Interested in food, music, and a good cause? Come to the HOINA Spaghetti Dinner tomorrow evening to satisfy these three interests and more.
The price of $7 includes dinner, dessert, and live instrumental music, ranging from a viola quartet to traditional Indian kirtans.
Homes of the Indian Nation (HOINA) is a nonprofit organization which runs an orphanage and school in Andhra Pradesh, India. All proceeds from the fundraiser will directly benefit the orphans themselves.
Learn more about the event after the jump.
Tonight at 8:30, several Penn State landmarks will go dark in celebration of the fourth annual Earth Hour.
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) started the Earth Hour tradition in 2007 to recognize the climate change caused by excessive energy consumption. International landmarks, such as the Eiffel Tower and Golden Gate Bridge, will go unlit for one hour tonight as a symbolic gesture.
Participating Penn State locales include Old Main, the Lion Shrine, the Nittany Lion Inn, and the IST Building, reports Penn State Live.
Tonight, turn off the lights and power down the computer. Sit down and talk to your roommates and friends. Sing songs. Gaze at the moon. Go for a walk. Be grateful for the ample electricity available in America, and appreciate your general existence.
Hip-hop duo Chiddy Bang will perform at Sigma Chi fraternity on Thursday, April 8. The show is part of Sigma Chi’s week-long philanthropy, Derby Days, and proceeds will benefit the Huntsman Cancer Foundation.
Chiddy Bang is well-known for sampling indie artists in their mashups. Check out “Opposite of Adults,” featuring beats by MGMT. Tickets will be $10 and available for sale sometime next week. See the Facebook event for more details.
Michael Leahy, recovering porn addict, says “yes.”
At a presentation titled “Porn Nation,” Leahy spoke last night at Eisenhower Auditorium about living in a hypersexual culture.
He explained that pornography teaches men to expect dominance in sexual relationships. According to porn, women must be sexy, submissive, and ready to satisfy men at all times.
This warped version of reality subsumes the minds of porn-watchers, whether they realize it or not. Men enter relationships expecting sex-on-demand. And if they don’t get it, Leahy says they watch more porn, and the cycle continues until women become mere pleasure machines to the porn enthusiast.
The Spring Creek Canyon area consists of 1,800 acres currently owned by the PA Department of Corrections. Everyone seems to want a piece, and negotiations have stumbled along for the past few years. Now, a final agreement has been reached.
Read on for the full details, as well as the controversy behind it.
Seven months ago, Penn State launched a “strategic plan” to deal with the challenges of operating a research university in the worrisome economic climate.
One facet of this plan seeks to ease the transition for Commonwealth students transferring to University Park. The University has formed a steering committee to improve these student transitions and has increased the flow of information to Commonwealth students considering such a transition. Read on for more comments and details.
Honors colleges offer the resources of a large research university and the community of a small liberal arts college. See any honors college brochure for a similar pitch.
Over 70 such establishments have appeared throughout the country, and their numbers have grown quickly since the mid-1990s, says the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The South Carolina Honors College ranks among the best in the nation. Mary Anne Fitzpatrick, a university dean, explains that the honors college “really attempts to focus on providing that elite, liberal-arts-college experience.”
South Carolina honors students live in a separate dormitory, complete a senior thesis, and enroll in seminar-esque honors courses. This neatly parallels our Schreyer Honors College, my personal favorite among such institutions.
According to the National Collegiate Honors Council, most honors colleges use the “best of both worlds” recruitment pitch. Such a pitch rings true. The Schreyer Honors College makes an excellent Penn State education even better.
ARHS and UPUA have accepted the fact that Penn Staters drink. With the help of new information cards, they’re striving to get students home safely.
The cards display phone numbers for three taxi services, the number for the campus escort service, and a miniature CATA bus schedule. The front and back are shown here.
Steve Roberts, associate vice president of Association of Residence Hall Students (ARHS), conceived the idea of the cards in light of the recent State Patty’s Day. We contacted Mr. Roberts for an explanation of these cards.
“The cards are printed on cardstock and thus are durable. Additionally, they are not in the traditional format of a flyer or larger piece of paper which would typically be thrown out. The cards are about the size of a normal business card and slide easily into your wallet or purse so that when students go out it’s not a hassle to bring it with them.”
In addition, he says that several bars and apartments have already requested information cards to distribute to students.
At my floor meeting last night, my RA passed around a stack of these cards. My floormates agreed that while the front side may prove useful, the reverse side is laughably illegible due to the minuscule font size.
This initiative is a great idea, and I hope it succeeds. However, a bit of advice for the lost drunkard in need of transportation: call a taxi, don’t wait for the bus. It’s highly probable that you can’t decipher the font.
Late last week, we asked if the pendulum was swinging on State Patty’s. Our answer? A loud, albeit slurred, “NO!”
State College police handled roughly 365 calls related to State Patty’s Day. University Police dealt with another 55 calls. This wasn’t your average Saturday.
Penn Live reports that the arrest count doubled from last year, jumping from 80 to 160 arrests. Between 6 pm Friday and 6 pm Sunday, Centre LifeLink EMS responded to 58 calls.
As you may know, the 36th annual Movin’ On is happening on April 17. As you may not know, the musical festival has a rich history starting in the yonder year of 1974.
