The faculty voted unanimously Wednesday to reconfigure the current Urban Studies major as a concentration and house it in the Geography department.
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Softball players arriving at Shaw Field on April 4 found the outfield fence completely dismantled and strewn about the field with several broken panels.
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The American Studies department sponsored its first symposium on Friday, April 2. Students heard from contributors to the book Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity, co-edited by American Studies Professor and Chair Duchess Harris.
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This is the first in a three-part series focusing on the eight faculty members who will retire at the end of the year. This week: Roger Mosvick, Communication and Media Studies, and Bernie Raskas, Religious Studies.
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Macalester’s student-run radio station, WMCN, will not be allowed to broadcast during the summer months, said Director of Campus Programs Brian Wagner.
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Brandeis University Professor of American Jewish History Jonathan Sarna presented a lecture on April 1 entitled, “On 350 Years of Jewish Life in America, 1654-2004,” in honor of Rabbi Bernard Raskas, professor of religious studies at Macalester since 1983. Raskas, who has worked as a rabbi and teacher in the Twin Cities area since he first moved here 53 years ago, was honored for his retirement.
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Why are people treating Student of Color concerns as a recent phenomenon? I have stated that this is, at least, a 30-year struggle at Macalester and I have dealt with this daily ever since my first day here.
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It makes perfect, logical sense that allowing gay marriage is “the right thing to do.” Aren’t you sick of talking about it? The arguments are clear—the term “marriage” should evolve with society, there should be separation of church and state, gay people should have the right to pursue happiness and gay couples should have the same benefits as straight couples. So why should Macalester students keep talking about an issue such as this? What good is all this talk about gay marriage anyway?
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We’ve heard it all before—despite the best efforts of the Advancement Office, Mac alums don’t support the college enough financially, which is why Macalester faces budget constraints and lower U.S. News & World Report rankings than many believe we deserve. Our alumni are popularly perceived to be A) disinterested, B) too busy paying off student loans to give anything more to the college, or C) barely able to survive on the meager salaries afforded them by the nonprofits they labor for, let alone contribute to Macalester’s future. The M Club, Macalester’s alumni athletic association, challenges all of those stereotypes.
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Students are often interested in how the college reviews faculty members when making decisions involving tenure and promotion. In particular, students often want to know how important student input is during this process. I hope the following comments will answer questions students might have on this topic.
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I’d like to refute Luke Calhoun’s arguments regarding the Coke boycott, which appeared in the April 2 Mac Weekly. His argument regarding domestic labor is one that campaign workers have been repeatedly confronted with. Yet, to my knowledge, few people at Macalester have actually personally talked to local Coke bottling plant workers, and are merely operating on the assumption that they intuitively know what those workers think. However, many of us have personally spoken with Luis Adolfo Cardona, a Colombian worker, and it is through his testimony and the testimony of other Colombian workers that we have come to understand the situation. Further, if you really support workers locally, then there are a lot of things you can do instead of bashing international workers’ rights campaigns. For example, there’s a transit strike on in the Twin Cities. Why is it that many of the students involved in the Coke boycott showed up to the strike support rally last Saturday, and yet those students who condemn the boycott on domestic labor grounds were nowhere to be seen?
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I would first like to thank Luke Calhoun for his article about the Coca-Cola campaign on campus. The Macalester community should consider the points he raised about the campaign and weigh their validity along with the voices of the Student Labor Action Coalition (SLAC) and other activists on campus working to discontinue our relationship with Coca-Cola. Calhoun suggests going to the www.killercoke.com web site for Coke’s response to the boycott’s allegations, which SLAC has also encouraged students to do in our door-knocking and literature. Everyone on campus should absolutely consider Coke’s responsibility (or alleged lack thereof) for the death of trade unionists in Colombia, and whether or not this company is one that Macalester should have an exclusive contract with.
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The Macalester golf teams had their first competitive meet since last October’s MIAC Championship tournament this past weekend. The meet took place in Waverly, Iowa. The Scots took advantage of the extended weekend to travel down to the Wartburg College Invitational April 9-10. Combating windy and cold weather conditions and a large field of entrants including several other MIAC teams, the Scots were tested early in the spring season.
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It took him almost 13 hours and 582 balls, but under the brilliant Antiguan sun, Brian Lara romped his way into the record books (again) as he smashed a new world record with 400 runs scored in a single test innings. Lara became only the second man after Australia's Donald Bradman to make two test triple centuries when he passed 300 on Sunday. The West Indian Captain also became the first test cricketer to score 400 runs in a single innings. In the process he cracked 43 four and 4 sixes, including a massive straight six to equal the previous record (held by Australian Matthew Hayden) of 380 runs.
