Home Blog Page 156

Counseling Neglected

-
0

More students than ever before, both at the College of William and Mary and in the country as a whole, are seeking the help of student health counselors. This is a wonderful development, and yet, as a result, wait times for treatment at the College’s Counseling Center have been steadily increasing, stretching to over a month for some students. Counseling Center Director Warrenetta Mann insists this is not the result of a lack of staffing or funding; however, we sincerely disagree. An inability to provide prompt assistance to those who request it constitutes a serious problem, especially for such a vital resource to the College community.

Not all students face these month-long wait times, the Counseling Center arranges an initial assessment meeting within a day or two of the student’s request. While only those deemed “well-functioning” are forced to wait for a follow-up meeting, an extended wait for any potential problem could prove extremely detrimental. We would hate to think that increased wait times, based on only one preliminary meeting, might discourage those students who are just, perhaps tentatively, asking for help.

While it may be true that the Counseling Center has experienced steady growth over the past few years, clearly that growth has not been enough to match increased student need. That the Counseling Center itself does not view these wait times as something that needs to be addressed strikes us as particularly alarming. Continuing to ignore the problem can only cause it to worsen. It is essential to know when to ask for help — or, in this case, increased funding.

If this is part of a seasonal pattern, as Mann seems to imply, then perhaps seeking additional help during those few busy weeks or months of the semester should be explored. The fact that the Counseling Center hopes to hire another full-time American Psychological Association intern looks promising, but if this fails to address the current problems with wait times, other options must be pursued.

We realize that this is a trying time for the College in terms of finances, and some departments are forced to function while under-budgeted. This cannot be one. Given recent events, it is essential that the College exercise complete care with its students. The Counseling Center provides a vital service to the College in this effort, and we must ensure it continues to have the ability to provide that service to all who request it in a prompt manner. The first step to a solution is to admit the problem.

Alumna still gets the story

-
0

Mary Fricker ’62, now 69 years old, is a journalist whose modest and kindly nature belies her reputation as a thorough and tough investigative reporter. Throughout her career, Fricker has received numerous awards and recognitions, including the George Polk Award and the University of California-Los Angeles Gerald Loeb Award. This month she will have been honored twice, having received the Norwin S. Yoffie Career Achievement Award from the Society of Professional Journalists earlier this week and will be accepting the McGill Medal for Journalistic Courage next week in Atlanta, Ga.

Fricker graduated from the College of William in Mary with a B.A. in English. From an early age she dreamed of being a reporter, and during her time at the College she worked for The Flat Hat. However, she would end up deferring her goal for about two decades. During this period she married twice, both times to U.S. Marines, was widowed twice, and raised two sons.

Her first foray into journalism came at the age of 43 when she began working for Russian River News. In 1989, Fricker co-authored the book “Inside Job: The Looting of America’s Savings and Loans,” which was a definitive report of the Savings and Loan Crisis. The book became a New York Times bestseller. Fricker’s success secured her a job at the Press Democrat, a newspaper in Santa Rosa, Cal. She worked there for 21 years, covering business and the economy until her retirement in 2006. Some of her best work, however, was still to come.

In April 2007, Chauncey Bailey, editor of The Oakland Post, was gunned down on his way to work. The assassination was in response to an article he was researching on Your Black Muslim Bakery. The Bakery was once a prominent institution in California’s black community and a model of black entrepreneurship. By 2007, however, the organization had regressed and its members were implicated in crimes including assault and murder. The man responsible for Bailey’s shooting was an employee at the Bakery.

After Bailey’s murder, Fricker came out of retirement to join other journalists, forming the Chauncey Bailey Project. She coined the group’s motto, “You can’t kill a story by killing a journalist.” The Project was determined to continue Bailey’s investigation into the Bakery and to report on the Bailey murder investigation. Needless to say, this was a dangerous and challenging job.

The project’s investigations uncovered important evidence the police had overlooked during the murder investigation, including a tape that implicated the Bakery’s leader, Yusuf Bey IV, in the killing and has since led to his indictment on murder charges. Furthermore, the project uncovered serious missteps by the police department, which led to the resignation of the Oakland police chief, who was found to be a personal friend of Bey. Their investigation into the Bakery turned up evidence of other crimes including sexual assault by its leaders, which Fricker exhaustively investigated. It is mainly for her work with the Project that she will be receiving the Journalistic Courage Award.

Throughout her journalistic career, Frickner has consistently shown herself to be a tenacious investigator striving to find the truth, and a courageous woman not afraid to start a new career later in life or follow a story, even at the risk of personal harm. She not only told her readers about the world; she also used her position in ways that caused real change in her community. We should be proud to call her an alumna.

