Students raised questions about the severity of Macalester’s financial situation, the suitability of the college’s mission statement and the efficacy of Macalester’s legislative process at a need-blind debate earlier this week.
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Significant student concern has prompted President Brian Rosenberg to charge the Multicultural Advisory Board with studying the college’s current policies on domestic diversity and developing a coherent philosophy on the issue.
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Gender-blind housing at Macalester is back on the table nearly a year after a blitz of media coverage sparked widespread disagreement and stalled discussions on the issue.
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The Legislative Body (LB) voted down a resolution to urge the Board of Trustees to postpone its vote on need blind admissions at its Tuesday meeting this week.
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In the midst of a campus-wide discussion about the financial constraints of need-blind admissions, Macalester is moving forward with plans to rebuild the fieldhouse and the Janet Wallace Fine Arts Center.
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Twin Cities alumni weighed in on the need-blind debate Monday night, with several alumni expressing concern that Macalester has not made a more extensive fundraising effort specifically for financial aid.
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George Lipsitz, American Studies Department chair at the University of California Santa Cruz, invoked an analogy of a slave rebellion on a ship en route to the Americas in his remarks at Macalester’s fifth annual Diversity Weekend. “It’s not enough to break the chains,” he said, “You have to know how to steer the ship.”
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William Sentell ’02’s update on his blog www.need-blind.com following Tuesday evening’s Resource Planning Committee debate claims that the night’s high point occurred when Jesse Mortenson ’05 “asked everyone in the room who benefits from Macalester’s need-blind admission policy to stand up.” Apparently Sentell still refuses to accept that, while we all have a stake in the need-blind issue, none of us can legitimately claim to be the product of need-blind admissions. We will never be able to retroactively apply a modified policy or determine which of us would have been left in that last discretionary pile.
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When Vijay Prashad was at Macalester on Friday for Diversity Weekend he asked me if I thought that there was a gap between the International Students and the Domestic Students of color. I told him that I did believe that there was, and while explaining to him why I thought so, I realized that much of the reason was systemic. Though Macalester claims that it values academic excellence, internationalism, multiculturalism, and commitment to service, I have to wonder if the institution chooses favorites.
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When the leaves start to fall from the trees and the temperatures dip into the 20s and 30s, many cyclists, especially in Minnesota, struggle with the fact that their bikes will soon lie at the mercy of the melting snow. My pair of sleek, stylish and always sexy Lycra bike shorts that I was sporting only weeks ago have been traded in for sweatpants and a fleece. Bummer, right? Well, not this year. This year I can turn the attention of my newfound free time to the upcoming presidential election and find some solace in the fact that both George W. Bush and John Kerry share the same passion for cycling that I do. It’s well known that both men love to get on a bike and ride for fitness and fun, and personally, I think it’s great for the sport. Their notoriety, along with Lance Armstrong’s record sixth victory in a row at the Tour de France, has skyrocketed the popularity of cycling. But their differences in the saddle are just as pronounced as those on the campaign trail, and may give us real insight into their presidential ability.
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Jacques Derrida, the French thinker infamous for the theory of interpretation known as Deconstruction, died at the end of a year-long struggle with pancreatic cancer this past Saturday. He was 74 years old. Born in Algeria, he was educated at the …cole Normale SupÈrieure in Paris, and taught at the Sorbonne and Yale, among other places. Among the challenging yet broadly influential publications he is known for are Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Limited Inc., and Dissemination.
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Last week, Roland McKay stated in his article “Six Things the Left Can Learn from the Right,” that left-leaning American intellectuals have failed to “articulate a bold alternative vision of America’s role in the world that reaches beyond the platitudes about global peace and justice and addresses the major strategic issues of the day.” However, the six suggestions he generously recommends liberal intellectuals follow if they are to achieve this goal are all either unrealistic or redundant. If liberals were to abide by McKay’s rules of thumb, they would be, well, conservatives.
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The golf teams competed in the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC) Championships last weekend. While overall they were no match for golf strongholds Gustavus, St. Thomas, and St. John’s/ St. Ben’s, the Macalester squads still walked away feeling good about their performances.
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At last weekend’s Macalester-hosted Minnesota-Iowa Border Challenge volleyball tournament, Mac volleyball won nearly all of its matches, losing only to the nationally-ranked Central College Dutch in a five-game heartbreaker.
