College President Gene Nichol was recently awarded a 2007 Distinguished Alumni Award by the Oklahoma State University alumni association. Nichol, along with five other recipients, were honored at a convention at Southwestern Legacy Hall of the ConocoPhillips OSU Alumni Center in Stillwater, Okla. Nichol was also honored during the halftime show of the OSU football game against Texas Tech.

p. The Distinguished Alumni Award is awarded to select alumni for outstanding professional achievement and community service.

Oct. 31, Anne Arseneau, head of student affairs for the Greek community, signed a green pledge by the Back Porch Energy Initiative (BPEI) to start the Eco-Coed competition for sorority court.

p. The competition, which is set to take place next spring, pits all of the sororities residing in Sorority Court into an eco-competition. Each sorority will be graded on various energy-saving criteria such as energy use, cleaning products and water use. The competition would consist of two “eco-audits” after which sororities would be given various tips by BPEI. After a month, another “eco-audit” would be administered to determine which house was the most ecologically friendly.

p. The Back Porch Energy Initiative, a non-profit organization founded by alumni of the College, was created with the goal of educating the community about environmentally healthy living.

**39 degrees**
The average low temperature for November in Williamsburg, nine degrees lower than the October average. The average high is 62 degrees.

p. **405**
The age of a clam that was discovered off the coast of Iceland, making it the oldest creature known to have lived. Nicknamed “Ming” after the Chinese dynasty that was in power when it was born, the clam was discovered by scientists almost a year ago, but died before its age was announced.

p. **5 million**
The number of new customers who subscribe to China Mobile each month. As the biggest cell phone carrier in the world, China Mobile has been finding new customers in the country’s rural interior, where only 1 in 10 people have mobile phones.

p. **50 million**
The number of feral cats in the United States, based on a 1997 study by the Progressive Animal Welfare Society.

The Student Assembly debated allocating $1,000 for a website that will compile past course syllabi and voted to allocate additional funding to the “Sister Split” event during Tuesday’s meeting.

p. When Sen. Matt Skibiak ’08 presented the Syllabus Availability Act for a vote, he announced an amendment that would allocate $1,000 from the consolidated reserve to set up a website that makes past course syllabi available to students.

p. SA President Zach Pilchen ’09 endorsed the bill and was responsible for hiring Ben Strahs ’09 to construct the website. Strahs works professionally as a website designer and is usually paid $100-$150 an hour. He originally estimated that the site would take 10 hours to build, but he has worked additional hours without further pay. The $1,000 is a one-time fee.

p. “You’ll be able to see exactly what is required for that class,” Pilchen said. “It’s pretty worthwhile since it’ll be here for decades.”
Many senators criticized Pilchen for only having a verbal contract with Strahs.

p. “I’m worried that’s a bad price bar to set,” Sen. Walter McClean ’09 said.

p. The bill was sent back to the finance committee.

p. “This shows how the senate puts stuff off in random committees,” Skibiak said.

p. The SA heard an appeal from Constance Sisk ’08 over the funding allocated by the finance committee to the “Sister Split” event. The Nov. 9 event features six lesbian spoken word performers with an anticipated attendance of 200 students. The event is sponsored by the Lambda Alliance, the Meridian Coffeehouse and Vox.

p. Sisk informed the finance committee that the speakers charged $1,500. Secretary of Finance Andrew Blasi ’10 said that last year’s event cost $1,000 and allocated $400.

p. “The price [of the speaker] has gone up,” Sisk said.

p. She had originally asked the senate to allocate between $600 and $800. The senate voted 14-4 to allocate $350 in addition to the initial $400.

p. Senators said they were concerned about the state of the Activities and Events Fund.

p. “If you divided our total money by the number of weeks, we are slightly above track,” Blasi said.

In light of the Student Information Network’s successful handling of this year’s freshman elections, the Student Assembly is no longer looking into hiring a third party to conduct elections.

p. “No, SIN is fine,” SA President Zach Pilchen ’09 said, when asked how the SA felt about changing to a new election system.

p. The SA began looking for a third party as a reaction to SIN’s loss of some election results last spring. Over the course of two SA meetings prior to this year’s freshman elections, the senate discussed using votenet.com at $2,500 per year.

p. “We put the system under a full test — the freshman elections, and it performed fine. The problems that people attributed to the software weren’t related to the software, but more about who had access to it. The only change that was made was to be sure that the elections software could accept the new student logins that were given to freshmen, and since there is no problem with it, I am very confident that the system will continue to be dependable,” Adam Boltik ’08 said.

p. He added that since the SIN-based election system worked for the freshman elections, the SA did not see any additional benefits from using a hired third party.

p. SIN’s Michael Weissburger ’09 said that SIN and the SA do not interact much. “Zach Pilchen has graciously extended a hand out to SIN, and offered to assist us with some problems we are facing, mostly with flagging membership and interest in the student body for working on SIN. I am happy about that. Other than that, we have little contact with SA,” he said.

