Yalowitz had spent the previous two months on leave from Northwestern canvassing in the swing state of Ohio. Early voting had begun Oct. 1, so by the time Election Day rolled around, “I’d done all I could do,” Yalowitz says.

He was still nervous, of course — a wave of nausea had hit by 6:30 the night before. “When you’re in Ohio on a presidential campaign, you’re in the middle of the storm,” Yalowitz says.

Photo provided by Adam Yalowitz

His “Get Out the Vote” director told him, “If we lose Ohio, we might lose the rest of the country. We can’t afford another four to eight years of Republican leadership, so don’t screw up.”

Yalowitz had left the office that night at 3 a.m., so he had slept about an hour by the time he received his robo-wake-up call. “‘You have to go win Ohio!” Clinton said. “It’s time to open up your campaign offices!’”

An hour later, Medill junior Molly Lister’s alarm went off. After securing tickets to Obama’s election night rally downtown, it seemed obvious that she and her friends would be forgoing their Global History lectures and spending the whole day in downtown Chicago rather than Harris 107.

Lister and her friends were the second group in line at 7 a.m., after two men who had slept there the night before. The two groups quickly merged, snacking on yogurt covered raisins and fruit, playing cards, and taking trips to a nearby Starbucks for the next eight hours.

MTV News and the Associated Press interviewed Lister as people drew Obama signs and American flags on the ground in chalk.

Weinberg junior Hannah Jaracz awoke with no intention of going downtown. A registered Republican, she had crossed party lines for the election. But her mother’s warnings of the inevitable crowd chaos had dissuaded her.

After hearing about other Northwestern students heading down, Jaracz said “what the hell” and crammed onto the packed Intercampus Shuttle with her roommate. On the ride in, she found out Jeff — a Loyola student with whom she had been good-friends-and-nothing-more since the sixth grade — was going to be downtown, too. She figured there wasn’t much of a chance of meeting up with him, though.

***

Photo provided by Garen Chekley

Communication senior Garen Checkley spent the afternoon marching up and down Michigan Avenue with fellow Communication senior Abby Miller. “Join the Obamanomenon!” their banner read.

Grant Park visitors joined in on the celebration, taking endless photos of Checkley, Miller and their creation. Reporters from Al Jazeera to the The Wall Street Journal approached Checkley with questions.

***

Soon after she had made it to her spot within the Grant Park crowd, Jaracz received a text message from Jeff, despite the faulty cell-phone reception. “J-15,” it read.

With her roommate’s clarification, Hannah looked up: they were currently in J-17, and with only a glance behind her she made eye contact with Jeff. “We were both downtown with millions of people and we were only 10 or so rows apart,” Hannah says. “It seemed like fate.”

Jeff took what was then a bold leap, confidently putting his arm around the girl he’d known for so long. Hannah’s anxiety did not fade for a minute during their two and a half hour time together, yet she still inherently felt “as if everything in the world was coming together.”

***

Lister watched pressed against the metal railing in the front row of Grant Park’s ticketed section. “I had bruises the next day,” she says. But sacrificing her body, a full night’s sleep, and the opportunity to go to the bathroom was worth it to Lister. Her parents called saying they’d seen her among what she called a “sea of faces” on CNN.

The countdown to the final results is a bit of blur, but once they called Virginia and Ohio, “I think we all looked at each other without saying anything, and we all just knew.”

Communication junior Allison Finn and her friends watched the five jumbo screen televisions and cheered riotously every time the CNN analyst declared a state “blue.” The collective energy of the crowd hit a tipping point though, when simulations imagining John McCain winning Democratic strongholds such as California showed he still would not have enough electoral college votes to muster a win.

Photo provided by Adam Yalowitz

Looking around the crowds, seeing “all ages, all races, all ethnicities … it was a true cross-section of the population,” Finn recognized that “it’s okay to be an idealist again.”

