Faculty members voted to retain the Russian major late last semester, making a decision on what had increasingly become a heated issue among faculty and students.
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Professors Kendrick Brown, Duchess Harris, Leola Johnson, Marjorie Merryman and Mary Montgomery were awarded tenure at the Board of Trustees meeting on Jan. 9 and 10.
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Intruders broke into a number of students’ rooms in Wallace, Bigelow, Turck and Kirk Halls over winter break.
According to Sarah Griesse, assistant dean of students and director of residential life, Security got a call just before Christmas from a passerby who had seen someone entering a ground level window in Wallace.
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On Saturday, Ruminator Books announced that Macalester had granted it a one-month extension for repayment of debts.
Macalester made the decision to extend the original deadline after Ruminator received a large donation from an anonymous private investor and secured an undisclosed amount of money through an offering of public stock. According to St. Paul City Council member Jay Benanav, the private investor, who is also providing strategic assistance to the bookstore, is a Macalester alumnus.
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Religious Studies Professor Jim Laine published a book, Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, that instigated a riot and caused unrest among Hindu fundamentalists in India in the past few months.
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President Brian Rosenberg will be touring the country this semester as part of a college relations trip to meet Macalester’s alumni population. Rosenberg will be making a series of trips that began early in January and continue for most of the semester.
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Clarifying Mac Weekly policies A wise Mac Weekly staffer once said, “You know why there aren’t windows in this office? So people can’t throw bricks through them.” We here at the paper like our work and want it to be read and used by the community. But we are aware that there is much criticism of the newspaper as well. Thus, we would like to clarify a few things that, we hope, will maximize the college-newspaper enjoyment of both readers and staffers.
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You may be saying “Ok...Nic -k, what are you talking about? Is this going to be another story about the administrative and institutional shortcomings of Macalester and its relation to students of color?” Um…yes and no, but I want to break it down to a more personal level. It is time to talk about a serious issue that too many people at this college deal with, especially students of color (SOC) and international students... coming out on campus and why it is not quite so easy as one would believe at good ol’ “liberal” Macalester.
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The coats were nicer, the haircuts more in line with social norms, and they were drinking glasses of wine respectable enough to sit on my parents’ dining table. I was definitely at a gathering of Macalester alumni.
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I can’t help but appreciate the irony of returning to this frozen tundra, as if my life had been put back on hold with the dropping of the temperature. I return to inching through everyday moments, a life of timecards and textbooks. After passing the best month of my life in sunny Quito, Ecuador, my fingers hammer the keyboard like shivering tarantulas, recording some version of what life was like on the other side of the equator.
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Liberalism in the United States today—though I’m not sure if things were ever much different—is a philosophy predicated upon compromise and hopelessness. It is myopic and naïve, reducing political action and its effects to the level of a game, to be enjoyed in a manner civil and detached, grimly and ploddingly.
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Macalester prides itself on preparing students to be socially responsible members of the real world once they graduate. Macalester’s Statement of Purpose and Belief asserts that, “the benefit of the educational experience at Macalester is the development of individuals who make informed judgments and interpretations of the broader world around them and choose actions or beliefs for which they are willing to be held accountable.” We believe that these ideals should not be limited to the individual student. The Macalester community needs to take the same kind of responsibility for its institutional actions as students are expected to take individually.
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On Saturday, third place Concordia entered the Macalester Fieldhouse for an important MIAC game with heavy playoff implications. A Cobbers win would pull them within one-half game of second-place Macalester. A Scots win, on the other hand, would bring them within one game of first place Gustavus. The Scots displayed their signature uptempo offense in the first half, with the lead changing hands a number of times. The Cobbers jumped out to an early 10-5 lead, with Brendan Bosman ’06 providing the first five points for the Scots. After trailing most of the first half and being partially derailed by a tight calling officiating crew that sent the Cobbers into the double bonus barely midway through the first half, a string of baskets from MIAC MVP candidate Ben Van Thorre ’04 and a tip in at the buzzer by Lars Johnson ’07 brought the two teams even at the half, 40-40.
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What was that? “Poker isn’t a sport,” you claim? Clearly you spent your break watching inferior, wussy “sports” like basketball and hockey, or perhaps even reality shows such as “Rich Girls,” “The Simple Life,” or dare I say “Newlyweds.” Fortunately, I did not. Although I did watch a disgusting amount of the latter (who can resist Jessica and Nick?), the majority of my break was spent in front of a TV watching relatively unattractive men sit around a small table throwing plastic chips into a pile playing a game eerily named “Texas Hold ‘Em,” which seemed like a title better suited for something satirized in a Mark Twain novel.
