campus press notes

The Spartan Daily out of San Jose State U.: A mock letter from the media to Tillman: "You asked us not to do this, Pat, but we need your story, to keep us moving forward. We need it, and we'll take it. See, we are trying to make sense of this thing, this shapeless battle against evil, against terror..."

The Daily Californian's editorial board (of UC-Berkeley) has this to say: "When he walked away from a $3.6 million contract he did so discreetly. He did not seek the spotlight when he left football. The best honor we can give to a man who shunned the spotlight is to not forget every life lost is precious and irreplaceable..."

A columnist at the Kansas State Collegian asks, "Sure, he brings a face to the servicemen and women dying overseas, and that may be a good thing. But then how shallow are we as Americans if it takes a former football player's death to realize these are real people with real lives?"

A University of Maryland's Diamondback columnist offers a salute to the soldiers.

Oregon Daily Emerald columnist says Tillman was a hero.

From the Kentucky Kernel:

A Kernel computer analysis shows that UK is somewhat lopsided when it comes to the diversity of professors’ political registration.

Registered Democrats comprise 62 percent of the total faculty, while 26 percent of the faculty are registered as Republicans, according to the analysis of UK faculty members employed during the fall 2003 semester. Independents make up 12 percent...

Boston Globe article in the paper's City/Region section.

The writer has apologized to Tillman's family.

From the blogosphere and other articles floating around on the Internet:

Steve Silver (hat tip for link).

Lilek's the Bleat.

Tim Blair.

Small Victory.

Nick of Begging to Differ.

Storyhunters.

Conspiracy Planet.

MichNews.

OpinionEditorials.com.

Bob Young of the Arizona Republic.

Boston Herald editorial.

MORE: Andrew Sullivan. JJ Daley. Jay Fitzgerald. Jawsblog's Josh. Dimmy Karas.

AND MORE: The Corner goes to town with posts on it.

Note to all people who keep calling The Mass Media about the Daily Collegian's Pat Tillman column/letter to the editor:

We are The Mass Media, the student newspaper at UMass Boston.

The Pat Tillman piece was in the Daily Collegian, the student newspaper at UMass Amherst.

So please stop leaving messages on our answering machine complaining about their column, okay?

I got a copy of the UMass president's statement as I left a Board of Trustees committee meeting this morning. I had no idea (I got up early, perused the Globe online, and left for the meeting) it had turned into a national story.

Made Romenesko and everything.

And now, of course, no one can access their site 'cause it's gone into overload.

UPDATE: Romenesko, ESPN, CNN...

Daily Free Press interview with Boston University President ad interim Aram Chobanian. Some of the more interesting bits:

Q: I mean, I was looking at some 990s, [non-profit tax filing forms], for 2001 now, and that said certain trustees got money for certain things. Do you think under these new rules those sort of things wouldn't be allowed if they were done now?

Chobanian: I think each rule needs to be looked at individually. Most of the 990 numbers that you allude to were not for direct conflict. They relate to the issues, that if you really looked at them carefully they did not have much to do with anything in terms of the trustees. I mean, for example, Melvin Miller's relationship with Boston Medical Center. I know that relationship very well. Mel is down for having a conflict of over $10 million where he is a trustee of both institutions. Well, we put that into the 990 because if you look at the 990s very strictly, you're supposed to put that there, but most institutions would not include that. That same goes with the Barnes & Noble relationship. Just because all of you buy books from the BU bookstore, and Barnes & Noble happens to own that, doesn't mean there is a conflict with our trustee who's a vice president of Barnes & Noble. Most of the situations in there are like that...

DFP: When you moved over from being provost of the medical campus and dean of the medical school to president of the university, what do you think was the biggest shock from moving from one post to another.

Chobanian: I don't think I could say there was one big shock. It was one large shock [laughter] of going from a job that I knew very well and had been doing for a long time to one that I understood very little and had been doing for no time [laughter] and only had two days preparation...

