The comments thread on this article about Whole Foods’ transporting some turkey breasts in a crowded, dirty, elevator next to some guy’s ass and trash cans is quite possibly the funniest and somehow simultaneously snarkey and happy stream of collective consciousness on a website. With 20,000 views of this article, the Gothamist has it going on apparently?
How The Meat Is “Prepared” At Whole Foods
What’s the best website we’re not reading?
October 19, 2010 By
Textbook Affordability Provisions in the Higher Education Opportunity Act
August 7, 2010 By
An article in today’s New York Times, How to Find Cheaper College Textbooks mentions new federal laws about the sale of textbooks that started July 1. The two important rules I noted were that publishers must sell items individually if they also sell items in bundles, and students have to be provided the ISBN numbers of the books that would be used in the courses for which they were registering. Well, in recently trying to find a computer science course, I saw that the bookstore was charging $86 for a copy of a technology book that was seven years old. I’ve overpaid for textbooks at our bookstore like all of you, but I’ve never seen such an obvious scamming of students in the way that Follett was charging for a used, out of date technology book. I sent this letter to our new President, Mitchel Wallerstein, this afternoon:
Dear President Wallerstein,
In trying to look up textbooks for the classes that are supposed to start in three short weeks, I found that the bookstore still did not have the texts available on their website for the fall semester.
Interestingly, in today’s New York Times, there is an article that mentions a new Federal Law that says I should have the ISBNs of the textbooks available to me for all the classes I can register for, effective July 1, 2010.
You can imagine how frustrated I am to be unable to find Baruch in compliance with this new Federal Law.
Interestingly, for one course I was considering taking, I looked up the book that the previous section used. It was a computer science course related to database applications and the textbook was for Microsoft Access 2003. The “textbook”, now seven years old, is selling at our bookstore for $86. I say “textbook” because a book related to a piece of software that is two versions and seven years old does not qualify as a textbook for a course in an American college in 2010 about technology. The only reason there are 56 copies available on Amazon.com in the price range of 1 penny and $20 is because nobody has any interest in buying the book and the other 50,000 people who have copies to sell have just thrown the book away! It obviously needs to be said that the school has no business taking the money of unwitting young people for such “education”, and it makes a mockery of the school for granting three credits in the study of such antiquated technology. What in the world is going on at Baruch College?
Please investigate and clear up these issues as quickly as possible.
Robert Reale, [repeatedly embarrassed] Senior
Fellow Baruch students, I hope there is an answer for us soon. Please feel free to comment on this post and/or email the Baruch College President at mitchel.wallerstein@baruch.cuny.edu.
We need to talk about the oil spill… (xpost)
June 10, 2010 By
That was clear from class today.
A friend of mine just brought up the oil spill to me again on the phone, and he was too young to remember the Iranian hostage crisis. We are living through a terrible moment in history right now, and this isn’t a moment where you “remember where you were when…” like one day you will tell someone younger than you where you were the day Barack Obama was elected President. That was a great day. Your grandparents remember where they were when they found out that John F. Kennedy had been killed. That was a horrible day.
Every single day during the Iranian hostage crisis, I came home from school hoping upon hope that my mom would tell me the hostages were freed. I remember getting the newspaper and hoping that there would be something happy there to find out about these poor people. The newspaper was Newsday, and it was an “evening” paper – so there was never going to be anything new in that paper that I didn’t already know. This went on for 1 year and almost 100 more days… it was torture to be an American citizen in 1980 because some Iranian college students made fools of us and we had a President who wouldn’t stand up for us. OK it wasn’t really torture, but it was deeply and thoroughly humiliating. I do not use these words lightly. I feel this same sense of humiliation again when I see these corporate executives on TV each morning, and I hear reported the effing jerk CEO of BP say he’d like his life back. Really? Like “Seth and Amy? Really?” really?
What we are living through now is an enduring and sustained horribleness. The world is being polluted – no, destroyed, before our eyes, while we watch – and we are powerless to stop it right this instant. By “we” I mean you, me, the President, scientists: by we, I mean all the people of the planet Earth. And men who make more money in a month than we will make in a lifetime sit on morning TV and act like snotty children who you want to just smack upside the head. If you’re lucky enough to be crazy busy, you can avoid the news. If you’re not, you try to figure out how to expel the sadness from your body because it’s so sad but it’s hard to cry for an oil soaked pelican. We couldn’t see those hostages all that time, but is the sadness different or is it my soul that is so hardened by a country so stupid as to elect the leaders that they do?
