Jezebel
higher education
Posts Tagged “
College
”
Oldies But Goodies
Attention, everyone: 20th century Barnard students were loose women. Well, not really, but that seems to be the underlying message of this 1920s article about a controversial "purity survey" in a Columbia University humor magazine. Here were some of the survey's findings: 50% of the women indulged in necking, 34% "soul kissed", 49% had kissed ten different dudes, 66% were tipplers, and 32 women had been "tight." We'll leave it to you to figure out that last one. [Susie Bright's Journal]
Punk And Circumstance
Vivienne Westwood has created what have to be the coolest caps and gowns ever for King's College, London. The line, which will premiere in a catwalk show in the campus's Great Hall, contains twenty different robes, including fuschia (Dental Institute) and silver (Law School.) Says the colorfully-coiffed designer, "Through my reworking of the traditional robe I tried to link the past, the present and the future. We are what we know."[Daily Star]
higher education
leftovers
Utah Residents Love Balls • College Dean Puts Kibosh On "Douchebag Party"
The Testicle Festival in Utah drew "hundreds" looking for a chance to eat balls (bull's balls to be exact) this past weekend. Think Alec Baldwin made an appearance? • An Italian court of appeals has ruled that wives forfeit their rights to shared assets if they use their marital bed for infidelities. • A NY teen who was arrested for a DUI claims she blew a .15 blood-alcohol level because she made out with a drunk boy. • Plan your life around your menstrual cycle! Including the "worst" time to do coke and when "nature conspires to make you pregnant" by making you walk sexier. • Party-pooping dean of students at Seattle University shuts down "Douchebag Party" for gender bias. • Although the International Olympic Committee states it is against gender discrimination, it still allows countries that ban female athletes to compete. • Women who have caesareans are sometimes denied insurance coverage or are made to pay higher premiums. • Two men rob a Colorado convenience store with thong masks. • Eager 95-year-old man proposes to 95-year-old girlfriend on the first date, gets married 18 months later. • Men and women metabolize fructose differently, making some doctors rethink the factor of gender in the study of metabolic disorders.
rag trade
Designer Divas Naomi Campbell And Sharon Stone Get Spanked
- Naomi Campbell has finally been charged for her April freakout at London's Heathrow airport. “Campbell is accused of three counts of assaulting a constable, one count of disorderly conduct likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress and one count of using threatening, abusive words or behavior to cabin crew, according to reports.” Her court date is set for June 20th; does anyone think that maybe a stint in juvie could set her straight? [The Guardian]
- Christian Dior cosmetics spokesmodel Sharon Stone continues to pay for her ridiculous remarks regarding last week's earthquake in China: Dior is pulling all ads starring the Hollywood wackadoo "from all of the department stores and from all of China". Karma, baby! [NY Times]
- Andre Leon Talley is returning to the Savannah College of Art and Design to speak at the school's May 31 commencement ceremony. Think he'll wear the "floor-length red satin robe and silver crown accented with red 'rubies'" this time around? [Paris Parfait]
focus group
How Many Professors Do You Actually Still Think About?
I dropped out of college. I hate that I dropped out of college, namely because it is invariably the subject of intense curiosity when it comes up with others, and being a devotee of curiosity myself, I would usually rather learn about them without resorting to an annoying Socratic exchange about what set of assumptions and societal norms led them to deem "exotic" a conversation partner upon the revelation that he or she lacks a dozen or so course credits. But if cutting short my college degree has taught me anything — and it sure as fuck didn't teach me how to stop drinking like a college student — it's that most people do still buy into the notion that college is a good idea. College is actually a stupid idea, as "Professor X," a smug/adept writing instructor at a third-tier college points out in the June Atlantic. I would even go so far as to say that American college is almost as stupid an idea as American high school is stupid in execution. Is there a sector of the economy in which the average American spends more to achieve less? Well yeah: War, health care…Why harp on the negative? I consulted some college veterans on my Buddy List in search of some answers to one of the worthwhile aspects of college: the rare professor you still think actually think about. More »
point/counterpoint
"Modern Love" College Edition: The Most Depressing Ever? I Ask My Sister In College
"Love: Really Now, There Is No Topic More Depressing" is generally the theme of the Sunday New York Times feature "Modern Love," whose most famous installment chronicled the author's efforts to train her husband as she might any other mammal of above-average intelligence. (Other columns have grappled with how hard it is to get into sex when you're a stripper, the profound sense of alienation that follows an unwanted divorce, how dudes today are irredeemably awful and women could potentially be worse, etc.) Yesterday's installment, the winner of a college essay contest, did not diverge from this theme. The author, a woman born in the late eighties, reflects on a few brief years spent dating noncommittal dudes in New York. "Over the summer there was the Jesuit taking a break from the seminary," she writes. He stopped calling after she refused to sleep with him on their third date. Now, clearly, she probably should have known better, since a dude just out of the seminary is not going to want to fuck around on second base (or whatever) but the overall message was kind of creepy-familiar, reminding me of this one time a friend and sometime fuck-buddy asked of me, "Who made you so cold?" More »
liberal arts
Are Women's Studies Departments Dying?
