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:

Just when you thought you were done hearing about racism at universities, turns out ignorance is striking a little closer to College Park this time.

UC San Diego may be ablaze with controversy over students hanging nooses in the library and fraternities hosting “Compton Cookouts,” but Towson University fired a professor after he made a racist comment during class.

Professional artist Allen Zaruba, who is an adjunct professor at the university, compared his rights and situation as an adjunct to “a n***** on the corporate plantation.”

A student reported him after the class and Zaruba was fired over the phone. Though Zaruba apologized, he said his recent unemployment only proves his point that adjuncts get few employment rights.

“I just finished talking to a lawyer,” Zaruba said. “I have no ability to appeal anything.”

Some students in his class, however, told Towson’s student newspaper, The Towerlight, that Zaruba, was honest and blunt in his language, something they did not have a problem with.

“He used the word to illustrate a point. He wasn’t trying to offend anyone. And obviously … we were understanding,” Maria Bernier, a sophomore studio art major said “And going into our class, you kind of should expect some level of shockingness and, you know, in your face [content].”

The kicker? Zaruba says his stepfather was black, a man he “loved dearly”.

“I am not a racist,” he said. “I never have been. I’ve been raised overseas and in other cultures. It just absolutely kills me.”

The way members of the Atheist Agenda at the University of Texas-San Antonio see it, UTSA students have more use for Penthouse or Playboy than the Quran or the Bible.

The student atheists kicked off their highly publicized annual “Smut for Smut” campaign on Monday, manning a booth in the middle of a crowded campus plaza where passersby can trade in religious texts for pornography.

In past years, the controversial publicity stunt has garnered new members and a ton of press, including a chance for an Atheist Agenda president to debate Tucker Carlson on MSNBC in 2005.

This year, hundreds of protesters circled the booth, singing hymns and holding signs that read “Jesus Saves” and “Jesus Loves the Atheist Agenda”. The student atheists held their ground on the stairs of a campus building, proclaiming their belief that texts like the Bible promote misogyny, intolerance, violence and genocide. Meanwhile, agnostics sat in the middle, attempting to keep the peace between the two sides.

And now for a breakdown of the factions. From the San Antonio Express-News:

“It’s a First Amendment right,” said Bradley Lewis, 18-year-old freshman from Pearland who said he plans to join the Atheist Agenda. “If religious groups can put out missionaries and go knock on my door and wake me up at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning, I can put a table outside of the college.”

Robin Lorkovic, an 18-year-old freshman from Houston, disagreed. Lorkovic stood near the “Smut for Smut” table holding a cardboard sign that said “God Loves You! Keep your Bible and learn from it!”

“I don’t really feel like that is appropriate at all,” Lorkovic said. “I am a Christian, I believe in God’s love and I am here to stand my ground and stand up for what I believe in.”

Let’s hear from the agnostics, quoted in the UTSA student newspaper The Paisano:

“Well, we don’t really believe in either side. We believe both foster hate,” UTSA junior Victoria Arzu said. “They know they’re doing it for show, and they know that either party could be mistaken in their beliefs. We choose an agnostic position because it’s the smartest thing to do.”

Later in the afternoon, Atheist Agenda president Carlos Morales debated one of the Christian protesters in a civil fashion before the crowd. And that’s really what the event is all about, those involved say:

“This is ultimately why this is going on,” Lewis said. “It’s an ice breaker to get people talking about these things.”

A student who hung a noose in a library at UC apologized in a letter in the student newspaper this morning. The (minority) student said that she and friends had been playing around with a rope, made it into a noose, then accidentally left it in the library.
The incident flaired concern about racial relations and sparked protests of prejudice across the campus. Students held a protest outside the Chancellor’s office friday, calling for the university to be shut down and respond to a list of demands from the Black Student Union.

Tensions had already been running high at the California university after a fraternity held an off-campus “ghetto-themed” party weeks before.
Though the letter was anonymous, the student has been suspended and is under investigation by campus officials.

