The Bowdoin Orient

Fifteen Colby students have left the school, either in suspension or permanent withdrawal, as a result of the sexual misconduct that occurred there this fall. According to student newspaper The Colby Echo, the students are being cited for violating the College's policy on "sexual misconduct, lying to school officials and hindering an internal investigation."

As part of an ongoing campaign against homophobia in sports, Paul Tagliabue, former commissioner of the National Football League, will visit campus on Monday. Tagliabue, who has a strong history of supporting gay rights, will deliver the keynote address at the third annual "Anything but Straight in Athletics" event. Created in 2010, the annual event is aimed at supporting the Bowdoin LGBT athletic community and eliminating homophobia in sports. One of the founders, Ben Chadwick '11, was an openly gay member of the men's lacrosse team.

One hundred and forty-five people applied for positions as proctors and RAs on the Residential Life staff for the next academic year—the highest applicant pool ever. Nonetheless, this number is only 3.4 percent larger than the 141 people who applied last year for the same 71 positions. This year's pool contains 46 current staff members who have reapplied and 99 new applicants. Twenty-six members of the staff are graduating in May.

The College is set to hire two new faculty members, reducing the number of ongoing tenure-track faculty searches to nine. The anthropology and government departments have selected Gregory Beckett and Andrew Rudalevige, respectively, to begin teaching next fall.

Twenty-one percent of classes were at or above capacity by the end of Bowdoin's two-week add/drop period last Friday. This year 1,043 add/drop cards were received compared to 980 last spring, a 6.4 percent increase. Registrar Jan Brackett said that numbers have not been this high since the spring of 2007, when the Office of the Registrar also coincidentally received 1,043 cards.

As an institution, Bowdoin has consistently shown an admirable dedication to the arts. A visitor to the Bowdoin College Museum of Art over the course of this year alone might have seen outstanding exhibitions of Grecian urns, Assyrian relief sculptures, Bronze Age Chinese vessels, and works by Edward Hopper, Henri Matisse and Käthe Kollwitz. The College has spent a fortune enhancing its arts facilities—most notably, the $20.8 million renovation and expansion of the museum and the $15 million renovation that transformed what had been the campus pool into a state-of-the-art performance hall. But Bowdoin's institutional support for the fine arts often fails to extend beyond these conspicuous gestures, and among students, a culture surrounding visual arts is strikingly invisible.

A few years ago, I took the night train between two cities 1,038 miles apart. It was meant to be a fairly quick journey, but the train arrived late at our departure point and left nearly an hour behind schedule. Its delay then added up through the night and we arrived at our destination almost three hours later than we had expected. There were no mechanical issues, and on paper, this was nothing more than a simple journey from Denver to Chicago, delayed even before the train entered the station.

This past summer, Nylea Bivins '12 planned a week of programming dedicated to discussing identity, bias, privilege, and inequality. The fruits of her work were seen during the first week of this semester, in a series of events thoughtfully entitled "Beyond the Bowdoin Hello: Ask, Listen, Engage."

Dear My Dear Author Mr. Isseroff, I write in response to your column in last week's issue remarking on the "thoughtlessness" of the "Beyond the Bowdoin Hello" series, likening it to that which has corrupted the ideals of today's Republican Party ("Republicans and the 'Bowdoin Hello' face distortions of original meanings," February 3).

Over winter break I met my friend Emily for lunch in Boston. To passersby we probably looked like old friends—effortlessly conversing about our families, friends and campus life.

The students behind Mass Deactivation presented a challenge to the Bowdoin community this week, urging students to deactivate their Facebook accounts for exactly one month starting on February 8. The premise of the experiment is to re-experience what life would be like without the social network, and creators Tyler Patton '12 and Ruiqi Tang '13 think that Bowdoin—as close-knit as it is tech-saturated—is the perfect environment in which to do so. And they're right.

There were two major developments over this winter break. Both the Republican Party and the "Bowdoin Hello" were put on notice. Now, as a dedicated Bowdoin student and an avid politics junkie, the prospective retirement of these two institutional staples has me scrambling to figure out what happened.

I attended a Bowdoin men's hockey game last December with an old friend whose son is a Bowdoin student. Great hockey, great arena. But the deafening musical assault—which relentlessly attacks and overwhelms the ear of every attendee during every single possible break in the action (even for 20 seconds, while the players quickly "set up" for a face-off)—is extraordinary. But not just extraordinary, disorienting. We almost always had to yell at each other if we wanted to speak—and we were sitting right next to each other.