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In two meets that were not team-scored, the outdoor track and field teams came through with some solid individual performances over the past few weekends, garnering a number of high-place finishes. On April 3 the Mac track hosted the Hamline Invitational due to ongoing construction on the Pipers’ campus. Anna Gordon ’06 and Koby Hagen ’06 led all Mac athletes, each earning a first-place finish. Gordon took the 3000m crown in 10:50.47 and Hagen continued to excel in the 1500m, winning with a time of 4:54.02. The women’s team also had a large number of second and third-place finishes: right behind Gordon was teammate Mo Mullikan ’04, coming in second with a time in 11:04.58. Kirsten Fristad ’05 and Johanna Shreve ’05 placed well in the 100m hurdles, finishing in second and third, respectively. The other top Mac women were Lisa Ostenson ’06 who got second in the javelin throw and Anna Shamey ’07 who took third in the 800m run.
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Evil English?
The word on the street is that English is spreading around the world in the disguise of globalization, brutally killing minority languages. The massacre has been widely reported (except for in the U.S.; the media here seems to have a tendency to distort the truth . . .) and is harshly condemned by survivors. One of them, French, has created laws in its self-defense to ban English in ads and to forbid the use of dangerous English contaminations such as the word “e-mail” in official documents. On the other side of the North Atlantic, the news has spread quickly among college students. “This is great”—responded an anonymous student—“now we officially have no reason to learn a foreign language!”
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Imagine running and gunning your way around a giant tropical island filled with cunning and well-equipped terrorists and grotesque mutants, all intent on seeing you dead. Now imagine that you had free reign to explore every environment, using terrain and a deadly arsenal to take down each enemy in whatever manner you desire. Now ask yourself this question: Do I care why I’m here?
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You know what? I wish I could sweat the small stuff. And when you say, “no sweat, my pet” nonchalantly, it hurts my feelings. “I’m sweating bullets,” you complain. Bite your tongue, young man. There are people out there with real problems and with real feelings to boot.
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“Yes Dr. Jewels, my art has been commended as being strongly vaginal. Which bothers some men. The word itself makes some men uncomfortable. VAGINA. They don't like hearing it and find it difficult to say. Whereas without batting an eye a man will refer to his ‘dick’ or his ‘rod’ or his ‘Johnson’.” Dr. Jewels cringed and shrank away from Professor M. Body, the notorious “feminist” sculptor. She was gearing up for her power-speech at the conference on “Bodies in Contemporary Society.” She passed by the boxed lunch table and eyed the coy lunch lady, her hairnet sumptuously placed atop her plump and crusty bun. They exchanged looks and an understanding passed between them, as can only pass between two women with one thing on their minds. “Would you care for a box lunch, Professor?” “Why yes, that sounds scrumptious . . . ” Professor Body replied, fingering her ear seductively. The lunch lady said, “Well, could you help me in the back room for a second? There’s a really large jar of special sauce back there that I just can’t handle all by my lonesome.” Professor Body followed the mistress of minced meats into the back room, admiring the way her ample buttocks played together underneath the starched white cafeteria apron . . .
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Forget John and Yoko. Forget Nick and Jessica (until their Christmas variety show, at least). For the world’s “coolest” artistic couple, look no further than the swan-princess and the man who turns Goodyear blimps in a football field into a critique of masculinity: Björk and Matthew Barney.
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Does real porn not do it for you anymore? Are the bikini-clad Maxim girls nothing but airport magazine stand eye candy? Do you find that your appetite for sexy, realistic mermaid art is gradually exerting its influence more and more in your daily life? Well, now there’s hope: Epilogue.net.
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Unlike my other favorite bands I cannot recall the instant at which The Books struck. Rather than the impetus of single moment, The Books embody the sequences of memory. Personally, statements like the one above step outside the boundaries of popular music. Popular music can be forever expanding and indefatigable, however it has yet to escape the present moment of thought. The theme might be angst or love but inevitably pop music channels its theme through instances and particular moments. This is the accessibility of pop music in its ability to create or recreate mood and feeling.
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Recently Macalester has been inundated with advertisements for events with “spring” in the title, and I’ve been seeing lots of first-years and transfer students getting confused about the abundance of shows that are occurring during the upcoming festive April weekends, especially the ones beginning with “spring.”
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The streamlined melancholia of the recently released full-length Misery is a Butterfly reveals a musical evolution for the New York-based, multiethnic rock trio Blonde Redhead. Fronted alternately by the semi-intelligible Japanese ultra-soprano Kazu Makino and the nasally Italian Amadeo Pace (identical twin drummer Simone Pace rounds out the band), Blonde Redhead’s first albums from the mid-’90s were favorably compared to the Sonic Youth. Sonic Youth’s music, a shotgun marriage between punk rock and art school experimentalism, often eschews melody and structure in favor of erratic guitar bursts and general noisiness. Misery retains little of the purposeful dissonance and unpredictability of no-wavers like Sonic Youth. Instead, Blonde Redhead offers up a more traditional, internally consistent album of lush, indulgent—even delicate—songs that shimmer like polished pennies.
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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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