2008 Woodie Awards
Would a state university by any other name still smell as cheap? That's what University of Massachusetts-Amherst officials are asking themselves and the alumni who have a staked interest in increasing the value of their diplomas. Recently arrived Chancellor Robert Holub and other top UMass administrators are examining what impact the hyphenated "UMass-Amherst" name is having on its national image.
One group of people hail primarily from the Middle East, they commute to school in a dirty, dusty, smelly city of 20 million people and eat falafel and shawerma daily. The other group of people come from all over America. They live on or right off campus, and their dietary patterns are dictated by Pita Pita and Domino's "5-5-5," deal.
Well, the new semester has begun, and with it the academic year. We've all - hopefully - found our new classes and professors satisfactory. We've begun finding old friends again who we haven't seen since last May. The corruption of a new generation of innocent freshmen can begin.
The first few weeks of fall semester when students run into each other and cheerfully ask how their summer was, is what I hate the most. It is just too painful to get the words out. My summer wasn't just so boring or ordinary that I would feel less cool to say "it was OK.
John McCain, at one point, was the nation's most popular politician. He was a straight-talkin' maverick who stood up to Wall Street and did the heavy lifting to craft bi-partisan, legislative coalitions. The press loved him. As the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz once said, "we're his base.
Barack Obama has a plan to fix the tax system in this country. He would raise the capital gains tax from 15 percent to 28 percent, set the rate for estates of more than $1 million to 55 percent, raise the income tax for those earning over $200,000 to 36 percent and of some higher brackets to nearly 40 percent of an individual's income.
Like one-fourth of our undergraduate population, last year I was a freshman. Unlike most undergrads, however, I was part of that puzzling subspecies: the out-of-state student. Right from the start I was set apart as a cultural outsider, unfamiliar with the ways of Massachusetts and the Bay Staters.