NERF Guns Banned at CU Boulder
Old timers might recall our Zombies versus Humans game that some students played at Cornell University, running around campus with nerf guns and socks. Well now, in a gigantic act of stupidity, CU Boulder has banned NERF guns:
BOULDER – If you’re caught walking around the University of Colorado at Boulder with a Nerf gun, you could be arrested. Notices have been posted around the campus’ dorm buildings, warning students that Nerf gun sightings will be treated like real gun sightings.
Nerf guns have been popping up around CU this week, after some students started playing the popular game “Humans vs. Zombies.” It’s similar to the game of tag.
“sightings of Nerf guns will be treated like real-gun sightings”
Really, the Onion couldn’t make up stuff this good.
“The Disadvantages of an Elite Education”
I just finished reading through The Disadvantages of an Elite Education by William Deresiewicz in a Summer 2008 exhortation of The American Scholar. You might imagine that an elite education by sheer definition would be beneficial to you as a student and seeker of truth, beauty, and goodness, but Deresiewicz is determined to shatter your preconceptions.
“The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you.”
The problem which most have talking to strangers is that people in general have difficulty talking to people who aren’t like them. If two students went to the same University, it’s the same as two people from the same town or city transplanted elsewhere. I guarantee that if I (now in NYC) bump into someone who lived in Sexsmith, Alberta we would be able to break the ice as easily as if I run into another Cornellian.
“The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.”
If you want to measure “worth” objectively you will arrive at some education versus income charts and begin to understand that the marketplace places worth on your elite education. If the marketplace considers you a more valuable asset, by what other valuation can you claim that a reasonable sense of self-worth is false? Students at elite universities have the opportunity to receive the best education possible in their fields.
“The final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. [...] Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas.”
OK, maybe us engineers are boring as all hell, but I promise you there are students in the Arts and Sciences whose curiosity exceeds even my own. Deresiewicz probably doesn’t consider athletic pursuits to be intellectual, but athletes share a common passion, if a different object. Besides academics and jocks on campus, we also boast republicans, anarchists, musicians, dancers, poets, writers, engineers, chemists, etc. All of them passionate about their field of study and self-improvement. Whether considering passions of the mind, body, or soul, the human endeavor cannot be reduced and limited to Deresiewicz’s notion of intellectualism.
In the end, Deresiewicz’s point–that the modern student lacks the passionate imagination and curiosity to innovate or engage complex ideas–could be equitably applied to students from so-called “elite (read: ivy league) universities” or those studying at public institutions. The determination “elite education” rather than education in general needs significant improvement betrays the author’s bias. The piece, littered with unsubstantiated jabs at prestigious universities, goes down tasting of sour jealousy. And, if Deresiewicz were to be believed, as a lifelong ivy-league academic (5 degrees in 13 years from Columbia University followed by a professorship at Yale) by his own admission he must lack the faculties to introspect and condemn the elite education he himself has been a part of.
If you must read, treat the premise as an assessment of the current apathy present in all higher education. Grade inflation, student apathy, “dumbing down,” the culture of standardized testing, etc are all symptoms of an increasingly unhealthy academic culture. To the degree in which they present variously in different institutions, they are problems in all of them–Cornell included.
Cornell’s Endowment Gains 2% in 1H 2009
Two new articles in the Cornell Daily Sun just came out dealing with the 2009 performance of the Cornell University Endowment:
Joanne DeStefano, vice president for finance and CFO of the University, is quoted: “We earned 2 percent on our endowment from January through June 2009.” The endowment suffered a 27% loss in the second half of 2008, as global markets crashed and the US entered a recession. Unfortunately, the Cornell endowment website has not yet published its June quartly report.
The S&P500 index is +2% for the January to June period, which makes Cornell’s 2% performance an interesting match. The S&P500 is up another 16% from July through the present: I will be interested to see how Cornell’s endowment performs in the second half.
The University has set very low expectations for future growth of the endowment:
“The ultimate goal of the endowment is to generate sufficient returns to grow the real value of the endowment while meeting annual operating budget pay-out with an annual five percent pay-out growth,” DeStefano said. “This translates to a minimum return target of CPI plus 5 percent.”
At a 5% rate (not including any pay-outs), it will take Cornell at least 7 years before the endowment is back to the level-water line. However, if Cornell can earn 14% a year, it might only take them 5 years.
