Quinnipiac 1, unfettered speech 0

[billhoward]

Careful what you say on signs you bring into the Quinnipac Rink. The school has taken a disliking to some forms of free speech and would like to ban access (from campus) of a troublesome website. Maybe they want to make students from the PRC feel more at home? In one instance, it's the school acting at the behest of the student governnment association ("respectfully submitted, Douglas C. Niedermayer, Sergeant at Arms").  

Curbing Speech at Quinnipiac
The university has gone to unusual lengths this semester to try to curb the activities of student journalists who are running an independent, online newspaper that is affiliated with the school and called Quad News. Students began the upstart newspaper over frustration with the administration's attempts to control the official student newspaper, a common enough conflict between students and university officials.
     But Quinnipiac's reaction was anything but ordinary. First, the university tried to stonewall student attempts to report stories by imposing a gag order on administrators, coaches and athletes. Then last month, the institution, in writing, threatened to ban from campus the student chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, a nationwide media advocacy group of working journalists that includes about 200 student chapters

New Haven Register:
Aim outrage at bad actors, not Web site
[op ed piece, Margaret Diaz, Journalism dept at Q]
HERE'S a timely freedom of speech quiz.
     Words of hatred and vicious rumors are anonymously posted on a Web site aimed at the student population on your campus. What do you do?
     A) Condemn the anonymous postings and vow to educate students on your campus, who are both posters and viewers of the Web site.
     B) Ask the university administration to restrict access to the Web site from campus computers.
     If you answered "B," you agree with the Student Government Association at Quinnipiac University, which has passed a resolution asking the university administration to do just that. ....

A school spokesman was quoted as saying there's no censorship of juicycampus.com but owing to bandwidth concerns, some traffic is being, ah, prioritized.

What can you say? The Q communications facility is named in honor Ed McMahon. If Ugarte can't think of at least three one-liners with that setup, he shouldn't be doing standup.

[ugarte]

[quote billhoward]What can you say? The Q communications facility is named in honor Ed McMahon. If Ugarte can't think of at least three one-liners with that setup, he shouldn't be doing standup.[/quote]
And if billhoward thinks that this is the pool that ugarte swims in, he doesn't pay attention to ugarte's standup.

[TimV]

You are correct sir.  Heh Heh Heh...

[billhoward]

[quote TimV]You are correct sir.  Heh Heh Heh...[/quote]
And that's exactly my thought when we did a campus tour of Quinnipiac last spring on a college visit. If my kid goes there, I'd willingly pay money to have that phrase inscribed in Latin and placed on the brick walls of the facility. But then, Carson and McMahon have been off the air since 1992, so it would be lost on most students.  

But the question I had when visiting was not Ed the M but funding priorities: $53M for a beautiful hockey and hoops complex on a hill a mile from campus ... while most freshman live four to a dorm room.

Thread drift: HS Class of 2009 has the most kids (of all time) graduating and heading for college, so it's a jungle out there to get into the school you really want. Still, I cannot believe the amount of mailings we get from schools still trying to bring in the best student body possible. One sign of eagerness (desperation?) among the B-minus and C-list schools is that they waive application fees if you apply online.

[Chris '03]

[quote billhoward] One sign of eagerness (desperation?) among the B-minus and C-list schools is that they waive application fees if you apply online.[/quote]

While no doubt some also ran colleges are in it to attract brighter students, fee waivers are also a sign of gaming the USNWR rankings. Law schools do the same thing. Some schools reject qualified candidates they've invited to apply who are unlikely to actually matriculate so that their acceptance rate is artificially low. If these students raise a stink, they'll likely be admitted after the app is "reevaluated." Things like number of apps and acceptance percentage matters in rankings and rankings drive the whole thing.

Continuing the thread drift, I'm reminded of the school that increased its percent of alumni donations by giving alumni at homecoming a coupon for a a discounted or free hot dog (i forget) and counted all the used coupons as donations. They jumped several spots the next year.

[billhoward]

And still further drift: I hadn't thought of the gambit to use fee waivers to attract then reject students who probably wouldn't go there anyway. (Thereby raising your rejection ratio.) I must admit that I do look askance at schools that admit > 50% of applicants (even as they self-describe as "selective"). Some have yields down in the teens. But low yield happens to good schools also: Lehigh admits around a third of applicants but I believe the yield is only about 20% of the admits because as they acknowlege, if you get into Penn or Cornell or Princeton, you're going there.

Two schools that mentioned the fee waiver genuinely seemed to be trying to get more kids to apply in hopes that when they got shot down by choices 1 and 2 and choice 3 didn't look as appealing in the spring, perhaps they'd go back for a visit and decide it's not such a bad place after all.

The biggest lie is that virtually every college says they don't pay attention to the pop rankings of USNWR, Newsweek, and etcetera. Of course they do. Nobody at Cornell griped about being the lead photo in Newsweek's America's Hottest Colleges last year.