After the current crop of seniors graduates this spring, women's studies will no longer exist as an autonomous field in Britain, says Angela McRobbie in today's Guardian. She thinks women's studies has disappeared for two main reasons: One, the mercenary job market, where a women's studies degree is not immediately applicable to a high paying job (though the same could be said of philosophy, comparative literature, or any other liberal arts degree). McRobbie's second reason is that women, in what she describes as a largely post-feminist England, "fear being seen as critical of men." Whether or not McRobbie's supposition about English women holds water, I wondered how American women's studies departments are faring these days. I called Barbara Howe, director of the women's studies department at West Virginia University and president of the National Women's Studies Association to find out. More »
Labor Pains
The new "ethics guidelines" written by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists instruct its members that they needn't perform any procedure that they take moral issue with. In other words: abortions, prescribing the morning-after pill or even regular ol' birth control pills — they don't have to do these things. The problem (okay, the other problem) is that though the ethics guidelines state that in this situation, a doctor should refer his patient to a physician who will perform such procedures, it is unclear whether a doctor has to make this referral. Says Joseph DeCook, an ob/gyn and the vice-president of the American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, "I'm not going to refer someone to a hit man to put to death someone that's inconvenient in their life." Charming! [NPR]
The new "ethics guidelines" written by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists instruct its members that they needn't perform any procedure that they take moral issue with. In other words: abortions, prescribing the morning-after pill or even regular ol' birth control pills — they don't have to do these things. The problem (okay, the other problem) is that though the ethics guidelines state that in this situation, a doctor should refer his patient to a physician who will perform such procedures, it is unclear whether a doctor has to make this referral. Says Joseph DeCook, an ob/gyn and the vice-president of the American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, "I'm not going to refer someone to a hit man to put to death someone that's inconvenient in their life." Charming! [NPR]
party animals
Philadelphia Jezebels, You Nave No Excuse For Not Getting Laid This Month
Talking about the election has become a fun sort of foreplay for spring breaking college students in primary states! A story in today's Wall Street Journal follows an Obama volunteer and Virginia jazz studies major on his Spring Break "springternship" to Philadelphia. (The Obama campaign is the only one with a formal "Springtern" program.) (Side note: Jazz studies...Hopeful? Or audacious?) Anyway, Tyler comes on a Greyhound bus with one dollar (um, one dollar: audacious? or just stupid?) in his pocket. He skipped a trip to Cancun! All to...hit the St. Patrick's Day Parades!It's noon Sunday at an early St. Patrick's Day Parade and roving packs of college kids on spring break are already drunk. Williams approaches a woman swigging from a beer-filled squirt bottle and tells her he's supporting Sen. Barack Obama. "What if I decide John McCain is the hottest guy ever?" says the woman, wearing strands of green Mardi Gras beads.More »
she said/he said
College Senior Tells Rape Apologist* To Stop Blaming The Victim
Remember that hateful Heather MacDonald essay in the Los Angeles Times where the conservative pundit claimed that the oft-quoted statistic that 1 in 4 college women is sexually assaulted was grossly overinflated? Well, today, University of Virginia senior Patrick Cronin takes on MacDonald's screed, which he calls "damaging and demeaning," and counteracts her statistical claims. (Because college women drink so much, MacDonald argues, "most campus 'rape' cases exist in the gray area of seeming cooperation and tacit consent, which is why they are almost never prosecuted criminally.") Cronin fights back with a well-reasoned retort: "If people like MacDonald stigmatize a survivor as a promiscuous, irresponsible alcoholic, is there really much incentive to come forward? And if a victim convinces himself or herself that no assault took place, why use the resources available?" Dayum, skippy! More »
shades of gray (rape)
Conservative Critic: College Rape Statistics Are Overinflated
Heather MacDonald, a fellow at the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, had an essay in yesterday's Los Angeles Times railing against the "phony" rape epidemic on America's college campuses. MacDonald claims that the statistic used by many university rape crisis centers — 20-25% of college women will be sexually victimized — is grossly over-inflated. The statistic, she says, comes from a 1988 study commissioned by Ms., in which a researcher, Mary Koss, classified things as rape that the respondents didn't construe as rape themselves. Writes MacDonald: "One question, for example, asked, 'Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?' — a question that is ambiguous on several fronts, including the woman's degree of incapacitation, the causal relation between being given a drink and having sexual intercourse, and the man's intentions." More »
primary motivations
Will College Women In Wisconsin Make A Difference In Tonight's Primary?
