So I was watching “The Hills” the other day …
I’m sorry. I promise never to start a column with those words ever again.

p. But I was watch-ing “The Hills” the other day, and Lauren said that she was getting back into the swing of dating and waiting for her prince charming to come. Whether or not this was one of the scripted moments the producers wanted, I began to think about why any of us are in relationships at all. Perhaps it’s best we’re not.

p. Take a look at your relationship for a moment. Chances are you don’t see yourself spending the rest of your life with that person — and if you do … well, you already know my position on crazy-young engagements. But just because you don’t want to marry your beau, is that a reason to break up? What’s the threshold past which relationships have to “go somewhere”?

p. In a generation of hook-ups, talking and dating distinction, who needs the added stress of another set of needs contributing to the stress of being a student? Or is it more stressful being single?
I would have to say no. For all of the griping about wanting to be in a relationship, nobody feels more wanted than a young single student. Every event becomes a prowl, an eye-contact game or just a numbers tally. As someone attached, all of that thrill goes away or at least elicits guilt.

p. Life’s just a little more interesting when everyone is a possibility — whether or not anything comes of it. Every decision is utterly and gloriously selfish, social plans are in your own best interest, summer jobs and locations are based on your individual needs and nobody has to sacrifice anything for the relationship. When so many decisions are made in these formative years, who wants to make a decision based on a potentially transient sweetheart?

p. Then there are those people trapped in relationships because they fear the breakup. Consider your hanger-on barnacle of a not-so-significant other as a splinter. Go ahead and hobble around (it’s a splinter in your foot, let’s say) for a month or so, but eventually you’ve just got to go in, dig around and squeeze that sucker out. Sure, there may be blood, tetanus or a staff infection, but all that might have occurred if you had been passive in the process. You need to consider what would be worse, getting rid of the splinter yourself or letting the splinter decide get rid of you first.

p. Perhaps you’ve found yourself in a relationship in which you never meant to be in the first place. Sometimes attachments grow like goiters because of some vitamin deficiency — a vitamin I (for independence). What if your cyst-friend swallows you up, and you didn’t even plan on a relationship of any kind, let alone a dependency. First the goiter holds your hand, introduces you to its friends, prefers cuddling to sex and then, suddenly, when you start to make decisions jointly, the goiter begins to run your life. Can you break up with someone you never intended to be with?

p. This thought brings me back to the way so many of us hold relationships as part of routine, habit, the low-grade annoyance of the quotidian. We are too young and vibrant to be stuck in a rut already. If sitcoms have taught us anything, it is the complacency of middle age.

p. It’s spring; nature is at its most promiscuous. Celebrate the season with a new style, a fresh bounce in your step achieved only from the knowledge of your own reclaimed flirting capabilities. I say it’s time for a little spring cleaning, but don’t throw away a classic piece.

p. Ask yourself if you actively chose the relationship you’re in. Are you giving yourself an expiration date? If you can easily see an endpoint when looking at your dating life, is it worth waiting it out until the bitter end?

p. Going back to that glorious episode of “The Hills,” I leave you with the following proposition: Clean out your emotional fridge. Toss out the moldy and enjoy the delightful possibility of shopping again, but treat yourself to Whole Foods instead of Food Lion. If everyone decides to cut ties at once (much as I imagine Los Angeles did one fateful day and never looked back), the singles pool would be infused with a new life.

p. Enjoy single life and all of the benefits of being selfish. The only rule is, no looking for fairytale romances — those are as stale as last year’s bread ends.

p. __Charlotte Savino is a Confusion Corner columnist for The Flat Hat. She has a boyfriend.__

__The SA senate passed a bill to give at least three credits for ROTC courses__

p. The Student Assembly senate unanimously passed The Full and Fair Treatment for ROTC Cadets Act March 27. The bill includes provisions urging the College to restructure credit for ROTC courses so cadets receive at least three credits per semester, and all credits earned through ROTC would be counted toward the 120 required for graduation.

p. These changes would be made retroactively in order to benefit all current cadets. The bill was sponsored by junior senator Joe Luppino-Esposito and sophomore senators Matt Beato and Zach Pilchen. Sophomore Matt Pinsker, ROTC cadet and member of the SA executive branch, was instrumental in conceiving and writing the bill.

