Moroccan authorities arrested an engineer Wednesday for allegedly stealing the identity of the king’s younger brother on the social networking Web site, Facebook, the state news agency said. Fouad Mourtada, 26, was arrested in Casablanca for “villainous practices” in connection with the theft of Prince Moulay Rachid’s identity, Maghreb Arabe Presse reported.

It’s a great day to be in America today.

Update: a website has been set up to campaign for Fouad Mourtada’s release.

After years in which many colleges have said privacy rules prevent them from interceding with troubled students, Cornell is taking the opposite tack. Its “alert team” of administrators, campus police and counselors meets weekly to compare notes on signs of student emotional problems. People across campus, from librarians to handymen, are trained to recognize potentially dangerous behavior. And starting this year, Cornell is taking advantage of a rarely used legal exception to student-privacy rights: It is assuming students are dependents of their parents, allowing the school to inform parents of concerns without students’ permission.

Notice the story slug: “safety school”. Good one, WSJ.

Student blogging project
- Alex Payne ’09
- Ben Crovella ’07: inactive
- Caroline Dias ’08
- Jennifer Lin ’09
- Jenna Bromberg ’08
- Nikki Gusz ’08

Other student blogs
- Charlotte Acharya, Grad: almost exclusively baby pictures
- Elliott Back ’06: no more breaking Cornell news
- Christian Montoya ’07: inactive, old content gone
- Stephen Miller: inactive, old content gone
- Erica Mallare ’08: inactive
- Shane Murphy, Grad: old content gone, farewell note remains
- Claudia Rodriguez ’08: now a wedding blog
- Dean Strelau: inactive, old content gone
- Center for Jewish Living student residence: inactive
- President of Facebook: Cornell-related posts are just follow-ups
- AdmitSpit — Polina Minkin ’10 contributes to this nationwide group blog on admissions and academics: inactive

Semi-anonymous freshman blogs
- Bungee Jump: inactive
- Cornell Days: inactive
- Karma Moths: one post in the last two months
- Wasting Forty Grand: inactive

General Cornell blogs
- Overheard at Cornell: two posts in the last two months
- Livejournal message boards http://community.livejournal.com/cornell/ and http://community.livejournal.com/cornell_u/: not exactly blogs to begin with
- MetaEzra — a group blog by Matthew Nagowski ’05, Andy Guess ’05 and Marc Zawel ’04: slowly becoming less Cornell-related

Ivy League-wide blogs
- IvyGate: pumping out multiple posts on most days
- IvyLeak: inactive, old content gone

Although some of these remain active, most aren’t, especially when accounting for the Life on the Hill blogs which are expected to meet a certain quota. According to BusinessWeek, “after 3 months on average, most bloggers realize that writing about their politics, launch haunts, or co-workers isn’t for them”. That makes sense based on what we see above. However, the same post says “we’re still seeing growth in the blogosphere”. It appears the same cannot be said for the Cornell blogosphere.

There have been virtually no new players during the last year. There are three new Life on the Hill blogs: Alex Cain ’10, Matt Hintsa ’10, and Joe McCourt ’10. Cornell Abroad came out with its own version called Voices from Cornell Abroad, a group blog by three students studying overseas. Engineering Admissions has several blogs as well (why they are hosted on Blogger is beyond me).

So far, all of these are Cornell-sponsored endeavors. As far as independent blogs go, the offering are slim. OTR, a network of college-oriented blogs, launched Cornell OTR. Despite high activity last summer, there hasn’t been a post in the last month. There is also CornellNewsWatch, but that is news aggregator rather than a blog. It does provide additional exposure to the few remaining Cornell blogs in an easy-to-digest format, so it deserves a mention for that.

Are these the last days of blogging at Cornell? They very well could be.

After stepping down as Cornell’s 11th president, Jeffrey S. Lehman ’77, who left office under controversial circumstances, was compensated $785,518 for the 2005-06 fiscal year — over $75,000 more than then-Interim President Hunter R. Rawlings III. … Lehman’s post-job compensation in 2005-06 was more than all the Ivy presidents, except Yale University President Richard Levin, who earned $869,026.

As you may remember, Lehman made over $1 million in 2004-05, the most in the Ivy League. Rawlings took over as the president on July 1, 2005.

Cornell is able to block copyright holders from identifying alleged music pirates by filing a motion to block or quash the subpoena. Cornell also could, like Professor Charles Nesson at Harvard, actively refuse to help the RIAA’s police mission. … the purpose of a University is to teach, not enforce an archaic notion of copyright.

