College Shorts

Author: Jaime Fuller

LAWLESS TOILETS CAUSE TROUBLE AT INAUGURATION

President Barack Obama's inauguration on Jan. 20 drew millions of people, but the lack of portable toilets led John Banzhaf, professor of public interest law at George Washington University, to threaten legal action against the Presidential Inaugural Committee. Banzhaf is well known for his famous lawsuit against McDonald's, which he blamed for causing childhood obesity.

The reason for his interest in the 5,000 portable toilets on the National Mall is his fear that designating the facilities by gender will result in longer lines for women and possible sexual discrimination lawsuits for the Committee.

"Women take longer than men to use the restroom," Banzhaf said. "Having the same number of facilities for men and women does not gather equal results. Failure to equalize this disparate treatment might rise to sexual discrimination suits."

In a legal notice he sent to the Committee on Jan. 13, he warned that by overlooking this matter, President Obama and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi were priming themselves for a humiliating predicament, but that the problem had an easy solution.

"Solving the potty parity is simple," Banzhaf said. "Don't sex-designate them. We are all used to using same restroom on trains, planes and buses. Why is the inauguration any different?"

- The GW Hatchet

COLLEGE APPLICATION NUMBERS BREAK RECORDS

Although the forecast for the Middlebury College Admissions Office is not too optimistic, elsewhere applications for the class of 2013 are up by as much as 19 percent, such as at Harvard University.

The prestigious university received 27,278 applications, the largest reported increase among all colleges across the nation. The University of Chicago, Amherst College, Northwestern University and Dartmouth College followed close behind with increases of 18, 17, 14 and 10 percent, respectively.

The upward trend was a result of demographics, aggressive recruiting, the ease of online applications and more students applying to even more colleges as a safety net, according to officials. The rise in applications is expected to continue next year, when 3.2 million high school seniors will graduate, the largest group in the nation's history.

"These are amazing numbers," said William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, speaking of the university's flood of applications.

However, the rise in applications is not simply caused by the expanding young adult population in America; recruitment of low- and middle-income students in new regions by elite colleges also contributes to the rise. The awarding of financial aid to families making as much as $180,000 by Ivy League universities also has led students to consider a pricey education despite the economic crisis.

Unfortunately, the rise in application also leads more hard decisions that admissions officers have to make about the merits of choosing different applicants, which is why Northwestern recently hired a new admissions dean, Christopher Watson, from Princeton, who was accustomed to rejecting many exemplary applicants.

"We anticipated having to go down the path of having to make more difficult choices," Mills said, adding that Watson helped with "making very fine distinctions among very similar applicants."

- The New York Times