The Jesuit institution in Seattle, known to many as the un-fun school in the fun city, pre-emptively shut down a Memorial Day weekend party entitled “the Douchebag party” because the party might have violated the university’s code of conduct policy.

I’m sure glad the LMU, also a Jesuit university, does not extend it’s rule off of campus.

Originally reported by the Chronicle for Higher Education:

“Seattle U Stops Student Party Because of Facebook Post” [Chronicle]

You would think that this week would be national JuicyCampus week or something. Last night at LMU, a senior girl hosted a debate and panel about JuicyCampus.com at LMU.

Here is the video of the debate.

One thing that has always been neglected in the JuicyCampus debate at LMU is the slightly potential that JuicyCampus can be used for good. When there was a shooting a little while ago just outside LMU’s pearly white gates, JuicyCampus was the first source to provide accurate information about the incident. The hivemind beat Public Safety; it beat the campus newspaper to the digital scene.

Banning the site wouldn’t work thanks to things like Tor. Boycotting the site would be pointless because of its persistence at other schools. JuicyCampus is on its way out; conventional wisdom tells me people don’t check it nearly as often as they do. And JuicyCampus is finding it tougher by the day to find advertisers.

The New York Times Education section published an article yesterday about universities that are drastically revamping their financial aid programs. Rather than aiming for ethnic or geographic diversity, big name schools are focusing on economic diversity, something that books like Freakonomics have been all about.

Check it out: The (Yes) Low Cost of Higher Ed

You would think that JuicyCampus would be long and gone by now, but such is not the case. The news and politics podcast/show/awesome asked Yale students about JuicyCampus today. Great stuff.

Is Yale Too Juicy? [MobLogic.tv]

We’ve done a few posts about JuicyCampus in the past after the site was used to syndicate a shooting threat. Check them out: “JuicyCampus.com, Anonymity, and (Fake) School Shootings” and “A Juicy JuicyCampus.com Follow-Up”.

Earlier last week, LMU announced a 6% tuition raise. Many other schools, both Jesuit and not, have also recently announced tuition bumps for the 2008-2009 year. As expected, torrents of complaints through voiceless mediums like JuicyCampus and letters to the editor flow in every which direction.

The universities fire back citing inflation, suffering markets, and a few other things. They lay on top of all of these reasons the rhetoric, “We want your degree to mean something in the future.” And that’s where every university reminds the world that they will never be a “Georgetown” or a “Harvard.”

The greatest minds have never been defined by their university degrees. Recent general conventional wisdom tell me, “Your degree doesn’t mean as much as you think.” Maybe conventional wisdom for once might be right.

Read on to your heart’s content »

Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas, has announced it will provide all incoming freshmen either an iPhone or an iPod Touch:

At ACU - the first university in the nation to provide these cutting-edge media devices to its incoming class - freshmen will use the iPhones or iPod Touches to receive homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their professors’ offices, and check their meal and account balances - among more than 15 other useful web applications already developed, said ACU Chief Information Officer Kevin Roberts.

And hopefully other universities will soon see the utility of this technology:

ACU’s innovative plans for this technology have attracted the attention of Apple executives and leaders at Ivy League universities. In fact, Roberts returned to Abilene Monday from Cupertino, Calif., where he was asked to present ACU’s creative vision for converged media devices at Apple headquarters to executives and to selected leaders from universities including Harvard, Yale, MIT, Duke, Stanford, Oxford, Princeton and UCLA, Schubert said.

ACU News [via SMS Text News]

HackCollege Reader “Marla” tipped us to the following story. Apparently Irvine Valley College wasn’t aware it was hanging the flag of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. I’m no Vietnamese history buff, but it seems this would akin to hanging a North Korean flag somewhere around school. Read on:

Vietnamese flag removed at Irvine Valley College [Orange County Register]

If you have any tips for a HackCollege story, send them to tips@hackcollege.com

And has been met with heavy criticism. Reportedly, JuicyCampus is:

• picking Yale apart:
  

  Posters to the site have mentioned specific student names in discussions such as “craziest bitch on the Yale campus” and “most overrated person at Yale.”

• highly visited and hurtful for Princetonians:
  

  Sarah Ferguson ’10 has firsthand experience with the negative effects of JuicyCampus. She was named on the site in several defamatory posts and challenged the anonymous poster to “grow a pair” and say something to her face.

• at UPenn but will fade soon enough:
  

  Like it or not, students have been ruining their own reputations long before gossip Web sites ever came along. And Web sites like these tend to fade fast. Words like “man-whore” and “slut” can only be read so many times before they start to lose their bite and put you to sleep faster than a Friday morning math recitation.

• still relatively unheard of at Brown:
  

  Looking to create a place for students to share their college stories, Ivester and his team initially launched JuicyCampus at seven trial schools across the country in Oct. 2007. Although JuicyCampus has attracted media attention - including critics at Cornell, Yale and Loyola Marymount University - many Brown students have yet to hear of the site.

• trashing Cornell students pretty hard:
  

  You have to have thick skin.

It is for good reason that there is no link to the anonymous forum from this post.

Stanford will announce today that tuition will be free for students whose families earn less than $100,000, plus a few other things. Damn, girl.

Stanford drops tuition for some students [via SFGate.com via digg]

In a weird twist of fate just a week after LMU’s emergency system failed, a shooting occurred yesterday at Northern Illinois University. Six people died, including the shooter.

A HackCollege reader from NIU Kellie wrote in a comment yesterday:

It’s a weird time to be a student. Two major school shootings in less than a one year period. Tragedy is inevitable, but why does it have to happen at schools? Why does if have to be so senseless?

We’ve been covering the failure of emergency notification systems, but the New York Times reports that the NIU’s system worked well and was used quickly: “At 3:20 p.m. [about 15 minutes after the shooting], he said, the university posted an alert on its Web site, through its e-mail system and through another campus alarm system: ‘There has been a report of a possible gunman on campus. Get to a safe area and take precautions until given the all clear. Avoid the King Commons and all buildings in that vicinity.’” Within an hour after the shooting, school officials posted a message that there was no longer a threat. We’re glad that at least everyone at NIU was kept informed.

Our hearts are again with NIU during this week and into the future. As Kellie said, we’re all Huskies.