Yes, the real Hogwarts—of Weed, naturally—actually exists, and got a wonderful New York Times feature this week in which, like every other time the New York Times tries to talk about weed, we anxiously await whatever bush league-level snickering they can sneak into the copy. Since B-Real isn't an adjunct professor, this could prove difficult for them.

The story: Med Grow Cannabis College is dedicated to informing and educating students about Michigan's new medical marijuana program, which, not a not-smart endeavor, considering the rest of the state's economy is totally cashed. The founder is—again, naturally, or rather: organically—a 24 year-old kid with entrepreneurial aspirations who's name is not Dr. Greenthumb. There's an accompanying video in which someone identifies a strain of weed in the first five minutes as "Obama Kush." And all it costs is $485 for a six-week "primer" on how to grow the best sticky on your street.

And what did the Times come through with here?

• The lede: "At most colleges, marijuana is very much an extracurricular matter."
  
  
• The title: "At this school, it's marijuana in every class."
  
  
• They labeled a video clip "Higher Schooling."
  
  
• This bizarre fill-in-the-blanks line that we're not high enough to laugh at: "....[classes share] stories of their best highs ("Smoke that and you are ... medicated!")."

And...that's it.

Seriously, those are all the weed "jokes" the New York Times managed to pack into an entire story about a university dedicated to Anthropotogy 1010, and the total sketchballs who attend this Hempstra University. If they want to graduate Magna Chronic Laude from Notre Dank, they're gonna have to hit the bongs harder than that. Then again, maybe weed humor just isn't (in) their bag after all.

Greg Van Voorhis is totally the Cool English Teacher: Young dude, beard, long hair, calls himself "GvDubs" on Twitter. He gave his students the Chuck Palahniuk short story "Guts" to read and next thing you know all the uncool school people are complaining like some episode of Leave it to Beaver, In the Beaver's Butt. Now the Cool English Teacher's been suspended and the tabloids got ahold of the story and a 16 year-old high school girl is telling the New York Post "He didn't mean it to be anything other than something we could learn from," and everybody is laughing about that quote, because the story is all like,

At home, he whittles the carrot into a blunt tool. He slathers it with grease and grinds his ass down on it. Then, nothing. No orgasm. Nothing happens except it hurts.

Go back to Ohio if you don't want your kids learning masturbation things! The only danger here is the possibility the kids will turn into dreary Palahniuk groupies.
[Pic via]

It's not entirely fair to cherry-pick the recipients of Goldman's past donations looking for examples of the company underwriting elite institutions that buttress the hyper-wealthy bubble culture that company thrives in, all in the name of "charity." So we'll point out that Goldman's assorted foundations have also given generously to genuinely needy causes like the Harvard Varsity Club, Camp Morasha, and Brown University. OK, ok—Goldman has also donated money to breast cancer research, after-school programs, and all sorts of good things that deserve its money.

But they also gave $210,000 to Rumson Country Day School in Rumson, N.J., a private school so desperately in need of money for the purposes of charging $20,000 per year to educate eighth-graders that Bruce Springsteen played a fundraiser for it in 2002.

And then there's $68,000 to the Lawrenceville School, a boarding school near Princeton, N.J. with an 800-acre campus and a 200-year history of taking disadvantaged kids like Tinsley Mortimer, Michael Eisner, and Prince Turki bin Faisal al-Saud and instilling them with the values of hard work and self-reliance that Goldmanites endeavor to live every day.

Or Greenwich Country Day School, which lifts children out of poverty by charging their parents $29,000 for "Grade IX," according to the school's tuition schedule. It was no doubt cheaper when George H.W. Bush went there.

Not all of Goldman's educational grants go to prep schools, of course. There are also the firm's Walter F. Blaine and H.R. Young Scholarship Programs, which award $4,000 and $7,500 scholarships, respectively, to the children of Goldman Sachs employees. Yes, Goldman Sachs has janitors and secretaries, so we imagine they employ people who could make justifiable use of such scholarships. Then again, they pay some secretaries $200,000 a year, and we'd hope that any firm that intends to pay out $23 billion to 31,000 employees this year would find a way to distribute it such that none of them need help putting their kids through college. We'd be wrong!