So we’re living through this event. People, animals, economies, systems of all types are going to be screwed over by this event. It won’t just end and we look back and see houses built a year later. We’re not going to grow a bunch new fish on the Today show and ship them in a big truck to New Orleans (they built house frames in Rockefeller Center and shipped them to La.) Whether or not you believe in a higher power, how did they ever think they were going to just rebuild biology? How did they think they allow the possibility of this happening and how do they think they can ever, ever possibly make amends to all of the Earth’s creatures for what they have done?
My friend Chris is a video guru of sorts and he made this video because he felt he needed to do something.
(This was also posted on a class blog, not for credit.)
Responding to a Comment Re: The Ticker (They’re Wasting Our Money)
April 25, 2010 By
While I was working on setting up the website (well I still am, this stuff is tough!) I accidentally had a setting set incorrectly that let someone register with a non-baruch email address. Our spam filter flagged the comment immediately, and I emailed the person to ask them to please post their comment using their baruch email address. I even copied and pasted their comment so it would save them some trouble. They didn’t come back. Here’s the comment:
I don’t think the Ticker spends $10 grand on photography equipment and hiring student photographers. This seems a little mean-spirited. I don’t think the coverage was all that misleading. The event was labeled and conducted as a protest, and whether or not there were motives behind it with the upcoming USG elections, it would have been MORE irresponsible of the Ticker to report about the event with the slant that you’re taking here. A blog post is allowed to have a scathing opinion of an event at school. A news article is not.
My response? The Ticker has several expensive digital cameras in their possession and the students that comprise the editorial staff take home 35% of the advertising revenues they bring in to the organization. There is one picture, and only one picture for a front page story. The truth is that there is more to the story than The Ticker reported. Have I taken a slant? Yes. I’m reporting on the reporting of an event. There’s nothing irresponsible in saying there’s more to the story — especially when I have the pictures to prove it. But I want to be extra clear that I stand by what I reported: I’m saying the story you got from The Ticker is not only incomplete, but by the nature of it being incomplete, it’s downright false, and I don’t believe it was actually attended by the person who wrote the story and gets paid a share of that 35% of advertising revenue of a business that our tax and student activity fee dollars go toward.
I’ll tell you that I didn’t mean to imply that The Ticker spends $10,000 on photography equipment alone, but The Ticker is apparently wasting your money. Whether it’s your tax money, your tuition money, or your student activity money, The Ticker uses a lot of it to produce a newspaper and pay themselves very nicely. According to Michael Wursthorn in a post on the Ticker’s website, the staff splits 35% of the revenue the Ticker takes in. He also claimed “the surplus” goes into the student activity fees. There is no surplus. The Ticker is funded through the communications budget of the school and student activity fees. If they were making a profit for the school there would not be any money budgeted to them. Since The Ticker has never operated in a transparent or democratic fashion, nobody knows what kind of money these people are stealing from you, and you just got tricked into paying more activity fees. (See “Did you know?“)
The above is taken from a copy of that web page that I printed out. It has since been one of those random removals you’ll find on The Ticker’s site. The Ticker staff will delete something from their site if they don’t like what you say.
Interestingly, on that date where Michael Wursthorn is addressing the student activity fees – this was before the last referendum that was disapproved – he says that The Ticker is not going to receive an increase in budget:
Well, in the new referendum, the “media” fee increased quite a bit for full time students, from $3.95 to $7.00. That’s so we can pay for a newspaper to be run out of the third floor and a few people who choose their friends to take over their jobs can pay themselves. You see at The Ticker, there are no staff meetings and no elections for any position of power. It is a purely nepotist organization in our public university. If you know anyone who has written for The Ticker, ask them, they’ll tell you.
If you’re wondering why nobody hasn’t said anything before now, I have. I have filed complaints in writing – not just in writing but in great detail (as if that wasn’t obvious, right?) – to Carl Aylman, Ben Corpus, Corlisse Thomas and Ronald Aaron who have given me one pathetic response after another, contributing a very bad reputation to Baruch College for their lack of interest in the utter absence of any ethics, morality or even faking the appearance of fairness at The Ticker. All the while, they run a business out of our school and keep 35% of the money for themselves. Do you think they don’t ALSO get reimbursed for their cell phones, luncheons, supplies and everything else they “need” to run the school paper? Don’t kid yourself.