p. “I went to the student senate first because I felt that I would get more from them than I would from the administration. I knew [they] would take the time to listen to and fairly evaluate our concerns,” Pinsker said.

p. A few years ago, the cadets presented the credit issue to the administration, but they were quickly rejected. ROTC cadets and the senate are hoping that the administration will pay more attention to the issue now because it has the full support of elected senators. The Educational Policy Review Committee, chaired by Professor Ray McCoy, is in charge of setting course credits.

p. “I have no idea if the administration will adopt all of the changes, make some changes or completely reject the opinion of the students,” Pinsker said.

p. The Full and Fair Treatment for ROTC Cadets Act has received high support from ROTC cadets.

p. “The ROTC community has been extremely excited by this. I’ve walked up to people who have thanked me for working on this, simply because ROTC is so much work without a lot of credit,” Beato said.

p. Cadets can currently earn up to 14 credits throughout their time in college, but a maximum of six may count toward graduation. Students enrolled at the University of Virginia, George Mason University and Christopher Newport University (which participates in the same ROTC battalion as the College) all earn full credit for ROTC courses.

p. “By studying lighting techniques for one semester, I can earn the same number of credits it takes me two years to earn in ROTC. Talk about discouraging,” Pinsker said in a Young America’s Foundation press release.

p. Only cadets who have signed to enter the military after graduation are paid. Many ROTC participants, including Pinsker, receive no financial compensation.

p. The bill has generated attention from national media. Pinsker has been invited onto the G. Gordon Liddy radio talk show, Sean Hannity’s radio show and the Hannity and Colmes television show.
“William and Mary offers us yet another example of anti-military bias on campus. If the decision-makers at William and Mary really care about ‘Supporting the Troops,’ they need to offer full course credit for ROTC immediately, like other state-sponsored institutions in Virginia do,” army veteran Flagg Youngblood said in the Young America’s Foundation press release.

p. “The bill is extremely logical,” Beato said. “ROTC cadets take classes just like the rest of us; why shouldn’t they receive full credit?”

Sixteen professors from various departments in the Arts and Sciences were granted tenure this spring, but less well-known are the stories of those professors who were not. In the economics department, a professor who is widely regarded as a great teacher, Jeffrey Gerlach, was not retained. He has found a new long-term position at an MIT–affiliated business school in Seoul, Korea, and will be on a fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this fall.

p. Several objective measures indicate student support for the professor. There were three sections of Economics 101 offered this semester, each with 150 slots and within half an hour of each other. While the class taught by Professor Gerlach was overbooked, with 167 registered, the two other course sections attracted just 89 and 78 students each.

p. On Ratemyprofessors.com, a widely-used website used by students to share their views on professors, Gerlach has a 3.9 “quality” rating, which is above the 3.6 average for tenured professors at the College. The quality rating is a combination of the “clarity” and “helpfulness” ratings.

p. “When I teach Econ 101, I include many examples from business, politics and everyday life. I believe economics is very useful for understanding the real world and I try to demonstrate that in class,” Gerlach said of his teaching methods.

p. “He is far and away my favorite teacher,” freshman Joe Hart, who has Gerlach for Econ 101 this semester, said. “He has made a subject that I did not think I would be appealing interesting, to the point that I would actually consider taking economics as a major.”
Although The Flat Hat is not authorized to release the precise numbers, student evaluations of Gerlach’s classes have also been significantly above average.

p. Department Chair Clyde Haulman agreed that Gerlach was a good teacher but would offer no further comment about Gerlach’s specific case because it was a personnel issue.

p. Dean of Arts and Sciences Carl Strikwerda agreed that it would not be appropriate for department chairs to discuss individual hiring decisions, even though the university is a public institution.

p. “The College, like almost all employers, does not comment upon personnel matters, “Strikwerda told The Flat Hat in an e-mail. “The final decision to grant tenure by the Board of Visitors is taken only after thorough deliberation by the department, an elected faculty committee, deans and the provost, along with extensive input from students and from scholars off-campus.”

p. Haulman commented on the tenure process in general, saying that the department evaluated professors based on three areas of ability: teaching, research and service.

p. “Those three areas are independent of one another in the sense that you could be way over the expected level in one, but that doesn’t make up for being below the expected level in another,” Haulman said.

