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From Page to Stage: Newark in Black and Blue in 2004

In the Fall of 2004, I was teaching a course at Rutgers University in Newark called “From Page to Stage” where the idea — as I was teaching the course — was to take original scripts written in class and present them in live performance to learn how the process of active creation worked.

The final project was a series of group presentations where students shared their lives as they were living it — and the alarming result of one racially diverse group was: “Newark in Black and Blue.”  That group’s bruising presentation was tough and blunt and dramatic and I decided we had to record that performance in audio so we could preserve the truth of the moment.

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Mike Rice is Head Bully of Rutgers Basketball

Mike Rice is the head coach — and Head Bully — of the Rutgers University basketball team.  By the time you read this, Rice may be long gone, but his bloody head will not be the only one rolling down College Avenue.  Athletic Director Tim Pernetti most certainly should lose his head as well — as should Pernetti’s school bosses, like the President Robert Barchi, who, it appears, refused, along with Pernetti, to fire Mike Rice in November 2012 even after watching video evidence of the coach physically and verbally abusing his undergraduate basketball team during practice.  The Rutgers Board of Trustees must act now and clean the Rutgers house and fire Mike Rice, Tim Pernetti and President Robert Barchi — because they were all in collusion to not protect the welfare of the student athletes entrusted to their care.

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Obama to Reward Restraint in Tuition Increases

My mother always told me that when it came to higher education, it was more important where you got degrees at the Masters level and above than where you got your bachelor’s degree. A person could, for example, get a bachelor’s degree at my alma mater Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey and then a Masters degree from Harvard and be equally impressive (according to my mother) as a person who got both degrees from Harvard. At the time that I attended Rutgers, the tuition was under four thousand dollars for New Jersey residents.

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Rutgers Pays Toni Morrison $30K: Commencement Speeches as a Pageant Play

Over the weekend, the most incredible news broke that Nobel and Pulitzer prize winner, and living institution, Toni Morrison was charging Rutgers University $30,000.00USD to speak at this year’s commencement ceremony.  I can’t decide who has the tinnier ear here:  Morrison or Rutgers.  Perhaps they’re both equally culpable.

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American Sign Language in Performance: Stop Bullying Now at Gallaudet

We know American Sign Language is the fourth most popular foreign language on American college campuses, and when you combine ASL to help battle bullying in the classroom, you begin to empower and enliven the downtrodden and the misbegotten. When we remember Tyler Clementi, we must always see our own vulnerabilities exploited by others in his demise. Some Gallaudet University graduate students have created an anti-Bullying video in American Sign Language to help spread the word. I promoted their — “Stop Bullying Now” — video from my Facebook page last night, and I was delighted to see how quickly a positive wave was built in support of the video.

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When University Learning and Alcohol Mix

University learning is not cheap. The annual fee for attending Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey is close to thirteen thousand dollars — for New Jersey residents who commute. For Princeton University students, it’s nearly forty thousand dollars per year. Why, then, would anyone even think about throwing away all that money for the purpose of getting drunk and in serious trouble when one can get drunk while not paying for every minute of every hour of every day through the nose?

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WordPrescience.com is now WordPunk.com!

Owning domain names is one of the few, joyous, pleasures of life.  You have an idea.  You try to congeal that notion into a memorable .com domain — and you always try to then give those ideas a good home.  Today, I am both sad and delighted to share some news with you about my WordPrescience.com domain.

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Did Tyler Clementi Leap to His Death, or Was He Pushed?

The recent, leaping, suicide death of 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi from the edge of the George Washington Bridge reads like “Lori Drew: Part II” in so many sad ways.  Two Rutgers students are charged with “invasion of privacy” because they secretly streamed live internet video of Tyler making out with a guy in his dorm room.

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Imus Back in Business on Fox

On December 5, 2007, we wrote about Don Imus’ infertile return to broadcast radio.  We were disappointed then, as we still are now, that he was so able to nimbly skirt around his bigoted and racist insults against the females on the Rutgers basketball team. On Monday, Imus started to simulcast his ancient and tired radio show on the Fox Business channel. 

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A Semiotic Imus Wiping

I thought we were finished wiping up after Don Imus this week, but the ongoing reverberations in the media and in our comments for all our coverage are still too strong to ignore — Don Imus and the Rutgers Nappy Headed Hos and Race and the American Humor Line and The Lesson of Don Imus: Red is Thicker than Green and Creating Consequential Context: A Semiotic Moral Correction for Don Imus — and while some of our regular commenters have fallen off into the darkness, their voices have been replaced with new commenters offering counter-advocacy and fascinating arguments.

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