So back to that $10,000 on photography equipment. I once applied to be an online editor at The Ticker, and was told several months later that someone else was hired for the position, who had less experience and tenure than I. When I asked why, I was told that I did not have knowledge in Final Cut Pro (a professional video editing program costing $999 at Apple) and Adobe Dreamweaver (part of a suite of Adobe products that sells for $1899 at Apple). The problem? First, nobody asked if I knew those programs; nobody ever contacted me about the position, ever. Second, if The Ticker purchased those programs they squandered our money. The Ticker doesn’t need to use Final Cut Pro to edit the videos that they post, iMovie is more than sufficient for their occasional YouTube video and comes free with every Mac they order – and they order them every three years apparently; and Dreamweaver is a web page construction program that they also do not use or need because they pay a third party service – part of MTV networks – to host their site for them entirely. These people are careless with wasting stealing our money. When I pressed the issue by filing another complaint to the Administration about unequal access to a student activity, I was told I would be considered for a position if I produced a portfolio of my work and I had to prove proficiency in the two programs to Michael Wursthorn. I was told that Michael Wursthorn would be the sole decision maker on whether or not I was hired as the online editor, and it was his prerogative to hire whoever he wanted. No elections, no voting by any group of members of the Ticker, just a Baruch student running the show hiring his friends. When I asked if the other people had to submit portfolios for the same position, I got no answer. I then applied to be a copy editor to the managing copy editor, and Michael Wursthorn inserted himself and said that I had to interview with him and pass a test in order to be considered for the position. When I asked if other people had to be interviewed by the editor in chief and take tests, I got no answer. Later, when my participation waned in The Ticker, Michael Wursthorn took over my email account without telling me beforehand, intercepted and read an untold number of private emails for an extended period of time. He defended that sleazy behavior to the administration claiming it was his right to do on behalf of The Ticker [as a paid employee].
When I contacted the former Baruch President, Kathleen Waldron after the leadershipless administrators previously noted, she directed me to school attorney (John Dugan) who expressed some serious concern and interest, or so I thought. I never heard from him again. His name’s not in the directory so I don’t know what happened to him.
If you have experienced similar issues with The Ticker, I encourage you to make your voice heard. If you do not want to contribute here to the site, then call the President’s office and let them know what you saw here and that your experience was similar. (But please do consider contributing here!)
USG Constitutional Referendum Slights Evening Students
April 21, 2010 By
Last week the USG pulled a fast one on Evening Students. They offered up amendments to the USG Constitution that stripped away the dedicated senator slots for evening students. The current system has 12 lower senators (9 day senators and three evening) and 4 upper senators (2 day and 2 evening) who serve as vice-presidents for various USG divisions.
The new constitution passed last week changes the text to read only 16 senators (12 lower and 4 upper).
I know it seems like I’m whining at, on the surface, what seems to be a measure to normalize the senatorial requirements.
My concern though is the high likelihood that future governments will be dominated by day students, effectively excluding the voices of evening students. Day students generally will have the opportunities to join activities and foster the relationships necessary to run for the USG. Evening students face unique time constraints that hinder many from committing themselves to their service of their fellow students, no matter their good intentions.
Without the enrollment distinction requirement there will be no guarantee that evening students will have their voice considered in government deliberations.
I, along with my fellow Lower Evening Senator Colin Rosenbaum, wrote a letter to the Ticker published April 19th detailing our frustration with the referendum.
Do the numbers add up?
April 16, 2010 By
The Ticker reports that Fix Baruch won the election:
President-elect Ben Guttmann received 1,061 votes, 209 more than New Baruch Alliance candidate Garam Choe. Independent candidate Zain Abbas came in at a distant third with only 119 votes.
That’s 1,389 votes. There are two problems here: 1, that represents a 50% reduction in the number of votes cast for our last election; 2, according to a tweet by Fix Baruch president-elect Ben Guttman, there were 1,621 votes cast at the end of the day Wednesday. (The election ended Thursday.) We believe he was given that information from the school.
The voting booth didn’t require you to vote for every candidate, do those numbers make sense?
Sound off in the comments.
Edit: I typically pride myself in my math skills, but finished my math requirements a LONG time ago; thanks to Jorge for pointing out the obvious error. A different post will be made for detailed election results.
Did you know?
April 15, 2010 By
When I asked a class of approximately 35 students if they knew that there was a referendum on the current ballot to increase the student activity fee by $50 a year (not including summer fees), only 5 students (including me) said yes, they knew.
Considering that the Microsoft mail system that presumably does not appear to cost the school any money still regularly sends Baruch emails to spam, and still regularly delays emails by random amounts of time, I would say that it was not OK to presume that one single email informing students of this referendum as part of a longer email about the student government election was an acceptable form of notification.
A little help please…
April 15, 2010 By
If anyone is reading this blog yet: If you took classes over last summer, and you took classes for sessions 1 AND 2, can you go look up your bill please? Did you pay a Student Activity Fee of $37 or $74? Please let me know at rob-at-ibaruch-dot-org. If you can email that bill, great; you can also fax us, just email for the #.
(The correct answer is $37, and you probably got charged $74.)
Oh man, this is just starting to get interesting…