If you know how Goldman employees will be spending their taxpayer-financed bonuses this year, let us know—you can e-mail us at the address below or post to the #goldmanproject page.

The Connecticut college will take a good, hard look at its internship programs to make sure none of their coeds end up backstage at Letterman's CBS digs:

Due to recent circumstances we will have a discussion with those in charge of placing our interns at the David Letterman show in the future.

We will diligently oversee this internship program to ensure that our interns are out of harm's way.

Isn't this going a bit, oh, we don't know — far? Should Letterman really cross over to full-blown villainy? Though, yes, his work place affairs were ethically dubious, but Letterman's a late night talk show host who fucked around, got caught and has now become his nightmare: a punchline. It's not like he's Jack the Ripper or the intern's greatest nightmare: a Congressman.

Jennings' real job title is "Assistant Deputy Secretary of Education for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools." It is, indeed, an unconfirmed position, but it was, of course, created by an act of Congress.

The Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools was created by George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. It was designed as the successor to the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Program, which was created in 1986, as part of the general Reagan and Congress anti-drug hysteria leading up to the '86 midterms.

In other words, it was the "drug-free school zone" program for a couple years until it got tossed in with some Columbine hysteria in 2002.

Kevin Jennings's book Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son is the story of growing up gay and Southern Baptist in the '60s and early-'70s. He got a lot of grief. And he went on to become an educator himself, and the founder of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network. There is basically not a single bad thing you can say about that organization unless you actually do think gay kids (and even not gay kids) should be taunted by teachers and classmates until they kill themselves. So, obviously, the Family Research Council is leading the charge against Jennings. They want gay kids to die. Sorry! It's the truth!

And guess who is more than happy to play along? Fox News! They officially deemed him a Czar and aired all the out-of-context quotes and read the charges against him running a heretofore completely unknown and relatively powerless little corner of the Department of Education.

The Assistant Deputy Secretary for Safe and Drug-Free Schools is, like most "Czars," responsible for almost nothing. He or she helps decide where anti-violence and anti-drug money goes and recommends how it is to be spent. He or she helps draft school violence policy. He or she goes to conferences.

So. Let's go back in time!

Eric Andell, George W. Bush's first Deputy Secretary of Education for the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools (you can see why the media decided to call everyone with a long title a "Czar" now, right?), was a juvenile court judge, Texas Court of Appeals justice, and a senior adviser to then-Education Secretary Rod Paige. As it was 2002, Endell's job description involved a lot of talk of Homeland Security, terrorism, and school shootings. Also, indoctrination:

Andell will oversee all activities related to safe schools, crisis response, alcohol and drug prevention, health and well being of students, and building strong character and citizenship in the new unit. His office will also take the leadership role in the department's Homeland Security efforts.

Andell left the Education Department when he was charged with a misdemeanor count of using federal money to pay for personal expenses—he pleaded guilty to traveling for "private personal and financial matters" on the government dime 14 times in one year.

He was succeeded by a woman who directed the National Prayer Breakfast and had a series of policy gigs at Bush's DoE.

Now, instead of a conservative policy wonk or a someone whose job it was to lock up children we have a dude who has written extensively on bullying and how to prevent it. Republicans are literally up in arms about him because they are afraid he will make it more difficult to bully children for being gay.

A repairman today found the body of 18-year old Joseph Dado, a Penn State freshman last seen leaving a frat party early Sunday morning. at a frat party. His new college friends reported him missing a few hours later and the school launched a helicopter search and everything.

Sadly, the repair man found Dado's body in a stairwell between two university buildings. It looks like he was drunk and fell over the edge to the platform 15-feet below.