Quick Hits:
The Fort Totten Metro site is inspected for wildlfe after employees were caught feeding raccoons.

A new report finds Maryland, Virginia and D.C. lagging behind other states in preparing students for college.

And, hey, apparently tickets for the Maryland-Duke basketball game tonight are the hottest in years. One law student in a Baltimore Sun article, could not afford tickets, and put out an ad on Craigslist offering free legal services in exchange for the coveted tickets.

If Virginia Tech finds out that any of its students have been drinking underage, that student’s parents will now be the first to know.

Under a new policy, the school will notify parents in writing even over their student’s most minor alcohol violations, the Associated Press reports.

Virginia Tech officials told the AP that their new system gives parents more warning before their student is suspended for repeat alcohol offenses, and helps parents “in setting boundaries” for their kids.

“We’re grateful for the positive involvement of parents,” the university’s vice president for student affairs told the AP.

Students, meanwhile, said they’d be more grateful if their parents and their university would mind their own business.

“Now that we’re all in college, we’re all adults. It’s kind of your responsibility to take care of yourself. If you want to make your parents aware you’re about to be kicked out of school, then it’s on you,” a VT junior told the AP.

Students at this university who share that philosophy need not fear — just yet, anyway. While UMD hasn’t threatened to contact parents over a single beer, the AP story describes Virginia Tech as “part of a small but growing number” of strict schools.

Why don’t you all just f-fade away (talkin’ bout my generation)
and don’t try to dig what we all s-s-say (talkin’ bout my generation)

The Pew Research Center released the results of the most extensive study of 18- to 29-year-olds to date yesterday, which breaks down our generation — known as the Millenials — into a series of figures and factoids.

For example, did you know that four in ten of us have a tattoo? Or that 20 percent of us have posted a video of ourselves online?

Perhaps the most consequential conclusion of the study is that we’re on track to become the most educated generation in American history. But, and this is one hell of an asterisk, we’re also the least employed on record.

Nonetheless, the answers given by about 1,000 of the 50 million Millenials indicate that we’re still confident about the future, upbeat and more open to change than our elders.
We’re less religious, less likely to be married, less likely to have grown up in a two-parent household, more liberal and we volunteer more than those who have gone before us.

At the same time, having grown up in the age of terror, we’re more paranoid but less skeptical of the government. The Millenials were among President Barack Obama’s strongest supporters, with 60% voting for him in 2008 compared with 50% of those 30 and older — the largest gap in voting patterns between two generations in four decades of exit polling.

Does this sound like you? Find out just how Millenial you are by taking Pew’s quiz here.

Rev. L. Jerome Fowler, a seventh-generation Prince George’s County resident, spoke about the connections between slavery and this university in honor of Black History Month Wednesday.

Fowler’s great- great grandfather, Adam Francis Plummer, worked as a slave on the Calvert family’s Riverdale plantation, which stretched across where the university stands today.

Plummer was the personal assistant to Charles Benedict Calvert, a plantation owner. Calvert donated part of his Riversdale plantation to create the Maryland Agricultural College, which eventually evolved into the University of Maryland.

Because Plummer worked so closely with Calvert, Fowler believes his great-great grandfather had a lot to do with the creation of this university. Therefore, Fowler along with many others, wants his ancester to be considered a founder of this university.

The role slavery played in the building of this campus has come under debate in recent years. A class taught by history professor Ira Berlin investigated what role slaves played in building this campus, an effort Fowler supported from the beginning. The class found no conclusive evidence about slaves working to build the university, but still found connections between its origins and slavery.

“If slaves didn’t lay the brick, they made the bricks,” Berlin told The Diamondback in April. “If they didn’t make the bricks, they drove the wagon that brought the bricks. If they didn’t drive the wagon, they built the wagon wheels.”

This post was written by Diamondback staff writer Kelly Farrell