From time to time, the Washington Post attempts to provide good hyper-local coverage of D.C.—and they almost always fail stupendously. Recently, the Post found a new, similarly out-of-their-purview beat to epically fail at: college campuses.

Their college news blog, Campus Overload, features either tame rehashes of mildly interesting stories from campuses all over the country, or completely inane original stories. Par exemple, within the past week, Campus Overload offered readers such gems as this “hilarious video,” “Spring Breaking It Down,” and a totally vapid interview with Georgetown University Student Association President Calen Angert (MSB ‘11).

Vox has no idea what the point of this interview—and its thought-provoking questions, like, “What’s allowed and not allowed on your Facebook profile?” and “When’s the last time you pulled an all-nighter?”—was supposed to be. To show readers how the sleepless, social-networking other side lives?

To edify student government leaders on other campuses?:

[Post]: What advice do you have for students on other campuses who are launching student government campaigns?

[Angert]: Make sure your heart and head are in the right place, and tell the truth.

[Post]: What’s the best way to get to know your fellow student government members?

[Angert]: E-mail them or call them. Anyone I know who is involved with student government would love to meet and talk about current issues and future initiatives.

To show off the Post’s incredibly high editing standards, where “haha” is a word?:

[Post]: How much sleep do you usually get?

[Angert]: Too little, haha. I’m fully operable on 4 hours — anything less and my productivity suffers.

Beats us. Even the interview’s more substantive questions, about funding reform, mystify us. Who cares to read about that who isn’t a Georgetown student? And if some reform-minded soul was interested, why would they turn to the Post for their nuance-free, after-the-jump coverage of it?

Oh well. At least now we know what Angert’s favorite Georgetown bar is (Saloun), what his favorite admissions essay was, and what he wants to do when he grows up.

The perfect Post columnist to have love-hate relationship with

There’s some good news and some bad news for Georgetown in Jay Mathews’ recent Washington Post column.  The good news: He thinks Georgetown qualifies as an “elite” university!  The bad news: He doesn’t think going to an “elite” university is important in the slightest.

Mathews’ Monday article urges students to focus on their experiences in their respective colleges and not get caught up in the name or prestige.

The article cites examples of “heroes” who did and didn’t attend prestigious, brand-name schools to argue why the college doesn’t determine one’s success in life. Billionaire businessman Warren Buffett, for example, attended the University of Nebraska at Lincoln; Oprah went to Tennessee State; and singer Bette Midler spent her college years at the University of Hawaii (I, for one, cannot imagine Bette Midler throwing a shaka sign).

Mathews concludes:

No one is sure where greatness comes from. These lists make clear that it does not have much to do with the name of the college on someone’s diploma …

Researchers Stacy Berg Dale and Alan Krueger found that admirable character traits—persistence, imagination, energy—produce success in life no matter which college a person attends.

While it’s depressing how quickly Mathews dismisses Georgetown’s hard-fought elite status, it does makes us feel better to know that the annoyingly knowledgeable kid in Econ isn’t necessarily the next Wall Street tycoon—or at least one can hope.

The summer got you hankering for some Georgetown education? Luckily for you, the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs and the Program for Jewish Civilization have just started producing a new series, “Faith Complex,” about religion, politics and art which is being broadcast on the Washington Post website.

The first episode, “A Bad Girl of Islam,” features PJC Director Jacques Berlinerblau (full disclosure: Berlinerblau is my certificate adviser) interviewing Muslim reformer and feminist Asra Nomani:

So far there’s only one episode up, but more should be added tomorrow, according to Berlinerblau. According to the program’s Facebook group, upcoming guests include “proponent of secular Islam Abdullahi An-Naim, David Freedman of the Anti-Defamation League (discussing Cyber-Anti-Semitism), and Father Thomas Reese discussing the Obama administration and the Catholic community.”