The TV in front of McCormick freshman Natalie Kennelley was substantially smaller. Kennelley was crammed in a room with 200 of her classmates at an international school in San Miguel County, New Mexico. She was stateside after growing up abroad, in places where anti-American graffiti adorned the alleyways and sides of buildings.

She spent most of her life in predominantly Muslim countries and was frequently self-conscious of the “American” stigma. She would conceal anything blatantly American and even pretend to be from Canada. But she linked arms with students from more than 80 nations, recognizing that the election was “not just about me and my country … everyone in the world was a shareholder.”

The screen in front of SESP senior Allie Bream was on a laptop in a van in Oman. Bream and her fellow study-abroad students were scheduled to go on an early morning hike in the Omani mountains, 10 hours ahead of Chicago time.

One student in the car had access to a wireless card, and was checking online results as they drove to their destination.

“It’s done. Obama won,” he said, in an unsettling and calm voice.

***

“Raw excitement, passion and relief,” Lister says of the moment CNN flashed “Obama Wins” in large capital letters. For the next 10 minutes, Lister joined in collective chants of “Obama” and “Yes we can”, waving a tiny American flag in unison.

In the back of the crowd, Checkley shared in the celebration with a member of Obama’s Chicago church standing beside him. “People were screaming and crying and hugging random strangers,” Checkley says. “It was super loud for about a minute and then, silence, dead silence. People hadn’t gotten over the shock phase.”

***

“We did it,” Kennelley overheard her best-friend whisper back in New Mexico, as tears openly flowed amid joyful roars. A stark contrast was drawn between the “internationals,” who outwardly celebrated, vocally cheering what was to them was the possibility of a reformed global atmosphere, and the American students who sat huddled, holding each other.

In Oman, Allie Bream’s van made a similar unexpected stop. Pulling off the road, the students got out in front of a tiny Omani restaurant, empty save for two men sitting at one of the few tables. The students were led by their program coordinators and the restaurant owners upstairs, into a modest apartment. They filed into a carpeted but bare room with a small TV in the corner.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, the students watched Obama give his acceptance speech on Al-Jazeera in English. Bream’s eyes welled. The program directors began congratulating them, passing out candy.

“This is a big day for you,” they told them.

***

“Holy fuck, we won!” Yalowitz thought, one of four volunteers left in his Toledo office.

Photo provided by Adam Yalowitz

After hearing the news in Ohio, he piled into a volunteer’s car and headed toward a party at Union Hall. Passing the barbershop where volunteer Betty Amison had been coordinating her neighborhood efforts, Yalowitz asked to pull over.

Walking around the back, Yalowitz found “a group of little old black ladies just going nuts, dancing, jumping up and down,” he says. The women yelled “Adam’s here!” joining in a group embrace. “The bond that I have with this 65-year-old, five-foot-two black woman in inner-city Toledo will probably stay for the rest of my life,” Yalowitz says.

***

Finn and her Northwestern friends, alongside countless thousands of strangers, frolicked down Michigan Avenue, singing, dancing, crying, screaming. Waves of triumphant strangers prevented any car from getting through. People were “just … running. I’ve never felt so unified with a crowd.”

Photo provided by Hannah Jaracz

As Obama’s speech came to a close, the Grant Park crowds spilled into the streets. Hannah and Jeff’s walk back to the El was sealed with a kiss on the cheek. “We call [Obama] the matchmaker,” Jaracz says.

***

One year later, Jaracz and her boyfriend are still together. Checkley’s banner hangs on the ceiling of his bedroom, spanning two walls and reminding him of a story he’ll “be able to tell the grandkids about.” Finn channeled her newfound idealism by interning at a non-profit women’s human rights organization in New York City. Yalowitz shook off his “Obama Hangover” and returned to Northwestern with at least 10 couches across the United States he can sleep on. Lister’s friend from the eight-hour line became a facilitator for the Global Engagement Summit, an organization where she hopes to recreate that same phenomenon of collective action.