There's a note to readers in today's Daily Collegian, the UMass Amherst paper:

In yesterday's Editorial/Opinion section of The Massachusetts Daily Collegian, a column titled "Pat Tillman is not a hero: he got what was coming to him" appeared. In the piece, graduate student Rene Gonzalez wrote about the death of former NFL player and Army Ranger Pat Tillman, who was killed during a skirmish in Afghanistan last Friday.

A flood of feedback has poured in, nearly all of which is harsh criticism of either Gonzalez's words or of The Collegian's decision to run the column. In fact, reader response has been so great that we would like to take this opportunity to respond to our readers.

The original column is here.

Put up here 'cause we're currently going over it in my Presidential Elections class.

Boston Phoenix article on campaign finance reform:

McCain-Feingold became law. And with soft money now illegal in the official political system, millions of dollars have been migrating to the unofficial political system — to nonprofit committees known as 527s, so called after a provision in the IRS tax code. These groups can raise and spend soft money on political advertising, provided the spots don’t tell people explicitly to vote for or against Candidate X, and provided they don’t coordinate their activities with an actual political campaign...

This was the UMass news I was talking about:

"UMass Boston Chancellor Jo Ann Gora is on the shortlist for the presidency of Lewis and Clark College, according to a recent article in a Portland, Oregon newspaper.

Portland's Oregonian Tuesday reported that Gora was one of three finalists who came to tour the 3,000-student campus this past Monday..."

The original Oregonian article is here.

An article about the third candidate, some guy from Germany, I believe, is here.

More information on the college here.

No sooner do I mention GMail, is it offered to me.

So far, so good.

It's like Yahoo mail, except 1000x and MBs better.

Not gonna say much right now.

You might see something in tomorrow's Globe, if you're inclined.

My first thought was, "Oh hell. There goes my social life for the next year and a half."

As if I wasn't living in the office already...

Daily Bruin:

"Lawmakers in several states have set out to ensure the liberal arts do not get too liberal.

A new GOP bill to be presented to the California Senate Education Committee on Wednesday has drawn fire from Democratic opponents who believe the proposal undermines academic authority in order to get more conservative college professors hired and assert more legislative influence in the academic world..."

Come this fall, the University Center of Chicago, otherwise known as the "superdorm," will open for business on the corner of State Street and Congress Parkway, and 1,680 students from Columbia, Roosevelt and DePaul universities will take up full-time residence in the 461-unit building. As one of the largest dorms in the country and an unprecedented experiment in cooperation between three separate institutions, the superdorm looks to transform not only the look and feel of Columbia, but also the way it operates..."

"NYU professor and Mexican presidential hopeful Jorge Castañeda established some of his campaign platforms in Hemmerdinger Hall Thursday, as he discussed prominent political and social issues with Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes...."

"The facts were apparent in the hours after a riot erupted early Sunday morning, but accountability was less clear as the Campustown and Iowa State University communities surveyed the damage.

Ames Police Chief Loras Jaeger said during a news conference Sunday afternoon that Ames police received a citizen complaint at 11:56 p.m. Saturday. The complaint was about a party on the 2600 block of Hunt Street that was spilling out into the street. Ames police estimated about 400 people were at the party. The group then moved down to Welch Avenue and two groups began to form -- one at the southern part of Welch Avenue and the other at Lincoln Way and Welch Avenue...

Iowa State Daily floods the zone.

Everybody remembers that Daily Collegian column where the UMass Amherst guy writes about his crush on this girl, right?

Looks like the Washington Post decided to use it as an anchor in their article about crushes:

"When Brochu's column ran in the University of Massachusetts paper in November, a cry of recognition arose from the young people of this nation. At last, someone had given voice to their silent suffering. Through instant messaging, the column spread from Amherst, Mass., to Boston to Austin to Muncie to Berkeley. It spread to England and Belgium and to a Navy enlistee in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and to a woman in eastern Canada who "almost cried" when she read it.