University Police director Steve Shelow, naturally, released a statement saying that Dado's death appears to be an accident, but they'll continue to investigate. Some frat boys are about to have a lot of explaining to do...

Image via KDKA.

Former schoolteacher Deborah Parish (we're unsure on the spelling, since we got her name from the video), wanted to impress upon the agency that you can teach kids to get sexy without taking their clothes off, a proposition for which the fact that she had gone all her 56 years without "technically" having sex somehow serves as evidence. But before she could testify about all her gratifying fully clothed sexual experiences, the agency's members informed her that they were taking testimony on alcohol awareness—the sex ed stuff, when her virginal status would have been relevant, had all happened the day before. Read the agenda, virgin!

(Also on the agenda yesterday was a proposal to teach all Texans about Newt Gingrich in history class, but Parish didn't weigh in on that.)

Basically, the speech amounts to nothing more than our nation's Commander-in-Chief urging kids to stay in school, for, if they do, perhaps one day they'll be president. Floridian Republican Jim Greer was one of the first to seize up over the news, and called Obama's September 8th an attempt to "spread" his "socialist ideology." Greer then got into nitty-gritty politics, and warned that the President would simply be indoctrinating guppies with his liberal politics.

Conservatives are easily swayed, almost collective organism, so their calls for prohibition only grew more voracious. They took particular offense over the announcement that students would be encouraged to "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president."

Rush Limbaugh was soon on board. So was Glenn Beck. And then Greer reared his head on Hardball this evening. Though he and his knows Presidents often address students, this is different, because Obama's a proselytizer of anti-American madness.

The debate has become so heated, in fact, that school districts in six states are refusing to show the video, for, it would seem, they believe Greer's worries that anti-Obama kids will be "ostracized." This couldn't be further from the truth.

First of all, kids are kids and, if our increasingly dim childhood memory serves, don't care much for nitty-gritty policy. They care about recess and juice boxes. By folding to conservative pressure, schools and parents both are tacitly vilifying the President when, in fact, even if he were to discuss policy, most kids wouldn't care or would forget about it after cartoons.

Perhaps the most worrisome aspect of this outrage is that the kids are being denied an opportunity to hear directly from the President, a man to whom some civics classes — if such things still exist — encourage. Democracy goes both ways, we're taught, so wouldn't hearing a generic message about the importance of education be an important lesson in and of itself?

If you ask us, America's children would definitely benefit from hearing the President, particularly the nation's first black president, discuss the necessity of reading, writing and arithmetic. Especially since a Florida school distract just now, in 2009, removed the term "negro" from its racial background form.

Meanwhile, the White House has caved and agreed to release the speech's text ahead of the event. They also changed the announcement letter's language about "helping the president" to "write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals." Both moves only give validity to these inane, unnecessary protests.

At least the kids learned one valuable lesson: bitch loudly and often enough and you can bring the White House to its knees.

It sure was an awesome story (written up last week by the NY Daily News, but it had been floating around long before that—Roxanne tells it herself on the Beef video series, for example): Warner Music put a throwaway clause in her record contract when she was still a teenager saying they'd pay for her education for life; she took advantage of it to go all the way through grad school on their dime.

But! Slate says the story has the following problems: Roxanne doesn't actually have a Ph.D. from Cornell; she didn't even graduate from Marymount Manhattan as an undergrad; she's not licensed to practice psychology; and all her record labels deny ever paying for her education. Caveat:

In a subsequent e-mail, Shanté wrote, "I also attended College under an alias, because of a Domestic Violence situation" and speculated that she "made a mistake on an application and put my old name so maybe that's the reason for the computer error?" But she was unable to substantiate such claims.

God damn it Slate. We are going to ignore these enormous red flags and cling to our hopes of some bit of good in the world. Everything was fine until you journalists started poking around.
[Pic via]

Though she once praised Twitter, Lacy has since become disillusioned by the amount of skin-centric span that's clogging her and her friends' feeds. Yes, there are ways to block the site's cabal of sluts, but Lacy argues it's far too hard, so she's offering Twitter her own advice — and knocks Tila Tequila in the process:

There's no reason why Twitter shouldn't be catching spam, or at least making it easier to report.

