Kristof and Riley to talk free speech

News in brief: Jack's Juice Bar will close doors

Next week will be the last for Jack’s Juice Bar, due to its struggle to make a profit since opening in fall of 2015. An offshoot of Jack McGee’s Pub & Grill, the juice bar offers fresh-to-order fruit and vegetable juices and smoothies on weekdays, some of which will be available in the Café and the C-Store next semester.
Although the juice bar had a small regular customer base, student workers said business was typically very slow.
“There’s not a lot of people who came, and they kept doing a lot of renovations to try to make it more profitable,” said Sophie Lemkin ’19, who began working at the juice bar last semester.
Juices and smooties were priced between $3.49 and $4.99, depending on the ingredients. This semester, the juice bar cut back from two employees per shift to one.
“For a business to exist at this school at all it has to be [that] everyone would want to come there, just because it’s such a small school,” she said. “So we had a number of people who enjoyed the juice bar. If this was at a big school with the same percentage of people who liked juice, it would be a fine business.”
Lemkin said she will miss the juice bar, although students will still be able to get juice in other places.
“I don’t think the juice bar closing will really affect the Bowdoin community. It just will affect the 10 employees who worked there,” she said.

News in brief: OneCard account glitch temporarily displays spring semester Polar Points

A technical error on December 1 caused students’ Polar Points to reflect the amount of points they have at the beginning of the semester. Students’ balances did not actually change. The issue resulted from the setup of spring meal plans and was fixed by Monday evening. Semester Polar Points are scheduled to reset on December 20.
Polar Points were not removed from students’ OneCards and students were still able to spend their remaining fall Polar Points.
“The issue was only in the web application, not the card system itself,” Assistant Director for OneCard Coordinator Chris Bird wrote in an email to the Orient.
The incident was caused by spring meal plans and Polar Points being loaded onto student accounts in order to produce spring billing information. A setting on the OneCard website failed to notice that spring plans were inactive, resulting in the program showing students their spring account balance instead of their fall ones.
Several students emailed Bird over the weekend with screenshots that demonstrated the problem.
Some students who noticed the error believed that their Polar Points had been reset, but discovered this was not the case.
“I think most people working at places where Polar Points were usable were aware of the issue. When I went to buy something from the [convenience store], they said that Polar Points weren’t reset and that the spring funds weren’t usable yet,” said Amanda Trent ’20.
Staff from the OneCard Office and Bowdoin Information Technology staff fixed the display error.

News in brief

Kristof and Riley to talk free speech

December 2, 2016

Manhattan Institute fellow and Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley and Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof will speak at an event titled “Up for Discussion: Free Speech and Political Correctness on College Campuses” at 7:30 p.m. on Monday in Pickard Theater. The discussion will be moderated by Associate Professor of History and Environmental Studies Connie Chiang.

Registration for the event opened online on November 18 and students obtained tickets on a first-come, first-served basis. A limited number of students also registered to join the speakers for a “dessert reception” in Thorne Hall after the event to debrief the talk and discuss the issues raised. Tickets for both the event and the reception are no longer available.

In a November 2015 column, Kristof addressed the issue of race and free speech on campuses, writing, “What’s unfolding at universities is not just about free expression but also about a safe and nurturing environment.”

Riley expressed dismay last May after he was disinvited to speak at Virginia Tech due to concerns that his “writings on race in The Wall Street Journal would spark protests.”

Both speakers were selected by a working group of students, faculty and staff, chaired by President Clayton Rose. The choice of speakers was influenced by a survey last December gauging student interest for speakers, in which the theme of free speech and political correctness on college campuses garnered the most support.

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