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A game that was slated to be one of the most boring Super Bowls in recent history ended up captivating viewers last Sunday as the Carolina Panthers hung on ruthlessly only to lose to the New England Patriots on a field goal kicked by Adam Vinatieri in the final four seconds of the game.
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Cathryn O’ Sullivan is a senior from Jamaica. She has perfect teeth, and is witty as all hell; “delightfully negative,” a particularly perceptive teacher once called her. She’s fabulous. We chatted whilst watching Frasier.
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You know them as the ever-cheerful, ever-adorable advertisement stars of today. You know them as the “Aflac” duck, or the Charmin toilet-paper bear, Snuggles. You know them as role models for your children. After all, any good parent would want his or her child to have layers of animal fat, speak in a high-pitched voice and display perverse beast-like behaviors. Who doesn’t smile at the coming-of-age moment when an adolescent begins to question his or her place in the taxonomic hierarchy of biology? Been there, done that. Right?
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Johnny Knockout had often found himself admiring the other boys in the locker room. Watching the basketball team file in from practice, admiring their chiseled figures and stealing glances at their athletic “assets,” Johnny wondered whether he might one day enjoy the pleasures of another man. He considered himself a typical college gentleman. On the surface, he was an intelligent, motivated, young liberal arts student, working toward a degree in post colonial international humanitarian studies. But beneath the surface, he was raging with hormonal desires and bursting with unadulterated animal urgings. One day while toweling off after a particularly steamy round of pickle-ball, Johnny noticed someone staring at him from the other side of the shower-room. It was his anatomy professor, Dr. Jewels. The sexy scholar was slowly soaping the bulging muscles of his sculpted torso, all the while shooting seductive glances in Johnny’s direction. As Johnny began to fondle his own growing bulges, he pondered what exactly was unfolding at his innocent midwestern college. Ever since that incident with the school nurse and her wandering stethoscope he had been questioning the seemingly asexual atmosphere of his beloved school. As he began to inch towards the soapy scientist, licking his lips in anticipation, he wondered whether he was making a terrible mistake…
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My tenth-grade honors English teacher attempted to integrate Eastern voices in our curriculum, so we read Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club and watched the movie. At the time, I enjoyed both the book and the film––it quite accurately portrays my mother's relationships with her group of middle-aged Vietnamese women friends, and its mother-daughter relationships humored me. The success of Tan’s novel and film only produced in me a desire for more literature by Asian women, in a contemporary context as well as an antiquated one.
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For the record, we are not Chanter-haters. It is commonly understood that the Chanter and the Banshee are rival literary publications. The portion of the campus that believes this is wrong. The Chanter and the Banshee coexist peacefully today, despite their distinctly different origins, and the staffs even occasionally wave to each other in Café Mac.
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Primed to be the most exciting semester in MacCinema’s history, this term’s schedule will continue to feature acclaimed films from around the world as well as two features that have not been screened before in the Twin Cities. The movies run the gamut from French animation to a suspense movie about ping-pong to the sight of Matt Damon lost in the desert. Last but not least, MacCinema hopes to bring a major event to campus this spring: the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival. Stay on the lookout for details about the festival as it approaches in April.
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I know almost nothing about electronic music. My plan was to read as much as I could on the subject during break, thinking that I might learn the difference between gabba, progressive house and funky breaks. None of this happened, mostly due to more listening to music than actually reading about it as I found my meek self surrendering to the intricate sub-genres of electronica. What is the difference between house, micro house and tribal house; more importantly, what is house and what makes it different from trance? Well, I learned the latter at least.
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Lo-fi singer/multi-instrumentalist Phil Elvrum, a.k.a the Microphones, spent five isolated months in Norway before embarking on a brief February, 2003 tour that included three dates in Japan. The resultant Live in Japan, a compilation of newly-minted songs released this week on K Records, is drenched in that isolation, at once haunting, desperate and uncertain.
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The skies blanketed Macalester’s campus with about a foot of snow on Sunday and Monday. Students spent the days avoiding towing tickets and slippery sidewalks. Photo by Brent Hecht.
The Mac Weekly is an entirely student-produced publication. The opinions expressed in this document are those of its authors and editors, not of Macalester College.
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