Former College President Timothy J. Sullivan will keynote the graduation ceremony at Christopher Newport University this year, CNU President Paul Trible announced in an e-mail to CNU students Wednesday.

p. Sullivan was the College’s graduation speaker in 2005, his last year leading the College. Since then, Sullivan has served as president and CEO of the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News.

p. “It is a great honor to have Tim Sullivan address our graduates,” Trible, a former U.S. Republican Senator from Virginia, said in a CNU press release. “As a professor and dean of the Marshall-Wythe School of Law and President of William and Mary and now as President of the Mariners’ Museum, Tim Sullivan has contributed immensely to the success of Virginia. His life embodies the qualities of leadership, honor and civic engagement that we strive to instill in all our students at CNU.”

p. Sullivan’s tenure at the College began in 1962, when he entered as a freshman. After graduating in 1966, he received a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Sullivan then served in the army during the Vietnam War. He returned to the College to run the Marshall-Wythe School of Law and became dean in 1985. In 1992, the Board of Visitors appointed him the College’s 25th president, a position he held for 13 years.

p. CNU’s commencement ceremony will take place May 13.

**Wednesday, April 4 —** A student reported that an iPod was stolen from the University Center. The estimated value of the stolen iPod is $175. **(1)**

p. —A staff member at James Blair reported that an iPod was stolen out of a locked office. The office and the iPod belonged to a graduate student. The estimated value of the stolen iPod is $150. **(2)**

p. —A student reported a larceny outside of Unit E. He reported that a Silver Schwinn Mountain Bike was taken from the Unit E bike rack and had not been seen since Friday, March 30. The estimated value of the bike is $70. **(3)**

p. **Thursday, April 5 —** Police Unit 104 reported vandalism in the William and Mary Hall parking lot. The unit reported that a van belonging to Rec Sports had been tagged and there were no plates on the vehicle. The estimated damage was $500. **(4)**

p. —A resident of Landrum called in a complaint about a man preaching at the Crim Dell. **(1)**

p. —A student reported a larceny at Jamestown South. The student reported the theft of a Silver Schwinn Ranger Mountain Bike from the bike rack in front of Jamestown South. The estimated value of the bike was $100. The bike was not registered with the police department. **(5)**

p. **Friday, April 6 —** A student reported vandalism to her vehicle in the Stadium Parking Lot. An officer was dispatched. **(6)**

p. **Sunday, April 8 —** An individual called in a complaint that someone used an unknown substance to write “leachbone” on the right rear corner of his vehicle. Estimated vehicle damage $35. **(4)**

p. **Monday, April 9 —** An Aramark employee reported a larceny at Ukrop Way. Unit 53 was approached by an Aramark employee and reported a stolen blue, women’s bicycle. The estimated value of the bike is $100. **(7)**

**1931**
College club baseball team, The Green Sox, defeated the Princeton University Tigers twice in a two-game series. Pitcher Lefty White led the College to an 11-1 victory in the first game. The Green Sox won 5-1 in the 2nd game due to Princeton’s infield errors.

p. **1966**
Singer Dionne Warwick headlined two concerts during Greek Weekend festivities. Warwick, whose “Walk on By” record became an international top-five record, came to the College after returning from a European tour.

p. **1973**
The Theta Delta Chi soccer team won the intramural championships. One hundred students watched as TDX beat independent team Pi Meson 3-1. Neither team scored in the first half.

p. **1984**
The Committee for Speaker Selection Process Reform put together a petition to increase student involvement in choosing a commencement speaker. The petition, signed by over 1,000 students, stipulated the creation of student polls to be used by the Board of Visitors.

p. **1996**
The College announced Netscape, a graphics-based Web browser, would be made available to students. It would be installed in the summer and replace Lynx, a test-based Web browser. The change included benefits such as improved security and faster e-mail.

**Professor awarded Guggenheim Fellowship**

p. Nikos Chrisochoides, alumni memorial distinguished associate professor of computer science at the College, has been awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship on Medicine and Health. The area of medicine and health awarded two Fellows this year, and Chrisochoides was the only American recipient of this honor. Chrisochoides has been working on Image Guided Neurosurgery, a treatment for brain tumors. His research team pioneered the field of image tracking by aligning pre- and intra-operative views of the brain, which can be used during tumor removal procedure.

p. Winning the Guggenheim Fellowship will allow his team to improve technology and expand their reach to hospitals across the world. As Chrisochoides noted, the award was given for medicine and health instead of computer science, which will create even more opportunities for its development. Chrisochoides is now the fourth professor from the College to receive this fellowship.

p. **Prime Outlets to expand retail space**

Prime Outlets is expanding onto the Comfort Inn hotel site and adding 3.54 acres of retail space. The expansion includes more parking spaces and plans to put a traffic light on Olde Towne Road. Opponents of the development cite environmental reasons, but developers have said they will take steps to be environmentally friendly. These steps include reusing brick from old buildings. New stores coming to Prime Outlets have not been announced.