Unless, of course, Twitter wants to be the new MySpace (NWS). After all, a lot of that site's early growth came from call girls, strippers, and purveyors of porn. Tila Tequila, who has been pictured in Playboy, Penthouse, and other publications, even got an MTV show out of MySpace.... If Twitter wants growth for the sake of growth, porn will do that.

But knowing the founders, my guess is that the site doesn't want that kind of success. Lewd content helped hobble MySpace's advertising efforts.

With The Olds leading the Twitter revolution, Lacy insists the site do something about this madness or face the consequences. But we say there's a far easier solution: don't "follow" or click on links to people you don't know, especially if they have whorish names like "Kiki" or "Cocoa" or feature pictures of bikini-covered breasts.

Even if Lacy and other worried people do leave the site, it shows no signs of slowing down, especially since a federal judge just launched a page that educates kids on civics and DePaul University is offering a class all about the site. If anything, Lacy's arguments will only help the site: you're nobody until somebody tries to stir up a frenzy of "family values" outrage.

The "mid-career" adult program is for both ambitious politicians and private sector titans looking to become ambitious politicians.

Past recipients of master's degrees in Public Administration at the Kennedy School include Mexican President Felipe Calderon, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, Mongolian President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Judd, who has a Bachelors in French from the University of Kentucky, is an actress known primarily for always being in a mess of trouble, in movies. Once she receives her degree, she'll join this august list of people who are currently running and destroying the world, and also Katherine Harris and Bill O'Reilly.

They paid Kenya Mejia $1,800 to say "I love you, Jake Minor!" in her actual graduation speech, the idea being that she would say she was inspired to call out her crush by seeing the same thing done in this movie, I Love You, Beth Cooper. Then the video of this would "go viral," supposedly. Let us count the ways in which this plan failed.

1. The movie bombed. "Even Ms. Mejia hasn't seen it." Return-on-investment fail.

2. The Fox-produced-but-supposedly-just-amateur YouTube video the company posted of the stunt barely has over 2,000 hits. Why would anyone care? They would not. Viral fail.

3. The school district is pissed. Education fail

4. This "Jake Minor" character that Kenya called out as her crush is not even her boyfriend. Although her boyfriend supposedly "endorsed it," hopefully for a hefty cut of the check. Furthermore, Jake Minor has a girlfriend of his own. His assessment of Kenya: "She's pretty quiet." Love connection fail.

Let us never try this again.

[WSJ]

"Thousands of districts" have canceled summer school this year. No money! 150,000 kids in LA who should be in summer school are instead wandering around joining gangs and etc. Half the school districts in Florida have forced their worst students out on the streets this summer—your streets.

And you'll know they're out there if you're one of the nearly half-million Americans who lost their job last month—many, many more than expert economists (who should be fired) expected! "The number of people who have been unemployed for more than 27 weeks has more than tripled since the recession began, to 4.4 million. The median time people go without a job has increased to more than four months, from slightly more than two months at the outset of the recession in December 2007." The "official" jobless rate is 9.5%, but factor in everyone who slips through the cracks and we'll go ahead and call it certifiably double-digits. Sad party time!

It's not just sad. It's criminal. We should really do something about it. Call someone. Call the cops. No—call a lawyer. Oh no: a lawyer has $400,000 in student loan debt and now they won't let him be a lawyer. What are we to do?

Planned Parenthood is mailing condoms to college kids in their welcome packets, which would be totally passé in developed regions of the country. But this was in Missouri!

Chief among the university's concerns, Smart said, was an ad for Planned Parenthood with a condom attached. In bold type at the top of the insert are the words: "Welcome to MSU!"...

Smart said the university had received nearly a hundred phone calls about the material — mostly with concerns about the Planned Parenthood ad.