For the past three years, the Post has run an Easter feature called “Peeps Show,” a Peep diorama contest. The results are as delightful as you’d imagine marshmallow-fluff-bunny dioramas would be—this year’s finalists include “Peeptown Cupcakes,” an even sweeter (as if that were possible) version of everyone’s favorite neighborhood cupcakery, and a Peep tribute to Aretha Franklin’s infamous Inauguration hat.

But we noticed something intriguing in the reader chat with Peep Show judge/organizer, Dan Zak. When asked if there were any entries that were awesome but too controversial to pick as finalists, Zak responded:

Yes. We originally included in the semifinals a great diorama depicting the Georgetown Cuddler (Google it). It was removed at the last minute after editors raised a red flag out of — as Robert Gibbs would say — an “abundance of caution.” We apologized profusely to the dioramist, and she was very understanding.

Curiosity sparked, Vox managed to get a hold of the diorama—entitled “Peeping leads to cuddling”—courtesy of its creator, Annette Lee.

Diorama, complete with hoodie-bedecked Cuddler-Peep, after the jump (with the reminder that—cute nickname aside—the Cuddler is a serious criminal, sexual assault is awful and we hope DPS and MPD get their act together and catch the creep ASAP)…

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The Washington Post captured this video of the much-hyped sculling explosion that CBS Paramount executed at 3 p.m. this afternoon (not between 9:30 and 12:00, as announced) for a pilot episode of “Washington Field.”

Was the special effects show worth the hype or lamesauce?

Spectators wait for the pyrotechnics

Video used with permission from the Washington Post
Photo by Lexie Herman for the Voice.

The Washington Post is good at a lot of things: Pulitzer Prize-winning Joshua Bell articles, investigative series on the kind of people who shoot their friends in the face, and reliable coverage of one of the worst teams in all of Major League Baseball. Notably absent from the list: telling freshmen the ways of the world.

Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the Post from running a feature over the weekend called “The Freshman 15: What Every First-Year College Student Needs to Know About Washington.” (Nor did the fact that this is already well-tred ground.) The article puts on full display all the worst qualities of the Post. The advice is at times preachy, inaccurate, and irrelevant. What’s more, they largely repeat what your 50 year-old parents told you on move-in weekend before you managed to escape them.

The worst offenders:

5. Forget the fake ID. The District is where fake IDs go to die. Give it up, McLovin. That expired Hawaii license might have gotten you 30s of Milwaukee’s Best at your local beer shack, but the bouncers in this town have you pegged: You stammer, you sweat and you don’t even know your own fake Zip code. Don’t believe us? Head to the 9:30 club. Test your luck, and let us know how that works out.

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Remember that Washingon Post Magazine Cover story about how everyone who’s anyone ends up in finance and the rest of us are doomed to be ditch diggers? Well, this week the New York Times seeks to debunk the myth.

They let us know that a lot of people in the highest levels of academia are worried that their lectures on the importance of altruism are being drowned out by the waiting expense accounts of Morgan Stanley and McKinsey.

So are graduates selling out or just being prudent? 30 pieces of silver doesn’t go as far as it used to.

Sam immediately noticed what’s become a pretty obvious trend since free newspapers hit the Georgetown campus a month ago: the Times is always the first to go, usually disappearing entirely while most copies of the Post still sit there, waiting for a loving home (I’m not even going to touch USA Today). I’m wondering if openly hoping that that will change after the Post deep-sixed its competition in the Pulitzers yesterday, taking home a half-dozen of the prestigious journalism awards. It’s the second-most ever by a single paper—the Post’s best-ever performance—and four more than its closest competitor, the Times.

I don’t have a problem with the Times. It’s a great paper, arguably the nation’s premiere one (despite yesterday’s verdict), and certainly an icon. But besides being a storied paper with what is probably the country’s best political staff, the Post is also our local paper here at Georgetown. To spend four years here and not take an interest in your community is something of a travesty. It’s likely symptomatic of many Hoyas’ larger allergy to getting out of the neighborhood at all (seriously—go for the coffee shops alone), combined with the multitudes that come here from the New York area. But please, give D.C. a try.

Photo courtesy washingtonpost.com.

