Eric the Red

I got this email today from the University of Maryland police asking students for assistance in identifying someone who is allegedly guilty of “Disorderly Conduct, Destruction of
Property and Civil Disturbance”. The riot occured after the 2006 Terp Womens Basketball Championship. Here is a picture of the offender:

This picture is teeming with property destruction! And who at the Terps riot could NOT be guilty of “Civil Disturbance” and “Disorderly Conduct”? I would wager that this request is a desperate attempt by the University to show off its new riot policy. Under the new policy, a student my be expelled if their name appears in a police report as a suspected rioter. While I think that rioting over basketball is idiotic, this policy is even more so: it presumes guilt.

The changes were adopted after some students were given probation before judgement rather than a conviction. Under the old policy, a conviction in court was required for a student to be subject to disciplinary action. In this instance, I agree with Christian Sullivan, who was given probation before judgement:

“This is just one more stupid act to fix the mistakes they made,” Sullivan said. “It’s just a bunch of kids trying to celebrate together to show their unity and love of [the] school. Since we don’t have traditions and nothing to do afterwards, that’s how we end up in a group on Route 1.”

I am all for traditions, but one can oly rub Testudo’s nose so many times. How about a decent post-game on the iconic frat row or Mckeldin mall?

Dining services recently proposed a new meal plan that effectively changes the value of $1 to approvimately 398% less than $1. Interesting fuzzy math, ya?

Consider the following:

“The A La Board meal plan introduces a five-level system, with the lowest level costing $1,545 and the highest costing $2,045. Level Two has the most similar cost as the currently most popular “Campus Plan,” at $1,645 a semester. Under the Level Two plan, if students wished to purchase food outside the diners, at the Stamp Student Union food court for example, they would be subject to a 398 percent markup. That is, with a cost of $1,645, you are only able to purchase $415 worth of food at the court. Even under the best-case scenario financially, which involves eating every single meal at the Diner, you would be able to buy $1,221 worth of food, still $46 less than the current Campus Plan provides.”

I am going to look over the “official” numbers myself after a couple of days due to exams and a hectic work schedule.

One of the atrocities this administration has committed against its students is the relentless hike in so-called “mandatory fees”in order to hide the cost of a semester of “education” from the state. Since these fees are assessed seperately from tuition, they school can claim to be affordable. Most of these fees are charged to students who live on campus.

Since the University does not itemize these fees on the tuition bill, the witch knows what they are. A friend of mine who lives on campus paid $585.50 in unspecified “mandatory fees” (on top of $70 to make per-minute phone calls and $42 “tech fee”). His other costs were:

• $1645.50 for the meal plan, which allows a little more than $1,000 to actually spend on food, subject to the University’s takings.
• $3283 for tuition
• $2392 for on-campus housing

Note that I live off campus and use a Terrapin Express account, where I get $1 to spend for every dollar I deposit. Also, the balance rolls over between each year/semester, while the meal plan balance vanishes the day after finals end. If one lives in freshman campus housing, one cannot rely exclusively on Terrapin Express, so the campus meal plan along with its forced budgeting is required.

Now the the Terps basketball season is down the drain, I guess they would like to brag about being the biggest waste of money in higher education? Perhaps I should write a book about my time here: “Mugged by the Terp” to describe my experiences with the exponentially higher costs for an exponentially lower education?

I recently completed my “senior survey” as part of my graduation paperwork. The Clark School of Engineering requires all seniors to rate their experiences while completing their degrees. I wanted to share my feelings on quality:

The best kept secret at the University of Maryland, College Park is how horrible the teaching at the math department really is. The textbooks are unreadable and the professors cannot communicate. I only had two (out of 7 courses) who could speak english clearly. My chemistry course was three hours of titrating per week….sound fun? Richard Feynman once stated that if one could not present physics in a way that allowed a freshman to “get it”, one has no business teaching it. The physics department could use some lessons from Dr. Feynman. Don’t erase the board while writing on it!!! You know who you are!!!

First of all, budget cuts in favor of groundskeeping and more research faculty ensured that the electives I was interested in were eliminated. As a result, I switched majors. For those who don’t know, CORE is a set of liberal arts courses that are categorized so students may choose which to take. Personally, I feel that CORE is too dispersed to be meaningful, although I was able to get some easy As and Bs.

The engineering school has no notion of career paths. This makes ‘elective selection’ (or lack thereof) a big issue for me. In spite of all the research and sports achievements that have been made over the last 3 years, the quality of education has fallen dramatically.

On the plus side, we have Fair Trade coffee, rennovated sports arenas and neat grounds for us to be mugged in! GO TERPS: ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM!!!

I have commented on political bias in the past, with some guest commentary from Peter Kirstein.

