The Year From Hell Gets Worse.

The Council for Postsecondary Education's Evergreen Study released in Feb. 1979 spelled it out. The College had to change or it would die. The essay admission form, gone. The wild and unstructured curriculum, out the window. Competitive sports would be introduced in the 1979-80 year. The future shape of TESC was being decided by legislators and administrators who tweaked and pruned away aspects of the school that had bothered them for years. Dropping the "The" came up. A professional marketing firm was employed.

The students did not rise up in arms as one would've expected. About the only part of this whole change where we had any say was an election where a new school mascot could be chosen. The geoduck was graciously allowed to be listed on the ballot. The other choices were pretty boring as I recall, I think the Orca whale was one. Of course, we stayed loyal to the symbol that disturbed our detractors. But I think we were resigned to the reality of the situation.

But the faculty were not. They were having some very hard feelings about the CPE's mandate for making the school more mainstream. In one seminar, my teacher went on a rant about how rock stars like Bowie, Lennon, and Jagger were really corporate products. "Behind every one of those guys," he said, "is someone just like Dan Evans." He did not mean that as a compliment.

Shortly after the CPE study was published, Willi Unsoeld took a group of students on a climb to Rainier and died in an avalanche. A student named Janie Diepenbrock perished as well. And if that wasn't bad enough, a few days later a student was murdered in the backyard of her Westside house. The campus fell into a dark shock.

Willi was easily TESC's most charismatic ambassador in carrying the message of the experiment. When we attended his memorial in the Library lobby, we were saying goodbye to more than just a person.

Obviously the traditionalizing of TESC paid off, as enrollment improved and the College started showing up on various top ten lists. But there was something wonderful and eccentric and electric that was taken away as a result. The Evergreen that opened in the fall of 1979 would be a very different school.

Help an Olympian in need, take the whiz quiz. 

Great essay, I learned a lot, including:

As part of our justice mission, we work hard to protect the rights of free religious expression for all people, including Christians. For example, we recently defended the First Amendment rights of a Baptist minister to preach his message on public streets in southern Indiana. The ACLU intervened on behalf of a Christian valedictorian in a Michigan high school, which agreed to stop censoring religious yearbook entries, and supported the rights of Iowa students to distribute Christian literature at their school.

Wed, 11/16/2005 - 10:29pm

First understand that harm reduction is typically aimed towards criminal and illicit behaviors that a person often has little or no control over. The lack of control can be a physical or emotional addiction. Being that tobacco is only illegal for those under the age of 18, it seems warranted that harm reduction activities are thus then aimed at those for whom it is an illegal activity.

Another premise of harm reduction is interceding at the lowest level possible. An effective reduction strategy ensures that individuals, families, schools, and communities work together to effect change to work towards the desired norms.

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Bloggers are fired, jailed, and banned from countries. For the crime of blogging.

Committee to Protect Bloggers is a great resource. One of their recent alerts concerns a Canadian-Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, aka Hoder, a member of their advisory board, who has been banned from U.S. for six months. U.S Customs and Border Security people, when they heard he was headed to U.S. to speak at a blog related conference, googled his name right there in front of him. Everything went downhill from there.

Do people who live and work in and around Olympia tend to have a certain style of humor? I know there is a huge variation in styles, but if we generalize, what type of humor do we have?

My nomination can be expressed through an example. I suppose it could be termed -dry- and -weather related-.

A few weeks back I was seated at a bus stop, a young man eventually joined me. I didn't know him but we exchanged friendly hellos and conversation about when the bus would arrive. It was cold, the metal bus shelter seat didn't help any, we needed distraction, so of course I said something about the weather.

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