“I don’t think I had ever felt so involved before,” Lister says. “We grow up in a very fractured world,” she adds. “In that moment everyone was rooting for the same thing. I just want[ed] to be an American.”

My experiences and musings on what I found to be stark discrepancies between my State School weekend and a life at Northwestern (shotgunning with strangers a case-in-point) are in no way commentary on the “Northwestern Student Body”. Despite the “Nerdwestern” shirts hanging in Beck’s, Evanston is home to some fairly socially well-adjusted individuals. I know Northwestern would have been much better represented by a Monday and Thursday night regular, one who knows the names and birthdays of both bouncers at the Deuce.

I consider myself somewhere in between, having been to the Deuce but never eaten the much-hyped free pizza. While I have drunk a Keg cup, I have only danced on the pole once, for irony’s sake. I also prided myself on never having vomited from drinking; my standby ace when playing Kings. Well, was my standby ace when playing Kings. Something I lost, along with my cell phone charger and temporarily the feeling in my lower jaw, to the State School.

I arrived at the airport on that Thursday to a cheery voice mail left by my best friend. “I’m on my way to the airport, see you at 11! Get your schwasted shoes on….” she said in a jingly voice. Fuck. Schwasted shoes? I knew I forgot something. Like an anal retentive fourteen-year-old, I’d remembered my retainer and travel-sized shampoo, but schwasted shoes I had definitely left behind. Especially given that I had spent my last three lonely weeks of summer soberly watching Top Chef reruns with my stepmom rather than training my liver for the four-day trial it was about to endure: the Iron Man Triathlon of drunkenness. But I had been previously warned of the impending debauchery. “You should definitely come Labor Day weekend,” she had told me in July. Not only was it a three-day weekend, Saturday was their biggest football game of the season. “It’s going to be a shit show,” she said, with what sounded like four extra t’s. As if only such diction could fully drive home just how drunk she intended to be. Shittttt. Show.

And shit show it was. Thursday afternoon was spent touring their gorgeously landscaped campus and downtown student district. Their town clearly had a lot to offer beyond tri-weekly keggers: hiking, biking, skiing and a vibrant arts and dining scene. Although I found their friends’ conversation inevitably strayed to one of three topics: how drunk they were last weekend, how drunk they planned on being this weekend or How I Met Your Mother.

After dinner and getting dressed, my friends and their roommates sat down at their living room coffee table to large cups of homemade jungle juice; just like grandma used to make. Their ritualistic approach to “getting schwasted” was completely foreign to me. My Northwestern drunken adventures usually started crammed with seven other people into a dorm room, sipping contraband Burnett’s and strawberry kiwi juice from the penguin mug I’d received for Christmas — for cocoa during all those cold Chicago winters, I’d been told. This was different. There were four of us, no looming CA’s, and CSI reruns were still playing in the background. “Well, what game should we play tonight?” they asked monotonously, as though this “pregame” was just an obligatory part of the getting ready process. At Northwestern, the pregame often became the game. But at the State School, they knew you had to stretch beforehand and take a warm-up lap around the field.

We left my friend’s apartment, myself admittedly sober, my friend admittedly not. Wary of anything made in Tupperware storage containers and containing Crystal Light, I had only consumed half a plastic tumbler of their house special. We made our way to the party, after meeting up with more friends who had taken part in the same obligatory small-scale Thursday night ritual. I realized quickly that earlier judgments aside, State School friends were just like my Northwestern ones. Friendly, buzzing with excitement and dropping the tired but always popular “that’s what she said.” Except they liked to drink. A lot. Even the State School friends I had considered a little more mild-mannered than the rest were surprisingly adamant about their vodka-saturated lifestyles. Maggie, a quiet girl from Ohio, had a telling calendar posted on her fridge. “Monday: Funday! Tuesday: boo. Wednesday: Almost there! Thursday, Friday, Saturday: Get Fucked Up!!!!” It was punctuated by a slew of bubbly exclamation points and read like a child’s birthday invitation. One where the party favors were colored erasers and butterfly clips, rather than a hangover.

