Let’s say you don’t like one of your professors this semester. Shouldn’t you be able to give him or her a review online? Apparently Syracuse University doesn’t think so.
The Daily Orange‘s big story yesterday was about four SU freshmen, who, after apparently feeling their writing instructor didn’t “know what she’s doing ever,” started a Facebook group centered around this opinion.
For my readers who haven’t heard about Facebook, it’s just like MySpace, Friendster, Orkut, hi5, etc., except that it requires a college email address, and the required email addresses have been mostly limited to the U.S., although the U.K. and Mexico are now being invaded as well. More than 80 percent of American college students are members.
Anyway, so these girls started a group on this social network entitled “Clearly [instructor’s first name] doesn’t know what she’s doing ever.” As far as the article informed me, there was no threatening terminology to be found anywhere in this group. Besides the four founding members, there were approximately fifteen other students in the group.
To make a long story short, the instructor found out about this group and complained, which eventually led to these four students being placed on disciplinary probation until November of this year. One of them transfered out. Apparently SU has secretly made it a code of conduct violation to publicly criticize professors.
I find this highly alarming. Unfortunately my generation, unlike the one before it, is too passive to do anything about it. This incident differs from most of the hundreds of Facebook news stories that you can find online as it does not involve college administrators using Facebook to catch underage drinkers or to find out about potentially rowdy parties ahead of time. I was alarmed by this story because I feel punishment for non-treatening criticism is just plain wrong.
Apparently things are done a little different at the University of Louisville. There a Facebook group dedicated to criticizing a professor helped lead to the professor being let go. [Read more]
Read the Daily Orange article

Last Friday night (actually Saturday morning), I was driving home from Fayetteville, the Syracuse suburb where I work. I had worked until about 10:15 and then went to Pizzeria Uno across the parking lot. I left there around 12:35, and around 12:55 I was standing at the traffic light at the corner of Coumbus Ave. and East Fayette Street. This is about one mile from where I live.
There’s a bar there called Club DC, and as I was waiting at that traffic light, I suddenly saw about a dozen people streaming out of it, over to a parking lot across the street. The traffic light turned green, and I slowly drove forward, where I noticed they were helping a man lying in the parking lot, very close to the street. I thought he was just lying there from over-consumption of alcohol or something else, and I continued driving home.
Two mornings later, while sitting in the break room at Target and reading the newspaper, an article about Syracuse’s first homicide of the year caught my eye. I was shocked to read that that man that I had seen lying on the ground was the victim. He had died at University Hospital shortly after I had seen him.
Read more

Today I read a quite funny article by Jeff Kramer, who writes a weekly humor column in the Post-Standard. This week he compared Syracuse to Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, and managed to find over a dozen similarities.
Is Syracuse just another Neverland?
This past week Syracuse Police began teaming up with the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Department and the New York State Police to crack down on crime in Syracuse’s worst neighborhoods, which has gotten horribly ridiculous.
Hardly a day passes without reading or hearing about shootings. Today I got to read about five people being injured Saturday in two separate shootings:

“Three teens were shot just after 2:30 p.m. when a shooter walked through a convenience store parking lot, firing off shot after shot in a spray that went in several directions.” –The Post-Standard

Wonderful… And the closest-to-home incident in the past few months was last month’s discovery of a body in the park at the end of my block.
Body found in Thornden Park

Thornden Park