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With three wins last week, the high-flying women’s soccer team improved its Div. III national ranking to 19th.
The team beat UW-Steven’s Point last Friday 2-0 and St. Olaf by the same score on Sunday night. Then on Tuesday, the Mac women dominated St. Kate’s 6-0. The wins improve the Scots’ conference-leading MIAC record to 8-0 and their overall record to 12-1.
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The Macalester cross country teams got an opportunity to preview the regional racecourse on Saturday at the Dan Huston Invitational in Waverly, Iowa. While there were some good individual performances, both teams came away disappointed with the overall results.
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The idea seemed simple enough: meet Jovana Trkulja at her house, ask her a few questions, arrange for a photo to be taken and regurgitate the results onto the back page of The Mac Weekly with enough time to leaf through my fresh new issue of In Touch.
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From womb to tomb, they say. Well, I couldn’t even get the womb part right. My mother, a French prostitute, had harbored a bad case of the jaundice while pregnant with me. And when I washed up from the shores of Placenta, that yellow-tinted anchor hit me full swing. I came sliding out of the birth canal yellow as a puddle of Mountain Dew. Just as symmetrically circular. Just as unhealthy (psychologically speaking). I learned to smile through the pain. I learned to smile through every conceivable human emotion. My youth was a troubled one.
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One of the first things I noticed upon my arrival at Macalester was the paradisiacal beauty of the campus. The sun welcomed me with its warm rays, the wind spread the sweet perfume of nature in the air and Fall herself bestowed a rainbow of colors to the majestic trees that guard our college like the walls of a fortress. And to add even more liveliness to this little piece of Eden, small brown fluffy squirrels jumped from tree to tree as if lost in the melodious rhythm of an Austrian waltz. What a serene place, I thought! What a heavenly panorama!
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Dynasty Warriors 4 - PlayStation 2
Ever daydream of striding across a vast battlefield, wielding a weapon of great mystical power, killing hordes of uncultured heathens? Even if you haven’t stooped to quite that levels of geekiness, chances are pretty high that you’ll enjoy playing Dynasty Warriors Four, at least for a while.
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The water drops on the car window showed a tiny upside-down world. Telephone poles flashed in front of the corn-rowed sky, and where the ground should have been, was only gray space. How could one be sure one wasn’t going to fall away, with nothing but the clouds to break one’s descent? What were the laws of physics to the will of the gods, in this world?
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To what extent can the cinema function as a confessional art? The question occurred to me a few weeks ago at a screening of Vincent Gallo’s “The Brown Bunny,” a film written, directed, produced, shot and edited by its leading man. Even before seeing the movie, I thought the charges of narcissism leveled against Gallo seemed exaggerated, if not off the mark entirely. After all, this wasn’t the first time an individual attempted so many tasks in a single feature (Steven Soderbergh’s “Schizopolis” is one recent example). Besides, novelists and painters have had total control over their output for as long as their media have existed—and few would deny these media close relationship to cinema. That a man can now make a movie almost single-handedly demands a momentary reverence, not an attack overshadowing timeless questions of artistic intent.
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While many of us associate George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” almost exclusively with the successful musical “My Fair Lady,” which was based on it, the play was a critical and popular success when it debuted in 1916. An excellent production of this scathing satire, coupled with fine acting and a gorgeous set, has recently been brought to Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater. Despite its veneer of quaint English living-room humour, “Pygmalion” strikes a chord with many of us by tackling the ‘Holy Macalester Trinity’ of race, class and gender.
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Deborah Heller ’07 knows a lot about movies. She knows who was in a movie (and not just the main characters), when it was made and most importantly she has a strong opinion about a film’s success or failure. Deborah works at an old movie theater near her home in Seattle, and she is also in MacCinema and you can thank her for getting “Velvet Goldmine” a few weeks ago.
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I had never heard of the band Rogue Wave until I received their CD in my SPO. Out of the Shadow is their debut album, which was just recently re-released by Sub Pop Records this year. Upon first listening, I was optimistic—despite the dark moods of minor keys—Out of the Shadow is a fairly upbeat, happy collection of sufficient 60s-style indie-pop. Rogue Wave is said to be a lot like their label and tour mates The Shins, and Out of the Shadow does sound derivative of The Shins’ debut, Oh, Inverted World (Sub Pop, 2001).
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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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