WWCD: What Would Carrie Do?

When I wrote about Georgetown’s sex and relationships columns in the paper a few weeks ago, I wasn’t too impressed by The Hoya’s current sex scribe, Colleen Leahey (COL ‘11).  Apparently I’m in good company: yesterday The Washington City Paper’s The Sexist blog surveyed the sex columns currently running in local student papers and ranked them on how progressive they are—and The Hoya’s came in last.

According to The Sexist, the city’s most progressive sex column can be found in the American University Eagle.  Co-written by three anonymous authors, the column has been a bit of a mixed bag, with high highs (tackling anal sex in an enlightened way) and low lows (the inaugural column kicked off with a disturbing date rape scenario).  But the Sexist found enough promise in the column-writing threesome to give them a progressive score of seven.

Coming in second was the GW Hatchet’s sex column.  The Hatchet switches off between an anonymous male writer and an anonymous female writer, and tends to neglect the LGBTQ perspective, according to the Sexist, earning them a six on the progressive scale.

The Sexist gave Leahey props for using her real name and acknowledged the challenges inherent in writing a column for a relatively conservative paper where “vulgarity” is frowned upon, but took her to task for directing her columns at “desperate” heterosexual females.  Ultimately, Leahey and The Hoya walked away with just four progressive points.

After earning the dubious distinction of being ranked the 11th best party school by Playboy, the University of Maryland at College Park is mounting an effort to crack down on excessive partying this year, according to the Washington Post.  But with only 34 officers in its Department of Public Safety charged with controlling over 26,000 undergraduates, it’s a bit of a daunting task.

The force of 34 officers put up a good fight, busting dozens of parties in a matter of a few hours. The consequences of a bust can range from confiscation of alcohol to, in  rare cases, arrest, and the University often comes down hard with harsh administrative charges.

The easiest way to crack down on parties? Taking advantage of clueless freshmen:

On this Thursday night, Ecker drives through campus and the surrounding neighborhoods, easily picking out the freshmen, who travel in packs composed of nearly every person from their dorm floor.

In one such clump, everyone has a student ID around his or her neck, and a few students wear high school T-shirts. But the most obvious clue that they are freshmen? No red cups in hand, Ecker said. They haven’t learned to bring their own cups to keggers.

Additionally, the police are declaring war on a much more frightening enemy this fall: the “undesirables.” These would be the young men who gather at a popular location and harass the women walking by, especially those who are dressed up for the evening.

The harassment that normally begins as verbal assaults and gradually increases to grabbing, pinching, touching, and fondling later on in the night when traffic on the sidewalk becomes more congested. This also makes it more difficult to identify the perpetrators, some of whom are students themselves.

Swine Flu: Scourge of college coeds everywhere

As you’ve surely noticed from your hacking, sniffly friends and classmates, H1N1 has hit Georgetown.  But we’re not the only ones: a virulent H1N1 strain has spread rapidly through several D.C. college campuses, according to the Washington Post.  UMD College Park, for one, has already reported 435 cases of flu-like illness.

With students sharing living space, classrooms, and red solo cups, H1N1 has the potential to spread widely on campus, according to the Post:

Swine flu appears to have spread to most of the country’s colleges and universities. A weekly survey by the American College Health Association found influenza-like illness at 72 percent of schools surveyed as of Sept. 4. The flu is being contracted at a rate of about 18 cases per 10,000 students.

In other parts of the country, H1N1 is most widespread at Washington State’s Pullman campus, where more than 2,600 students have contracted flulike symptoms, according to Inside Higher Ed.

At Cornell University, where a junior died Friday due to complications related to the flu, the Inter-Fraternity Council at Cornell University has enacted a moratorium on all social events for a week.

Monument-filled AND college-kid friendly!

A new report by the American Institute for Economic Research ranked Washington D.C. as the fourth best metropolitan area to attend college, according to the Washington Post.

The report highlighted the 75 best college locations in America, subdividing the list by city size.  D.C. was grouped into the major metropolitan category, and finished behind only New York, San Francisco and Boston.

The rankings were determined based on 12 factors, including the number of college students per every 1,000 residents and the cost of living.  D.C. particularly excelled in the student to resident ratio category, with 81 students for every 1,000 residents.  We also had the lowest unemployment rate and the second-highest average income of the major metropolitan areas in the study.