Haha! I thought that sort of protest went out of fashion in the 90s. Missourian parents are total throwbacks! For the more jaded kids in first-world parts of America, Trojan has paid for some product placement in the new Cobra Starship video, starring Leighton Meester and some young jerk in white sunglasses, who "makes it rain," with condoms.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Not since Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes, a member of R&B girl group TLC, wore a condom in place of her left eyeglass lens in the 1990s has safe sex received such a starring role.

It's only one small step from this to "making it rain" with American Eagle t-shirts, or cans of Pepsi, or Taco Bell spicy chicken wraps, which is a trend much more disturbing than the trend of telling kids about condoms. Priorities, Missouri.
[Gannett Blog, NYP]

Erin Siegal submitted the same work twice, to two different professors. But she insists she was above board about everything. Both her thesis adviser, Wayne Barrett, and her book seminar professor, Samuel Freedman, knew she would be sharing content between the two projects. The high-achieving scholarship student even made a PowerPoint presentation for Freedman explaining everything!

But now he's saying she took the three-way arrangement too far. Instead of giving him a big ole book and just excerpting 5,000 words for her thesis, she turned in the entire 16,000 words for her thesis at her adviser's urging. This apparently left no exclusive content for the book class, as Freedman had been expecting.

So, in new media terms: Siegal promised her magazine's print editor an exclusive tome teased online, but ended up giving the Web editor everything, at his request, to amplify the buzz (which worked, in academic terms; her thesis passed with honors). Now the print editor is totally pissed and is all, "you're fired," and she's like, "come ON!"

It's a bizarre spat from where we sit, given than Freedman knew there would be some content-sharing going on. Sure, he doesn't have the exclusive. But what he does have is a student who's poised to do quite well in a world where even the traditionalists at Time Inc. have come to believe in the idea of sharing across titles.

Siegal's email (sent to classmates in April — presumably she's "stop[ped] crying" since then):

(Top picture via ErinSiegal.com)

A letter handed out during the ceremonies is reproduced below. It sketches out the barest outlines of the problem (and you call yourselves journalists!), involving a high-performing student who was nevertheless blocked from graduating when a "misunderstanding" with a professor led her to earn an "Incomplete" grade.

The student, photojournalist Erin Siegal, is named in the letter. The professor isn't, but we're told it's former reporter Samuel Freedman (pictured).

We have no idea what went down, or what Siegal's peers mean when they refer to Freedman's "type of behavior", but we assume scholarship-student Siegal isn't about to start fishing in her pockets for the tens of thousands of dollars she would need to re-enroll on her own dime, if that's even possible. If it did come to that, the economics of the industry make it an unlikely bet for such an apparently bright journalist.

The lothario in question, 17-year-old Tyler Frost, goes to a fundamentalist Baptist high school in Findlay, Ohio; he had to get permission from his own school to go to a dance at another school, which is where his girlfriend went. Even after he got permission from his own high school, the crotchety, brimstone shitting principal of Heritage Christian decided to still make an issue out of Frost's date. "England acknowledged signing the form but warned Frost there would be consequences if he attended the dance. England then took the issue to a school committee made up of church members, who decided to threaten Frost with suspension."

Principal England also noted the following:

"In life, we constantly make decisions whether we are going to please self or please God. (Frost) chose one path, and the school committee chose the other."

Yeah. This kid went to his girlfriend's dance, and now he's Forsaken (or something). In the section on pop culture, the school's handbook definitely reads: "[rock is] part of the counterculture which seeks to implant seeds of rebellion in young people's hearts and minds." This could actually be true; when my 17 year-old cousin listens to Death Cab for Cutie, all she wants to do is get read the Riot Act. Actually, she just wants to go to sleep. She's 17. She loves sleeping. Anyway, Tyler Frost is probably gonna get suspended and have to go to summer school, and he'll be prevented from dancing, and thus, rising up against something. Findlay, Ohio will live to see another day. And because it's Sunday: