College Clips

By James Patrick Schmidt, Maggie Creamer and Steve Oslica
May 9, 2008

Impaled goat terrifies Harvard students

At 9 a.m. Saturday, Harvard University junior Jessica Means was finishing her breakfast as she entered the Eliot courtyard.

“There was the skin, the body and the head of a goat draped over a tree branch,” Means said. “On the gate facing Memorial Drive there was a head impaled, literally impaled. A post was stuck up its neck and it was facing the sky.”

The animal remains had come from preparations for Dunster House’s Goat Roast.

The Harvard University Police Department determined that no criminal activity had occurred, just “bad decision-making.”

Daniel Lieberman, an anthropology professor at the college, said he was not aware of last weekend’s goat incident.

“That kind of reminds me of ‘Lord of the Flies,’” he said.

Lieberman added that anthropology students are “a very nerdy bunch” who would probably not have strung the pelts.

— The Harvard Crimson (Harvard University)

Drink-special ban constitutional, court rules

After a four-year and nearly $700,000 battle through the court system, the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided Tuesday that Madison-area tavern owners did not violate antitrust laws with their voluntary ban of weekend drink specials.

In 2004 three people, including two University of Wisconsin students, filed a lawsuit against a group of downtown area taverns for banning weekend specials, which they said amounted to price fixing.

Kendall Harrison, attorney for the taverns, said the court agreed with what the taverns have been arguing from the beginning of the case.

“This is exactly how we expected it would end,” Harrison said.

In this instance, the court decided that because the city regulates alcohol licensing and it was the instigator of the ban, the businesses were not trying to restrain competition.

— The Badger Herald (University of Wisconsin)

Ho: ‘Keep It In Your Pants’

Second-year Annenberg graduate student Angel Ho wants us all to keep it in our pants.

On April 22, Ho was named winner of the “Keep It In Your Pants” Student Video Contest for creating a public service announcement about the threat that credit debt poses to American consumers.

The site that hosted the contest — keepitinyourpants.org — is dedicated to educating young people about what it has dubbed “debt disease.”

Communications professor Paul Messaris explained that Ho originally created the video for the Public Service Announcement production class he teaches.The organizers of the competition “try to make it catchy and funny by putting sex into it,” Ho said. “They especially paralleled debt to venereal disease.”

She added that this method is successful because “people using sex-related objects inappropriately is pretty darn funny.”

— The Daily Pennsylvanian (University of Pennsylvania)

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