Innermost Parts

Brandeis is pretty great but also a bit too serious sometimes, and also bureaucratic. I’ve gone to colleges with brown sheet paper pasted to the bathroom stalls, so that students were encouraged to write. Instead of the lewd crudity you see here, they had poetry, discussions, stories. We need that sort of activist spirit at Brandeis.

We need to do more things like this:

I put on a “Zombie Week” program in my Washington State University dorm last spring, which was an RPG/game of tag/social experiment, and won residence hall program of the year.

Infected had to wear a red wristband inside the dorm. One person started as an infected. Dorm rooms were safe. A tag from any infected, and you were infected too. Weapon and item cards, (a few provided in the mail, and others cached around the building) could be used to defend against zombies.

Basically, weapons and items were RPG-style cards that had to be handed to attacking zombies. We had a pretty large selection with some interesting combinations and effects. Pipe wrenches, decoys, propane tanks, etc.

Everyone was “required” to play, and even though there were a few people who just became infected and didn’t give a shit, there were hundreds of others sprinting up and down the halls at all hours. It seriously sounded like a fucking zombie apocalypse. Three in the morning you’d hear crashing and screaming, and then silence.

Motivation to survive was a Visa cash card for $50 and other prizes such as Left 4 Dead copies and “The Zombie Survival Guide”. The finale of the event involved fighting your way to the rec room Friday evening for prizes, pizza, and a zombie movie. I swear half the dorm showed up.

Anyway, we had a lot of fun, and I’d be happy to post the ruleset and items if anyone is interested in replicating this (or just taking a look).

CAs take notice!

If you were wondering, our hall government committee was called Coffee Hour and our job was to host foreign movies with coffee and intellectual discussions. We deemed that super lame and instead spent our whole budget line item on Zombie Week.

This is awesome. This is what college should be. Let this be an example of the lifestyle we could be living in

What’s going on at Innermost Parts? Why has posting been so light?

Here’s the deal. Many of us at Innermost Parts are spending our time getting the Change Agency off the ground. Change Agency is a chartered campus club with the same goals as we have: to grow and strengthen the progressive community at Brandeis.

Change Agency is having a retreat this Saturday (from 1-6pm in Grad 110 Room E3). After the retreat we’ll hopefully have everything organized and be ready to provide you our regularly scheduled Innermost Parts programming.

Welcome to the Change Agency, the new progressive activist group on campus! After a lot of hard work from a lot of talented people, the Change Agency is finally ready to go public and bring activism at Brandeis to new heights. And each and every one of us can bring our talents together and play a role in changing Brandeis for the better. Check out the Change Agency vision statement to get excited, then visit us at www.brandeisactivism.org to learn more and sign up to join our mission!

Imagine, if you will, Brandeis about a year from now.

The campus thrives with good-hearted students, all who are, in various ways, working hard to make the world a better place. A year ago, they barely knew each other, now they clasp hands as brothers and sisters when they pass each other on the roads and hallways of Brandeis.

Imagine Fred Lawrence, the new President, only a semester into his tenure, taking students seriously and treating them as equals ,making sure to consult students on every major decision. Under his tenure, social justice is not a buzzword used to generate fuzzy feelings, nor is it an adjective tacked on to every new faculty or administration initiative. Yes! Imagine a Brandeis where the term Social Justice is a clarion call to action!

Imagine a Brandeis that takes that core value seriously, a Brandeis that prepares its citizens to strive for a better future, a Brandeis that has given students the tools, skills, and connections they need to make our world a better place.

Imagine a Brandeis where changemakers of all stripes – social entrepreneurs, budding organizers, the left, the religious, the artists, and everyone else – all of them celebrating each other’s successes, attending each other’s parties, and learning trusting, growing, laughing with each other.

In this future, Brandeis alumni will visit, and pass on the torch to the next generation of changemakers. Social Justice Activists from across the land will flock to Brandeis to train, inspire, and hire these budding students.

Imagine this Brandeis. Seize this vision.

It can happen. With your help, it will happen.

We at the Change Agency believe in our hearts that this future is worth investing in. We are working night and day to make this vision happen because we want to be citizens of a Brandeis that inspires us, not just customers of a Brandeis that teaches us.

In 1972, the young reporting team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein almost single-handedly uncovered the evidence of the political scandal of the century and forced the resignation of a corrupt President.  Thirty years later, another corrupt administration lied the nation into an ongoing war with the complicity of a media that served as cheerleaders rather than fact-checkers.  What happened?  How did the grand tradition of investigative journalism  disappear in a single generation’s time?  Has the rise of the media conglomerate and the lowest-common-denominator “if it bleeds, it leads” coverage killed honest reporting for good?

