Earlier this week, I wrote to advocate the placement of artistic stone work on the New Housing 2010, also known as the replacement Ashton.

In that column, I talked about the multitude of stonework exhibited on this campus, and the tradition it represents. I wanted to point out a great photo gallery which contains a lot of pictures of exactly these artworks. The full gallery is found here. I want to specifically show you the duck, which is on the top of Goodbody Hall, as well as “Truth, Daughter of Time,” which is on the exterior of Ballantine Hall.

We need to embrace this tradition of stonecarving, and make sure it is continued with the new Ashton, as well as all new buildings on campus. We are in the heart of limestone country, and its production is a part of the cultural and industrial history of Indiana. For example, the Benton Murals depict limestone quarrying, and a recent exhibit at the IU Art Museum in celebration of Limestone Month featured watercolors by Indiana artists depicting the limestone quarrying.

No matter which side of the debate you fall on, the decision just passed can’t have pleased you. It was a classic compromise, guaranteed to make everyone a little less outraged but no one truly satisfied. Unfortunately, people pressed with difficult decisions sometimes opt for these copouts.

The issue raises an enduring question– Do we hold people responsible for subscribing to the views popular at the time, views that we now know to be wrong?

Whichever side of the debate you fall on, it isn’t too much to ask for a little continuity. So, my question to you, if you favor the decision, is what you’ll be changing your name to.

Chances are you were named after a deceased relative or other historical figure, one who probably grew up about 60 or more years ago, whom there’s a good chance subscribed to the overwhelmingly popular consensus of race at the time. And while you’d be right in saying that this person didn’t, like Wildermuth, advocate segregation, chances are they didn’t have much of a voice either way.

But since most people when elected to positions of power make decisions upon what they already believe, the only meaningful difference between your detestable, racist ancestors and Wildermuth is that Wildermuth held more influence at IU. You’d be kidding yourself, however, if you said that their views were very different.

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Everyone rants about athletics officials being paid more than professors.  Today the point was illustrated nicely when we found out that new althletic director Fred Glass will recieve a salary of $410,000 annually – $10,000 more than even university President Michael McRobbie makes.

If IU ever aspires to be a top-notch research institution, reducing frivolous expenditures on athletics programs and directing more funds toward attracting competitive administrators and researchers must be made a priority.

So, the Elections Commission ruled, and Kirkwood still wins. Hooray!

Now, IUSA, which students didn’t care about already, has essentially no legitimacy as a profound liar now assumes the position of “President.”

My question is, “What recourse can students take?” What will a protest do? Little to nothing, as IUSA has shown time and time again to not care about student opinion. What will complaints do? Little to nothing, as IUSA’s insular nature prevents outside complaints from having much impact.

So is IU just doomed to having an ineffective and corrupt student “government”? God, I hope not.

The only way to get at them is to get at their money, but frankly, I’m not sure how you go about that. The only way I can think of is refusing to pay the student fee, but there’s no way you could get the whole campus to do that. Unless IUSA’s own mechanisms prevent this, no one outside will care about it, and they’ll just continue bumbling away and wasting our cash.

Photo: Chris Pickrell, IDS

A washed-up rapper and a poorly-planned frat event get some poor kid in a wheelchair maced by police; a Messianic Barack Obama glides through Bloomington in two hours of Ghandi-like shock and awe before evaporating to Terre Haute; and then my phone plunges to its death down a sewer grate. Another year, another Little 5.

Luckily my last three years of downing tequila being a classy lady during the Best College Week Ev-uh have been, on the whole, a good experience: Nobody died, nobody got arrested, and we all enjoyed the professed point of it all by watching bikes go ‘round in a circle while holding footlongs and screaming along to Tom Petty.

It’s more than can be said for a lot of people, though – walking around Bloomington this week yields a strong sense of…well, “tacked on.” As if we’re so concerned with making this “Best Week Of Your Entire Life, Ever, No Really” truly something for the record books that in the process, much of the fun is caught up in the transition, and a lot of genuineness of the thing is lost: We want so badly for it to live up to expectations that it’s necessarily always going to fall short.

And that’s the way it goes for a lot of things, I think – remember that birthday party when you were a kid that had to be perfect, only to end up feeling miserably sold short? The sentiment transcends right up to college – except swap out monkey bars for real bars and spike the punch along the way: Bloomington was nothing but a big kids’ playground this week.

So absolutely, it’s fun – I look forward to Little 5 just as much as the next person. But it’s the nature of the fun that’s getting skewed here, I think – it’s one thing to enjoy a stupid week and an excuse to act three years younger, but it’s another to slap some artificial quota on there, thereby creating an element of self-fulfilled prophecy that can never be reached, and entailing that we will always, always, always be slightly disappointed.