Back in the day, the East Halls Residence Association held a primordial Movin’ On at the fields by Beaver Stadium, where students jammed to area bands and watched W.C. Fields and Marx Brothers movies. The event was then called “Good Feelings ’74,” a name which I definitely dig.
In 1975, the event’s organizers joined the Association of Residence Hall Students (ARHS) and tremendously expanded the festival. Each day of the week, a different group of dorms presented a day of activities, collectively known as “Penn State’s Greatest Week of Entertainment.” The week culminated in the epic day-long Movin’ On concert (for the record, the phrase “Movin’ On” acknowledges the seniors who are “movin’ on” after graduation). Eventually the week-long event evolved into a two-day audio extravaganza.
The organizers extended Movin’ On to a two-day concert in 1976. A local radio station played a live broadcast of the acts, and Movin’ On raised money for the Volunteer Service Center for the second year in a row. Orleans played in ’77; Gregg Allman played in ’78.
Again, Movin’ On outlives The Spill Canvas and The White Tie Affair. Check out the Facebook event, and get ready to “move on” this April.
On their website/newspaper/blog, the Huffington Post recently launched a “College” section, where they publish the work of selected college media outlets. Why am I telling you this? Because they selected Onward State as a partner!
Our “THON in Review” article appeared on the Huffington Post yesterday, much to everyone’s delight. To get hyped for this new affiliation, we’ve added a HuffPo widget on the right side of our page.
This new phase of our bloghood is big news for us here at Onward State. @Writers, we’ll have to step up our game. Davis’ so-called “duopoly” has erupted into a monopolistic competition, so we’ll have to differentiate our product in order to succeed. @Readers, post exemplary comments; the whole world may see them!
In case any of you fine folks really dig the Huffington Post, answer their call for citizen journalists. They’ll be recruiting “about 30 students, both photojournalists and videographers, to cover college issues…. There will be weekly assignments, training events, crowdsourcing projects, and most importantly, daily access to HuffPost editors.” If interested, click here to apply.
In 2007, the National Study of Student Hazing found that 68 percent of women in Greek life experience hazing before joining their sororities. Penn State is not immune from this barbaric behavior. Serious reports of hazing have recently been reported at Penn State Altoona.
ABC News reports that “Joanne” pledged a Penn State Altoona sorority and suffered from severe hazing. Her potential sisters made her clean the kitchen floor with her fingernails. They screamed about her worthlessness, threw her against brick walls, and forced her to drink black, dirty water. When Joanne finally quit, the girls keyed her car and left scathing messages on her Facebook profile.
Along with most colleges, Penn State Altoona strictly prohibits hazing, yet it happens nonetheless. Hazing frequently includes labeling areas of fat on girls’ bodies with marker and “boob ranking,” in which girls are rendered topless and ordered by their breast sizes.
Obviously, this is awful behavior, and the fact that it occurs causes me to question the decency of my fellow college students. Hazing has probably occurred for a long time, but why have young women recently become so violent and hateful? I look to overzealous feminism and the bawdiness of reality TV for answers.
Sororities should bond through unity and accomplishment, not mental trauma. To any hazers out there, remember the moral pillars that support your establishments.
In 1986, Gene Baur took a stand against the exploitation of our fellow animals. He founded Farm Sanctuary, an organization which promotes animal welfare laws, rescues farm animals from slaughter, and shelters these animals in upstate New York and northern California.
Mr. Baur recently authored Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds about Animals and Food, a national bestseller.
He and his organization strive to improve conditions in factory farms and slaughterhouses. They recently won legislative victories in California, which has since banned various confinement systems and outlawed the force-feeding of ducks and geese to produce foie gras.
A dynamic orator, Gene Baur will speak tonight at 7 pm in the Kern Building. See the Facebook event for more details. Herbivores, omnivores, and carnivores alike should attend this event. You may gain an ethical perspective about what’s really on your plate.
A quartet of wealthy alumni just donated $2.5 million to the Penn State University Libraries. This gift set a new donation record and will support the Pattee Library’s new Knowledge Commons.
A major upcoming renovation, the Knowledge Commons will act as an information technology center within the library. Jeanette and John R. McWhirter and Ann and Peter G. Tombros are the generous donors behind these funds. Read the Penn State Live article for the details regrading their fascinating (and financially rewarding) career trajectories.
In addition to the joint gift of $2.5 million, the Tombros couple has offered $1.4 million to improve the University Libraries’ collections of Classics and Greek Literature.
This fortunate turn of events is excellent news for our libraries. May the manifestations of these gifts expand our knowledge as university students.
Those of you who read the Collegian on Tuesday probably read about Dennis Shea, head of the Department of Health Policy and Administration and staunch objector to State Patty’s Day. For you devout Onward Staters, you may know Dr. Shea better as the prolific commenter “GTWMA.”
To the average college student, GTWMA may seem like a stringent fun-sucker beamed to the future from the temperance days of yore. But when compared to the shamrock-covered sloppy messes drunk at 10 am, the enlightened Dr. Shea wins the allegiance of many.
Dr. Shea has gained a following; the End The “State Patty’s Day” Tradition Facebook group has amassed over 1,185 members (although the “official” State Patty’s Day group has 9,390 members, roughly a quarter of the student body).
Read on for more.