The Elaine and George Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism is Brandeis’s vehicle for restoring the power of a truly free press.  The Institute will celebrate it’s birthday next month, marking six years as the nation’s first investigative reporting center housed at a university.  Its directors are well aware of the trials facing the news industry; the Institute’s website states that it was founded “to help fill the void in high-quality public interest and investigative journalism—and to counter the increasing corporate control of what Americans read, see, and hear.”  As technological advances change the way we access news, it’s important that the voids that traditional news outlets leave are filled with well-trained, ambitious muckrakers.  Rather than killing investigative journalism, the online revolution can be a restorative purge — and the Schuster Institute puts Brandeis at its forefront.

Just like the University, the Schuster Institute is built around the pillar of a commitment to social justice.  Its major projects involve exposing governmental and corporate abuses, freeing wrongly-incarcerated prisoners, and uncovering gender inequalities in society.  While it’s important that they avoid bias, journalists can maintain objectivity without losing their conscience, much like biologists who employ the scientific method while developing medications.  I’ve always considered the pursuit of truth to be a desirable end in it’s own right, but it can also be the means to building a better society — perhaps our most important goal as a species.

In short, I believe that journalism has the potential to do almost limitless good in the world, and I’m proud that Brandeis approaches it with such seriousness and humanity.  But the news is only useful if it reaches people and inspires them to action, and I’d like to help in whatever way I can.  So Innermost Parts is going to start an effort to publicize Schuster Institute reports on campus and explore ways that Brandeis’s awesome activist clubs can work to address the issues they raise.  You can check out the Institute’s archives here, and check here for opportunities to work directly with the Institute.

IF YES…..

I received this e-mail from the national Democracy for America group, one of the many causes I support and wish I was more involved with but sadly am not…Don’t let the same thing happen to you.  (I love you, Howard Dean!)

It takes three things to win elections — good candidates, good campaigns, and you.

We’ve already trained over 1,100 activists and candidates in 13 states this year and now we’re excited to announce the return of DFA Night School as a free online resource for progressive campaigns across the country.

Register for DFA Night School today!

Since it was created in 2006, DFA Night School has helped 31,382 activists write field plans, organize precincts, raise money and get out the vote. This August and September we’ll be organizing weekly trainings on our brand new interactive video-based platform that will focus on how we can get our supporters back to the polls in 2010.

Currently, the DFA online Night School, which is all free btw, offers 6 one-time sessions dating from August 18th until September 22nd, all at 8:30 pm EST.  The topics include: Messaging for Progressives, Mobilizing Key Constituencies, Creating a Positive Campaign Culture, and more. (http://www.democracyforamerica.com/pages/2428-nightschool_2010)

Now, while these workshops are intended for “progressives”, that term is just about flexible enough to refer to anyone who wants to change things for the better, so don’t let it scare you off. It doesn’t matter whether you want to go into politics or not, are liberal or conservative, or even follow the news or focus on staying out of it– these workshops are open to EVERYONE, and they seem like they’ll be interesting one way or another; if you do not learn from them, at least they will give you food for thought, or for laughter.

SO, go check out the site (once again, http://www.democracyforamerica.com/pages/2428-nightschool_2010) and look into those workshops and OH YEAH, while you’re at it, send in your RSVP to the similarly-minded Campus Camp Wellstone event we will be conducting on our very own campus, September 25th and 26th, http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=146495518696124&ref=ts#!/event.php?eid=146495518696124&ref=ts!

The American Enterprise Institute is an explicitly right-wing organization. They have a new report out claiming that we students study an average of 14 hours a week, which is 10 hours less than people in the 60′s. Their summary:

In 1961, the average full-time student at a four-year college in the United States studied about twenty-four hours per week, while his modern counterpart puts in only fourteen hours per week. Students now study less than half as much as universities claim to require. This dramatic decline in study time occurred for students from all demographic subgroups, for students who worked and those who did not, within every major, and at four-year colleges of every type, degree structure, and level of selectivity. Most of the decline predates the innovations in technology that are most relevant to education and thus was not driven by such changes. The most plausible explanation for these findings, we conclude, is that standards have fallen at postsecondary institutions in the United States.

So I’m not sure I agree with or trust the AEI on anything. What do you think of these allegations? I I don’t keep track of how much I study per week – is 14 hours correct? Also see Ezra Klein for more.