p. Given Gerlach’s teaching credentials, this may indicate that tenured professors in the department had reservations about his publications and research. While Gerlach has had four published and forthcoming publications in economics journals during the six years since he earned his Ph.D., the accessible curriculum vitae of tenured faculty indicates that they had, on average, slightly more: 4.5 publications in economics journals during their first six years. Haulman had no comment on the analysis, other than that both quantity and quality were important.

p. “I have very much enjoyed working at William and Mary and am grateful for the opportunity the College gave me,” Gerlach said. “In every class I taught, there were bright and well-motivated students who made teaching an enjoyable experience. Although I will undoubtedly miss the students at William and Mary, I am very excited about my new position at the SKK Graduate School of Business in Seoul, South Korea … For both professional and financial reasons, this is a great opportunity for me and I can’t wait to get started.”

p. Another assistant professor, Sara LaLumina, is also leaving the department next year. Two new assistant professors, who are both expected to receive their Ph.D’s from the University of Michigan this spring have been hired.

The College’s Mason School of Business celebrated its groundbreaking March 30. The building is scheduled to open in the fall of 2009.

p.

There exists a stereotype that the College community tends to be more liberal than the Williamsburg community, but opinions differ on whether this impacts town and gown relations.

p. Administrators and professors who live in the community are less likely to believe that the ideological gap between the College and Williamsburg is important. Students are more likely to sense a gap that affects relations.

p. “The only thing that I’ve noticed is that during the Wren cross deal there were a lot of [alumni] writing in,” said John Gay, a freshman. “A lot of alums live here, but you can’t really say that makes them more conservative. I don’t know if it’s really local, either.”

p. Freshman Max Faubion, a Williamsburg resident, said that he noticed an ideological gap between the city and the College. “[Some people] seemed pretty outraged about the Sex Workers’ Art Show, and they were condemning [College President] Gene Nichol about it,” he said.

p. Neither went so far as to say that an ideological difference was a major factor in town and gown relations. Both students cited lack of interaction as a possible factor.

p. “We have more interaction with the tourists [than town members],” Faubion added.

p. Voting records indicate a rather large gap. In the 2005 gubernatorial election, 98.9 percent of campaign donations from College professors went to Democrat Tim Kaine.

p. While Kaine carried the City of Williamsburg by a margin of 60.5 percent to 36.7 percent (over Republican Jerry Kilgore), Kaine won James City County by a margin of only 101 votes, or 0.5 percent, and Kilgore carried York County with 52.2 percent, according to the Virginia State Board of Elections.

p. Government professor John McGlennon said that may not matter very much in the College’s relations with the town.
“As is always true of more established folks, there’s going to be skepticism about more controversial issues,” he said. “I don’t think [recent controversies have] changed the attitude toward the College fundamentally.”

p. “We’re [in] an area that has grown rapidly, and I think the College is attractive to newcomers. They want to be in a college community because it’s intellectually stimulating and there’s more going on than in a typical small town,” McGlennon added.
Vice President for Student Affairs Sam Sadler agreed with his assessment. “I’ll be honest. I don’t know that [the ideological gap] has a lot of impact. I don’t hear discussions about ‘those liberal people’ or ‘those conservative people.’ I don’t sense that as much of an issue,” he said.

p. Both McGlennon and Sadler noted that the community and the College have become more interwoven since they arrived at the College. According to Sadler, as Williamsburg has grown and become more affluent, the traditional classifications of College, Colonial Williamsburg and everyone else, has broken down.
“We’re much closer now. I’ve seen the community rally around issues that have surprised us. For example, when Preston Hall burned a few years ago, thousands of dollars poured in to cover uninsured student losses,” Sadler said.

p. Sadler said that while divisions still exist, such as the disagreement over student housing, many are not as contentious as they were a few years ago.

p. “Twenty years ago, the College was more Republican than the surrounding area,” McGlennon said. “Our student body has changed. I’d say in many ways the College and the community have grown more similar.”

p. “We live in the community,” Sadler said. He noted that ideology “is not generally how you begin relationships [with members of your town].”

p. “Even if it were true — and I’m not sure that it’s true — that there was this huge ideological gulf, we still have over 4,000 employees,” Sadler said.

p. Whether this gulf exists or not, everyone is in agreement that closer cooperation between the College and the community was in the best interest of all parties.

p. “The more common ground we have, the better we can achieve things we all want,” Sadler said.