E-mail Ed Innace at einnace@wm.edu.

Students don’t have to travel in order to help those abroad

-
0

From the money I earned working over winter break, and the money I received as a teaching fellow this semester, I am donating $1,414 — the average cost for one student at the College of William and Mary to go on an international service trip during spring break — directly to VillageReach, a highly efficient charity that works to improve the infrastructure in rural Africa. By staying home, I am actually doing good abroad.
How much good? According to GiveWell, a non-profit committed to evaluating charities not just on their financial efficiency but on their human impact, my donation could be used by an immunization-focused organization like VillageReach to save up to seven lives.

As GiveWell’s top-rated international charity, VillageReach satisfies all four of GiveWell’s evaluative criteria: demonstrated impact, cost-effectiveness, scalability and transparency. If GiveWell’s evaluation is correct, then I am doing the most good I possibly can with the monetary resources I have. Does this mean people who participate in international service trips are somehow contributing less?

The ramifications of service trips are difficult to evaluate, and it’s not just because these trips tend to be coordinated by small organizations that lack the means to analyze their own impact, but because much of the good service trips claim to engender can’t be counted simply in terms of lives saved. The good they contribute, it is often claimed, is something less tangible. Service trips have the power to shape attitudes toward poverty and suffering, and to make their participants into caring citizens of the world in whom the seeds of future service are planted.

But if it’s true that giving to a highly efficient charity does more good — perhaps significantly more — than going on an international service trip, wouldn’t one expect those who have been so motivated by their experiences to eventually come to the point where they just want to do as much good as they can with the resources they have? If so, one would expect them to give the money they would spend on a service trip directly to a charity like VillageReach.

Is this realistic? After all, it’s not like all service trip participants have $1,400 sitting around ready to go — they work really hard all year long trying to raise money through concerts, bake sales and other events to reduce their costs. They do a remarkable job — many end up paying just a few hundred dollars to cover the airplane tickets that take them outside the country.

But couldn’t these efforts themselves be reoriented directly toward charity? I think they could, but let’s give the benefit of the doubt to service trips and say that they couldn’t. Let’s say that students are only motivated to raise money because they know they will see the fruits of their labors firsthand. In this case, we arrive at a dilemma. We could encourage students to give $300, the price many service trip participants end up paying out of pocket, directly to charity — or we could continue to encourage them to raise $1,400 apiece to go on a service trip. The question becomes: Is more good achieved when $1,400 is spent inefficiently, or when $300 is spent efficiently?

Three hundred dollars could easily save one life, if given to the correct charity. I simply don’t know how many lives per participant service trips save, if any. I am sure it depends on the service trip. If for every $1,400 spent sending one college student on a service trip, at least one life were saved, then going on that trip could, in fact, be one way to maximize moral good. But accepting this last part requires the assumption once again that it is implausible to expect a college student to be able to raise that money and just give it straight to an efficient charity.

I hope that in making my donation, I have shown this last assumption to be false. I believe that many College students like myself are already motivated to help the world’s desperately poor, and that this comprises a substantial part of what motivates them when they raise the money for their service trips. For this reason, if what we care about above all is doing good, then we should give to charities that are proven to successfully help those they aim to help, do so in a cost-effective manner, have potential for productive growth, and make their records available for those who ask to see them.

Some service trips may satisfy these criteria, but no one knows. Until they do, I feel better placing my money elsewhere. After all, this is a matter of life and death.

E-mail Adam Lerner at ajlerner@wm.edu.

A mattress of discrimination

-
0

_Click image to enlarge._

Football: Seniors show off at Pro Day

-
0

Early Wednesday morning, 20 NFL scouts, plus San Francisco 49ers Head Coach Mike Singletary, a Hall of Fame linebacker, watched intently as seven Tribe seniors attempted to improve their professional football prospects at William and Mary’s annual Pro Day at Zable Stadium.

Quarterback R.J. Archer, safeties David Caldwell and Robert Livingston, defensive tackle Sean Lissemore, wide receiver D.J. McAulay, defensive end Adrian Tracy and tight end Rob Varno participated.
The players ran through drills traditionally featured at the NFL combine, including the 225-pound bench press, vertical leap, standing broad jump and 40-yard dash, as well as various quickness and position drills.

“It was definitely exciting,” Tracy, an All-CAA honoree, said. “A lot of people think William and Mary is an academic school and that we don’t really have athletes. It was nice for them to see that we do have athletes that can play with the highest levels of competition, and it definitely felt good to have a chance to showcase the talent.”

Tracy, who was the only Tribe player to also work out at the NFL combine in February, used Wednesday’s Pro Day as a chance to improve his standing with scouts who took notice of him over the year. Although Tracy chose not to participate in any combine drills Wednesday, he ran through several position drills as scouts looked on.

During the combine, Tracy recorded a 40-yard dash time of 4.76 seconds, a vertical jump of 35.5 inches and 20 reps on the 225-pound bench press. CBS Sports currently projects Tracy as a sixth or seventh-round pick in the upcoming NFL Draft.

“I’ve had a lot of positive feedback from everyone who was here, and if they didn’t speak to me here, they spoke to me at the combine,” Tracy said. “The positive feedback I have had from everybody is definitely a confidence booster, making me feel like I do belong, and that all the hard work has paid off to certain extent. But there is still more work to be done.”

Many eyes were also on Lissemore, who tried to leave a memorable impression on the scouts.

“I feel like I did well on all my drills,” Lissemore said. “I hit the [225-pound bench press] 36 times, which I think ranks third at the combine right now overall. On the vertical jump, I recorded 30 inches, which is respectable for weighing 298 pounds … My 40-yard dash time was 4.83 [seconds], which is right in the range that I need to be.”

Lissemore believed the other seniors caught the attention of the scouts in attendance as well.

“I think that R.J. Archer did a great job,” Lissemore said. “He is just one of those guys that can just do it all. Coming off of baseball and throwing the ball around the way he did, he really turned some heads … I think David Caldwell had a heck of day. He had been flying under the radar for a number of reasons, but he is just a physical specimen and he really performed well.”

Archer has been projected to make an NFL roster as an undrafted free agent by CDSDraft.com, and Tribe players and coaches have said that he has the potential to succeed at the next level. Caldwell talked to several scouts Wednesday and said that representatives from the Kansas City Chiefs and the New England Patriots have expressed interest.

With 20 scouts present, the event featured the biggest turnout in recent memory, a fact players attribute to the successful NFL careers of several College alumni. William and Mary has graduated two Super Bowl winners: Pittsburgh Steelers Head Coach Mike Tomlin ’95 and New Orleans Saints safety Darren Sharper ’97. Derek Cox ’09 was a third-round draft pick by the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2009.

“When we have guys coming out and performing real well, it helps us,” Caldwell said. “If Derek Cox hadn’t performed so well last year and made such an impact on the Jaguars, we wouldn’t have had as much attention on Adrian and Sean, and that gave players like myself an opportunity to go off of Adrian and Sean. You just have to use whatever you can use when you come from a small school that’s not used to putting out big name prospects.”

Football: Seniors show off at Pro Day

-
0

Early Wednesday morning, 20 NFL scouts, plus San Francisco 49ers Head Coach Mike Singletary, a Hall of Fame linebacker, watched intently as seven Tribe seniors attempted to improve their professional football prospects at William and Mary’s annual Pro Day at Zable Stadium.

Quarterback R.J. Archer, safeties David Caldwell and Robert Livingston, defensive tackle Sean Lissemore, wide receiver D.J. McAulay, defensive end Adrian Tracy and tight end Rob Varno participated.
The players ran through drills traditionally featured at the NFL combine, including the 225-pound bench press, vertical leap, standing broad jump and 40-yard dash, as well as various quickness and position drills.

“It was definitely exciting,” Tracy, an All-CAA honoree, said. “A lot of people think William and Mary is an academic school and that we don’t really have athletes. It was nice for them to see that we do have athletes that can play with the highest levels of competition, and it definitely felt good to have a chance to showcase the talent.”

Tracy, who was the only Tribe player to also work out at the NFL combine in February, used Wednesday’s Pro Day as a chance to improve his standing with scouts who took notice of him over the year. Although Tracy chose not to participate in any combine drills Wednesday, he ran through several position drills as scouts looked on.

During the combine, Tracy recorded a 40-yard dash time of 4.76 seconds, a vertical jump of 35.5 inches and 20 reps on the 225-pound bench press. CBS Sports currently projects Tracy as a sixth or seventh-round pick in the upcoming NFL Draft.

“I’ve had a lot of positive feedback from everyone who was here, and if they didn’t speak to me here, they spoke to me at the combine,” Tracy said. “The positive feedback I have had from everybody is definitely a confidence booster, making me feel like I do belong, and that all the hard work has paid off to certain extent. But there is still more work to be done.”

Many eyes were also on Lissemore, who tried to leave a memorable impression on the scouts.

