CornellWatch

Last semester, conservatives bristled at the fact that their (parents’) hard-earned money was being spent on an event that instructed doe-eyed college kids in the wonderful, sinful ways of buttsex. They even showed up to protest! (And the Daily Sun caught it on video.) This semester’s Women’s Resource Center production was a bit less, shall we say, ass-positive; and, despite certain scatological inclinations, it was kinda disappointingly tame.

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Cornell has a well-deserved reputation for incubating a certain breed of political animals, that is to say, we pop out overzealous assholes like nobody’s business. There is, of course, our very own “Rush Limbaugh in a miniskirt”: the Cornell Review-founding, polemic-trafficking Ann Coulter ‘84. And on the other side of the partisan picket fence, there’s ESPN sportscaster-cum-liberal talking head Keith Olbermann ‘79.  And recent weeks have found our glorious institution, yet again, at the center of the shit-slinging culture war between liberals and conservatives. Except this time the wannabe pundits of Cornell are not bashing one another like the big boys and girls do — some outside libertarians are jumping into the fray, too, and it’s all because some blasted zygote had to up and scrawl her (pro-)life story on some signs (see left).

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Old people these days… As soon as they achieve the status of legendary journalists, they’re given license to spew adorably misinformed bits of crazytalk alongside dazzling rhetoric with little to no public recognition of the crazytalk part. So it was when Tom Wolfe, the father of “New Journalism,” came to Ithaca College to talk about journalism this past Halloween Eve. He called blog readers “tribal people,” equated bloggers with rumormongers who spoon-feed misinformation to said unsophisticated people, and insinuated that online journalism, even when based off of pre-existing newspapers, will contain no reporting. These opinions are rather unsurprising given that Wolfe has recently blamed the entire financial crisis on the fact that it’s hard to read stuff on “the computer.” (Perhaps fellow computer-ignoramus John McCain should consider Wolfe as his economic advisor.) The old bat’s quasi-senility is totally forgivable, but it’s worth examining some of his crazytalk mostly because it reflects opinions that are widely held among other old bats.

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The name of the body found yesterday in Cascadilla Gorge has been released, and the details may shock you. His name is Jakub J. Janecka of Lake Ariel, PA, and he graduated in 1998. Why a Cornell alum would such make an eerie pilgrimage to Ithaca to commit suicide is as strange a question as it is tragic.

And, although we send our deepest condolences to the family and friends of Jakub Janecka, we believe that this story is worth investigating in the interest of preventing future suicides. With that in mind, anyone upset by this incident should talk to Gannett’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS).

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This morning, weatherman and feature reporter Dave Price (ILR ‘87) of the CBS Early Show returned to his lovely alma mater (far above Cayuga’s waters) and — in addition to reporting the national weather with trademark panache — ran an exhilarating feature on how things have changed in the 20 years he’s been gone. Apparently, school’s more expensive and more selective. College is the new high school. Who knew?

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Everyone knows that the Ivy League is the secret gathering place of the Coastal Elite, where we drink organic champagne, eat free-range caviar, and laugh snidely at the fact that Sarah Palin has managed to trainwreck softball interviews with Katie Couric. She reads a “vast variety” of newspapers and magazines! She hates those pesky reporters perpetrating “gotcha journalism” (but was a journalism major herself, go figure)! Ha.

Still, precious few people know what actually actually goes on behind the scenes in these Ivy Towers of ours, well out of sight of the meddling riffraff from landlocked states.Here are a couple things we’ve enjoyed this past week, mostly to hold over the heads of landlubbers: Read the rest of this entry »

The Student Assembly is best known in recent memory for its finger-wagging resolution asking the Office of the Dean of Students to investigate whether conservative tabloid the Cornell Review’s “hate speech” violates Cornell’s Statement on Diversity. And the gang’s rolling seven more deep after online voting* for the Fall 2008 Assemblies Elections took place from Tuesday to Thursday this week. The University Assembly, which by contrast probably actually matters because they get to talk to the old white guys on the Board of Trustees, also elected two more peeps. Who are these new kids on the block, and what particular empty promises did they campaign on? Facebook pictures and candidate statements say a thousand words.

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What’s GXC? Pretty much the most important thing to ever happen to the Ivy League since Facebook. It’s short for Go Cross Campus, which is not asking you to visit other colleges but rather to participate in an online game similar to Risk where colleges battle one another for control of territory and shit. Like Facebook, it started at the Ivies only to be later opened to the lowly masses. So please go help Cornell the fuck out: as of right now, we have the 2nd highest out of any Ivy (308, Penn leads with 367) out of 1,700 players total. And Brown, even though it has only 198 players, is “winning” with the most “Energy” (1,513, us in second with 1,423).  Stats in full after the jump.

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Last night, the non-partisan group Americans for Informed Democracy held a roundtable discussion on Net Neutrality led by Tracy Mitrano, director of Information Technology (IT) Policy at Cornell. The dinner-discussion is the first in a six-part weekly series* aimed at raising students’ awareness of issues pertinent to the 2008 Elections.

What is Net(work) Neutrality (NN)? It’s kind of complicated, but PCMag.com says it “states that all traffic be treated equally… that packets are delivered on a first-come, first-served basis regardless from where they originated or to where they are destined.” Basically, NN would have Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Time Warner not be able to discriminate torrent-downloading traffic from mp3-downloading traffic from whatever. Unfortunately for us ‘Nets-lovin’ kids, Mitrano suggested that Net Neutrality and other internet issues — most notably archaic copyright laws — are not really election issues.

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After a marathon 17-hour session of bargaining, negotiators for Tompkins Consolidated Area Transit and representatives for Local 2300 Union of Auto Workers reached a tentative agreement for a new 3-year contract yesterday, the exact day that their previous contract expired. Had they not reached an agreement, TCAT bus service might have been suspended until a new contract was agreed upon. Thank god, because the drunk freshmen coming back from Collegetown tonight seriously need bus drivers to harass.

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