**Zero**
The number of years since 1947 that Williamsburg received snow in April, according to data from the Southeast Regional Climate Center.

p. **413**
The number of lawsuit notification letters that the RIAA sent out this week to students at 22 universities. The RIAA also notified the College this week that it found copyright violations tied to 12 campus computers.

p. **34 percent**
The proportion of college students who reported spending 10 hours or more online per week, according to a nationwide survey of August 2006 survey of 800 students.

p. **25 percent**
The online betting odds that Virginia will vote for the Democratic nominee in the 2008 presidential election, according live quotes from Intrade.com.

p. **7 percent**
The proportion of all married couples that are interracial, up from 2 percent in 1970, according to a Stanford researcher. A Virginia law barring non-whites from marrying whites was not struck down by the Supreme Court until 1967.

p. The College forwarded 12 pre-litigation letters from the Recording Industry of America to students who allegedly downloaded music illegally. The letters offer the students a chance to settle copyright infringement claims at a reduced rate or face lawsuits from the association.

p. The RIAA tracked students based on their IP addresses and sent 413 letters to 21 universities, requesting that the universities forward the letters to the students. The RIAA does not know the identity of the students, and the College currently will not release that information but may eventually be legally obligated to do so.

p. “The College would not release such personal information about students without their consent,” Vice President for Student Affairs Sam Sadler wrote yesterday in an e-mail to students. “We were informed that this request was being made of us in advance of a possible subpoena for the information. Were a subpoena issued, we might well be required to provide the identifying information.”

p. According to a press release from the RIAA, the association is trying to deter illegal downloading on college campuses. The press release says that a 2006 survey by the Student Monitor found that more than half of college students obtain music and movies illegally.

p. “Without question, this new enforcement initiative has invigorated a meaningful conversation on college campuses about music theft, its consequences and the numerous ways to enjoy legal music,” Steven Marks, general counsel and executive vice president of the RIAA, said in the press release. “The question we ask of students is this: with high-quality legal music options available for free or deeply discounted, why take the twin risks of exposing your computer to viruses or spyware by downloading from an illegal site or exposing yourself to a costly lawsuit?”

p. The letters mark the third wave of bulk notifications to universities about student copyright infringement. According to The Daily Pennsylvanian — the student newspaper of the University of Pennsylvania, which received 17 pre-litigation letters Wednesday — the RIAA has sent over 1,200 letters total to universities and plans to send 400 per month, in addition to lawsuits filed on a rolling basis.

p. The College was the only Virginia school to receive letters. Ohio University topped the list, receiving 50 letters.

p. “Obviously the recording industry is stepping up enforcement of its copyrights,” Sadler said in his e-mail.

p. “If you have doubts about whether it would be appropriate to download from the internet music or other materials, my strong suggestion would be, don’t.”

“They said that I was going to come to William and Mary and ‘take over the yearbook,’” junior Michelle Gannon said, thinking back to a running joke her high school buddies made because of the enthusiasm with which she took to her tenure as editor of their school’s award-winning yearbook. They were right.

p. Proving her friends correct, Gannon has since served as managing editor for the Colonial Echo for the last two years, overseeing every detail of the Echo’s publication from start to finish. Now, with her graduation next spring looming around the corner and with no successor in line, the College’s oldest running publication faces an uncertain future.

p. Because she has time-consuming plans to student-teach next semester, Gannon had hoped that this year would be her last with the Echo. However, in the organization’s annual officer elections, only one staffer ran to replace her, and the unopposed staffer has since withdrawn her bid for the position.

p. Gannon has since agreed to stay on staff for at least the 2007-2008 edition. If no one takes her spot after that, the Colonial Echo will be forced to miss a year for the first time in over a century for its 2008-2009 edition.

p. “There will be a yearbook next year,” Gannon said. “If there will be one after that, I don’t know. It’s possible it might not publish, but it’s a really sad thought.”

p. This is especially poignant at a time when the Echo’s quality is on the upswing.

p. “I think we’ve done a really good job bringing it up to a higher standard than it’s ever been,” Gannon said, referring to the many recognitions the yearbook has recently won, including the gold prize from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, which was awarded to the Echo last year for the first time since 1907.

p. “The College would hate for it to be lost, there’s no doubt about that,” Mark Constantine, assistant vice president for student affairs, said.