“I feel like I did well on all my drills,” Lissemore said. “I hit the [225-pound bench press] 36 times, which I think ranks third at the combine right now overall. On the vertical jump, I recorded 30 inches, which is respectable for weighing 298 pounds … My 40-yard dash time was about 4.9 [seconds], which is right in the range that I need to be.”

Lissemore believed the other seniors caught the attention of the scouts in attendance as well.

“I think that R.J. Archer did a great job,” Lissemore said. “He is just one of those guys that can just do it all. Coming off of baseball and throwing the ball around the way he did, he really turned some heads … I think David Caldwell had a heck of day. He had been flying under the radar for a number of reasons, but he is just a physical specimen and he really performed well.”

Archer has been projected to make an NFL roster as an undrafted free agent by CDSDraft.com, and Tribe players and coaches have said that he has the potential to succeed at the next level. Caldwell talked to several scouts Wednesday and said that representatives from the Kansas City Chiefs and the New England Patriots have expressed interest.

With 20 scouts present, the event featured the biggest turnout in recent memory, a fact players attribute to the successful NFL careers of several College alumni. William and Mary has graduated two Super Bowl winners: Pittsburgh Steelers Head Coach Mike Tomlin ’95 and New Orleans Saints safety Darren Sharper ’97. Derek Cox ’09 was a third-round draft pick by the Jacksonville Jaguars in 2009.

“When we have guys coming out and performing real well, it helps us,” Caldwell said. “If Derek Cox hadn’t performed so well last year and made such an impact on the Jaguars, we wouldn’t have had as much attention on Adrian and Sean, and that gave players like myself an opportunity to go off of Adrian and Sean. You just have to use whatever you can use when you come from a small school that’s not used to putting out big name prospects.”

Community: See you Later, hot-but-totally-annoying Stats professor!

-
0

I breathed a sigh of relief after about 4 minutes of this episode, when we found out that the Stats professor broke up with Jeff. As can be seen by my other unread blogposts, I never liked her from the beginning. Good riddance! I never thought Jeff was as funny as he could have been when he was around her. She was supposed to be smart and witty, but just came off as snooty and high on her horse. Whatever. Hopefully we’ll never see her again!

I still don’t really like Pierce-centric episodes. He’s just such a pathetic character. It makes it hard to watch and even harder to sympathize. The fact that that girl (who, for the record, I didn’t even think was that attractive — I’m committed to Annie) was grifting Pierce, and he sort of knew it, was just sad. It wasn’t funny.

Brita is hard to like. And that’s on purpose, I think. She’s always on her soapbox, yet she always ends up eating her words or realizing that life isn’t as idealized as she may want it to be. I guess that gives her room to grow. But her preachiness is grating.

On an unrelated but very important note, I still want more Annie.

Community: Back in the swing of things (no pun intended)

-
0

This episode of “Community” was funny from beginning to end.

Let me repeat: this episode of “Community” was funny from beginning to end. I know, I know. Hard to believe. Community has rarely been funny all the way through. But it sure did succeed this time! It was a great blend of clever humor (that is the modus operandi for most “Community episodes”) to stupid physical humor (which we rarely see on this program).

The whole pool-playing plot (ooh! Alliteration!) was stupidly funny. It’s a cheap laugh to have an old man in his tighty-whities (for more information, see “The Hangover”)…but it’s a laugh nonetheless.

Abed-centric episodes are the greatest. He’s so funny, loveable and neurotic that you can’t help but like the episode! I also really like the fact that he is used to girls approaching him. It keeps you from feeling sorry for him, which you can very easily do sometimes. On the contrary — apparently Abed has got a pretty awesome life.

Those endings with Troy and Abed are quickly becoming my favorite part of the episodes. They’re a chance for two very funny guys with very good writers to just do something stupid and only sometimes related to the 22 minutes preceding it. It’s almost sketch-like, but the show does it very well. Plus, I just like “Sesame Street” parodies.

30 Rock: the way a cameo SHOULD be

-
0

In short — and per usual — this episode of “30 Rock” was flawless. So I’m just gonna focus on two things in particular and spare you all the trouble of just reading sycophantic blather: Michael Sheen and Alec Baldwin.

Michael Sheen was perfect as Liz’s future husband. They built him up perfectly and it was flawless how awkwardly he interacted with the already-awkward Liz. It was also a great chance for Sheen to play a character that’s the total opposite of his famous roles. He’s played the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, for crying out loud! You don’t get much more sophisticated than that. And now he’s this pathetically awkward character. This is what they were trying to do with James Franco a few episodes back, but failed miserably. I’m willing to bet that that had to do with the actor and not the writing. No offense, James.

