Often the news is a very serious subject, but occasionally there are interesting and funny news bits that go by relatively unnoticed. The Lawrentian would like to change this. As often as possible, our staff will compile these news pieces and put them in a section called “News Shorts:” If you have news that you would like to see featured in the paper, please e-mail suggestions to lawrentian@ lawrence.edu. This week’s “Beyond the box” is compiled from The Chronicle of Higher Education.•••
Physics professor Ronald L. Mallett at the University of Connecticut is working on the development of a time machine. According the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mallett will test his theory this fall when he tries to move a neutron through time by altering the decay rate of radioactive material. He got the idea from reading H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. He hopes to one day visit his father who died of a heart attack at age 33.
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In February, to celebrate Black History Month, a manager of a Pennsylvania grocery store put fried chicken on sale. This manager could not understand why customers were upset. The head of the chain asked that he sell the chicken at regular price and apologize in the weekly flyer.
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What kind of college requires “Basic Drug Dealing” as a pre-requisite to “Advanced Drug Dealing”? The University of Psychogenic Fugue, of course. Two graduate students who dropped out of the University of New Orleans (later to graduate from Augustana College in Illinois) compiled the mock handbook that they describe as a joke with “serious underpinnings.”
Among other things, the handbook also includes a description of the Fraternity Homo Ecco Tau that allows its members to explore their homosexual tendencies without admitting to them, as well as a section on Bitter Faculty Congress that allows professors to get together and discuss “how much time [the] Bitter Faculty Congress takes away from letting them be good teachers.”
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Alex Cota is not your typical college applicant. Cota, who was kicked out of UCLA law school in 1952 for allegedly low grades, has been fighting for re-admission ever since.
He claims he was unfairly ousted from the school after expressing strong anti-communist views and not for academic reasons, as the school claims.
When asked why he wants to return to the school some fifty years later, Cota responded, “UCLA churns out people who keep their mouths shut, real shysters. It’s not a trade school churning out electricians. It produces statesmen, lawyers, you know, Congress, the Senate. I want a higher standard of ethics for that school.” UCLA is still denying his petition for re-admission.