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Volume CXXXIII, Number 15 |
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Profiling we like
Last September in this space, the Orient recommended progress on the
long-awaited 'student portal' website, which would provide an online gathering
place for students, since the www.bowdoin.edu
site is an online gathering place for prospective applicants, and not
too interesting for the rest of us. Nothing much has happened, but instead
of retiring the point, we direct attention to a smaller-scale issue. Whatever
happened to the senior profiles?
Before this summer's site redesign, each new week saw the arrival of
three new 'senior profiles' front and center on the home page. Someone
from the College would interview selected seniors about their time at
Bowdoin, where they were from, what academic projects they were working
on, their experience in athletics, and other topics. Hard-hitting investigative
pieces they were not. The profiles are admissions tools-attempts to sell
the College through the voices of its most experienced students.
Despite that nature, they were fun to read, and added a human face (three,
actually) to our online presence. That presence has been missed, as only
two senior profiles have been posted this academic year-one in November,
and one in December. In contrast, 86 members of the class of 2001 were
profiled.
This is an unfortunate contrast. Senior profiles were one part of the
webpage that interested current and prospective students alike. In addition,
there are a lot of disappointed mothers out there wondering where their
child's senior profile is.
The trustees' meeting this weekend will feature discussion on some very
broad and difficult topics, including the College's operating budget and
the role of athletics in our lives here. If the trustees would like some
less weighty discussion topics, with simpler resolutions, the question
of senior profiles and how soon they can resume should be taken up. The
profiles don't need to be brutally honest assessments of the school. We
just want to know how the honors projects are going.
-JMF
What's next? The wet T-shirt contest?
Anyone walking through Smith Union on Tuesday during the early afternoon
most likely encountered the college-aged AT&T representatives. Some
were standing at the bottom of the stairs handing out bags of "free
stuff." Others were giving out T-shirts to students in exchange for
having their picture taken inside the AT&T "grass hut."
This would be no more unusual than the average advertising campaign carried
out in the Union, except for the fact that the female representatives
were wearing hip-hugging sarong skirts and mid-drift tops and posing as
"models" with the students who chose to have their picture taken.
It is strange that even as Bowdoin is celebrating 30 years of enrolled
women, the College is nevertheless allowing an outside company to come
on campus and represent females merely as pretty things to have your picture
taken with instead of people to be respected for their intelligence and
talents.
Thumbs down to AT&T for even conceiving of such a foolish and degrading advertising campaign. Thumbs down to the College for allowing it to be realized.
-BJL