Another thing I liked about Sheen’s character was that he wasn’t central to the episode. We saw a good amount of him, just enough to know he existed and that he was a terrible match for Liz. It was the perfect length for a cameo. That’s one of the many things I don’t like when Julianne Moore has been on , or even Elizabeth Banks (Jack’s current fling) — we see way too much of them. It’s almost like the show can’t figure out if they’re supposed to be cameos or regular characters.

Speaking of Jack’s current fling, let’s talk about Jack. He’s loveable not only in his absolutely perfect business sense but also in his inability to believe that he can be taken down. His whole struggle with not knowing about the merger meeting with “Kabletown” (in a blatant nod to the Comcast buyout of NBC) was both satisfying and heart-wrenching. We as viewers are really glad that Jack doesn’t have everything under control, but at the same time we don’t like to see him weak. “30 Rock” does well to keep that fine balance between Jack’s total power and his crushing powerlessness.

One last question — what happened to the new cast member of TGS? We didn’t see him at all the entire episode. I miss him already.

William and Mary falls to North Carolina in NIT’s opening round

-
0

Head Coach Tony Shaver sat alone before the podium at North Carolina’s Carmichael Arena and looked down. William and Mary (22-11) had just fallen 80-72 to the Tar Heels in the first round of the National Invitational Tournament. Tears welled in his eyes as he gained his composure. Finally, Shaver raised his head and spoke.

“I’ve coached a long time,” he said, pausing to catch his breath. “But I’ve probably never been prouder of a group of kids than I am of these guys.”

Shaver’s squad had just taken the defending national champion Tar Heels to the wire, turning a 10-point halftime deficit into a late second-half lead before succumbing to the North Carolina pressure down the stretch.

“The way they played, the way they keep their composure, the schedule they faced this year, to play as well as they did was very impressive to me,” Shaver said. “I’m happy to be a part of it.”

The game got off to an ominous start for the Tribe, as Carolina scored the first nine points, sending the sellout crowd into a frenzy. But the College fought back behind a barrage of three pointers from senior guard David Schneider, senior forward Danny Sumner and sophomore forward JohnMark Ludwick.

The squad shot a season-high 43 attempts from beyond the arc, making 16. Schneider buried seven of his 15 three-point attempts as part of a 21-point, eight-assist performance in his final collegiate game.

“[Schneider] played the way he always plays. I can’t imagine playing without him. I really truly can’t,” Shaver said. “His effort, his intensity, his heart, are always on display. You won’t find a kid playing the game harder than he does anywhere.”

But soon shooters fatigue set in. Junior center Marcus Kitts, who amassed 12 points on six-of-seven shooting while guarding North Carolina’s big men, fouled out with 3:43 remaining and the Tribe up by three points. The Tar Heels dominated the glass in Kitts’s absence, outscoring the College 11-0 in the last four minutes.

Without Kitts the Tribe’s offense fell apart.

“Our rotations weren’t right at the end of the game.We had people out of position, but I think [North Carolina’s] pressure forced the turnovers,” Shaver said. “They really overplayed our pass to the post and got some key turnovers in that spot.”

Sophomore forward Quinn McDowell did not play Tuesday due to a right-ankle injury suffered in the Tribe’s CAA-semifinal win over Northeastern. With McDowell on the bench, the Tribe was missing one of its better defensive players on the interior and its best three-point shooter on the season.

McDowell’s absence was felt on the game’s deciding play with under a minute remaining and the Tar Heels up 75-72. Senior center Steven Hess was forced to the high post, McDowell’s spot in the offense, and a Tribe pass intended for Hess was stolen by North Carolina forward Tyler Zeller. Zeller came around Hess’s back and took the ball the length of the court for an uncontested slam dunk. The basket stretched the Tar Heel lead to five, and the home squad never looked back.

The turnover was one of 17 for the Tribe, which was outscored 38-20 in the paint and 10-2 on fast-break points. Although the College shot 41.9 percent for the game, the squad failed to make a field goal over the final 5:09.

Despite the final score, when the buzzer sounded a palpable sigh of relief echoed out of the Carmichael Arena crowd, serving as an undeniable sign that the transformation of the Tribe under Shaver from laughing stock to legitimate contender was complete.

“I remember telling our guys six years ago, I think we came here and got demolished in a ball game. We talked then about how we want our program to get to the point where we can walk in these arenas expecting to win and our kids did that this year,” Shaver said.

1...155156157...455Page 156 of 455

ABOUT US

The Flat Hat has been the College of William and Mary's student newspaper since 1911. It covers the College and the surrounding area of Williamsburg, VA, printing on Tuesdays of the academic year.

FOLLOW US

© 1911-Present. The Flat Hat. All Rights Reserved.