Though the presidential general election is still over a year away, some students at the College are already sure who they are voting for.

p. Among the many candidates, the three who have active student groups in the form of chapters of Facebook groups on campus are Republican candidates Rep. Ron Paul and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, along with Democrat Sen. Barack Obama.
Kelli Chappel ’08, creator of the College chapter of the Facebook group Students for Ron Paul, reported that as of about two weeks ago, Students for Ron Paul expanded beyond Facebook and is now an official campus group.

p. “Our strategy for this semester includes raising awareness about important issues, informing voters about Congressman Ron Paul’s positions on those issues, and registering and turning out voters,” she said.

p. Chappel explained that it is Paul’s unique platform that distinguishes him from the other candidates and inspired her support. “I realized the only politician, Republican or Democrat, campaigning to be president who offered the hope of a real change was Congressman Ron Paul. Before I had heard about him, I was disgusted with the way that Washington politics have been over the last few years, but I had accepted it as a necessary evil.”

p. Paul’s supporters deny the common criticism that Paul’s views on foreign policy effectively make him an isolationist.

p. “He is a non-interventionist,” Chappel said. “Non-interventionism is spreading democracy by setting a good example for the rest of the world to see and not with the barrel of a gun. Our interests here at home need to come first before the interests of other nations.”

p. Joe Luppino-Esposito ’08 created a campus Facebook group in support of Rudy Giuliani, the Republican candidate who has maintained front runner status throughout the past year. “Right now, it’s just me and a few others consistently involved. We’re hoping to garner more student support, but there’s still four to six top Republicans and students aren’t necessarily ready to commit yet,” he said.

p. “Our first task has been gathering the 10,000 signatures necessary to get Rudy on the ballot for the Virginia primary.” Luppino-Esposito expressed further plans to make Students for Rudy 2008 an official campus group in the next few weeks.
Giuliani has been criticized by some who claim that his tenure as mayor of New York City leaves him lacking credentials necessary to be president. For Luppino-Esposito and other Rudy supporters, it is his record of leadership that makes Giuliani the candidate most qualified for the nation’s highest executive office.

p. “It’s not as if he was the Mayor of some small city,” Luppino-Esposito said. “He managed a huge budget and school system, cleaned up the city and made it safer and economically prosperous.”

p. The Facebook group “William and Mary Students for Barack Obama,” created by Jared Calfee ’10, is the largest of the three, with 85 members. It is also an official student group on campus. Calfee described the group’s campus activities.

p. “We have done things like gathering petition signatures to get Obama on the primary ballot in Virginia. We have also collected pledges, handed out signs and just answered people’s questions about Obama. We want to increase name recognition and make all the information possible available to anyone who wants to hear it,” he explained.

p. Obama supporters say they look beyond policy and see in the senator a leader who has characteristics that America should seek in their next President.

p. “The qualities that Obama possesses may seem somewhat intangible, but they are vital for a successful president,” Calfee notes. “His ability to inspire and motivate people is a crucial quality for someone in a major leadership role. To be successful and get things done that need to get done, you have to be able to convince people that your ideas are right and beneficial to them.”

p. Obama is the junior senator from Illinois and has served for two and half years. His supporters are adamant that experience is not the only factor that voters should utilize in evaluating candidates.
“The qualities that make a good president are intelligence, leadership, judgment and genuinely caring about the people of the country you will be leading. We believe Senator Obama has these qualities to such a great extent that he is the most qualified candidate for president,” Calfee said.

p. Noticeably absent is a group dedicated to candidate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Neither a Facebook nor official student group in support of the Democratic front runner exists at the College. Rachel Wolin ’08, a member of the Young Democrats, offered an explanation.

p. “I would hazard a guess of why Hillary is not as popular to younger voters; she has not made the honest, good-faith effort to reach out to the kind of voters that we have here at William and Mary.”

p. Wolin did say a contingent of Clinton supporters will likely emerge from the student body at some point. “I think time will tell. Give it a few months. Let the first few primaries happen. I do not think we can declare a complete lack of support for Hillary by W&M students. It just is not as loud.”

p. Regardless of the divergence of their views on policy, the students articulated a bipartisan dedication to increasing awareness and involvement in the voting process.

p. “Most people realize that whether or not they agree with the issues that we’re talking about, we’re informing voters,” Chappel said. “For me personally, I’d rather have informed voters causing us to lose the election than people just voting for who the media tells them to vote for.”

p. Calfee reaffirmed the sentiment. “Our goal is to both help advance our candidate on campus, but also to increase students’ awareness about politics in general as well as our candidate and encourage them to register and vote,” he said.

p. “Our belief is that if everyone is well-informed about all of their choices, the majority will make the choice that is best for the country, and that is democracy in action.”