Well, it appears colleges are about to encounter additional scrutiny stemming from P2P traffic issues. Ars Technica:

A massive education bill (747-page PDF) introduced into Congress contains a provision that would force colleges and universities to offer “technology-based deterrents” to file-sharing under the pain of losing all federal financial aid. Section 494 of the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007 is entitled “Campus-Based Digital Theft Prevention” that could have just as easily been called “Motion Picture and Recording Industry Subsidies,” as it could force schools into signing up for subscription-based services like Napster and Rhapsody.

Well, it appears certain people are above the law. Sean Parker is an early employee and a major shareholder. He is also a member of numerous networks:

It appears he graduated from Columbia, Sarah Lawrence, Pepperdine, USC, UCLA, UC Berkeley, New York University, and Stanford. All in 2002. He is also in four regional networks while regular users are limited to one.

Via Valleywag.

Now there are additional reports that this really is the case. Valleywag reports:

Turns out Facebook employees can (and do) check out anyone’s profile. Not only that, but they also see which profiles a user has viewed — a major privacy violation. If you’ve been obsessed with a workmate or classmate, Facebook employees know. If Barack Obama’s intern has been using the campaign account to troll for hotties, Facebook employees know. Within the company, it’s considered a job perk, and employees check this data for fun.

It is not especially surprising that employees of a company have access to the data stored by that company. More shocking is that the profiles views are secretly monitored and the records are easily accessible by anyone at Facebook.

The creator of a fake Facebook profile purporting to represent former President Jeffrey Lehman ’77 writes a widely read blog where he comments on the intersections of social networking and higher education, often with a Cornell twist.

Cornell Alumni Magazine happens to be the most widely circulated Cornell-related publication out there, at least based on data easily found online. Thus, I think it is fair to say that I am now officially Cornell’s version of Fake Steve Jobs (covered by NY Times, BusinessWeek, Reuters, CNBC, etc.). Note to publishers: unlike Steve, I have not signed a book deal yet.

The Brown Daily Herald reports:

“We don’t use Facebook unless someone says there’s something we should look at,” said Dean of Admission James Miller ’73. But Miller conceded that admission officers take outside tips seriously. “Anything we get, we follow up on,” he said. Associate Director of College Admission Elisha Anderson ’98 agreed with Miller. There is a “limit to what we can appropriately judge people on,” he said, but added, “You have to remember (Facebook) is a public place.” He said there was “maybe one case” in which Facebook yielded information that affected an admission decision.

It should be noted, though, that certain applicants are actually trying to show off their profiles:

Sometimes admission officers receive friend requests on Facebook from applicants, Anderson said, noting that accepting the requests “would appear weird.”

Sending those requests in the first place is probably more weird.

Newsweek:

Unlike the other Ivies, Cornell is a land-grant college emphasizing problem solving as well as scholarly debate. The university boasts a world-class engineering college and top-flight liberal arts, science and fine arts. The hotel school is considered the world’s best. Cornellians, proud of the variety on campus, point to the president, David Skorton, a cardiologist, jazz musician and computer scientist who is the first in his family to have a college education.

Via IvyGate.

It presented an interesting history of the project:

The West Campus Initiative at Cornell is emblematic of how residential life shapes a campus. It began under Hunter R. Rawlings III, the university’s president from 1995 to 2003. Mr. Rawlings arrived to find what he called “a divided campus.” The dorms then on West Campus, undistinguished buildings popularly known as U-halls, were located near many fraternity houses, and tended to attract white suburban students interested in a “pre-fraternity experience,” Mr. Rawlings says. Most minority students gravitated to the dorms on North Campus. Seeing an opportunity both to cross-pollinate the campus and to provide incoming students with greater supervision during their first year, Mr. Rawlings herded all the freshmen to North Campus. Then he embarked on the West Campus project, which he saw as a way of combating another tradition at Cornell — very hard work offset by very hard partying.

Missing from the article completely are Lehman and Skorton, but let’s not get distracted. It gets better:

“It had become clear that there was a 4:30 p.m. cutoff at the university, after which many students entered an intellect-free zone,” says Mr. Kramnick, who was named the first vice provost for undergraduate education in 2001. Cornell, he adds, prided itself on giving students independence in their choice of housing, “but for some students, better students who were looking for more intellectually oriented living arrangements, we didn’t have it.”

Also missing from the story are any real student opinions:

Indeed, interviews with a dozen students at Cornell would indicate that in loco amicus is thriving. They don’t think the West Campus houses have changed campus life – not yet – and most students see them not so much as a new learning philosophy as a snazzy new place to live.

Out of that dozen, only two make it into the article. Both were West Campus residents last semester.