After my aversion to the earlier offered jungle juice, I found comfort in a keg, a silo of 4.2 percent happiness. I spent the rest of the night playing pong and “gargoyling”. A State School alternate to the much-loved keg stand, “gargoyling” involves squatting atop the keg, hose in mouth, whilst forming a menacing gargoyle claw with one’s left hand. Don’t forget the claw. That’s the most important part.

The next morning I woke up, nursing an inexplicably scraped knee, pounding headache and the memory of several embarrassing conversations from the night before. My phone’s inbox looked like a reader-board of popular Texts From Last Night including “Are you alive?” and “I have a weird story. It involves a jug of Carlo Rossi and a dog with a beer cozy around its neck.” It was only Friday. After gulping water and vomiting up last night’s indiscretions, I rolled over to my friend as she chattered about that night’s plans. “This place is like running a marathon,” I said, careful to not lift my head too high. “Except usually during a marathon you pace yourself. This is a marathon of sprints.” And that it was. Blackout. Sleep. Repeat.

Lucky for my liver, I learned my lesson after “Thirsty Thursday.” I played it safe enough to avoid more early morning conversations with their bathroom floor, but drinking enough cheap beer to avoid embarrassing myself in front of my iron-stomached friends. It wasn’t until my last day at the State School, when someone finally asked me, “so what are parties at Northwestern like?”

I paused, the shotski hovering at my open mouth.

Not like this. Not once that weekend did I pay to get into a fundraiser party, or hear someone drop their SAT score in a solo cup conversation. Not once did I have to shuttle north to a freshman-filled frat house, or end my evening in the blue plastic booth of a 24-hour fast food establishment. But not once did the State School parties erupt into a spontaneous dance party to both Animal Collective and Miley Cyrus. Not once did their Kings games develop into hilarious and thoughtful discussions that continued long after the keg was tapped. It was easy to find friends at the State School. Instantaneous and well-lubricated connections formed quickly over common “shittttt show” stories. If State School friends are the kids you water ski with each summer at camp, Northwestern friends are your brothers in battle, your allies in the trenches of Tech.

“Not like this,” I said again, shaking off the burn of whiskey with a grimace. That’s for sure.

Northwestern community members rallied Thursday evening to protest the Iranian government’s continued detention of journalist Roxana Saberi, who received her graduate degree from Medill in 1999. The student-organized event, which attracted as many journalists to cover it as actual participants, was a testament to the growing interest in and outrage over the case at Northwestern and in the American media.

The march, which started at 5:30 p.m. at Fisk Hall, proceeded to the Rock, and featured speeches from Medill professors, an NU students that offered support for Saberi and condemned the tactics of the Iranian government. Protestors shouted “Free Roxana” and “Bring Saberi home,” getting louder as they approached the Rock.

Medill dean John Lavine was the first to address the crowd, and his speech highlighted some of the various incarnations Saberi’s case has assumed in the past months; the case has been a humanitarian and personal tragedy, the subject of diplomatic tension, and a reminder of the perils and value of international reporting. “My message is quite simple,” Lavine said. “Justice, humanitarianism and freedom.”

When Saberi was arrested in Iran in late January, Northwestern professors, especially Medill professor Jack Doppelt, who has maintained contact with Saberi since she left Medill, were among the first to speak out.

“Roxana Saberi is no more a spy than I am, or you are,” Doppelt said, citing Iran’s refusal to release any evidence to support the charges. He warned of the urgency of the situation, and said that “[Saberi] told her parents she was going on a hunger strike this morning.”

Two months after her arrest, Saberi was charged with spying and sentenced to eight years in Iranian prison in a closed one-day trial. President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Northwestern President Henry Bienen have all advocated for Saberi’s immediate release.

The rally was also an occasion to reflect on the issue of free speech.  Lavine told the onlookers that “the freedom of the press is the freedom to tell this story.” And told it was — campus, local and national media pushed for space to talk to the professors and students participating in the rally.

