College Shorts Racial controversy at A&M, Sexual frustration at UPenn

Author: Scott Greene

A&M students post slavery video online

Three white students from Texas A&M University in College Station recently posted a homemade video on YouTube depicting a master and slave scene in which a man in blackface is beaten for not following orders.

The video, titled "The Adventures of Jeraboem," is two minutes long and, as of Monday, Dec. 4, had already been removed from the video-sharing Web site. Texas A&M easily identified the three men who made the video, and Vice President of Student Affairs Dean Bresciani said that his staff has spoken with the offenders.

In the video, a white master ridicules a white student covered in black shoe polish, calling the man "boy." The scene involves a beating and simulated sexual abuse with a banana.

In "An Open Letter to the Aggie Family" on Nov. 7, University President Robert Gates wrote that the video "is not simply an example of poor judgement and insensitivity" but that "it appears to have been purposefully produced to insult and demean."

Texas A&M has fewer than 800 black students in an undergraduate body of 33,400.

-U-Wire


Students discuss sex, drugs on UPenn site

The University of Pennsylvania has joined a small group of Ivy League campuses in embracing a Web site which offers students an alternative to Facebook and the chance to anonymously discuss topics such as sex and drugs.

Launched last month by Columbia University alumnus Jonathan Pappas, the site, named BoredatVanPelt.com after UPenn's library, only allows students who submit their e-mail addresses to register.

The website functions as an anonymous message board and services all niches of a school's social spectrum. Posts range from solicitations for sex to questions on how to get marijuana on campus.

"I'm really sexually frustrated," claimed a Nov. 21 user of UPenn's website, while a Nov. 17 post called all a cappella groups "a waste of SAC funding."

The original website, BoredatButler.com, debuted last February to immediate success. Pappas created similar websites at Stanford, New York University and all of the Ivy League schools except Brown University. BoredatVanPelt is one of nine "bored-at" sites, all of which feature their respective school's library in their URL address.

-The Daily Pennsylvanian


Dartmouth Review photo sparks outrage

Over 500 students, faculty and administrators gathered at Dartmouth University on Wednesday, Nov. 29 to demonstrate after The Dartmouth Review, an independent conservative student newspaper, published a front page photo of an Indian warrior wielding a scalp with the headline, "The Natives are Getting Restless!" a day earlier. The publication intended to ridicule recent complaints by Native American students regarding a series of events seen as racist.

In the fall term, American Indian students protested Homecoming t-shirts showing a knight performing a sex act on an American Indian caricature, and accused fraternity pledges of disrupting a Native American drumming circle on Columbus Day.

"Like an open wound, Dartmouth is hurting - we have all been insulted," College President James Wright told the crowd gathered before Dartmouth Hall.

Dartmouth was originally founded in 1769 as a school for American Indians, and a mission to recruit American Indian students over the past 30 years has resulted in Dartmouth having the largest indigenous student body in the Ivy League, at three percent.

-CNN.com