Elephants banned in classrooms, “vengeance” reportedly “coming to professors like a bag of bricks with tusks.”

Last week’s Hatchet included another editorial about the proliferation of laptops in classrooms. The argument is that laptops allow students to look up words like proliferation when they’re listening to their wise, mustached sage of a professor. From where I’m sitting, a 20-year-old student talking about the necessity of electronics is a lot like a CEO talking about the efficacy of bonuses. The arguments may be passionate, but they always ignore the elephant in the room: reality. And the reality of a classroom full of blue lights and motionless man-moths is a lot like…having an elephant in your room. In fact, if a student spent as much time staring at elephants as he did laptops, he would engineer an equally compelling argument. Let’s say I’m that student…

Banning Elephants Hurts the Environment

Capturing the brutal elegance of the elephant is an elusive goal for any writer, but soon that beauty will go from elusive to extinct. Overzealous professors—most of them born before we invited Discovery’s Planet Earth into our homes and elephants into our classrooms—are making every effort to banish them. Simply put, these tweed tyrants are poaching our greatest ally in the game of learning, and by willfully ignoring the benefits of these heroes, they are just asking for 10,000 pounds of trouble.

I believe it was Sir Isaac Newton who said “If I have seen further, it is only because I am soaring on the hilarious ears of elephants.”

“I would never f*** with one though,” he added. Since then, the elephant in the room helped us win The Great War and land a man on the moon.

Naysayers call them distractions, but so what? They use their giant trunks to hold our Starbucks, they use their giant tusks to tickle our bellies, and they use their giant brains to plot revenge on naysayers. They demand our attention by building massive piles of felled trees or by spitting 100 ounces of salivary bliss onto our chests. It is the professor’s duty to grab our attention. Instead, they silence our friends, almost like they’re just asking for it man…

It’s not my fault if facts aren’t interesting. PowerPoints just don’t cut it in today’s world, and the fact that professors have chosen to accept minimal salaries to share a lifetime of wisdom with us isn’t enough. They need to incorporate Megan Fox into lessons about supply-side economics, and they need to show movies and Youtube clips. I have a whole playlist devoted to elephants making the rest of the food chain their slaves, but professors are stuck in their ways like old dogs. They may succeed in taking the elephant out of the classroom, but they can’t take the classroom out of the elephant—once it chooses to devour it as an example to the rest.

Also, Michelle Rhee supports elephants.

Now look yourself in the mirror and say you aren’t convinced, not even in the slightest. That’s what a liar looks like my friend…you’re staring at the freckles of deceit. Don’t be ashamed though, we’re trained to trust the editorial format even when it doesn’t match reality. As for the laptop: anyone who has ever sat in the back of a classroom can probably tell you what all of their classmates did over the weekend, and if they have any respect—or even empathy—for the teacher, they can’t help but feel a little bummed out by this. I mean, it’s not like we take our laptops to the mall or the movies…

Oh wait, I watch a movie every week for my Philosophy of Film course, and that’s exactly what everyone does.

Yeah…

I think our only hope now is for Hannibal’s army of elephant justice to somehow conquer our minds. [By the way, googling Hannibal AND elephant justice is always acceptable, especially if you’re in class]

Hippo CONTROVERSY!

There's been talk in the U.S. presidential race about "phony outrage." I'm curious, does today's Hatchet editorial calling the University "heavy-handed" for phasing out the hippo resonate as a real controversy for folks?

Some specific parts that caught my eye:

The University's eventual removal of the hippo, a mascot students love and embrace, is a heavy-handed, unilateral and poorly defended move that should be seriously reconsidered.

Do you actually love the hippo?

Students have embraced the hippo as representative of the more whimsical side of the University. On a campus populated with BlackBerrys and suits, the hippo grounds us and keeps our college image lighthearted.

Is there really a whimsical side and non-whimsical side of GW? (And if anything represented pure whim, is the hippo a better example than, say, random Greco-Roman structures near the Gelman library?)

What the administration should realize is that the hippo is GW's most distinctive brand.

Seriously?!?

When I think about Georgetown, I don't think about the Hoya--I think about a good school, the one that Bill Clinton went to. If I was neutral in this "controversy," learning that the hippo is GW's most distinctive brand might actually be the strongest argument for ditching it.

My inner data geek rejoices

Was I the only one excited about the news that the SMPA now has fantastic new researching abilities?

This new system, SnapStream, purports to have 10,000 hours of storage space for TV broadcasts. If you've ever attempted content-analysis research, you know how cool this is. The biggest reason media generalizations exist is because getting the data to back up assertions like "GWTV shows aerobics videos more than the news" is time-consuming and expensive. If you missed a broadcast of something, it used to be gone forever, which made it hard to back up any ideas about content beyond "last week's episode of I Love Lucy was pretty funny." And content analysis still needs a researcher to consume all of this media. But having the ability to store it -- rewatching to double-check your data, seeing the news report you missed when you were stuck on the Metro on Tuesday night -- makes me happy on behalf of anyone doing media research. My sophomore year, we had to do a content-analysis project, and several of my classmates expressed frustration with trying to analyze current TV programming. Even people who lived off-campus and had Tivo had too much data to handle.

