Was it really just two years ago that everyone hooked into the Rutgers Emergency Alert System (upwards of 40,000 students, faculty, and staff) received this terrifying text message, three times in succession, in the early morning hours of April 16th, 2011: As I’ve written about elsewhere, this text was anything but an “early warning.” Around midnight, the first of three shootings occurred on or near the university’s...
Did you catch that news conference Friday? The one following the firing of RU men’s basketball coach Mike Rice and the resignations of RU Athletic Direction Tim Pernetti, RU interim chief counsel John Wolf, and Jimmy Martelli, assistant basketball coach? Kind of a big deal ’round these parts. It began quite oddly. There’s President Barchi, who just days earlier had issued a statement that he and Tim Pernetti, RU’s...
A visual exploration of how the place of physical education at the university has changed over the past two hundred years. What does taking the bird’s eye view allow us to see? Is anything to be gained by treating a football stadium as the subject of poetry? Let me know what you think. I Nothing moves.Not even the eye of the blackbird. Queen’s College, established in 1766, middle right. II Three squares.I am of three...
Act One, Scene one: April 27th, late in the afternoon. Returning from a matinee performance of Tony Kushner’s “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Communism and Socialism, with a Guide to the Scriptures,” (the title is a snide reference to an unfinished dissertation, twenty years in production, by the main character’s son). There’s a line stuck in my head that’s been looping the whole train ride home....
Well, the new graduation procedure appears to have gone off without a hitch. Some 40,000 folks found their way to the stadium; parents and friends cheered during the conferring of degrees; Toni Morrison gave the address to the first students to graduate from the School of Arts and Sciences; no one got shot. Excuse me? The beauty of the academic calendar revealed itself once again, as it does annually: students arrive in the fall; time passes...
Ready for your test? Describe YaWifeyLovesMe, the videographer/citizen journalist/ringside announcer, who excitedly recorded “This is Just 2 Crazy,” the four-minute video of the brawl in front of the Rutgers Student Center that has racked up over half a million views on WorldStarHipHop.com over the past eight days. (If you’re lagging the action, I’ve been writing around and about this video over the first three posts in...
In Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold’s foundational act of public criticism, the author looks on in horror at the society that is being brought into being by the Industrial Revolution. Nearly one hundred and fifty years later, although most of Arnold’s observations are about practices, institutions, and factions long gone, Culture and Anarchy remains an object of interest because Arnold had a way of categorizing that would now be...
And now we turn to the runaway hit from Rutgersfest 2011, a video that to date (some 48 hours out from the event) has garnered more views than all the other videos of fist fights, drunken walks, revelry, and stupidity from that day combined: “This Is Just 2 Crazy: Fight Outside Rutgers Fest 2011!(Girls Poppin Off On Everybody & Boyfriend Fights 3 Chicks While His Girl Gets Jumped).” This video, captured by a cell phone, has far...
Is this when it begins, the end of civilization? I had the ringer on my phone turned off, so I didn’t wake at 3:14:53 when the string of text alerts came in announcing a shooting on campus. As it turns out, the three text messages were lagging reality: at least four people had been shot in separate incidents hours earlier. Here the technology provided not so much early alert as eventual alert. What’s a few hours on a Saturday night?...
When you're all degreed-up, it's natural enough to feel that that signifies something. But what if the Internet Age really is one gigantic harpoon heading towards the Great White Whale of higher ed?
