Tuesday, March 3, 1998
Jackass O’Lantern
Vexing issues face the Cornell community. In early October, someone perched a pumpkin atop the 173-foot bell tower there, where it remains today. The university declined to remove it around Halloween, figuring that decomposition would have its way with the gourd. Not so, and now the still-extant beast (estimated to weigh 60 pounds, according to The New York Times) will be probed and sampled during repairs to the belfry. Many assume it’s not a true pumpkin, and a contest has been announced for undergraduates: the team that accurately guesses the makeup of the object from the ground will win a “Great Pumpkin” drawing from the comic strip Peanuts, autographed by Charles Schulz.
Students with as much idle time as the Cornell library staff can visit the pumpkin’s web site at “pumpkin.library.cornell.edu” — it features a live video feed, which can transport the thrill of real-time vegetable decay into the bedrooms of Dormnet-blessed students.
Police State
We didn’t have any home football games this year, but that doesn’t mean the stadium doesn’t offer entertainment. Not to be outdone by Cornell, Princeton’s Public Safety has installed an Internet-accessible camera in the stadium to monitor action at the construction site (Computer Science students, please bookmark www.princeton.edu/stadiumcam without delay). True, there may not be much football action now, but this cloud has a brilliant silver lining: there’s no marching band either.
Inflation or Unemployment?
Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel began playing Alan Greenspan recently with a report on grade inflation here — warning, more or less, of “irrational exuberance” about students’ work. Princeton faces that age-old economic question posed above: how can seniors compete in the job market if C’s, D’s and F’s start appearing on transcripts?
A week after running “Just Because Grades Are Up, Are Princeton Students Smarter?” on its front page (in time for job recruiters to read before conducting spring interviews), The New York Times may have answered its own question. In a Science Times article last week, it reported that the average person today is 20 I.Q. points smarter than the average person in 1932. So mayhaps we’re not the undeserving simpletons that some cranky alumni — born in the apparently benighted days of yore — claim we are.
Nevertheless, the graduating Spectator editors beg for successors in their heroic battle against grade inflation — the abysmal GPA’s of just a few slackers can counteract the work of perhaps two or three American Studies professors.
Life of the Party
The self-described beneficiaries of most of this I.Q. increase, Princeton’s “Smart Fans,” have railed at season’s end against thersitical cheers and jouncing the stands at basketball games. The four-person-strong organization complains about the ochletic behavior that led to a technical foul at the Harvard game on March 20 — shaking the hoop during a foul shot by jumping in the stands. Its posters besought, “Let’s not give any points to the other team at tonight’s game.” Luckily, the Tigers were still able to squeak by with a 77-55 win over the Crimson despite the technical foul.
A Tough Guy, Eh?
James A. Baker 3d ’52 chooses Iraq as the subject of a column in last Friday’s New York Times. Baker, endorsing military action if Saddam Hussein reneges on his recent deal with the United Nations, writes, “Saddam’s actions must now match his promises. Unfortunately, there are many — and I am among them — who do not think that will be the case. We’ll almost certainly see his ‘cheat and retreat’ obstructionism again.” He adds toughly that “responding as we have before — using ‘pinprick’ force or accepting another promise — should be out of the question,” and concludes that “what’s important next time is not Mr. Clinton’s words, but his actions.”
That’s right, Mr. Baker: the president should never back down from an evil dictator in exchange for false promises. Neither should the Secretary of State.
Transparent Ruse
Jason Harte, owner of a New York glass-replacement company called Crystal Windows, was convicted of criminal mischief for using hammers, rocks and slingshots to break his own customers’ windows, the Associated Press reports. Harte’s five-year prison sentence may seem harsh, but then he did manage to destroy an impressive $150,000 worth of glass.
True, Harte’s motive was nothing nobler than greed, but this campus could use a man like him around. Particularly near Spelman and Feinberg Halls.
Beerjack
Two men hijacked a truck in Brooklyn and made off with 1,470 cases of Heineken beer, reports The New York Times. The list of charges the criminals face is daunting: it includes robbery, kidnapping, weapons possession, and assault and battery. They have not been caught yet — an impressive feat, considering that beer is one of the few substances that becomes harder to hide as one consumes more and more of it. But it might profit the New York Police Department to round up suspects on Prospect Avenue, whose inferior ale could drive the most honest citizen to worse crimes.
Golden Archfiends
In related news, two men — presumably not the same two — were spotted putting a new twist on drive-through service at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, according to KYW Radio in Philadelphia. The men were attempting to load 240 pounds of uncooked hamburgers into the trunk of their car. Local authorities, responding quickly, arrived in time to avoid an E. coli scare.
Writers Still Sought
Journalists who possess the proper credentials — literacy, most vital signs and eight letters of reference — may call The Spectator at extension 9483.
Nudity Worldwide
It seems that Princeton’s brand of fun, frolicsome nudity is rare. In Sweden, a country famous for nude beaches and a fictional bikini team, a political party has stirred up controversy with a poster portraying a naked woman walking into a lake. The Centre Party’s female members are outraged, but it serves them right for misspelling the name of their own organization.
The female members of another sort of political group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, treat nudity differently. Two women belonging to the group were led away by police in Hong Kong after they painted their nude bodies with leopard spots and marched through the streets. Male Princeton students, alarmed by the recent construction which has displaced dozens of rabbits from thickets near Palmer Hall, have called PETA to demand that something be done.
The Elusive Armadillo
Although Princeton’s claim to being the finest university in the country is intact, it appears that finer facilities exist overseas at Oxford University. Oxford has just accepted one Miguel Hilario Manenima, an Amazonian Indian from Peru who is the first of his tribe ever to study abroad. His skills include fishing for piranha and hunting armadillo. It is sad that Princeton lacks the resources to attract such students, and very clear that until it begins to restock Lake Carnegie, piscicapture here will never be able to compete with that in the River Cherwell.
Double Chen
The last issue of The Spectator treated with mild incredulity one Hon-Ming Chen, a sect leader and former sociology professor who believes, among other things, that God will come to Texas on March 31 in Chen’s form. Chen, whose sect has settled in a suburb of Dallas, has further stated that God will arrive in an aptly named “Godplane.”
But apparently such sects are not uncommon. In what appears to be an unrelated story, The New York Times reports that Chen Heng-ming, a former professor of medicine, has formed the God Saves the Earth Flying Saucer Association. He and his followers claim that God will fly believers to Mars in a flying saucer on March 31, 1999. Is this coincidence? Clearly not. We suspect that UFOs were involved.
$21 Airporter?
Attentive readers of the Daily Princetonian may have noticed a casual advertisement by the Airporter, touting a $21 fare from Princeton to Newark Airport, up from $19 last semester. We would like to point out that a train ticket to Penn Station in Newark, and a shuttle ticket from there to the airport, cost a total of $11.35. And you can buy a lot of Coke with ten dollars.
Teaching 101
Publisher Harold W. McGraw Jr. ’40 has donated $5 million to Princeton for the establishment of a teaching center, according to the Associated Press. The center’s ambitious goal is to improve the quality of instruction at Princeton. While it would be ungrateful not to acknowledge Mr. McGraw’s generosity, it is all too clear that a lot more than $5 million will be needed to improve teaching here. And that $5 million would have been better spent on hiring more professors, who could replace overworked and often incompetent graduate students as preceptors.