The New York Times:

It was the most selective spring in modern memory at America’s elite schools, according to college admissions officers. More applications poured into top schools this admissions cycle than in any previous year on record. Schools have been sending decision letters to student applicants in recent days, and rejection letters have overwhelmingly outnumbered the acceptances. … Harvard College received applications from 22,955 students, another record, and accepted 2,058 of them, for an acceptance rate of 9 percent. The university called that “the lowest admit rate in Harvard’s history.” … Applications to Columbia numbered 18,081, and the college accepted 1,618 of them, for what was certainly one of the lowest acceptance rates this spring at an American university: 8.9 percent.

Yale Daily News:

Excluding Yale, other Ivies and peer institutions broke admissions records for applications and admit rates this year. Harvard University accepted 9 percent of 22,955 applicants, down from 9.3 percent last year. Columbia College and the university’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences accepted 10.4 percent of 21,343 total applicants. Brown University admitted 13.5 percent of a pool of 19,043 applications, while the 14,159 applications received by Dartmouth College resulted in a 15 percent acceptance rate. The University of Pennsylvania admitted 3,610 students, or 15.9 percent of its 22,634 applicants, and 20.5 percent of Cornell University’s 30,383 applicants received acceptance letters.

Bloomberg:

Princeton University rejected 90.5 percent of applicants for its next freshman class, the highest percentage since at least 1953, mirroring a trend among many of its Ivy League peers. … Cornell University, another Ivy, admitted 20.5 percent of 30,383 applicants, a record for the school, down from 24.7 percent a year earlier. The Ithaca, New York school has had a 24 percent increase in applications over the past two years.

Meanwhile, The Sun is focusing on other statistics:

High-risk drinking is marked by the consumption of five or more drinks consecutively, and, according to The Core Alcohol and Drug Survey conducted by Gannett in 2005, 31 percent of Cornell students reportedly consume, on average, five or more drinks in one night.

It turns out colleges have been exploring other ways of using blogs to attract applicants. Admissions offices, traditionally shrouded in mystery, are beginning to open up. Yale Daily News sums it up:

In recent years, the increasingly intense college search process has given rise to online forums in which college-bound seniors swap advice, statistics, and stories in order to increase their chances of acceptance to top-tier schools. Now, some colleges are bringing information to the students in the form of behind-the-scenes blogs and message boards that offer a revealing look at what goes on inside America’s most selective admissions offices.

Yale does not have an admissions blog and has no plans for one. A quick search reveals that neither does any other Ivy League school. The only exception is Cornell’s College of Engineering.

Here is a small sample of schools jumping on the admissions blog bandwagon:
Bryn Mawr – www.brynmawr.edu/admissions/blog
Case Western – blog.case.edu/admission
Chicago – uncommonapplication07-08.blogspot.com
Connecticut College – admissionblog.conncoll.edu
Cornell (Engineering) – cornellengineeringadmissions-jill.blogspot.com
Johns Hopkins – hopkins.typepad.com
MIT – www.mitadmissions.org/blogs.shtml
Olin College – admissionblog.olin.edu
Oregon State – oregonstate.edu/admissions/blog
SUNY Stony Brook – sbuchris.blogspot.com
UCLA – blog.admissions.ucla.edu
UVA – uvaadmission.blogspot.com

It’s certainly refreshing to see schools make a legitimate attempt to connect with the potential future students during the stressful application process. I can only hope that more colleges follow their example.

It has come to our attention that you have been spending a considerable amount of time on a website known as ‘The Facebook’. This is unacceptable since firm regulations do not permit usage of social networking sites. Moreover, your combined total usage time over the past six months has now exceeded 500 hours (the equivalent of over four hours daily), which we feel would normally be sufficiently high to render us duty-bound to inform your manager. As a gesture of goodwill, we will not forward this email on this time, but would ask that you stop utilising this site, and in addition would advise you that this is your final warning and subsequent offences will be treated with more severity and through the appropriate official channels.

So what does he do? He posts it on his Facebook profile. Screenshot:

The fascinating part is his reaction:

It’s a measure of how warped I’ve become that, not only am I surprisingly proud of this, but in addition, the first thing I did was to post it here, and that losing my job worries me far less than losing facebook ever could.

Via TechCrunch.

A desert island teeming with mangroves and gazelles may seem like an unlikely site for a Yale arts program, but the government of Abu Dhabi, attempting to create the world’s next artistic and cultural haven, is betting that Yale will want to be a part of it. … The program would be the first of its kind in the Middle East for Yale.

Brings back the memories (from April 2001):

In an unprecedented expansion of the international presence of American higher education, Cornell University and a private foundation organized by the Emir of Qatar announced today (April 9, 2001) the establishment of the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. The new medical college will offer a complete medical education in Qatar leading to a Cornell University M.D. degree, based on the same admission standards and curriculum as the New York campus. … “This agreement is a first in Cornell’s 136-year history, and, in fact, a first for U.S. higher education,” said Hunter Rawlings, president of Cornell.

Just a little flashback.