The Web site for the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, where Brochu's column was posted, was flooded. A typical column gets at most 1,000 readers in one month. Brochu's got 570,000 hits from November to March..."

That'll teach me to give a quiz a cursory glance.

Nick e-mails to let me know that I (as well as Arthur Guray) misinterpreted the quiz results of the Harvard IOP thingy.

I thought it was telling me that I was 32 percent "Traditional Liberal," with 29 percent "Secular Centrist." Those are, in fact, numbers of college students nation-wide.

Before posting I thought it was curious that my "percentages" matched national ones.

Anyway, I'm right about the quiz deeming me a "Traditional Liberal," at least on the issues that the 11 questions concerned.

Thanks for the heads up, Nick.

"About 200 students and faculty of a Jewish school in New York rallied yesterday outside the Lithuanian consulate in Manhattan, calling on the Baltic state to extradite an 89-year-old retired factory worker from Millbury accused of Nazi war crimes.

Vladas Zajanckauskas, who received a grant of immunity from federal prosecutors in 1981 for testifying against an Illinois man accused of being a guard at a Nazi concentration camp, has lived in the United States since 1950...

I can tell you right now it'll be useless if he is extradited. Once in Lithuania, there's a good chance that there'll be lots of foot-dragging in his trial, enough so that he'll die before he's convicted or vindicated, like the last guy, who lived in Norwood, MA.

This is not, I think, something that Lithuania wants to come to terms with. Whether that's because of old anti-Semitism or something else, I don't know.

My grandfather was a freedom fighter in Nazi-occupied Lithuania, where he was captured and drafted into the Luftwaffe (where, the family story goes, on several occasions he worked to sabotage their operations), and then was there when the Russians marched into Berlin.

He died of lung cancer before I was old enough to remember him.

Whenever I read these stories, I wonder how he'd react, what stories he could tell.

MORE: Found through a quick Google search: "In contrast to the legal delays and the evident unwillingness of the Lithuanian public to re-examine cases of World War II criminals, the official position of the government is firmly in favor of trying Lithuanian Nazi war criminals and of combating any evidence of current anti-Semitism. This was the position taken by President Valdas Adamkas on 23 September 1999, when he marked the memorial day to those killed in the Vilnius ghetto, and again, on 20 April 2000, in a speech to the Lithuanian parliament..."

"Duke University is eliminating 8 a.m. classes and trying to come up with other ways help its sleep-deprived students, who too often are struggling to survive on a mix of caffeine, adrenaline, and ambition.

The school is also considering new orientation programs this fall that would help freshmen understand the importance of sleep..."

Had a class last semester on public policy at 8:30am where I was 20 minutes late every single time.

I couldn't get out of the house any earlier than 8am. Thankfully, the professor didn't seem to mind, and I got a -- don't remember exactly -- high B or low A for the semester.

The Globe had an interview with conservative David Horowitz in yesterday's paper.

The Mass Media had an article about his "Academic Freedom" movement earlier this month.

Iowa State Daily:

Three student newspapers were not allowed to cover President Bush's visit to Des Moines on Thursday.

The Iowa State Daily; the Daily Iowan, the student newspaper at the University of Iowa; and the DMACC Chronicle, the student newspaper of the Ankeny campus of Des Moines Area Community College, were all left off the approved list to cover the presidential visit...

Article from the Des Moines Register here, too, which I found through a broadcast Kerry campaign e-mail.

If the White House has concerns about fairness and bias (which I'm just speculating, I have no idea whether they do or not), then they should talk with the paper about it. I'm sure it'll be appreciated, and preferred to a brush-off.

I forget how I got on the Kerry e-mail list. It may just be for campaign reporters, since I've started getting press stuff (as well as from the DNC Press), most recently about the college students poll.

Last Wednesday, they damn near killed my Yahoo account when they sent an mp3 of the conference call Kerry had with college papers (didn't have the time, so I didn't get the chance to do it, and not sure if I would've, either). I was greeted with the red bar telling me I was 115% over my storage limit.

