This weekend proved that you only need a handful of protesters to close down Bank of America.

“Bank of America, bad for America!” shouted 14 protesters from Occupy Our Homes DC at the Bank of America on the corner of Wisconsin and Dumbarton last Saturday. The bank was forced to close operations for its entire business day. At about 8:45 a.m., the protesters struck, putting “foreclosed” signs on the bank’s doors and caution tape on the bank’s ATMs. The protest was one of eleven Bank of America Occupy protests, each targeting a different branch in the district.

“This has been a mobilization to shut down all the Banks of America that will be open today,” Ben Johnson, a sophomore at American University and a member of the Occupy Our Homes team, said. The protest is for Michael Vanzant, a reverend who formed Faith Temple, the first LGBTQ church in DC for people of color. Vanzant is allegedly being evicted.

Vanzant’s house served as more than just a house. It was a community center, a shelter for the homeless, and a hospice for HIV AIDS patients. Vanzant started having trouble with the Bank of America a year ago, when he fell behind in payments due to a disability.

“He tried to call ahead and was like, yo I’m going to on disability pay because I hurt myself, so I’d like to negotiate with you guys now before I fall behind,” Johnson said. “They were like nope, we can’t help you until you fall behind. After missing one or two payments and refusing to negotiate with him, despite the fact that he was good on all the money, they started to try to kick him out of his house.”

“It’s bullshit, get off it, our lives are not for profit.”

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In a letter to readers, Eagle Editor in Chief Charlie Szold announced that the American University student paper will switch to a weekly, tabloid format this semester.

Previously, the Eagle published a twice weekly broadsheet-style paper.

Because it fell short of repaying a $100,000 University loan last year, Szold wrote, the paper had to slash its budget in half. (Although the Eagle is technically an independent paper, it still receives University loans to cover some costs, such as printing.)

“We will be working throughout the year to permanently fix our financial problems,” Szold wrote. “Furthermore, The Eagle will be working to fix any systemic flaws that led to these problems.”

In the comments, Szold added that the cuts were not related to recent boycotts against the paper.

Earlier this week, students at American University vandalized copies of The Eagle, its main student newspaper, over a column by student Alex Knepper in which he calls date rape “an incoherent concept.” Anonymous students littered hallways with Eagle copies taken out of their stands and hung a sign that read “NO ROOM FOR RAPE APOLOGISTS.”

In the column, Knepper explains that feminists are sucking all the passion out of sex by pushing for “a bedroom scene in which two amorphous, gender-neutral blobs ask each other ‘Is this OK with you?’ before daring to move their lips any lower on the other’s body.” He continues:

“For my pro-sex views, I am variously called a misogynist, a rape apologist and — my personal favorite — a “pro-date rape protofascist.”

Let’s get this straight: any woman who heads to an EI party as an anonymous onlooker, drinks five cups of the jungle juice, and walks back to a boy’s room with him is indicating that she wants sex, OK? To cry “date rape” after you sober up the next morning and regret the incident is the equivalent of pulling a gun to someone’s head and then later claiming that you didn’t ever actually intend to pull the trigger.

“Date rape” is an incoherent concept. There’s rape and there’s not-rape, and we need a line of demarcation. It’s not clear enough to merely speak of consent, because the lines of consent in sex — especially anonymous sex — can become very blurry. If that bothers you, then stick with Pat Robertson and his brigade of anti-sex cavemen! Don’t jump into the sexual arena if you can’t handle the volatility of its practice!”

Knepper also expounded on how feminists want to ban “gendered thrills” like cross-dressing. In the comments section below his column, Knepper wrote that the article had gone through five rounds of edits to remove “remove remarks deemed too inflammatory” before it went to print.

AU student K. Travis Ballie, a feminist and LGBT activist, told Amanda Hess of the Washington City Paper section The Sexist that the vandalism, which included copies flung at the door of the AU Eagle‘s office, is unsurprising given similar Eagle pieces that had appeared and inflamed campus tempers recently.

“The Eagle has repeatedly refused for months to show adequate sensitivity, compassion, and common decency to the well-being of rape survivors on campus and is complicit in promoting a rape culture where survivors are blamed for the crimes of sexual assault perpetrators,” she wrote in an e-mail.

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Makin’ bank

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently released its database of executive compensation at colleges and universities for the 2007-08 school year and Georgetown’s own John DeGioia isn’t doing too poorly for himself.

With a total compensation of $642,582 (that’s $607,939 in pay and 34,643 in benefits), DeGioia was the 63rd highest paid private university president in the country in 2007-08, according to the Chronicle‘s data.  That salary was a $50,965 upgrade from what he received during the 2006-07 school year.

But DeGioia was outdone in the District by the president of American University, Cornelius Kerwin, who was the fifth highest paid private university president with $1,419,339 in total compensation.  The real record-holder, though, was George Washington University’s former president, Stephen J. Trachtenberg.  With a total compensation of $3.7 million, Trachtenberg was the high paid current or former university president by a margin of $2 million.

Photo by Lexie Herman.

