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.

Reverend Jerome Fowler

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

The Huffington Post launched a spankin’ new section Monday called HuffPost College, inspired by founder Arianna Huffington’s travels to campuses nationwide that reminded her of “all the excitement, promise, passion, intellectual curiosity, and vitality of college life.”

In other words, HuffPost College is not the world of drunken debauchery and one night stands that we know here in College Park, but instead a feature fed by over 60 college newspapers and student contributors from across the country.

In case you were wondering, The Diamondback declined to be a part of the new section.

Huffington has been widely criticized for killing newspapers, a charge she flatly denies. Critics claim she just aims to maximize her exposure and uses as much free material as possible by emphasizing citizen journalism, unpaid bloggers (often her celebrity friends: if you’ve ever wondered what John Cusack thinks of health care reform, you’ve found your site) and by linking to other papers’ original reporting instead of conducting its own.

But in a hilariously ironic twist, the first major item was called “Majoring in Debt” and featured essays from nine college students who collectively owe $816,897 in tuition, and who weren’t paid for their contributions to the site.

The success of the section remains to be seen, although the Huffington Post boasts more readers than the New York Times website with over 20 million unique hits a month.

However, we look forward to stealing ideas from it for blog posts in the coming days and weeks. It’s called payback, Arianna.

Looks like our very own President Dan Mote is not the only one stepping down these days.
Several university presidents and officials across the nation resigned this week for unusual and, in some cases, unexpected reasons.

President Gary W. Streit of Malone University resigned immediately this week after accusations surfaced that he had not attributed sources in some of his speeches. Streit served as president of the university in Canton Ohio since July 2007.

The president of University of Mary Washington, resigned unexpectedly during a university Board of Visitors meeting. Judy G. Hample has served as president for two years and the exact reasons for her resignation still remain unclear. A statement from the university only says that Hample chose to “to pursue other interests in higher education.”

A member of the Board of Governors of Missouri Southern State University resigned Monday after making a homosexual slur at a board retreat over the weekend. The board had been discussing changes in the athletic department including tweaks to the university’s mascot, Larry the Lion, and logo made a few years ago. To which the board member in question, David Ansley, commented, “We went from the f– lion to the ferocious lion.”

Quick Hits:
Prince George’s County will not receive federal aid for clean-ups associated with the first Read the rest of this entry »

For the past seven years the University of Mississippi has been mascot-less.

Why? Well, the school’s beloved Colonel Reb was banned in 2003, due to the fact that he was, as the Associated Press aptly called him, “a caricature of a white plantation owner.”

Tomorrow, students will be able to vote on what their new mascot will be (our guess is something a little bit more politically correct) or continue to live without a fuzzy creature or historical figure to represent them.

“We’re tired of having nothing to represent us,” junior Josh Hinton, a member of the Associated Student Body, which approved a resolution calling for the vote. “We’ve gotten our song taken away. We want to have some kind of tradition back.”

And at a school known for its tense racial relations, (everyone remembers the deadly riot that erupted in 1962 when James Meredith’s tried to enter as the university’s first black student) time has come for a change. Once a symbol of the Old South, the Oxford campus has slowly been dropping old traditions.

The Confederate Flag-waving finally disappeared in 1997 — only 132 years after the Confederacy ceased to exist. And last year, the fight song “From Dixie with Love” bit the dust, too. Mostly due to the fan chant “The South will rise again” that followed.

That doesn’t mean that Civil War influence is completely gone, however. The team is still nicknamed the Rebels. And merchandise sporting Colonel Reb can still be purchased.

And some are just not willing to let the Colonel go.

“The majority of students I talked to feel they’d rather have no mascot if they can’t have Colonel Reb, and that’s going to be evident,” Hannah Loy, a senior from Natchez, Miss. She’s part of the Colonel Reb Foundation, which is urging students to vote “no” to a new mascot.

Other universities (and professional sports teams) have also been forced to drop their mascots due to a lack of political correctness.

The University of Illinois, though they remain the Illini, eliminated Chief lliniwek, a student clad in a Native American costume who danced around during sports games.

The NCAA told North Dakota University a few years ago that they needed to obtain approval from Sioux tribes in order to keep their Fighting Sioux.

On the other side of things, Central Michigan has obtained permission from the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe to use the Chippewa as their mascot.

And Florida State is famously known for having a good relationship with the Seminole Tribe in Florida. The tribe’s chief has even said it’s an honor for the school to use the Seminole and the Chief Osceola name.

Kind of makes you happy there isn’t a fierce anti-Turtle lobby, doesn’t it?

Students are applying to colleges in record numbers this year (this university’s application numbers fell slightly, but were still the 3rd highest ever), and yet schools aren’t opening that many more spots. As your ECON200 professor would note, this is an increase in demand without a corresponding increase in supply.

So kids these days are going to ever-crazier lengths to get into the school of their choice. Applicants to Tufts University in Medford, Mass. were invited to submit application videos – and the school posted all of them on YouTube. And you thought writing two essays instead of one was difficult. The Boston Globe’s Tracy Jan reports members of the campus community there have picked out their favorite students from among the bunch and are lobbying for their admission.

Quick Hits

*This post originally incorrectly stated it was the dean of the University of Baltimore’s law school who received questionable payments.

If you want to go snowboarding in College Park, you need a record-shattering blizzard, a friend with a car and — some might argue — not a lot of sense.

At Salt Lake City’s Westminster University, not only are snow-covered legitimate mountains within easy reach, but school officials openly encourage winter sports.