I await the days of GMail...

College students are more likely to identify themselves as independents and support John Kerry than to classify themselves as Democrats or Republicans or vote for President Bush, according to a survey released yesterday by the Institute of Politics (IOP).

The poll, which surveyed 1,205 college students nationwide, revealed that Senator John F. Kerry, D-Mass., leads President Bush by 10 percentage points and that 41 percent of students identify themselves as independents..."

The lead is a soft one, according to the poll.

More info (pdfs, etc.) on the poll here.

This 11-question quiz, meanwhile, says I'm 32 percent "Traditional Liberal," with 29 percent "Secular Centrist."

Getting back to the poll, what's interesting to me is the major drop in support for the war in Iraq, putting college students evenly divided on the issue.

Or rather, why the drop happened. I'm wondering just how college students are getting their views of the war shaped.

How many have friends who are currently overseas?

How many watch the news on a regular basis?

How many read LiveJournal (where 17-19 year-olds are the biggest users) which has things like this wounded soldier's and this one by the head of a growing technology firm in Baghdad?

MORE: Minnesota Daily has some more on the poll:

Those polled ranked the war in Iraq as their chief concern.

[College Republicans Chairman Tyler] Richter said that ranking was because of the high number of college-aged soldiers stationed in Iraq.

"Nineteen years old is the average age of the soldiers in Iraq," Richter said. "It’s our friends, brothers and sisters doing the fighting over there."

Last week George Stephanopoulos came by UMass Boston to help inaugurate the new Center on Media and Society.

I wrote up an article, but there was a lot of interesting stuff I didn't get to put in (the article had already ballooned to 1100 words). So here are some remainders, that will be cross-posted to the Mass Media blog, too, when I get the chance.

On blogs:

One of the students there asked him how the emergence of blogs as a viable alternative will impact the media.

Blogs have already affected the media, said Stephanopoulos.

"We read them everyday," he said, calling blogs a "tremendous tool."

Several blogs he named were Where is Raed, the Baghdad Blogger's, and Juan Cole's, which he said was "one of the most perceptive, thoughtful blogs on Iraq."

He limits, however, how often he reads blogs on a daily basis, since there is a hazard of getting sucked into incestuous debates. Anonymous blogs, in particular, encourage a kind of nastiness, he said.

On gay marriage:

Veteran political reporter David Nyhan, who moderated the discussion, brought up gay marriage. This was something Stephanopoulos was familiar with, having had to deal with the policy of gays in the military as one of Clinton's first things in office (thanks to an NYT headline).

Does gay marriage offer the potential to hamstring Kerry campaign?

"It could," Stephanopoulos said. "The problem with the gay marriage debate, I believe, that politically – you guys are living with it right now in Massachusetts – whoever gets blamed for rubbing it in people’s faces, politically, loses. So if it looks like Bush is rubbing the constitutional amendment in people’s faces, I think there will be a backlash against him." The same thing would apply to the gay community, if they were to look like they're spoiling for a fight, he added.

On Kerry and Iraq:

"I think it’s very tough for Senator Kerry. It was hard to be against the notion of taking Saddam Hussein out," said Stephanopoulos. "It’s hard for him to really turn this into a political plus. He has to support the troops, which I think means supporting more troops in the short run."

The vote against the $87 billion dollars may have been a mistake. "I’m certain that in late October, late November, it felt like he had no choice. He might’ve been out of the game, if he hadn’t had that vote," said Stephanopoulos. "But there’s no question it’s going to cause a problem now..."

On Bill Clinton's book:

"And also, I wonder – I know he’s talking with Senator Kerry quite often - I just wonder how much pressure, direct or indirect, he’s getting from the Kerry campaign to hold off publication until next year," he said.

Quipped Nyhan: "If I were Clinton, I would want to have a massive impact on this campaign, and I’m thinking about a launch right around Columbus Day."

