it to you):

Video by WUSA (Channel 9)

Video by WTOP:

CBS News video:

We all know the riot/demonstration happened at night — this video includes post-processing brightening to useful effect:

And three more: