Today, the Class of 2009 will breathe a collective sigh of relief as the deadline for major declaration passes. While declaring a major only requires a student to get an advisor’s signature on a declaration form, deciding on what to major in is not quite so easy.
David Graeber, associate professor of Anthropology at Yale University, met with Associate Professor of Sociology Jonathan Cutler last Tuesday evening to engage in an open dialogue about anarchy and youth activism. Student turnout was high at the event, where both professors expressed their opinions on the role of anarchy and youth activism on campus and in today's world.
Professors and students in the science departments will soon be tracking the evolution of DNA strands and the development of tumors faster than ever before thanks to the recent installment of a new high-performance computer cluster at Information Technology Services (ITS).
Asked by an audience member to describe his creative process, playwright Charles Mee gave the audience an open-ended and disarmingly simple answer that very well summarized the spirit of his lecture last Thursday evening.
From the moment the Ujammaa Board led the audience in singing the Black National Anthem, the atmosphere of Jubilee could only be described as electric. Held in Crowell Concert Hall this past Saturday and running more than two and a half hours, Wesleyan’s Black Cultural Show showcased some of the finest talents the University has to offer, with performances ranging from dance to spoken word to musical numbers.
The First Annual Sophomore Blues Competition provided a showcase for sophomore musicians and performers, who were comfortable screaming, staggering, strutting, and rocking all over the stage. Big drums and amps backed up some, while others were more somber and introspective. Though sparsely attended, none of the competitors held back once they got on stage.
Wesleyan's wonderful art galleries provide ample opportunities to see exhibitions and art shows. But, what do you do if you've already seen "Robert Boyd: Xanadu" at Zilkha or the "Etching Since 1950" in the Davison Art Center?
David Remnick, Pulitzer Prize winner and editor of The New Yorker magazine, spoke Wednesday night at a packed Memorial Chapel. His talk included a scathing indictment of the Bush administration, accompanied by a somewhat gentler review of the recent failures of American journalism's coverage leading up the Iraq War. He then conducted a lively question-and-answer session that touched on topics from creeping authoritarianism in Russia to continuing media coverage of New Orleans.
I guess Nature took offense to my last column—the frozen specimen that once frosted my hair has since melted into a lovely pool of shit-mud-water-shit beneath my feet. I'm not complaining. At least I can make angels in the shitty sludge.
You go to MoCon for dinner, study at SciLi, and visit your friends who live in WestCo, the Nics or the Butts. As the students who will inaugurate the new Suzanne Lemberg Usdan University Center, we feel obligated to come up with a nickname that will do justice to the building and honor the venerated traditions of the University.
The WSA spends a significant amount of time attempting to convince the student body that we are, actually, just students, not some complex part of an administration conspiracy. So for us to be sponsoring and promoting a University fundraiser may seem counterintuitive. But give us the rest of this column to convince you why it is in your best interest and why Wesleyan is deserving of your money. If you still have doubts or questions, let me know and we'll see if we can't address them personally.
We would like to apologize for a photo caption that ran in our last issue (Feb. 27) accompanying the article "Proceeds from charity dinner benefit schools in Nicaragua."
So no one ever has candles or tapestries in their homes? I know if you went to my parent's house you'd rack up thousands in fire fines, and as far as I know their house has yet to burn down and its been a good twenty years that way. The fire codes are truly ridiculous, the fines are absurd, the methods of inspection are highly questionable, and the squandering of resources is enough to make me sick.
I am writing to applaud Stephanie Quainoo '10 on her Wespeak that ran in Tuesday's Argus as a response to Ed Klein's Wespeak on our classmates' choice of clothing. I agree wholeheartedly with Quainoo that it is a common misconception here that everyone can afford clothing that carries a price tag meant only to send a message about status. While Wesleyan students enjoy privileges that most other people don't (a $42,000 yearly education, state-of-the-art facilities, top-notch instruction and advising from professors), it is simply untrue that we are all able to afford luxurious clothing, cars, and vacations.
Dear friend, I’ve got a story I’ve been meaning to tell you for some time now. The story is set on a sunny Saturday afternoon in mid-December, unseasonably warm as December afternoons have seemed in recent years. I am standing at the front circulation desk in Olin library.
Dear Campus Fire Safety, Of all the Man's bureaucracies, it is hard to imagine that Fire Safety would be caught up in childish competition with "peer schools." Is your goal really to out-fine Williams? Will it impress US News and World Report if Wesleyan can be more paranoid about spontaneous combustion than the billion-dollar schools?
A group of students met in a crowded room in the Public Affairs Center on Monday afternoon to get a glimpse at what activism looks like beyond college life. Wesleyan's Prisoner Research and Education Project (WesPREP) invited David Stein '06, a former member of the organization, back to the University to speak about his ideas on the prison industrial complex and his work with the prison abolition organization Critical Resistance.
Six Earth and Environmental Science (E&ES) majors presented their findings on Monday afternoon in Exley Science Center, summarizing research they conducted in Death Valley, CA during winter break. Students discussed their investigations of fault line angles, distribution of "bombs" from explosive craters, and "booming sound," a rare phenomenon in which dunes exhibit low-frequency vibrations.
Professor of Theoretical Physics Ronald Mallett thinks he knows the key to making a time travel machine. And as ridiculous as that may seem, Mallett's efforts are not going unnoticed. The visionary University of Connecticut professor, who has been approached by the Defense Department and is currently funded by venture capitalist David Zinn, has been featured in a Learning Channel documentary, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, NPR's "This American Life," and the BBC, among other media outlets.
Three years ago the mayor of London, the Right Honourable Ken Livingstone, proposed a law that threatened, in one fell swoop, to eradicate all traces of over 400 years of British history. The mayor, after receiving a cleaning bill for £140,000, officially banned pigeons from Trafalgar Square—one of Western civilization's most prominent meeting places, and most notorious of pigeon factories. After banning food sellers, fining seed-scattering tourists, and installing trained hawks, the Brits managed to reduce their nearly 5,000-strong pigeon flock to a scant 400 feral birds. Trafalgar Square, I should mention, is roughly the size of two football fields.
What happens when you inject fish genes into the chromosomes of corn? This is just one of many questions that new student group Wesleyan BioJustice seeks to answer.
Although he's only been here a short time, you might know Leif as the guy singing next to you in Wessingers, the guy helping you out in the Office of International Studies, or the guy talking about Glam rock or German philosophers. That is unless you've shared a classroom with him — then he might just be "that guy."
There exists currently a divide within the Division III President's Council regarding the state of athletics. A Feb. 13 New York Times article by Bill Pennington reports that the 420 schools making up NCAA's Division III are closer than ever to splitting into two groups: one division maintaining more restrictive recruiting policies, the other remaining more permissive on such issues. The repercussions of such a split would affect Wesleyan athletics directly.
Every year the NCAA Division I basketball season culminates in an event that many would call the pinnacle of college sports. The NCAA tournament, aptly titled "March Madness," is as much a cultural phenomenon as a contest of athletic achievement. Every year across the country, college students don their team's colors, skip class, glue themselves to their television sets, and get fired up for the "Big Dance."