When the entertainments of a long break run dry—"Hugo" seen (in 3-D), cookies baked (and eaten)—what is a liberal young woman to do to occupy herself for the rest of a five-week break? Download NPR podcasts, obviously, and catch up on back issues of The New Yorker.

While the New England weather might be cold, gray and depressing, I find that eating colorful, cheerful foods can make the winter months seem less dark and drab, and this spicy avocado rice is definitely colorful. It is, in fact, almost disconcertingly green.

Before I even start talking about the different options, I think it should go without saying that this is 7-Eleven. It won't be fresh. It won't be good for you.

Back in Maine for the spring semester, conditions outside are anything but spring-like. You can be forgiven if you're angry or confused.

When James Bowdoin III donated his private art collection to the College in 1811, he started a tradition that lives on today.

While surfing YouTube this past week, I came across a video called "Angst" by New York rapper T.Shirt. I was immediately enticed by the old-school boom-bap drumbeat and the meandering horn section, but was soon assaulted by an aggressive onslaught of profanity.

In 1929, silent film star Lillian Gish declared the cinema "a new Esperanto," or a new artificial language that combined aspects of all cultures. At that point, Gish was most famous for playing waifish damsels in D.W. Griffith's early epics like "Birth of a Nation" (1915) and "Broken Blossoms" (1919), but she was able nevertheless to recognize how the language of film could be understood by all.

In the genus of things that improve with age—wine, women, leftover Indian takeout—TV shows are not usually included. This is because it is nigh impossible to balance the demands of continuous creativity with predictability. For a series to seem fresh, we can't guess what the jokes will be or which characters will kill each other. We need change, but not too much of it. In short, the show that viewers keep watching is the show that fulfills their emotional expectations, while the show they become bored with is too familiar. It's a very delicate distinction.

Peter Coviello, chair of the English department, will lead a discussion of Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno" Wednesday as part of the Bowdoin Book Lecture series.

A Chadian man sends his son to war; a failing magician forms an unlikely friendship in Scotland; a disabled woman travels to the Pyrenees. These diverse characters and more will come to Bowdoin next week as part of the Tournées Festival.

Of all of the remixes, music videos, and performances one can find online of Lana Del Rey's hit single, "Video Games," none are more beautiful or poignant than her performance at the Corinthia Hotel in London.

Toby Gard had a problem. Back in the summer of 1993, Gard—a famous British video game designer and consultant—was tasked with creating a more distinctive character for his studio's upcoming game, a 3-D action-platform inspired by the "Indiana Jones" films. However, the game's engine could only display a limited number of polygons, the basic building blocks of any 3-D model. Whereas modern game characters are composed of up to 60,000 polygons, Gard could only use a maximum of 230. It was hard enough making a computerized figure recognizable as a human being, let alone one that would stand out against a glut of similar games.

Four professional Maine-based poets will be coming to campus tomorrow and Sunday for the first two events of Bowdoin's annual Longfellow Days celebration.

Richard F. Thomas, professor of classics and director of undergraduate studies in the classics department at Harvard University, will deliver a lecture on Wednesday that should appeal to classics and English majors alike.

As part of its annual Girls and Women in Sports Day, female student-athletes from Bowdoin will welcome local girls in grades K-12 to campus this weekend as part of an initiative to expose them to an array of sports.

Usually, the week after the Super Bowl is a big let-down. The closest thing we have is D-I spring football practices, but they're just a poor substitute that holds us over until the NFL starts back up in September.

After stunning Amherst 7-4 four weeks ago to start an undefeated streak throughout the month of January, the men's ice hockey team fell to the Lord Jeffs in a 3-1 loss last Friday.

A bout of bad luck hit the Nordic ski team last weekend at the University of Vermont Carnival: two of the team's top contributors were unable to compete due to injuries. "We've been a bit snakebit this year, with an unusual number of injuries and illnesses hitting our team," wrote Coach Nathan Alsobrook in an email to the Orient.

After losing to Bates on January 25, the men's squash team fell to the Bobcats once again last weekend, this time in the quarterfinals of the NESCAC tournament. With a final 5-4 tally, the match was one of the closest of the season.