So sure, enjoy it. But there’s not much to be said for people waiting in 15-minute-long lines in the freezing rain, only to stand smooshed up against our college compatriots, plastic cup in hand, in a room that’s slightly smelly, over fire code, and too loud to hear anything anyway. It’d be infinitely more enjoyable if this almost-militant notion of “WE MUST HAVE THE ENCYCLOPEDIC EXPERIENCE OF LITTLE 5” didn’t flood the server with stiletto-clad input: all we end up with is a higher person-per-square-foot ratio and a slightly hazier memory of it all.

Rarely do we get such a great insight on why economics just works, despite what we want to believe. You may know about the free Dave Matthews Band Concert put on by Obama’s campaign. Without much forewarning, they decided to hand out free tickets to see DMB and Tim Reynolds in a concert for Obama. All you had to do was wait in line. What a gift! Letting all those great DMB fans go see this concert.

 And if you didn’t get a ticket, that’s okay. You can buy one.

On Onestart Classifieds.

On Ebay.

I mean, check out the Onestart page. It is literally full of sellers, price range $20-$200. People are even vying for VP passes, which you can only be given if you register 20 people to vote. Everything is negotiable, it seems. This may seem like ridiculous price gouging, and it is, but it serves a purpose. Now if couldn’t go get tickets because of a job or school (unlike most DMB fans), you can go see it. But doesn’t it seem like a waste? All that revenue that could have gone for Obama or DMB or some other good cause and it’s just in the pockets of opportunists.

You know that’s not what McCain would have done, and it’s just another reason to cast a vote for a guy who knows how the economy works can hire a VP who does.

This editorial ran as an opinion front in the Indiana Daily Student on April 2, 2008. (i.e. This was a product of the opinion staff, not necessarily me or any other single author.)

Behold, the end is near:

[IU] blames the thousands of students… who don’t take early morning or Friday classes — and the professors and deans who let them — for a scheduling crisis that’s resulted in a room shortage.

But before they ask taxpayers to pay for any new classroom buildings, the university is considering what has become almost unthinkable at IU: more students in class at 8 a.m. and on Fridays. Officials are looking at a system of incentives and penalties for professors and departments to make that happen and partly fix the problem.

If you click on the above link to the Star’s original story, I might suggest steering clear of the comments section; some of them are pretty brutal (especially from those goody-goody Boilermakers). 

I’ll admit, last semester I had what I call a “Ferris Beuller” schedule: class from 4-6:45pm on Monday’s and Wednesdays, 9:30-2:15 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and no class on Fridays. This semester has been considerably less convenient, with class starting at 8am two days a week, 9:05am on two days, and two classes on Fridays. To make things even worse, I have to walk to class barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways. In short, I’m being exploited and abused by the University.

Maybe the recently-elected Kirkwood ticket can put an end to this madness (heh, heh, heh… ahem, excuse me.)

On the other hand, it is getting difficult to register for classes. I’m having a hard time creating a schedule that will even work, let alone trying to avoid Fridays and early mornings. Is anyone else finding this to be true for them as well? Is this just something we’re going to have to embrace?

Why are these students smiling? Because they partied at Sports last night until 2am and slept in til noon.

So, Kirkwood won the election. This is the ticket with the email peeping scandal, whose victory  meeting with IUSA was also a judicial session that fined them 20% of their campaign expenditures.  But I’m having trouble grasping how they got elected. Big Red was clearly the most visible party, the IDS Opinion page had columnists (myself and Scott Leadingham) endorsing Big Red and INdiana. Sure, Kirkwood had signs at a few fraternity houses and outside of Kilroy’s, but all the substantial information on their campaign came from third party sources who for the most part disapproved.  Can it be that their publicity in this scandal got them elected? That there is indeed no such thing as bad press? If it were me, and I hadn’t personally been looking into the election, the breaking news would have compelled me to vote for anyone else. So, either people didn’t care enough that they acted unconscionably or were otherwise persuaded through personal connections. It must be the latter, there’s simply no other explanation.  Regardless, IUSA’s crisis of legitimacy just got worse. Kirkwood’s platform has been noted, I suppose I’ll be following along, but right now I expect the worst to happen. This may have been the killing blow to an already fragile political organization.   

This is pretty bad news. Apparently someone on the Kirkwood ticket hacked into the computer of a rival candidate (who just happens to be his roommate) and forwarded some campaign emails to different sources. Now it’s a legal issue, Kirkwood has dropped him from the ticket, and IUSA might disqualify Kirkwood from being elected. Truth be told, I doubt this will have much significance on the IUSA elections. This is relatively late-breaking news and it seems like the great majority of voters are interested parties and cajoled friends. Still, though, such clear deviation from any honor or integrity are rarely so transparent. Sometimes you get the gut feeling that a candidate is doing something wrong, but now, we have proof. Kirkwood already has a problem with the integrity of its members. It came off during the debates as aggressively phony– its didn’t speak its opinions so much as declare them, and even then, used politico-speak that is at once alienating and suspicious. And then there’s the problem that their candidate for VP was also the president of AEPi, the frat that got kicked off campus this semester. If they get elected, it will completely destroy IUSA’s already fragile legitimacy. I hope INdiana (my personal choice) can at least repair it.