The Bowdoin Orient

How much have you learned from students, faculty, and staff significantly different from yourself at Bowdoin? When and where did this learning happen, if at all? How large a part has this played in your life? On Monday, members of the Bowdoin community gathered in Thorne Hall to discuss these and other questions regarding the educational value placed on diversity by the College.

This Ivies Weekend will be the last for 40 College Street as current Bowdoin students know it. The College recently announced that is has bought the residence, though details of the purchase were not readily available at press time.

Many colleges have started taking action to increase not only cultural and ethnic diversity but economic diversity as well. According to The New York Times, over the past few years the number of students from low-income and middle-class families attending universities and colleges has decreased, suggesting that while racial diversity may be increasing, economic diversity is not.

The proposed changes in distribution requirements, which will be voted on by the faculty next week though won't affect any current Bowdoin students, contain a number of improvements over the current system. The addition of an arts requirement and a more narrowly-tailored quantitative requirement are especially welcome.

Because it is fashionable to critique traditions as remnants of ages past or the unhealthy preservation of outdated social constructs, few are willing to give the devil his due regarding the benefits of a healthy respect for it.

If you're reading this-or anything, for that matter, but given the audience I can safely confine the conversation to this-then you are most certainly living in a hole in the ground. It's Ivies. There is no reading during Ivies.

So BowdoinMatch has been out for over a week now and everyone's changed their answers a million times to see how many people they can get onto their lists, but I'm still hearing all over campus "Dude, I don't know any girls on my list!" or "He is on my list? But he's such a dork!"

Last week Pro-life speaker Olivia Gans gave a lecture for her cause in Kresge Auditorium. I remember sitting at dinner with my friends debating whether or not to go to what I expected to be a radical, offensive, and primarily moral oration.

It has been for as long as I can remember, and I want to know where the good old days of dating went. You remember, the ones your parents tell you about.

Jeff Pike '04: Watching naked people run around.

This weekend, 73 Bowdoin students attended the March for Women's Lives in Washington, D.C, to protest the Bush administration's attack on women's reproductive rights.

My wife Tina and I attended the Spring Dance Performance, and what a show it was! Thanks, Bowdoin dancers, for taking creative risks with such talent, such abandon, such joy.

What does the word feminist mean to you? Overbearing woman to be avoided at all costs? Angry, irrational, militant weirdo? Hairy and unwashed radical? "Femi-nazi"? Well, for a significant number of Bowdoin students, it's a self-identifying term used with pride.

Dear Dr. Jeff: I've been having trouble concentrating on my work for a while. I tried a friend's Ritalin to study for a midterm, and it worked great. I wonder if I have ADD?-J.L.

The benefits of mentoring programs for elementary, middle, and high school students throughout the country and here in Maine are invaluable. Studies in the past 10 years prove that young people who participate in a mentoring program have higher educational aspirations and achievement, are more likely to say no to drugs and alcohol, and form better relationships with adults and peers.

In late August, 1891, Austin Cary '87 and Dennis Cole '88 continued their trek back to the mouth of the Grand River in Labrador. Having lost their supplies, they used the bits of meat to "help fill the gap, now becoming quite long, between square meals."

It started as a simple online conversation among members of the Bowdoin Women's Association list-serve. Through a chain of emails, members expressed their general frustration with the silence surrounding the issue of eating disorders at Bowdoin.

Dear Dr. Jeff: My boyfriend is a very dedicated athlete on one of Bowdoin's most competitive teams. He and some of his teammates seem to think they need to lose weight and skip meals or eat tiny portions. They're still working out many hours a day. Can this be healthy?-B.B.

Every year college students leave behind literally tons of unwanted items when they head for home in May. All these valuable things could very well end up in Brunswick's landfill if it weren't for Dump and Run.

Forget BowdoinMatch for a minute-before students started registering with the online matching service in droves, they took the Bowdoin Student Life Survey. According to that study, not all Bowdoin students are looking for a match-64 percent said they desired a boyfriend or girlfriend, while 38 percent stated that they were already involved in some sort of relationship.

Though it is sad to think of a concert on the Quad without those sorely missed tree sculptures, the four live bands, inflatable toys, and raffle prizes at this Saturday's Bear AIDS concert should keep Ivies Weekend's easily-entertained students more than occupied.

We all know that person. There's one in every crowd. He is the dreaded greatest hits listener, and his music collection is limited to what has been identified as "album gold."

On Wednesday evening, Bowdoin's Kresge Auditorium was visited by a Venezuelan string quartet, Quarteto Millenium. The special guests of the Portland String Quartet are performing at many venues in the area. Professor John Turner arranged their performance at Bowdoin.

My friend and I were psyched. We had our tickets, we had candy, we had a minivan that more than adequately resembled a pumpkin coach, and we were the only people in Brunswick seeing the 9:30 p.m. showing of Ella Enchanted.

For many students, Ivies Weekend represents a pleasant departure from stress and work in exchange for a few carefree days of parties, bands, and other fun activities. To add to the spirit of Ivies, the Film Society will be showing the semester's horror film (and no, Lolita doesn't count; that's romance): The Exorcist (1973), which is hailed by many critics and fans as one of the scariest films ever made.

"I'm really excited about the Spring Dance Show," said Karen Fossum '07, a dancer in VAGUE. "It's so great to perform and show people what we've been working on." Her enthusiasm is catching, and you too will be able to partake in it at the 33rd annual Spring Dance Show this weekend.

Bowdoin's crew topped regional teams in the New England Fours championship regatta in Lowell, Massachusetts, walking away with both the men's and women's event trophies as well as the overall points trophy.

The women's track team finished seventh in the NESCAC Championships at Trinity, 48 points behind Williams (247), Tufts (141.5), Middlebury (118), Colby (79.5), Amherst (63), and Bates (49.5).

Another NFL draft has come and gone, and it's now time to give out the grades. This article will cover the three best, the two worst, and the one team whose draft could go either way. This year's draft was very deep in the receiver department, and there were also some very solid quarterbacks to choose from.