“Hi, my name is Jessica. I’m from New Jersey…and I’m an alcoholic.”

Okay, that’s not exactly your typical NSO introduction. But for a few select students living in Harrison College House next fall, it might be. Yesterday, The Daily Pennsylvanian reported that a new residential program for recovering substance abusers could begin as early as Fall 2007 and would likely be based in Harrison.

I am fully in favor of increasing facilities available for students in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. After all, a college campus is hardly the easiest place to try to stay sober. But a residential program may not be the best way to do that. While the eight-person program would be completely voluntary, it still presents the very real possibility that the students would be branded as addicts and potentially ostracized.

Let’s face it: Penn students love gossip. Everyone would know exactly what hall was “That Hall.” Anyone who admitted that they lived there would have as much anonymity as someone who said they lived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. A supportive environment is good, but if the benefits are going to be offset by isolation from the university community, it becomes pointless. The Undergraduate Assembly told the DP that maintaining students’ privacy is a concern, but in a small campus community, that seems nearly impossible.

Put the money into establishing an incredibly well-funded support group instead, or establish campus branches of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. Former addicts could attend meetings and events without having to tell anyone and could keep their past addictions as private or public as they wanted. No one should have to “out” themselves just to have full access to the University’s support systems.

If the University is as concerned as they say they are about maintaining the privacy of students in the program, maybe they have an amazing proposal up their sleeves that could get me on board. But until then, University money should be focused on support resources that don’t force users to broadcast their problems to the entire campus.

(buycostumes.com)

Every year, I come home on Halloween and proclaim that, “next year, I’m just going as a slut.”

I mean, I might as well. Every girl on campus, myself included, seems to put extraordinary effort into turning a normal costume into something provocative. I could save myself a lot of time by not having to bother pretending to be a nurse.

According to Thursday’s New York Times, the evolution of Halloween into what comedian Carlos Mencia has deemed “Dress Like a Whore Day” extends beyond the college crowd.

Some of the experts interviewed for the Times article viewed this as a step backwards for women. There aren’t nearly as many sexualized costumes for men, and some women complain about the lack of normal costumes available. Deborah Tolman, the director of the Center for Research on Gender and Sexuality at San Francisco State University, also expressed concern that teenage girls are starting to believe that being “sexy” is only for someone else, not themselves.

I’d really love to condemn Halloween for single-handedly undermining the women’s movement. But like most of the girls on campus, I’m not going to deny that dressing a little provocatively can be downright fun. It’s a night to act out a personality other than your own and explore a different side of yourself. My daily uniform consists of t-shirts and jeans. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to branch out a little? It could even be considered a feminist statement for women to express our sexuality so openly.

There are some caveats. If you’re killing yourself trying to make a sexy policewoman costume just because all your friends are doing it, then you’re not making a feminist statement. Ditto for if it makes you so uncomfortable that you spend the entire night with your arms folded in front of your chest. It also doesn’t count as a healthy expression of sexuality if your only aim is to impress boys.

Halloween is a week from Tuesday, and we all know that nighttime at the end of October can be chilly. But if you’re comfortable with it, throw on a corset under your parka and risk frostbite because you’re wearing hot pants when it’s 30 degrees outside. It’s okay, we all know you’re really supposed to be Minnie Mouse.

(nyunews.com)

When I lived in the Quad during my freshman year, the two most irritating wake-up calls were the Penn Band marching past my window before football games and the Spring Fling 9 a.m. sound checks.

But the RAs in NYU’s Weinstein Hall have one-upped any dorm distractions at Penn. They turned the building’s windows into a giant Connect Four board as the final round of NYU’s “Dorm Wars,” a month-long series of competitions held in each freshman dorm.

If I were a Weinstein resident, I would feel like NYU freshman Michael Bliss, who told the University’s Washington Square News, “It was definitely not good that they came and woke me up just to hang up things in my window.”

However, inconveniences aside, I have to admit that this is incredibly cool. We don’t have freshman-only halls here at Penn, but that’s no reason we can’t come up with some more creative ways to make life on campus a little more fun and keep us all united. After all, College Houses and classes are rarely united. The only time the entire campus comes together is Spring Fling.

As Weinstein RA and NYU junior Jorge Hernandez put it, the game “[brought] us together as a community just by seeing all the people out here watching.”

Sounds good to me. We need activities like this for our College House system and our comunity–as long as they start after noon, of course.

Wednesday’s march of same-sex couples in honor of National Coming Out Day was undoubtedly a resounding success. As Queer Student Alliance Co-Chairwoman Alexis Ruby-Howe told the Daily Pennsylvanian, the march met with very few, if any, openly negative reactions. Penn’s campus has certainly progressed tremendously since the jaw-dropping and blatant staring of the October 2001 Coming Out Day.