If you’re a Georgetown student, chances are that at some time you’ve walked by the “265 Kappa Hops” message taped on the sidewalk of the Key Bridge’s D.C. side. Like me, you’d probably never given it much thought.

But, for some reason, when I passed the message on Saturday, an article that ran in the Washington Post a few months ago came to mind. The article, “The Measure of this Man is in the Smoot,” tells the story of some MIT frat brothers who used 5′ 7″ pledge Oliver Smoot as a yardstick to measure Boston’s Harvard Bridge, marking every ten Smoots with a spot of paint. From the Post:

Somewhat miraculously, the markings have been repainted ever since — meaning that while Smoot was pursuing a quiet career in the Washington association bureaucracy, he was also becoming a Boston area landmark and a nerd legend.

“The first time I went to an MIT gathering of undergraduates,” Smoot said in a telephone interview this week, “I introduced myself to this young man, and he said, ‘Oh, I thought you were dead.’ “

Even the government got involved with the Smoots, the Post reports, scoring the bridge’s sidewalk every five feet seven inches when it was renovated a decade and a half ago.

At the time, they [the frat brothers] didn’t understand what they had done. But their Smoots were destined to become part of campus culture, since they contained two key elements of a classic MIT prank: a hint of science and a low level of vandalism.

Jay Keyser, a professor emeritus at MIT and a chronicler of the school’s wacky side, said: “What the Smoot does, it makes fun of measuring. . . . It makes fun of the precision of engineering.”

Could the Kappa Hop be the Smoot of Key Bridge? Hard to say. When I emailed Xavier Aguirre, the co-president of Alpha Kappa Psi, Georgetown’s Business Fraternity, he assured me that AKP had nothing to do with the Kappa Hop. Also, if 265 Kappa Hops does refer to the span of the Key Bridge, each Kappa Hop would be roughly equivalent to 6′ 5″. That seems to me to be quite a distance to hop, especially 265 times. Still, if the Kappa Hop isn’t a unit of measurement, I’m not sure what it would be. Thoughts, anyone?

Photo by Sam Sweeney, Blog Editor

Avid readers of The Washington Post were regaled Wednesday morning by Hope C. Bogorad’s letter to the editor ridiculing student complaints about Georgetown’s new alcohol policies. Besides being based on multiple logical fallacies–most notably, straw man (claiming that Georgetown students can’t complain about anything else while the country is at war, even though activism on both fronts is not mutually exclusive) and poisoning the well (more on that later), with a nice bit of spotlight (believing all 18-25 year-olds should be drafted because of a few quotes from Georgetown students against an unrelated policy), ad hominem (we must always pass out when we drink) and special pleading (unless, of course, Hope spends all her days solving the dilemmas of Iraq and Afghanistan) thrown in. That’s five fouls in 50 words; it’s the logical equivalent of fouling out five minutes into a game without scoring. And that’s before even touching the obvious grammatical error in her first four words (which should read “if there ever were“).

What’s more, she bemoans the “appalling behavior” of Georgetown students (this is the well being poisoned). Let’s count up every single one of the actions Post article depicts students taking: 1. Not having parties at a “typical party spot.” 2. Feeling blindsided by a rule change that did, in fact, come without discussion. 3. Creating a Facebook group. 4. Bringing home a case of Bud Light and not have many people over to drink it. 5. Offering various docile quotes in opposition to the party. 6. Allegedly holding noisy parties, with no direct quotes about it. Appalling!!!

Most disturbingly, let’s take Hope’s argument out to its logical conclusion: students who are willing to be vocal about infringements on their rights to assemble peaceably and (especially for the many students who are 21) to imbibe alcohol (which actually very rarely involves passing out) should be sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, where they would risk death. Students who want to enjoy weekends the same way college students (before, during and after Hope’s generation) have traditionally done should be forced to risk death.

Rest assured, Hope, that we would never harbor any similar wish for you. We just hope you’ll think responsibly in the future.

-Mike Stewart, Managing Editor