However, I'm a little annoyed that the Hatchet story (and headline) only reference SnapStream's Tivo-like abilities. The story already contains two quotes from professors comparing the new system to Tivo; if I didn't know better, I'd accuse the SMPA of buying this so professors could save their favorite episodes of 30 Rock:

Roxanne Russell, studio manager for SMPA said, "It's basically a big Tivo with multiple users, giving each user the ability to record directly onto his computer. It ends the bottleneck on recording."

...

"We call it 'Tivo on steroids'" said Janet Kolodzy, chair of Emerson's journalism department.

Using the same analogy four times within one story is just lazy writing, however apt the comparison may be. According to Tivo's website, you can store up to 300 hours of TV on Tivo. SnapStream has 10,000 hours' worth of space. Even split within a department rather than a household, that's still a giant leap forward in terms of memory. Calling this technology a "glorified Tivo" makes it seem like GW is once again spending money frivolously, when in fact, this program sounds pretty cool. Tivo is for entertainment, not serious researching needs, and treating this new program like a pedestrian enterprise only demeans media research as a whole.

This election is getting ridiculous

For the past few weeks, I've been reading the Hatchet and one thought keeps going through my mind: "These GW kids really take the SA elections seriously.  Too seriously, actually.  It's only the SA".  The candidates announce their candidacy in the newspaper, and there was the race-card scandal.  And this week there was a debate. 

This article, about a collegiate consulting firm, was when I realized that the SA elections were seriously overblown here at GW. 

But seriously, it's only student government.  Maybe everyone in the SA needs to realize this.

Now, I realize that almost everyone who goes to college in the DC area wants to be involved in politics one day, and most people who run for things like the SA want to be the President one day, but what the SA candidates aren't realizing is that in the real world, it's not that big a deal. 

GW students can be a force of nature. They are a huge group and living in a city where things can get done.  Maybe they should put there time and energy into doing more good (seriously, they could only raise $500 for the National AIDS Fund?) than trying to be president and campaign manager and consultant for the SA. 

The Shows Should Go On -- But They Won't

There aren't going to be any more musicals on campus for a while, because -- apparently -- when you have a lot of people singing and dancing, it makes a lot of noise.

Singing and dancing causing a ruckus? I'm just as shocked as you are. But I can't say I'm surprised that GW is trying to keep student groups from using space on campus. It's just another instance of the administration acting like a business rather than a school. I'm sure everyone has their own horror story of trying to organize an event for a group on campus, only to be told all the good spaces have been taken by non-GW-affiliated groups. Bureaucracy is one thing -- it's necessary and keeps things organized, and a manageable amount of red tape keeps everything running. But when student organizations are consistently passed over for lucrative outside groups looking for a place to hold a conference, something has gone wrong. We're a campus, not a convention center, and space allocation should reflect that. From the Hatchet:

"We're basically forgoing revenue-producing rentals in the space so that students can produce their musical," Schario said. "It's an excellent theater but it's not something they can have access to all the time. We're having daily conversations about how to make sure students can rehearse and perform, and a lot of what this involves is some flexibility on everyone's part."

"Not something students can have access to all the time"? Okay, they shouldn't be living there (well, except during tech week, as any theater person can tell you), but denying student groups space merely because of financial issues is ridiculous. Unless GW has some undisclosed financial issues it's not letting on about, guarding these spaces so jealously is repugnant.

I'm sure there are legitimate sound issues in play here. And certainly I don't want anyone's performances wrecked by bleeding sound -- either professionals or student groups. But students deserve a space on campus, and they shouldn't be punished for an issue that the administration is only now choosing to address. (How long has the space needed soundproofing, anyway? How long have musicals been performed in the downstage? Is GW really only now aware of this problem, or is this a punishment for, perhaps, an unexpected nude scene in a musical earlier this year?)

I'm an erstwhile actor (you should see my Second Tree From the Left in Midsummer Night's Dream) and I've performed in some pretty terrible spaces. That's nothing new. But not even being allowed to perform -- and being passed over in favor of outside groups willing to pay more -- is a reminder of the sad priorities of the administration.

Socialist Dining?

David Ceasar's op-ed in this Thursday's Hatchet hit the nail on head...

Simply put, the food at J Street today is rather abysmal. Students choose to eat elsewhere because there is better food at better prices at GWorld partners outside the Marvin Center. But it hasn't always been this way.

This is my fifth year at the University, and I've witnessed firsthand J Street offerings get progressively worse - in both quality and diversity of choices. Regrettably, it's been a devolution, not evolution of changes.

Well I've only been here three years, each has seen an J Street "update" -- each making the venue dramatically less attractive.

My freshman year I ate at J Street several times a week and was fairly happy with its offerings. Name brand eateries such as Subway and Starbucks were generally fast and served products on par with any of their other franchises. Since then, Sodexho has turned most everything into generic brands that just aren't good quality.

This year, I can count the times I've eaten at J Street on one hand... and that's too many.

In recent weeks, Student Association leaders have lobbied the administration to diminish the unpopular mandatory minimum spending at J Street.

I also feel very bad for the freshman and sophomores forced to spend a large chunk of their gworld money there, subsiding what would otherwise be an unprofitable endeavor for the food service company.

Ceasar correctly concludes, "The crux of the supply-and-demand problem lies in the quality of the dining options."

The university and Sodexho are providing a product that simply can't compete with the plethora of other options downtown has to offer. Until they fully recognize this, they'll continue to have no other choice than a socialist/welfare based cafeteria regime. I mean the food kind of does taste like something from a Soviet gulag. Free market capitalism anyone?