(daytonlgbtcenter.com)

Thankfully, this positive reaction was somewhat predictable. Penn is very socially liberal. If you’re brave enough to admit you don’t like same-sex couples holding hands and marching down Locust Walk, then you better be gracious enough to wait until after they’re done. We’re not perfect, but we’ve got class.

Unfortunately, not all universities are so lucky. Yale’s National Coming Out Day festivities started off on a sour note when students checked their e-mail Wednesday morning. Many of them found an anonymous anti-gay message sent from what appeared to be a Yale e-mail account.

Sent under the alias “Yale LGBTTQQQQ…(et al.),” the message was signed by a fake group calling itself the “National Organization to Gain Acceptance for Your Sins,” or “N.O.G.A.Y.S.” Along with comparing LGBTQ students to racists and Nazis, the e-mail also proclaimed that “there’s no shame in being who you are. Just remember, admitting it doesn’t make it right.”

Corresponding flyers also appeared around campus, one of which featured a picture of Paris Hilton and the words, “Paris is coming out as a whore… Admitting it doesn’t make it right.”

I’m so thrilled to find out that some Yalies are putting their Ivy League education to good use by covering their campus with this prejudiced garbage. Hatred is never acceptable, and it’s definitely not okay to voice it on a day that is geared toward celebrating those who were brave enough to stand up and say to their entire campus, “This is who I am.”

It’s important to remember that no matter how much progress we’ve made, there are always new obstacles. It’s great that we go to a school where at least relative acceptance of those who might be different from us is common place. But we need to remember that this isn’t the case everywhere. And because Yale is widely known as very welcoming toward the LGBTQ community, this should serve as a wake-up call that prejudice can be found anywhere, even here at Penn.

And to the geniuses behind N.O.G.A.Y.S.: If you’re going to force everyone to listen to your hateful rhetoric, please at least have the guts to sign your name.

For those who are keeping score, Penn stereotypes are still alive and well.

Yesterday afternoon in my Consumer Behavior class, we studied Levi’s and its struggles to stay current and trendy. As an educational tool, it was actually quite helpful until the professor made the fatal mistake of asking how many of us were actually wearing Levi’s jeans at the moment.

Surprise! Not a hand in the house. Well, that’s not exactly true–at the end of class, it was revealed to us that someone actually had half-raised their hand. However, after we had spent the class bashing Levi’s as old-fashioned and farmer-esque, our professor felt that it would be rude to point them out. Probably a good call.

Not long after the “Oh my God, we really are all as snobby as they think” nervous laughter died down, our professor made the fatal mistake of asking us what brands of jeans we were wearing.

“Seven…Sevens…Diesel…True Religion…”

Just to be clear, I was wearing one of those brands of jeans at the time. I can’t criticize anyone else’s interest in designer labels, but there really is nothing more entertaining than stereotypes that we resist bitterly but conform to anyway. Sort of like how the majority of Penn students “aren’t” Jewish, but everyone’s cousin was still either in my bunk at Jewish Camp or in my Hebrew school class.

But just in case you were worried that Penn students were being unfairly stereotyped as somewhat snobby and image-conscious, don’t get your Sevens in a twist. Rest assured, we’re being stereotyped perfectly fairly.

A university that is not in the Ivy League made it into the New York Times. And for doing something a whole lot cooler than dropping Early Admissions.

Forty-six years ago, James M. Lawson, Jr., then a graduate student studying Methodist divinity at Vanderbilt, was expelled for his role in the 1959 Nashville lunch counter sit-ins. The controversy, later dubbed the “Lawson Affair,” led to both national outcry and the eventual resignation of the dean of the divinity school.

While Vanderbilt had already officially apologized to Lawson, they’ve taken it one step further. This fall, Lawson (now a Reverend) has been invited to spend the year at Vanderbilt as a visiting professor.

I have to give credit to Vanderbilt for not only acknowledging its mistake, but moving past the PR concerns to realize what Lawson could bring to the university today. Lawson himself is even more deserving of our praise for being cool enough to not hold any grudges against Vanderbilt and accept their invitation. After all, it must have been tempting to simply say, “F you, Vandy. Should’ve kept me when you had me!” and run triumphantly in the opposite direction. But I guess civil rights pioneers don’t do that. So, kudos to him.

In the lecture covered by the Times, Lawson opened by asking the class, “How many of you have experienced a hate crime against yourself? Let’s see the hands.” He then moved through a discussion of hate crimes. Lawson also led role-playing exercises with the students and showed a movie about apartheid.

If “the world is flat”, it shouldn’t be hard to get him here, right? (NYTimes.com)

Vanderbilt isn’t the only college with big-name visiting professors this semester. Rebecca Chaikin, a Brandeis senior (full disclosure: and a high school friend) is taking a course taught by Thomas L. Friedman.

