HOME |
RSS | 
Mathieu Deflem, a professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina, is offering a class on Lady Gaga:
The synopsis for the course reads: “The central objective is to unravel some of the sociologically relevant dimensions of the fame of Lady Gaga”.
Prof Deflem, 48, who has met the singer, real name Stefani Germanotta, on a number of occasions, said: “We’re going to look at Lady Gaga as a social event. Other people say that Gaga’s the new Madonna. I see it more like there’s people who have this very individual thing. Frank Zappa had it. Prince had it. Miles Davis had it. Jimi Hendrix had it. And Lady Gaga has it.”
Link | Professor’s Website | Photo: Flickr user kate_xo used under Creative Commons license
Previously: The 15 Strangest College Courses in America
Drake University is a private college in Iowa. Pictured above is a logo from its new ad campaign. Do you think that it sends a good message?
The college administration doesn’t see any problem:
However, Drake officials are standing by the D+ campaign — which college officials crafted with outside PR contractors. Defenders of the ad blitz described it as “edgy and intriguing” in a letter to faculty and staff this week. The letter explained that the campaign “was designed to catch the attention of high school students who are bombarded with college and university materials to the point that they are often in information overload and unable to differentiate among the many institutions that have contacted them.”
Link | College Website | Screenshot: Yahoo
Everyone is familiar with the fact that grades in American colleges and universities are prone to “inflation” over time, but the data are much more striking when presented as a graph.
We’ve looked at contemporary grades from over 160 colleges and universities in the United States with a combined enrollment of over 2,000,000 students and historical grades from over 80 schools… The rise in grades in the 1960s correlates with the social upheavals of the Vietnam War. It was followed by a decade period of static to falling grades. The cause of the renewal of grade inflation, which began in the 1980s and has yet to end, is subject to debate, but it is difficult to ascribe this rise in grades to increases in student achievement.
In a companion piece, the authors discuss these trends in detail, compare the sciences to the humanities, and note that the same trend is not evident in community colleges. Of particular interest are links to the data from over 200 colleges and universities. At my college the GPA was 2.7 in the mid-1960s, and is now nearly 3.5.
Link.
TopTenz.net has a list of the ten smallest accredited colleges in the U.S. The largest on the list has 260 students, and the smallest has 38. In the #3 position with 84 students is the Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire:
It is a Roman Catholic college and all students spend one semester in Italy, living in a monastery and studying at the Rome campus, just five miles away from St. Peter’s Basilica. According to the college’s website, students will have “visited over 100 baroque churches, Roman architectural sites, Renaissance palazzos, or catacombs” and “translated over 1,000 lines of Homer, Cicero, or other Classical authors” after four years of study.
Link via The Presurfer | Photo: TopTenz
1. Cy the Cardinal, Iowa State University Cyclones. I have to put this one in here, ‘cause I’m an ISU alum and still like to tailgate it up during football season. So why is a cardinal the mascot of a team named after a force of nature? Because it’s kind of hard to make a mascot out of a tornado, Cy the Cardinal was chosen by students in 1954 to represent the school colors of cardinal and gold. The “Cyclones” moniker came in 1895, when the ISU football team trounced Northwestern and a reporter noted, “”Northwestern might as well have tried to play football with an Iowa cyclone as with the Iowa team it met yesterday.” Photo: ISU Alumni Association
2. Sammy the Banana Slug, University of California Santa Cruz. When the University decided to get into the NCAA game in 1980, it was decided that the school’s mascot would be the venerable sea lion. But students at UC Santa Cruz had grown attached to the colorful slugs that populated the redwoods on campus and had sort of adopted them as an unofficial mascot, so when the university announced their sea lion decision, students rallied together to lobby for the hermaphroditic Ariolimax columbianus. They won, and Sammy has been one of the most recognizable college mascots ever since.
3. The Boilermaker Special, Purdue University. Some background: the first reference to the Boilermaker name came in an 1890s newspaper article that called the Purdue team “Burly Boiler Makers,” which was a nod to their engineering roots. Even so, the university had no official mascot until 1937, when a student suggested a “mechanical man” or something similar as a mascot. The idea snowballed into building a train that could be driven like a car, which showed off the school’s prowess in the engineering realm while giving them a meaningful mascot at the same time. The train would then carry fans to other cities for games, and became known as Boilermaker Specials. Today, Purdue is on Boilermaker Special V and the X-Tra Special VI, a mini version that can go indoors. Purdue also has Purdue Pete, a human Boilermaker who carries around a hammer. Photo from Purdue Reamer Club.
4. Gladys the Fighting Squirrel, Mary Baldwin College in Virginia. The school’s mascot is the squirrel because Mary Baldwin had a squirrel in her family crest. I can’t find a single thing on why they named her Gladys. Any Neatoramanauts know the story? My research did turn up another interesting fact, though: Tallulah Bankhead was a Mary Baldwin grad.
5. Artie the Fighting Artichoke – Scottsdale Community College. The school needed a new mascot in the 1970s, but at the time, the student government was mad at the administration for steering funding toward athletics instead of academics. So they picked three unorthodox mascots and let the students vote. The choices? The Artichokes, the Rutabagas or the Scoundrels. Former college president Art DeCabooter says the artichoke won out because it’s got heart. Ha. Photo from JamesStephanieKayley
6. Boll Weevil, University of Arkansas Monticello. This name comes courtesy of former school President Frank Horsfall, who noted in 1925 that “the only gosh-darned thing that ever licked the South was the boll weevil.”
7. John Poet – Whittier College, California. This one is pretty easy – the school is named after poet and abolitionist John Whittier. The town the college is in is also called Whittier. Richard Nixon is probably Whittier’s most famous Poet (although it has lots of notable alumni, including the actress who played Kimmie Gibler on Full House) – he was an accomplished football, basketball and track runner for Whittier. Photo from Whittier.
8. Speedy the Geoduck, Evergreen State College, Washington. Surely an inspired mascot if I’ve ever heard one. The geoduck (gooey-duck) isn’t a waterfowl, as you might suspect, but a mollusk. It’s native to the Pacific Northwest, which explains why the college chose it as a mascot. Sort of. Also notable: Matt Groening was an Evergreen State Geoduck. Here’s Speedy doing his thing:
9. The Anchormen, Rhode Island College. I’m not even going to lie – I was totally picturing a mascot that looked similar to Ron Burgandy. It turns out by “Anchormen,” they mean “sailors.” Dang. As for the inspiration – one of the nicknames for Rhode Island is the Ocean State, so it really does make sense when you think about it. But I still prefer to think of a mascot running around in a suit and big hair, carrying a microphone and talking about his “guns.”
10. The Student Princes, Heidelberg University, Ohio. Prior to 1926, the team was known as the Cardinals. But then the university’s alumni director saw a movie called The Student Prince, which was about a prince who went to the Heidelberg University in Germany. He was inspired to start calling his students the same thing, and it caught on. At first it was just an unofficial, on-campus thing, but quickly grew to sports writers and the media.
Others that I was interested in but couldn’t find a good backstory on? The Long Beach Dirtbags (baseball only) and the Columbia College Claim Jumpers. What are your favorite weird mascots? I have a friend who was a Fighting Pretzel in high school.