Over on the New Republic's website, writer Elizabeth Cline argues that women in college are not voting for Hillary because college campuses are ivory towers where gender discrimination barely exists. Barack Obama leads by as much as 17% in polls among college Democrats, while his lead over Clinton among 18-24 year-olds not in college is a mere 3%. "College has become one corner of American life where hardworking females are consistently and fairly rewarded," Cline reasons, "and they are succeeding there, to a much greater degree than their male counterparts. It's possible, maybe even likely, to graduate college with little sense and zero experience of institutionalized gender discrimination — with almost complete freedom from the type of covert, daily setbacks that drive blacks to the polls for Obama and older women to vote for Clinton." More »
drinking it in
College Party Girls Find Themselves In Perilous Positions
A new study from the University at Buffalo suggests that the transition between high school and college is an especially fraught one for young American women: According to researchers, the increasing number of sexual assaults on freshman females can be explained by a number of things, including "psychological symptoms during the first year at college, number of consensual sexual partners and increased drinking." The problem with the study, however, is not its veracity — it makes sense that mentally-ill women who abuse alcohol and engage in numerous sexual encounters are more likely to be victimized — but its language: The wording implies that women shouldn't be indulging in risky behaviors because they need to be ever-vigilant in protecting their sacred lady flowers. More ridiculously, there is no responsibility whatsoever placed on the men doing the sexual assaulting. More »
school daze
American Coeds Are Majoring In Booze & Bras
Many parents dream that their little girls will grow up and get into a good college. But these days, college campuses feature alcohol-soaked theme parties where the girls are scantily — or barely — clad. Party 101! According to ABC News, UCLA doctoral student Megan Holmes and a team of researchers reported from inside a total of 66 college parties to see what was really going on. "I had just graduated college so I had seen most of this stuff," Holmes says. "Most shocking to me was that women at themed parties kept dressing less and less. When I was in college there were themed parties, but I never saw girls just wearing lingerie or just a bra and panties, and that was pretty common." Holmes and the researchers were armed with Breathalyzers and surveys, obtaining results on the scene. They found that the more sexualized the party, the more women drank. In fact, the women outdrank the men in those situations. More »
a touch of class
In Bizarre Development, Elite Universities Pledge To Offer Something Called "Financial Aid"
Here is something good happening in the world for once: Yale just decided to do a radical thing and actually use the billions of dollars in its coffers to actually give financial aid to students who need it. It's a very odd move, one that defies market conventions since Yale has absolutely no problem filling its classes with kids who will willingly indenture themselves at investment banks and management consulting firms for decades after graduation to pay off their tuition fees, but see, Harvard did it a few weeks ago — and one can only imagine that Princeton, whose endowment is big enough to give tuition away for the next half century or so, will follow suit. Interestingly, this news comes on the same day that New York Magazine runs a story on the problem of instilling work ethic in the children of America's 15,000 families worth more than $100 million. Most likely, you never kids from families worth $100 million before you went to college. And once in college you probably didn't see them in class! Remember Born Rich? More »
gimme whore
Is Prostitution Glamorous? A Hooker And A Slut Weigh In
A TV show is premiering in the UK next week called The Secret Diary of a Call Girl, based on the writings of "Belle de Jour," the pseudonym of a high-class British call girl who chronicles her life in her blog and books. The program is brewing up a lot of controversy because it is said to depict prostitution in a much different light than most people are used to; namely, that being a hooker can be an enjoyable experience. In fact, people find the idea that Belle not only likes sex but likes getting paid for it so unbelievable that they've insisted she's a fake. The Guardian has an article today in which they get different people — a sex magazine editor, a professor of criminology, someone from a prostitutes collective — to weigh in on the show, which many have deemed "dangerous" because it supposedly glamorizes prostitution. In response, Belle says on her blog:Unless you have been a sex worker, or know one intimately, you have No. Fucking. Clue.I totally agree with her on that. And lucky for me, I actually do know a call girl intimately. Well, not in a sexual way, but she's one of my BFFs. After the jump, College Callgirl and I discuss how turning tricks can be both sexist and sexy. More »
broadsides
Pregnant And Smoking? You're Probably Depressed... Or Famous
- Catherine Zeta Jones is not alone! More than one in ten pregnant women smoke, reports the AP (via MSNBC), and research suggests that many of those women suffer from depression, making quitting even more difficult. A Columbia University epidemiologist, tracked more than 1,500 pregnant women, and "22 percent smoked at some point during pregnancy" with about 12 percent classified as nicotine-dependent. [MSNBC]
- A bunch of spunky girl soccer stars urinated on the opposing team's synthetic soccer field. "I think it's unclassy," sniffed a rival. We think it smells like chicken soup! [Boston Herald]
- A 5-foot tall woman was cleared of charges that she raped a 6-foot tall man, after he accused her of spiking his drink with roofies. We know she's innocent and all, but that giraffe print sweater is criminal. [Daily Mail]
- Cuesta Benberry, a quilt historian an archivist who helped bring attention to the contributions of African-American woman to the craft, has died at the age of 83. No word yet if Anthropologie sends their regrets. [NY Times]