“It’s amazing,” she said. “He knows so much and has seen so much first-hand and has this unbelievable understanding of how the world works in today’s society. But he’s able to translate these concepts into laymen’s terms so that everyone can grasp them.”

Penn needs these kinds of visiting professors on campus. Most of our visiting professors are simply faculty from other universities, not names ripped from history books and headlines. Lawson and Friedman have lived what they’re teaching, which makes it extremely valuable to learn from them.

Visiting professors like Lawson and Friedman can bring a fresh perspective and voice to the classroom that is just as valuable as what our standing faculty have to say.

Yeah, we have a student on trial for murder and we’re keeping Early Decision because we like it, dammit. But Radar Magazine has got us covered. Get psyched, Penn students: we’re not the worst Ivy!

Citing ugly girls, less-than-favorable alumni and a high acceptance rate, Radar bestows this particular honor upon our neighbors to the north, Cornell.

I’m a fan of these new ranking criteria. After all, I don’t think any school should be let off the hook for bringing us Ann Coulter.

The article also bites the bullet and calls Cornell “America’s Best Safety School.” Regardless of how true or false this might be, the idea has picked up steam on campus: four years ago, a group of Cornell students formed an Image Committee devoted to help their school stop looking like the stupid cousin of the Ivy League. The group successfully lobbied for a change in the school’s logo and are planning an upcoming campaign for reducing class size.

And we thought getting mixed up with Penn State was a problem! Perhaps life in the 19104 isn’t so bad. The only student image committee we need is a bunch of uh, really cool people wandering around in “Not Penn State” t-shirts (you know, to help out all the people who meant to drive to State College, Pa. and are wandering around West Philly looking for The Creamery). Hell, we’re so cool that we brought the world Maury Povich.

So take your #7-ranking-blues and drown them at Mad4 happy hour like a good Penn student. Because, remember: it’s always better to hover awkwardly in the middle than come in dead last.

UPDATE: Cornell apparently feels that even though they gave Ann Coulter a degree, they hadn’t contributed quite enough to helping out the Bush administration and generally scaring the hell out of everyone that reads a newspaper.

As announced in the New York Times today, Big Red has decided to join a group of major American universities that will use funding from the Department of Homeland Security to develop software that would allow the government to keep track of negative opinions of the United States in newspapers and other publications across the globe. Officials have said that this “sentiment analysis” will be used to help identify potential threats to national security.

A graphical respresentation of Cornell’s new “information extraction” program. (news.cornell.edu)

Thumbs up, Cornell. This is really going to help with that image problem you’re apparently having. No, really, you’ll be considered an oustanding member of the Ivy League after this one. Oh wait. By “Ivy League,” I mean “Bush League.”

It’s that time again…that third-week-of-the-semester panic is just starting to sweep over campus, and away messages are shifting from “Watching Project Runway” to “Studying calc all night” or “Trying to remember how to write a paper.”

But there’s hope for some. Math 104 students can get free tutoring and paper-writers have all sorts of resources available to them. And no, I’m not talking about buying a paper from I’mALazyAss.com.

Private services go way beyond what the Writing Center offers (www.writing.upenn.edu)

As was reported in the Daily Pennsylvanian last week, there are people who run entire businesses geared towards helping students write papers.

It seems only fair that resources are available for everyone, no matter what assignment is giving them trouble. After all, certain groups of Penn students are at a tremendous disadvantage. China Okasi, a Penn alumna and founder of Penn and Paper, a professional editing service, says that her company is geared mainly toward international students, who are already at a disadvantage because of “language and cultural issues.”

But helping people with practice problems is not the same thing as helping someone re-work the essay they are actually handing in. When you’re dealing with an essay, it’s far easier to cross the line between helping and doing someone’s work for them.

So where should we draw the line? College junior Kerry Killeen said that “It’s okay to offer general feedback,” but that specifically telling someone what to change might entail crossing the line.

Okasi says that her company does a “thorough editing job,” but that they don’t address content-related questions, which would give an unfair advantage to the writer.

The Code of Academic Integrity’s definitions of “Academic Dishonesty” are predictably vague. “Unauthorized assistance” with classwork is prohibited, whatever that means.

Last year, one of my professors ordered us to have a parent or friend read our papers for clarity before we handed them in. He specifically warned us that there would inevitably be a handful of us that wouldn’t listen and would do badly. So I obliged, and sent my paper to my father, along with explicit instructions not to give me too much help.

In this case, asking for help was specifically authorized. While my father was careful not to address any issues except clarity, it could have gone too far.

We’re probably safe going to Penn and Paper or the Writing Center. But what level of help should we be comfortable with? These questions are hard–the line is blurrier for editing papers than preparing for exams. And the various sources of help we’re “allowed” to use make everything more confusing.

