Eric Stoller's Blog

I visited and/or lived in the following cities in 2007*:

Cannon Beach, OR
Ashland, OR
Portland, OR
Corvallis, OR (Home)
Newport, OR
Orlando, FL
Warwick, RI
Columbus Junction, IA
Washington, DC

*one or more nights were spent in each place

• College of William and Mary replaces logo to shed Indian feathers
• Undocumented students in U.S. could pay in-state tuition
• Oregon Panel Explores In-state Tuition For Undocumented Immigrants
• Northeastern State University revises graduation policy and allows Native American students to wear items such as feathers, beads, medallions, stoles, or other relevant tribal insignia during NSU commencement ceremonies.
• N.C. Community Colleges President Defends Undocumented Immigrant Policy
• Tenure at MIT still largely a male domain

Sometimes there are moments at OSU that are so amazing that they give you chills to your fingertips. The recent OSU Drag Show took place in a massive tent structure in front of the Memorial Union. (The tent was part of the kickoff event for the OSU Capital Campaign and the coordinators/participants for the Drag Show got to use it the day after the fundraising event.)

I’m not going to tell you her/his name, but this gal/guy, who majors in science, is amazing!!! I cheered until my throat hurt.

Part 1:

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It always saddens me when I read a news report that focuses the lead paragraph on the public relations aspects of something awful instead of talking about the survival and recovery of those who have been victimized.

And seriously, WTF, when is it ever “proper” to “procure women”? What a mess.

The University of Colorado on Wednesday announced that it would pay $2.85 million to settle lawsuits by two women who said they were raped by football players, closing the book on a scandal that tarnished the school’s athletics department and led to the departure of its chancellor.

The assaults allegedly occurred in 2001 when a group of football players and recruits crashed an off-campus party at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Although no one was convicted in the attacks, the lawsuits contended that the incident was sparked by a hostile atmosphere created by the school’s use of alcohol, drugs and sex to lure top athletes.

During the height of the furor in 2004, seven women came forward to say they had been raped by football players since 1997. No charges were filed, but a university panel found that the school had improperly procured women and alcohol for football prospects. The football coach, athletics director, chancellor of UC Boulder and president of the entire university system eventually left.

via the Houston Chronicle.

The visiting team locker room at the University of Iowa is painted pink. Hayden Fry, the oft-revered Hawkeye football coach, had the locker room painted pink as a “psychological strategy.” A former University of Iowa law professor plans on filing a complaint under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

“I don’t think this is about Hayden Fry or his intention in the 1980s; I think this is about how people understand the locker room in 2007,” said Gaulding, who has since left Iowa and now practices employment discrimination law in Minnesota. “This [is] understood as a funny version of the slur that goes on in athletics about playing like a girl, playing like a sissy” — and worse, she said, the university has perpetuated the insult in “a very official, permanent way.”

“It’s based on a concept of gender hierarchy that says not only are boys and girls different, but more important it’s better to be a boy than a girl; it’s shameful to be a girl,” said Gaulding, who is researching a book on cognitive bias and gender discrimination. “Anyone who’s not deeply in denial understands and acknowledges that the pink locker room taps into this very long tradition of using gender as a put-down.”

via Inside Higher Education.

The sexism within the comments on this article at Inside Higher Education are nauseating. I hope Gaulding is successful with her complaint.

I’m currently subscribed to 104 RSS feeds. My bloglines is sometimes a bit overwhelming as I peruse content from around the blogosphere. One of the blogs that I always read, no matter how busy I am, is the MIT Admissions Blog(s). The site is written by several MIT students and staffers. I love the breadth and depth of the content on the MIT Admissions Blog. Blog posts are full of student stories, campus and event photographs, and important procedural processes.

In my opinion, it’s the premier admissions blog in the United States in terms of content, diversity of bloggers, comments, and overall aesthetics. A Google search for “admissions blog” places the MIT Admissions blog in the 4th spot on the results page, just below the Oregon State University Admissions blog.

A recent post on the MIT Admissions blog on a talk by Noam Chomsky contains a wonderful mix of text and photographs.

Ben Jones, the MIT Director of Communications, even posted his own, custom made Lolz Catz post!

I think this student-written post on Application Cycles is a wonderful example of informing students about application policies while simultaneously telling a narrative of what it’s like to be a student at MIT.

The MIT Admissions Office has set the admissions blogging bar at a high level. It’s a wonderfully constructed group blog that is impressive within and outside of the admissions blogging context.

Two Penn State students dressed for Halloween as Virginia Tech shooting victims. The following is a letter to the editor of the Daily Collegian by a friend and student affairs colleague.

Waking up the morning of Friday, December 07, 2007 – the anniversary of bombings at Pearl Harbor – I read the Collegian cover story “Va. Tech Mockery Incites Anger.” As someone who studies ethics, which is deep consideration of how we human beings treat one another, I wondered “is this kind of mockery pathological?” and yet wonder if it’s too convenient to dismiss the choices involved as the acts of those with mental illness.

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MediaTemple is my web host. Recently, they have had a lot of technical difficulties with their Grid-Service that resulted in unscheduled downtime and blogosphere frustration. The problem was caused by a hardware malfunction. MediaTemple, a company that is highly aware of the competitive nature of the web hosting world, decided to give their Grid-Service customers 2 months free credit on their accounts. I truly hope that this is the last of the downtime gremlins for MediaTemple. There are a lot of hosting options and I picked (several years ago) MT because they host one of my favorite web authors, Jeffrey Zeldman.

The OSU College of Engineering website design was “borrowed” from the Virginia Tech homepage. I received confirmation from a reliable source that the OSU COE site was designed by a student designer who used the VT site for design inspiration. Apparently, VT was made aware of the COE site design and was “not happy” about it.

I emailed the COE’s webmaster email and asked if they were aware of the site design similarities. I did not receive a response. However, a quick check of my web statistics showed a 54 second visit (referred from a Google Search for my name) from “kleinerpbook.engr.oregonstate.edu.” It turns out that that is the host name for Gregg Kleiner’s computer at OSU. Gregg is the Director of Marketing & Communications for the OSU College of Engineering.

My addiction to web site statistics continues unabated…although is has been quite a while since I posted about my site’s web analytics.

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