p. Constantine oversees the student publications committee and the groups it funds.

p. “This is a student initiative,” he said. “If no one is that interested, ultimately the publication would go away.”
Constantine cited what he perceived as a general nationwide trend moving away from yearbooks in higher education.

p. “Many schools have dropped them altogether,” he said.

p. As far as Gannon is concerned, the main problem facing the Echo right now is a top-heavy hierarchy that gives the managing editor too much work and too few rewards.

p. “If you’re the editor of The Flat Hat, that’s pretty cool. If you’re the editor of the yearbook, people are like — we have a yearbook?

p. It’s much more behind the scenes,” Gannon said.

p. After acknowledging that she has a great staff working for her, she goes on to explain that the workload is enough to keep anyone away.

p. “Basically, I kind of do everything that doesn’t get done. Proofs, copy-edit, work with the publishing company, answering phones — whatever,” she said.

p. On top of that, when writers shirk, the buck stops with her. She personally wrote 100 pages of last year’s 300-page edition.

p. “I am going to be studying abroad next fall in Singapore, but even if I were here, I would not be willing to take on responsibility for the entire yearbook. It is a ridiculous time commitment,” Echo staff writer sophomore Andrew Chan said.

p. In many schools, such as James Madison University, journalism and media arts major students flock to the yearbook staff in hopes of creating a layout and design portfolio that would be helpful in later job searches. The College does not offer these majors.

p. “They can take it as examples of their work. We don’t have that here,” Gannon said.

p. For now, Gannon is planning an organizational restructuring that would include delegating some of the managing editor’s duties to the section editors and perhaps creating two co-editor positions.

p. She also will actively try to find and train a successor.

p. College admissions are becoming notoriously more competitive, but the College may not be keeping up. As other colleges have seen record-low acceptance rates, the College’s acceptance rate has increased from 31 percent two years ago, to 32 percent last year, and 33 percent this year.

p. Dean of Admissions Henry Broaddus and Associate Provost for Enrollment Earl Granger attributed this year’s higher acceptance rate to press about early decision programs earlier this year, when such programs were discontinued at Harvard University, Princeton University and the University of Virginia.

p. “The early admissions rates [of applications] are down because of how much of a beating early decision took in the press this year,” Granger said.

p. This year’s early applicants decreased by 6.7 percent from last year. According to Granger, the lower early admission applications affected who applied regular decision.

p. “The selectivity is a little different, but as a qualitative matter, we identify the most talented within our pool, so the most important thing is that the class is its own best resource, and in terms of how diverse it is, it has really been a great success,” Granger said.

p. Many colleges saw record lows in admission rates, such as U.Va.’s 33 percent rate, down from 36 percent last year.
The College received a record 10,845 applications and accepted 3,577. The College still expects its typical enrollment of around 1,350, but that the College is offering spots to more students indicates the possibility that the College may be trying to compensate for a lower yield rate.

p. Of the 10,845 applicants, 20 percent of applicants (2,179) were students of color. This is an increase compared to the 2,076 (19 percent) of last year. 938 students, or 8.6 percent of the accepted class, were students of color. Last year, the rate was 8.8 percent. Of the 938 of color, 270 are black, 375 are Asian, 258 are Hispanic and 35 are Native American.

p. First-generation students, whose parents or guardians did not attend college, increased from 331 to 375.

p. “There is a significant increase in this area of 13 percent. We are very excited about this, because it is another indicator in our success in outreach towards students who wouldn’t normally think of attending William and Mary,” Broaddus said.

p. Granger also emphasized the first generation increase as a way to impact campus economic diversity.

p. “Clearly we’re excited about the first generation increase; most people think of race as diversity, but we think about it in the broadest context,” he said. “We’re excited in terms of direction; we are able to impact the way our campus looks and the way our students are challenged.”

p. The SAT middle 50th percentile was 1310-1470, identical to last year. Of students who attended high schools that use class ranks, 87 percent were ranked in the top 10 percent of their class. This is an increase from last year, according to the Admissions Office’s press release.

p. Statistics for waitlisted students are not yet available.

p. “We don’t have those statistics yet. We are still building the waitlist; students can be admitted, denied or offered a place on the waitlist,” Broaddus said. “We usually have an active waitlist of just over 800.”

p. Despite the rise of the admission rate, Broaddus and Granger are happy with the turnout of this year’s process, and they want to continue to focus on expansion of diversity.

p. “It’s a college community where we have a lot to be proud of, statistically,” Granger said.

p. “We want to cultivate and develop the Gateway pool, which is for students whose family makes below $40,000 a year. Only 28 percent of students at William and Mary are here on financial aid,” Granger said.