College Shorts - 4/8/10

UCLA celebrates “the Dude” at Lebowski Fest

A man dressed as Jesus swilling White Russians and bowling strikes was not out of place in Los Angeles on April 2-3, at the Annual Lebowski Fest. The festival celebrates the 1998 cult film “The Big Lebowski.”

The festival started in Louisville, Kent. in 2002, and has since expanded all over the United States and Great Britain, including the event held at UCLA.

The weekend is filled with trivia contests, costumes, and of course, White Russians, which is the drink of choice of the main character in the film, “the Dude.”

Lebowski Fest has been featured in The New York Times and Playboy magazine, but has altered little from the small event for friends that began eight years ago.

“It’s basically the exact same event that we started with,” said Will Russell, one of the co-founders. “All of it is pretty much an inside joke. That’s the fun of it. We all get it, and we’re all into it.”

—Daily Bruin

Colleges offer students some unusual courses

Although fulfilling requirements takes up the bulk of a college student’s time, some colleges offer some alternative electives that draw the interest of students on campus, as well as the national media.

Reed College offers the bizarre “Underwater Basket Weaving” as part of the non-credit Paideia Festival of Learning, and two other colleges offer similar courses. Cornell University also has an interesting outdoors course — Tree Climbing — for physical education credit, and Centre College had a Modern Language course titled “The Art of Walking,” which encourages students to ponder Immanuel Kant’s work while walking through nature preserves, battlefields and cemeteries.

Other quirky courses include Georgetown University’s “Philosophy and Star Trek,” Frostburg State University’s “The Science of Harry Potter,” Stanford University’s “iPhone Application Programming” and Alfred University’s “Maple Syrup, The Real Thing.”

—Huffington Post

UVM questions concept of academic objectivity

Students and faculty at the University of Vermont are examining academic objectivity and whether it is essential in the classroom.
Professor of Geography Pablo Bose said, “I don’t believe in the idea of objectivity. I don’t think that you can remove your own perspective on something.”

However, he added that providing more than one framework with which to analyze information is necessary.

“Classrooms should be spaces where there are multiple perspectives that are entertained and debated and discussed.”

Despite the inherent opinions in his lectures and the lectures of his colleagues, he insisted that they are not “trying to form a revolution or something.”

Students notice that many of their professors lean liberal, but they see this as a function of where they decided to go to school. Senior Jae Vick does not see professorial opinions as a problem.

“I think it’s impossible [to be objectve],” she said. “I think that if you’re trying to be or pretending to be, that it’s more dishonest than saying, ‘I have a bias.’”

— The Vermont Cynic