The College is ranked near the bottom of large American and Canadian colleges and universities for environmental sustainability, according to the Sustainable Endowments Institute’s 2008 Report Card.

p. The report graded the schools with the 200 largest endowments in the United States and Canada. Along with 21 other schools, the College was awarded a ‘D-,’ while four schools received a failing grade. The College is tied with Virginia Commonwealth University for worst in the state, and the College lags far behind the schools with which it competes for resources.

p. Of the eight categories in which the College was graded, the College received a failing grade on five, including Administration, Climate Change and Energy and Transportation. The College received no grade higher than C, which it received on Green Building, Food and Recycling and Investment Priorities.

p. The College was far outdone by peer schools such as University of Virginia (B-), North Carolina-Chapel Hill (B-), Duke University (B+) and Georgetown University (B-). Other schools that received ‘D-’ scores included Arkansas’ College of the Ozarks, Loyola University, the University of South Alabama, the University of Mississippi and Saint Louis University.

p. According to its website, the SEI is a non-profit organization seeking to advance sustainability in the operations of colleges. Its grades were based on surveys filled out by administrators and publicly-available information.

Oh my goodness, what the hell is on my chin (nose, cheek, jaw)?!
No, it’s not a staph infection; it’s that dry, rough, scaly, discolored remnant of a makeout with a bearded dude. The kiss-chafe is just one of the many terrible side effects of wretched facial hair.

p. As No Shave November begins, we brace ourselves for the influx of hairy cheeks and regrettable ’staches. Granted, this month-long celebration of virility is mostly ironic, kitsch and silly: the great mystery lies in the men who desire the facial hair lifestyle the other 11 months.

p. Under the school’s anti-hazing policy, fraternities and other groups cannot force or mandate that members be clean-shaven. There is a new Beta Theta Pi who, despite the general good grooming habits of the other brothers, continues to have questionable facial hair. How this happens, nobody knows — and believe me, the fate of the hair has been discussed at length in several different venues. While I know there is nothing to be done on the hazing level, I implore you — a capella groups, frats, performance organizations — let the perils of facial hair be known to your members.

p. For one thing, facial hair can exhibit disease-like symptoms; it is often blotchy, discolored, rough and unsightly. Valtrex anyone?
Speaking of nether regions, chin pubes are the worst — those little hairs that are more reminiscent of an elderly woman than a strapping young man do nothing for the masculinity of anyone.

p. Yet sometimes all the peer pressure in the world won’t separate a man from his face-locks. I’m tempted to publicly (I like to pretend my column is widely read) humiliate every be-pubed face on campus, but unfortunately the list is too long. Instead, this is a call to arms. A call to razors. A call to sensitive-skin Nair.

p. I once gave an old boyfriend one of those electric razors that oozed goo. The allure of the gadget overcame the allure of rough facial hair, and my skin was rejuvenated before prom. Subsequently we broke up, the beard came back and his new girlfriend says she likes it.

p. I guess that means they deserve each other, because any woman who likes facial hair is clearly a little coo-coo-kachoo. Yes please, I’d like scruffy hair rubbing on my face (and elsewhere). And yes, the porn ’stache is really a selling point to my parents. Sally, while you’re struggling to find the perfect gift for clean-shaven Dave, look no further than some mustache wax and beard trimmers — they’re so convenient!

p. I also do not believe the guys who trout the convenience of facial hair. First and foremost, how long does it take to shave, really? Girls are expected to keep a certain level of hairlessness on a larger surface area and yet, the 15 minutes of facial upkeep is too much to ask of a guy? Additionally, if done correctly, beard and mustache maintenance is a science and an art, as unfortunate and upsetting as that may be.

p. There are so many things working against our generation. We are touted as apathetic, lazy, privileged, disconnected, uninvolved and now, I hate to say, bearded. The world is creepy enough without the aesthetics of a peeping Tom.

p. For the general advancement of our peer group, remember: Vote or Die. Shave or Grave.

p. __Charlotte Savino is a Confusion Corner columnist. She recommends Gillette Quatro for a nice, close shave year round.__