The UGBC administration, which had run on a promise to “bring back the fall concert,” failed to do so, though it did institute the popular “Gym Class,” a recapitulation of junior high recess that offers pickup games of kickball and dodgeball Wednesday afternoons on the Dustbowl. What had been the black studies program for more than 20 years has become the African & African diaspora studies program under its new director, Cynthia Young, a member of the English faculty. Professor of Chemistry Paul Davidovits and Professor of Physics Zhifeng Ren were named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the former for work on confocal microscopy, a technique that uses computers and lasers to scan specimens, and the latter for his research on the synthesis of nanomaterials. Newton was named the safest city in America for the second year running; and Chestnut Hill was ranked by Coldwell Banker the fifth most expensive university neighborhood of 59 studied. Palo Alto (Stanford) finished first, and Lubbock (Texas Tech) finished best. The library added 7,000 full-text plays to its online cache of 18,000. The newest batch, in English, French, and Spanish, ranged from the “Shrewsbury Fragments” (bits of 13th-century English verse) to Alice Tuan’s Coastline (2004)—“a virtual hypertext theater piece,” according to the standard and mysterious elucidation. The University refused to approve a dance originally titled “A Night in Gay Paree” and sponsored by the undergraduate government’s Gay Leadership Council. The proposed event, according to a BC statement, “would not be consistent with BC’s mission and heritage as a Catholic university.” A lunch-hour protest in a snowstorm on the Dustbowl drew about 120 students and faculty who linked arms, listened to student speakers, and then danced the snow into slippery slush to tunes played on a small boom box. Four seniors represented “Great Britain” at a model U.N. conference and won one of five “Outstanding Delegation” awards. In consequence, they will continue in the competition during the spring semester, representing, at various times, Belarus, Libya, Israel, and South Korea. The 78 percent (six-year) graduation rate among football scholarship athletes at BC was found to be the second highest among bowl-invited teams, after Northwestern’s 83 percent. The University acted on more than 300 complaints about off-campus student behavior during the fall semester, more than twice the average, and the Heights editorialized, “Students deserve suspensions for crimes.” Under a November 10 front-page, top-of-the-fold headline, “Students Experience French Unrest,” the same newspaper disclosed in paragraph three: “Violence has not directly affected any Boston College student studying in Paris.” A student team from CSOM placed alongside BYU, William & Mary, and Wisconsin-Madison in the semifinals of the Deloitte & Touche tax competition. Franco Mormando, an associate professor of Romance languages and literatures, was designated cavaliere in the Ordine Della Stella Solidarietà Italiana for contributions to Italian culture. BC physicists showed that carbon nanotubes, thought to be brittle, can, under high heat, in fact be stretched to almost four times their normal length. “The finding could have implications for future semiconductor design as well as in the development of new nanocomposites,” said Science Daily. Mary Ann’s, home of the “$1.50 Busch Light Special,” sticky floors, and laid-back ID inspections, has been told by the City of Boston that it may no longer admit customers who establish age by flourishing out-of-state driver’s licenses (40 to 60 percent of entry seekers, according to those who should know). “The dream is over now,” a bartender told the Heights, apparently seriously. Graduate A&S applications from abroad, in decline since the 9/11 attack on the U.S., rose by 8 percent in 2005, to 693. They had fallen by 30 percent the previous year. Guest speakers: Kathleen O’Toole ’76, Boston police commissioner, on her life and times; the historian Adam Hochschild, on his book Bury the Chains; prize-winning illustrator Barry Moser, who said, “Taking a text—literary, scientific, or sacred—from where it is to where it ain’t is the specific intention of illustration”; Catharine Stimpson, redoubtable pioneer of feminist scholarship, on Gertrude Stein’s religious sensibilities; William Kristol, of the Weekly Standard, on his hopes for the Bush second term; former U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson, at the opening of the Center for Human Rights and International Justice; the director Sandi Simcha DuBowski, at a showing of his documentary film Trembling Before G-d; U.S. Congressman John Lewis, on Bloody Sunday, in Selma (see “The Long March”); Helen Kelly, consultant genealogist at the National Library of Ireland, on how to trace your line; Pulitzer winner and Times reporter Linda Greenhouse, on the Supreme Court she’s covered since 1978; and John Bishop, of UC-Berkeley, who offered a talk titled “Child’s Play: A Finnegans Wake Primer” to an alert adult audience in Gasson 100 on November 29.

Ben Birnbaum

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