On Al Gore:

In 2000, Gore was in a "close to impossible situation," said Stephanopoulos. The former Clinton advisor also sought to dispel the notion that Gore could have won if President Clinton had campaigned in several close battleground states.

"People still had a big problem with Clinton’s personal behavior and that was spilling over onto Gore," he said. "I think he would’ve probably lost some states that he won."

One of Gore's biggest mistakes was how he handled the debates, he said. He won on points, said Stephanopoulos, "but he couldn’t hide his disdain for Governor Bush in all the cut-away shots."

Have to get up early tomorrow for a day of work and school before heading out to Harvard for the Christopher Georges Conference on College Journalism, held tomorrow night and all-day Saturday.

It's being hosted by the folks at the Harvard Crimson and Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

Campus newspapers who will have people there include The Dartmouth, The Cornell Daily Sun, The Brown Daily Herald, The Daily Princetonian, The Daily Pennsylvanian, and the Columbia Spectator.

And yes, even a couple of folks from UMass Boston.

I have a sudden urge to hum 'Which of these things is not like the others.'

The whole thing should be fun.

Of course, that's not the only thing that's happening at Harvard this weekend. There's the much-anticipated BloggerCon, which Steve Silver's going to be at, too.

The Ohio University Post:

"Most college students have trouble waking up in the mornings, heading to classes and writing papers that are due the next day. A part-time job to foot the bills just adds on to the list of pressures a student must face.

But many Ohio University students fill their time by working many hours at multiple jobs.

When he is not working the counter at Brenen's Coffee, 38 S. Court St., senior Matt Lakia is a bartender and barback at the Cat's Eye Saloon, 12 N. Court St. He said his part-time work is necessary for him as a student and that he handles his free hours as best as he can given his packed work week..."

UCLA'sDaily Bruin:

Since the inception of the war in Iraq, young soldiers, often of college-age, have suffered a large portion of the casualties, making up more than 40 percent of the toll.

Data from March 18 indicated that out of the 432 casualties in Iraq at the time, 182 ranged from 18 to 24 years old.

As of Wednesday, a total of 664 U.S. troops have been killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom; age-specific data has not yet been released...."

From The Louisiana State Reveille:

"Political campaigns and the mass media have combined once again in an effort to reach out to young voters -- and this time the effort has hit close to home for one Louisiana State University student.

MTV Productions and Cox Communications announced Kristy Davis, an LSU mass communication sophomore, as their chosen junior correspondent for the 2004 'Choose or Lose' campaign..."

The Pitt News at the University of Pittsburgh obtains a departmental review:

"A recent review of Pitt's communication department describes an atmosphere in which 'senior faculty routinely and repeatedly have engaged in consensual sexual relationships with graduate students'...

The Pitt News obtained a copy of the document, which begins by giving high marks to many aspects of the communication department, from a source who refused to go on record..."

The Dartmouth Free Press gives the "libertarian lowdown" with Cathy Young:

DFP: What is your opinion on President Bush’s call for a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage?

CY: I don’t think we should amend the Constitution to make social policy. On a strict libertarian approach, marriage would be deregulated completely and people would be allowed to conclude whatever contracts they want to—same sex or opposite sex. Churches, synagogues, or other organizations could decide on their own what kind of marriages they want to solemnize. It is an interesting idea, but it has some consequences that have to be thought out...

DFP: Given these recent events, do you think the United States is becoming more conservative with regard to social issues, or do you think this is a reflection of an already evident social divide?

CY... Then we get people like Ann Coulter and Michael Moore, who I think are sort of evil twins. Well, Ann Coulter is much better looking but they are still evil twins. Maybe Ann Coulter is the anti-matter to Michael Moore or vice-versa? Anyway, I do think the blowhards on the left and the right are sort of mirror images of each other. One of the consequences of this diversity is that people can withdraw into their own niche culturally where their ideas never get challenged and spend their time talking only to like-minded people...

SEE ALSO: Bernie Sanders interview.

And one writer talks about the seven month slog to Election Day.