Perhaps then it’s no surprise that the 14 of the school’s 2,600 students are in Vancouver competing in the 2010 Winter Olympics and one of them had already won a medal by Sunday.

According to National Public Radio, 14 members of the U.S. ski and snowboard teams are attending Westminster on full scholarships, and the school is very accommodating of its student athletes.

“Like her Olympic colleagues, [Lacy] Schnoor, 24, basically goes to school when she’s injured,” NPR writes. Schnoor told NPR she’s been a junior for the last four years.

And to think — at this university, the dining halls hide their trays on snow days! That’s no way to get Olympians.

Sure, you may feel really popular because you have 1,500 friends on Facebook. But how many of those people are really your friends?

According to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, there is a cognitive limit to the number of friends one can truly maintain. Dunbar places the limit to 150 people, a number he asserts also applies for Facebook.

Dunbar has pegged the number of friends one can have at 150 since the 1990s — it’s called “Dunbar’s number.” But this new study is his first examination of how Facebook impacts this.

“The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world,” he told The Times of London.

One student said he mostly envisioned Facebook as a way to casually keep in touch with acquaintances.

“I know all my Facebook friends. They’re people in my immediate community. Like friends from high school and college and family, too,” said Michael Peters, a junior communication major.

In order to truly culture a friendship with each and every person on the friend list, people need to take the time to regularly comment on other people’s pages and update their own statuses, said Ron Yaros, a journalism professor who studies social media.

“However one defines the ‘maintenance of friendships on Facebook,’ it is obviously much easier to interact with 150 friends today than it was twenty years ago,” said Yaros. Students in his Information 3.0 “I”-series course seem to think college students spend more time communicating with friends virtually than vis-à-vis, said Yaros.

“I just started deleting all of the friends I don’t talk to anymore. I had thousands of friends. There was no reason I should’ve been friends with them anyways,” said Andy Sotak, a junior finance major.

Dunbar noted a gender disparity in terms of relationships, which hints that media channels like Facebook better suit women.

“There is a big sex difference though … girls are much better at maintaining relationships just by talking to each other. Boys need to do physical stuff together,” Dunbar said.

In a study measuring the overall “happiness” of its users and based on user statuses and the USA Gross National Happiness Index, Facebook reports that people who are in relationships seem happier than those who are not in relationships. People that seem most unhappy do not disclose their relationship status or claim they are in an “open relationship.”

One student said she actually thought the report should have indicated the opposite that people in Facebook relationships are unhappier than the norm.

“When you’re on Facebook you can find out what people are hiding from you. It’s harder to keep secrets from your partner,” said Sheri Winegardner, senior finance major.

Peters said: “Most of the relationships I see on Facebook are fake. I see a lot of friends who are listed as married.”

Crying “Socialism!” is an effective political tactic in the United States, and one President Barack Obama’s enemies have embraced fully. But while accusations of being insufficiently tough on Marxist enemies of capitalism are heard regularly on the national political scene, members of Maryland’s General Assembly aren’t regularly accused of being red.

In their weekly Thursday’s list column, Center Maryland, a new website covering state politics and policy, highlights what they call “The Extreme Team.” The leading member on the left wing is College Park’s own Sen. Jim Rosapepe, a Democrat.

Center Maryland's take on Sens. Jim Rosapepe and Andy Harris

Other names on the list include Sen. Paul Pinsky (D-Prince George’s) and Sen. Jamie Raskin (D-Montgomery) for the left, and porn-hating Sen. Andy Harris (R-Baltimore County) and Del. Pat McDonough (R-Baltimore County) on the right. But for now, let’s focus on Rosapepe.

Their description of Rosapepe’s liberalism is:

We must nationalize the means of production — bringing a little of Romania to Maryland.

The reference to the eastern European nation is due to Rosapepe’s time as the U.S. ambassador there under President Bill Clinton. But the larger implication of “nationalize the means of production” is to link Rosapepe to the once-Communist policies of the former Soviet satellite.

But the piece is light-hearted, so why is sarcastically labeling an otherwise unremarkable liberal Democrat a Communist a crime? For that, look after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Public high schools in a handful of states, including nearby Pennsylvania, are testing a pilot that will allow sophomores in high school to graduate two years early and enroll in community college right away — provided they pass a battery of tests on a number of subjects, of course.

The new program, funded in part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, aims to cut down on the millions of high schoolers who need remedial classes once they get to college. With prominent backers like the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, early-college programs like this one are expected to spread around the nation.

As if we needed more underage kids at the Route One bars.

Your future classmate in lecture

Students who pass the board exams but want to attend more selective colleges would be allowed to take college coursework throughout their junior and senior years. And students who fail the 10th grade tests can always try again.

The commissioner of education in Kentucky, one of the states where the program will debut, said the new system will transform the typical route to high school graduation — by accumulating enough credits in a wide range of dull subjects.

“This would reform that,” Dr. Holliday said. “We’ve been tied to seat time for 100 years. This would allow an approach based on subject mastery — a system based around move-on-when-ready.”

Evidence suggests that similar fast-track programs helps at-risk students stay in school, reports Tamar Lewin of the New York Times Academics note that high expectations tend to lead to better overall performance in school.

“As a nation, we just can’t afford to have students spending four years or more getting through high school, when we all know senior year is a waste,” said Hilary Pennington of the Gates Foundation.

Hopefully part of the new educational reform sweeping the nation will also include tutorials for drunk college boys on asking if the new crop of freshman are over 18.