The Princeton Review just released its annual rankings, and Georgetown got some
real nice accolades (registration required):

• Georgetown was named the eighth best college town, up two from last year’s 10th place showing.
• We also moved up two place to number eight on the rankings of politically active student bodies.
• We’re number seven in terms of popularity of study abroad programs, a new ranking for us.

As strong as our showing is, it’s hard not to get a little crosstown envy. George Washington University was ranked first for most politically active students, second for best college town, and eighth for best dorms; American University was crowned second for most politically active students, seventh for best college town and 19th for best career services.

As far as D.C. schools go, it feels an awful lot like we’re playing third-fiddle in the Princeton Review’s eyes…

No T-Pain for you, AU

Last week, the Voice‘s Sean Quigley had some harsh words for Spring Concert performer T-Pain (to refresh your memory, some of those words were: underwhelming, lackluster, repetitive, tiresome…). But at least we had the chance to experience the auto-tuned wonder, as disappointing as he may have been. Our peers at American University weren’t even that lucky.

The Eagle reports:

The T-Pain concert, scheduled for 8 p.m. [Monday], has been cancelled, according to Student Union Board Director Josh Offsie.

T-Pain was forced to cancel the concert due to laryngitis, according to a source familiar with the situation.

These watchdogs of democracy are busy reporting important national news

American University’s The Eagle doesn’t have a reputation for being umm… any good at all. Wrote City Paper back in August:

One [AU] writing professor joked that his colleagues spend their end-of-semester party opening a random issue and doing shots for each grammatical error …. In some cases the paper even quotes its own opinion columnists as sources.

Ouch! So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the author of the article reporting that the seat in ANC 3D reserved for a student representative is vacant clearly didn’t have a clue as to what the heck an ANC-thingy does.

Still, the fact that The Eagle staff has only just realized (or worse, only just reported) that they don’t have a rep on the ANC is truly frightening. Seriously guys, elections were in November! And another thing! The article downplays the importance of an ANC to an absurd degree:

The Advisory Neighborhood Commission’s Ward 3D commission – part of the governing body for D.C. neighborhoods – meets once a month and discusses issues that could be pertinent to AU students, but the committee has no AU student representation.

Issues that could be pertinent to AU students? I seem to remember that there are undiscovered caches of chemical weapons still buried on your campus leftover from WWI, when you were a chemical weapons testing site for the army.

The Army has been cleaning up chemical weapons buried in AU’s neighborhood since the nineties. But ANC 3D Commissioner Thomas Smith (who is currently AU students’ only representative on ANC 3D—two of AU’s dorms lie in his district, 02) worries that there’s nothing safe about the way American University is going about it (more to come in this week’s Voice).

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Are you part of the freshman spillover that every year dominates one floor of Village C East? There are some American University students who totally get you. This fall semester, American University faced a housing crisis and as part of their solution, housed 50 to 60 student in the Georgetown Holiday Inn on Wisconsin Avenue.

Had no idea? It’s no wonder. American University delivered these students, who you might have expected to see trekking the two miles to their classes by bike or on foot, from Georgetown to their Mass. Avenue campus by car or by limo nearly every day for the entire semester. But don’t feel too jealous:

“The living condition has been so bad,” says [Shuo] Li, 21. “The study environment-you know, this is a hotel, so we don’t have much room. And the light here in the room is not so good.”

The guys’ room has a circular wooden desk that has barely enough room for a laptop and a book. So they’ve improvised: In another part of the room, they’ve set up an ironing board that holds a lamp and a cup of pens.

Worse yet, friends of the Holiday Inn residents claim their hoity-toity living has made them adverse to the main campus’ “binge-drinking culture”–the horror!

Peta2 released its annual list of vegetarian-friendly schools this week, and we’re on it. In the grand tradition of the Jacksonville game, we made it, but barely, scraping into 10th place:

Placing in the top 10 for the second year in a row, Georgetown has continued to win rave reviews from students and faculty alike. Some of the many highlights include barbecued veggie-riblet sandwiches, Asian sesame lo mein, and vegan tacos. No wonder Georgetown sits comfortably among the most prestigious universities in the country!

I haven’t seen such breathless copywriting since the season finale of Mad Men, but hurray for Leo’s.

What’s up at first-place American University? I’m sure the AU Eagle is taking the rankings in stride and not acting like it’s BREAKING NEWS…

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This week’s edition of Modern Love, the New York Times’ treacly Sunday Styles feature, comes from Randon Billings Noble, a literature professor at American University.  “War Weary From a Dangerous Liaison” is about a Valentine’s Day email from her most significant ex-boyfriend (the one she still thinks of as her “safety net”) that forces her to break the news to him that she’s married:

I had always carried him in the back pocket of my heart. He was my safety net. During my catastrophic breakups, he was always faintly in the background, ready to be called if needed. And he felt the same way about me. At 19 we decided that if we weren’t married to anyone else by 30, we would marry each other. But by our late 20s we had broken up, gotten back together, broken up again. Thirty came and went in silence. I had thought he was the love of my life.

There are some heavy-handed trapeze metaphors and presumptuous comparisons to Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, but it’s got some poignant insights into the painful process of getting over that person you never thought you could.  That said, from a student’s perspective it’s kind of TMI and would probably make taking a class with Professor Noble a little awkward–another reason to be glad you don’t go to AU!