This is something that the University Honor Council and the Office of Student Conduct should directly address. No student should have to be afraid of breaking a rule that is not clearly articulated. Telling us to use our best judgment just simply isn’t enough.

I’ve never had as much respect for people who work in the service industry as I did after the Class of 2008 Welcome Back picnic last weekend. As a new member of the 2008 Class Board, who hosted the event, I had only just found out that part of my job description was, in addition to helping to plan fun events that included delicious food, actually helping to actually serve that food.

The picnic attendees seemed thankful for the free food, but were also incredibly demanding. I was surprised–we were giving them free lunch, and they were complaining that they were going to miss the Eagles game. I gritted my teeth, sliced more pitas, and as I washed cherry water ice out of my hair that night, I swore never to be rude to anyone who served me food ever again.

Regardless of how true or false the generalization may be, Penn students are widely stereotyped as rude and stuck-up. According to Sociology professor David Grazian, many service workers in the area complain that Penn students are notoriously bad tippers and that we treat those that serve us as if we are superior.

Class of 2008 Picnic (Dramatization) [seykota.com]

Luckily for us, many Penn students are lucky enough to have no experience working in the service industry. According to Grazian, it’s “very easy for affluent people to–forget the humanity of the people that are serving them,” and he also pointed out that in an urban setting like Philadelphia, the customer-employer interaction is one of the few instances when people from different socioeconomic classes interact.

In a class I took with Professor Grazian last fall, he declared that every American should have to work six months in the service industry before they should be allowed to vote. While he obviously wasn’t serious, he made a strong point about the key lessons that can be learned by serving others that many Americans are too lucky to ever have the chance to learn.

Those that have worked in the service industry are typically nicer to those that serve them. After working in many service jobs, including a delivery driver and an ice cream server, College senior Matthew Dintenfass said that he has “definitely” changed his behavior toward those that serve him. He is now more careful to leave big tips because he understands the frustration of tip-based wages and tries not to get frustrated if the service isn’t perfect. After my own experience working in a clothing store my senior year of high school, I am now careful to refold anything I take off the shelves, and I never leave unwanted garments in dressing rooms.

Sure, Matthew, I or any of the other Penn students that have had similar experiences might have been just as considerate anyway, but now we really get it. We understand what it’s like to be treated like servants, and we appreciate the value of a customer that treated us with respect.

I’m not pretending that my one afternoon serving food or my four months refolding t-shirts can even remotely compare to the experiences of someone who makes their living in the service industry, but it’s definitely taught me how to treat the person on the other end of my lunch order.

there’s another person on the end of that sandwich, and even if you’ve never worked a day in your life, they don’t deserve to be treated as anything less.

Maybe you were too busy studying for finals when United 93 came out last April. It’s entirely possible that you had the complete intention of seeing Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center when it came out this summer, but you spent too much money on Snakes on a Plane and Invincible. Not a problem: CNN has you covered.

This Monday, in honor of the five-year anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, CNN will air its news broadcasts from that day in real time for free through its Web site. From 8:30 AM to midnight, even those that don’t subscribe to the video streaming news service, CNN Pipeline, will be able to re-live that day, from the first plane hitting to the umpteenth shot of the towers collapsing.

United 93 Premier (ABCNews.com)

Did I miss something? Has so much happened in the five years since September 11, 2001 that we’ve forgotten what happened and need to be reminded? it’s almost as if movie studios and television networks were just itching for a mandatory five-year waiting period to pass. I can see it now: executives leaning back in their leather chairs, cackling as the dollar signs flash in front of their eyes, eerily grateful for the day they have the opportunity to make millions off people’s morbid fascination with death.

There is a reason that many movie theaters in Manhattan taped up signs to warn their customers if they were going to have to sit through a World Trade Center preview. there’s a reason that when I saw The Da Vinci Code before the signs went up, the preview was immediately followed by the sound of multiple people in the theater crying. It was–and still is–a real day.

For all of us who were in New York that day and countless others across the country, September 11 isn’t a movie. It’s not something we should be able to buy a ticket for, or “tune into,” or something that should be used for financial gain by movie studios and television networks.

Actual people died that day; not actors. If I had lost a loved one that day, I wouldn’t want to see anyone making money off of their death. I wouldn’t feel the need to watch them dying over and over again, and I would be horrified to know that others were doing just that.
We shouldn’t be getting entertainment out of September 11, and we certainly shouldn’t be indulging that same “sick fascination” impulse that makes us slow down when we pass car wrecks. Five years isn’t a long enough time to assume that everyone’s wounds have healed from that day, and the anniversary of September 11 should be spent honoring the memory of those we lost, not re-living their deaths.