Alice Mathias '07, a former columnist for The Dartmouth Mirror, has been named a contributor for the New York Times on an online blog called "The Graduates." The blog can be accessed on TimesSelect, recently made free for those with a college e-mail address. An editor for the New York Times e-mailed Mathias on March 13, asking her to write. "I almost deleted it because I thought it was spam," Mathias explained. The editor had scoured the web pages of college newspapers, looking for eight senior college students to write in a daily blog about the prospects of graduating from college today. Mathias said that this blog demonstrates how the media has evolved to empower many different voices, albeit for a temporary period of time. "People from all over the country are giving me input about my blog post on Facebook," Mathias said. "It shows how the world is so big, yet so connected."
Presidential candidates will make Granite State stops this week on the campaign trail. On Monday, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois appeared in nearby Keene, while Rudy Giuliani, the former Republican mayor of New York City, stopped in Hampton Falls, located in the eastern region of New Hampshire. Republican Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, plans five stops in New Hampshire Tuesday, beginning in Keene at 9 a.m. and ending in Derry, in the Manchester area, by 5 p.m. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., also plans to visit the Manchester area Tuesday.
The tenure system cannot sufficiently protect professors' academic freedom, the American Federation of Teachers said at their annual meeting of higher education union leaders in Portland, Ore., this past weekend. A draft of a new statement on academic freedom acknowledged that relying on the tenure system fails to work since "more and more faculty members don't have, and may never have, tenure," according to Inside Higher Ed. The draft policy says that non-tenured faculty members should have full participation in college governance, freedom to teach or study as tenured members do and intellectual property rights to materials they develop.
