Cornell Blog: An unofficial blog about Cornell University

A tipster forwarded me this hilarious recruiting “oops” email sent from Deep Springs College after it emailed her by mistake. Deep Springs is an all-male college, so recruiting high school females would probably not be in its best interests:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Deep Springs College [comcom@deepsprings.edu]
Date: Oct 26, 2007 3:24 PM
Subject: An Apology from Deep Springs College

Dear ******,

We write from Deep Springs College to apologize for the fact that you were sent our recruitment brochure by mistake this fall.

Deep Springs has an all-male student body. You received the brochure because you had an exceptionally high SAT score, and fell within most of our recruiting criteria. However, when purchasing one of our SAT mailing lists, we neglected to check the “MALE” box and our brochure was automatically sent to the addresses of some women.

Needless to say, we are very embarrassed by this error. The only explanation we can offer is that mistakes do happen. But most of all, we want you to know that this actually was a mistake, not some malicious prank.

Please accept our apologies for the fact that we cannot consider applications from women at this time. We apologize as well if we have inconvenienced you during this busy application season.

Good luck with your endeavors, wherever they may lead you.

Sincerely,
Silas Hundt, Student
Communications Committee
Deep Springs College

David Neidorf, Dean
Deep Springs College

Note that a similar but worse thing happened when Cornell accepted all its applicants via email, “Congratulations on your acceptance into the class of 2007!” Unfortunately, the acceptance rate that year was not 100%, and they had to send a disappointing followup.

Kitsch magazine just put an article called Inside the Hub which no doubt evokes fond memories for all of you. It explores the internal private file sharing network that exists at Cornell as a DC++ hub server, and includes a selected quote from yours truly:

Elliott Bäck, a Cornell alumnus whose once-controversial campus blog I previously profiled in this magazine, collected data on the hub before graduating and last September posted to his blog an analysis. Bäck found over 19 terabytes comprising about 2.5 million different files shared between more than a thousand users at any given moment. (Apple’s popular—and legal—iTunes store currently has more than 6 million songs, but not even close to the over 200 thousand video files on DC++ at any one time.)

Unfortunately, the article is also heavily pro-administration and pro-RIAA, with a few ridiculous statements like:

• “When presented with a court-ordered subpoena, Cornell has little choice but to hand over this information.”
• “[A]ll Cornell can do is step back and stay as uninvolved as possible in the conflict between the entertainment industry and students.”
• “Mitrano says she has processed over 1,000 takedown notices.”

Nowhere in this article do they suggest that these things are in fact bad. For example, Cornell is able to block copyright holders from identifying alleged music pirates by filing a motion to block or quash the subpoena. Cornell also could, like Professor Charles Nesson at Harvard, actively refuse to help the RIAA’s police mission. As he points out, the purpose of a University is to teach, not enforce an archaic notion of copyright.

I’m disappointed that Rob didn’t quote my response to one of questions:

(4) As you acknowledged in your coverage, the RIAA has not sued a Harvard student yet. Is there anything Cornell can do to protect its students?

Fire Tracy Mitrano. Instead of writing memos like www.cit.cornell.edu/policy/memos/dcplus.html when she receives a request to police the Cornell LAN, she could write a letter categorically refusing to do so, as is the University’s right under the safe-harbour provisions of the DMCA.

It was designed to spark a little outrage and to highlight the fact that she’s not doing her job, unless her salary is coming from the RIAA and MPAA. Note that I am not a lawyer, and in no way this post should constitute any sort of legal advice.

Update: Hurray, I’ve been misquoted by Tracy Mitrano who writes in today’s Sun that “a DC++ posting”–hey we call that a blog entry–concludes with the statement “Fire Mitrano”–which as you can see it does not. It actually concluded with “Fire Tracy Mitrano,” an error so severe given the ready access to the source material above, that I’m not surprised the article offers no insight into what happens when Cornell actually receives a subpoena, or what Cornell is doing to protect its students from predatory lawsuits.

According to an article in the Washington Post, Muslim students at George Washington University blanketed the campus with “offensive posters” that shocked with a “gigantic headline:”

“I was just really shocked that this sort of hatred exists on our campus,” said Najah El Bash, a sophomore from New York who is one of the leaders of the GWU Muslim Students Association. “You never think this would come so close to home, from people you’re in classes with. . . . It’s scary.” It had to be well-planned, she said, for so many posters to go up so quickly

The image, which was intended to satire the current American sentiment towards Islam and Muslims, clearly failed to achieve its intended effect. The blog Little Green Footballs reproduces an article detailing the general GWU reaction:

Representatives from more than a dozen groups on campus and from Muslim, Catholic and Jewish faiths spoke in unison condemning the posters and the unidentified subjects who hung them.

“We wish to reaffirm our solidarity with all our brothers and sisters of all faith backgrounds and reiterate our commitment to greater understanding of all peoples, of all creeds and denominations,” said sophomore Brandon Hines, in a statement from the GW Catholic community.

It’s unfortunate that the poster was misinterpreted as “hate speech” by the GWU community. Instead of thinking about why an negative American attitude towards Islam might exist, or how American and Islamic cultures can work together, the dunces at GWU stuck their fingers in their ears and shouted “I can’t hear you!” Maybe we should organize a GWU-wide field trip to a NYC comedy club to teach them the difference between racially motivated satire and hate crime.