This Week at College: BU Isn't That Desperate for PSY's Money
Never change, HuffPost.
Welcome to our weekly round-up of the news of note from Boston’s college campuses, because, hey, it’s the greatest four years of someone’s life right now. We’ll be bringing you a collection of quirky tales from our many fine institutions of higher learning. In our second installment, we check in on the Harvard cheating scandal, BU debunks some PSY-related rumors, and an MIT columnist has some #realtalk with his school’s freshmen.
Drew Faust wishes students wanted to learn Checking in on the Harvard cheating scandal, we find that Harvard President Drew Faust has given The Crimson one of only a few interviews on the topic this week. She, unsurprisingly, wishes students cared a bit more about learning itself. “I think the world puts those pressures so clearly on students that we need to think of ways to counteract that with an emphasis on how important the act of learning and the substance of learning is in itself,” Faust tells the paper. She also remains glad that Harvard took the P.R. hit in order to get a conversation started. “People have written widely about it in ways that I think are very important.” [The Crimson]
BU wants everyone’s money. Perhaps you read that Boston University was hoping to hit up South Korean rap star and famed invisible horse rider PSY for some cash. PSY, you may remember, attended BU for about a minute, a fact which came to light shortly after PSY himself became a viral superstar here in the states. If you actually read these stories, however, you discovered that BU was actually just asking all its alumni for money, and PSY is, presumably, included in that group. Thus Huffington Post style clickable headline is born. Anyway, BU would like you to know they are not that desperately band-wagoning. “[It’s] no different [for PSY] than it is for the other 300,000 graduates we have or alumni in the sense that we’re just trying to encourage everyone to support the university,” Scott Nichols, senior vice president for Development & Alumni Relations, tells the the Daily Free Press. [Daily Free Press]
MIT Freshman sound delightful MIT freshmen were submitted to quite an ego check after one of them got a little competitive in a ping-pong game with a student newspaper columnist. Writes Feras Saad in a column for The Tech:
I was involved in an intense game with a group of freshmen when we lost track of whose turn it was to serve. After some arithmetic to clear up the confusion, one freshman declared, “I am a math major,” with a haughty smirk sprawled across his face.
I was quite puzzled as to why this person would use simple addition to brag about his aptitude in mathematics
Saad reminds freshmen that they beat out many extraordinarily qualified applicants to get a place in the school, largely out of luck. He’s not just trying to be a downer here. “The point is not to downplay the merits of our undergraduates, but rather to highlight what genuinely does matter: how MIT students make use of the remarkable facilities at their disposal.” [The Tech]
Social Media vests are so hot right now And in other MIT news, in case you missed it, a vest invented by some MIT Media Lab designers went viral on the web this week. The vest inflates remotely when someone likes your activity on Facebook, giving one tangible feedback for online affirmation while also guaranteeing the wearer a dearth of actual physical affirmation.