How does one detect bias throug the actions of a university? Its easy when releases a guide to help viewers of the State of the Union address determine if the President believes what he is saying, is being fed through a microphone, etc. Thats exactly what the University of Maryland, College Park did today in an official press release.

Some of these tips include:

Watch for hypervigilance in the eyes, excessive grimaces, the furrowed brow that contrasts with the attempted smile, the lip-licking that signifies nervousness, the auditory attending that causes people to think he is being fed his speech through an earpiece (as opposed to the visual scanning that people who read their speeches on a monitor often display)- all of these indicate a man under pressure and in psychic danger.

The piece was written by certified movement analyst Karen Kohn Bradley.

A screenshot of the article is here [JPEG, 291 kb]. A higher resolution copy is here [JPEG, 560 kb].

A list University experts on the State of the Union address is here.

Where is the pet psychic to read his dogs mind?

Here are the long-awaited photos of the 2001 UMCP basketball riot

These photos are form the ACC Championship Riot of 2004. Enjoy:

Next on Riot Review: readers will be able to see pictures from the famous 2001 NCAA Basketball riots that occured in College Park after the Terps lost the national championship. Of course, students rioted even whether the Terps won or lost, but we don’t care about that do we?

As a follow-up to UMCP Riot Review, Part I, here are pictures from the basketball riot of January 2005.

The crowd near the regents drive parking garage.

The crowd was more or less concentrated on Frat Row. See the videos below for some clips. When the crowd was forced off frat row, guess where it went?

Revelers moved to Route 1, less than a block from the edge of campus.

Since the crowd on the street was so large, this guy decided to perch on a street sign

The cops, clearing the street once. They did this two times that night.

Cops of horseback.

Now for some video:

Rock-n-Roll, Part 2 on Frat Row. This was banned by the University administration at football and basketball fames.

F*CK Duke, on Frat Row. Yes, Dule sucks……

F*CK You, J.J., on Frat Row. So does JJ Reddick….

Since the spring semester is about to begin, I will post various photos of the NCAA/ACC basketball riots I was fortunate enough to experience during my stay here at the University of Maryland, College Park.

First, we will start with the riot of February 2005:

BROOM POWA!!!

The crowd….

The cops….

The horses….

The big fire of the evening….

More of the lame-old fire…

The annoying helicopter….

This isn’t really a riot in the classical, and you will have to wait until the end to see what I mean. In the meantime, the riot of January, 2005 will appear here tomorrow.

Is my university biased? This picture makes me think so:

Posters, reading “Who dies for Bush lies?”

These posters have been on display in a window of the campus administration building for more than a month in a high traffic area of the campus.

When a campus condemns a students criticism of the left while actively patriotic displays, it is obvious that a bias exists. But is academic freedom at risk?

The administration did not punish Diamondback cartoonist Daniel Friedman when he published a cartoon mocking the death of Rachel Corrie. The university did refer to the cartoon and the paper as “an embarrassment”.

There is a campus policy prohibiting the display of flags for “safety” reasons. This policy was used to prevent such displays during the first Gulf War in 1991.

I recently read this article by UMCP Junior philosophy major Yarden Catz, who targets David Horowitz. Horowitz promotes an academic bill or rights, which is supposed to prevent politically-motivated grading and hiring.

For instance, a right wing student (such as myself) gets into a disagreement with my professor in a class discussion by saying that Marxism is bad. Since the professor disagrees with me, he may fail me. Or if I, as a professor of history find evidence that a key first-hand account of a slave is really a collection of second hand acounts, I could be fired by my left-wing administration.

Says Catz:

“Horowitz tries to motivate the need for this bill by a series of junk studies that “show” the overwhelming majority of professors are leftists. Upon closer look, it turns out these studies surveyed only select departments such as gender/women’s studies departments, English and others. Of course, nobody bothered to check the political leaning of people teaching in business schools or various engineering departments, where I assure you Marx is not generally cited with enthusiasm during coffee break. And as Horowitz knows, his “study” will yield much more useful results for his hypothesis if he picks on Berkeley or NYU rather than, say, Oral Roberts or other conservative schools.

Catz continued:

“The bill also claims that “academic institutions … should maintain a posture of organizational neutrality with respect to the substantive disagreements that divide researchers on questions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry.” This principle can amount to nothing less than an end to any sort of substantive argument put forth by any academic institution.”

While Catz says that a academic bill of rights would end substantive argument, I disagree. A bill or rights wold protect students from politically-motivated punishment from their professors for expressing an unpopular conservative point of view. Leftist professors such as Nicholas de Genova, Ward Churchill and Peter Kirstein would as well. The bottom line: policy defending academic expression benefit everyone and harm no one. Lets clean the mud off our ivory towers and make it happen.

Joe Wilson is visiting campus on Wednesday at 8. I’ll arrange to get some photos and a recording for a little project of mine.