Subsequent speakers included Joe Freeman, a Medill graduate and lead writer for the blog Free Roxana, and an anonymous Iranian Northwestern student, whose comments were read by Shari Weiss, a Medill senior and event organizer.

“Roxana is innocent,” the Iranian student wrote. “I hope for a day when the lives of people are not tools for politicians to reach their goals.”

Doppelt encouraged the marchers to sign petitions and participate in an upcoming letter-writing campaign. He added that he had sent an email to Saberi this morning and relayed the message, “we are standing by you at every turn. The students called for this debate from the ground up.”

The idea for the rally was conceived during a meeting of the Medill Undergraduate Student Advisory Council, according to Medill junior Sarah Fay. During open discussion, Weiss suggested taking action to support Saberi.

“It certainly speaks to what we do that there are as many members of the media as there are students,” Fay said.

The idea that media can be an active part of the fight to free Saberi is one that pervaded the event, implicitly in the number of journalists in attendance, and explicitly in the comments of the marchers. In his speech, Doppelt said that one victory in his campaign has been convincing “newsrooms that the story was worth keeping alive.”

Santa Cruz has a cousin.

Albeit a slightly older, chubbier cousin, but a relative nonetheless. A cousin more likely to be baking and getting baked on the beach than youthfully crashing through the waves. While a less shiny and fit model of its Californian counterpart, Bellingham, Washington is home to just as much peace, love and organic grocers.

Once an aegis of hippie sensibilities and the sock with Teva sandal, Bellingham is a city in flux. Change is washing slowly into the harbors. A tide of development creeps onto its shores in the early morning when no one’s around. On a recent trip home, I noticed newly plexiglassed and veneered buildings sprouting between the cracks of our well-loved sidewalks. In Fairhaven, a small neighborhood with park benches and used books, the once-decaying Waldron building had been revamped. It now housed a new bank and several expensive condominiums. Many said it was an effort to conserve the classic red brick architecture, to seal the Fairhaven charm in a mason jar of modernity. But I could taste the artificial preservatives.

The story has been told before: Small town loses small town charm when big developers and their big ideas build big buildings. But Bellingham is a unique case. Somewhere between the Saturday farmers’ market on Railroad Avenue and the newly opened Starbucks down the street mixes yuppie wealth with Hippie social consciousness. It’s this new breed, this newly formed “yippie” demographic, which threatens to consume my hometown like a fair-trade macchiato. They drive Subarus, sport body-conscious but eco-friendly yoga pants and can actually afford to shop at Whole Foods (while Bellingham has yet to welcome a Whole Foods, it can’t be far behind the Trader Joe’s that moved in recently). And with their gluten-casein-sodium-free, flax-fed children getting older, the movement is only growing. The yippies are becoming a true force.

But Bellingham is a town that can’t be lost to the black hole of Bed Bath and Beyond. It’s a colorful patchwork of people and personalities, not unlike the Mexican poncho my seventh-grade technology teacher wore on particularly windy days. Like the poncho’s nubby yarn and small tears, Bellingham’s authentic eccentricity is what makes it so comfortable and well worn. Home to the Pita Pit on the corner, where they often hot box the walk-in freezer, and will trade you a late-night sandwich for a spliff. Home to the man in a ski hat and backpack on the street corner, listening to a Walkman and spinning in circles. It’s a place of pacifists: my high school U.S. History teacher was a Vietnam leftover that didn’t make it quite as far as Canada when avoiding the draft. But when a Hummer drives down Railroad Avenue, be forewarned. Fingers in a peace sign also form the perfect cradle for a free-range egg—to be launched with a collection of choice expletives at the offending vehicle. Republican is a derogatory term. Right-wing voters were often hidden in the closet, not openly admitting their conservative orientation until they were in college and free from their oppressively liberal high school. Bush, Cheney, or “weapons of mass destruction” were my teachers’ favorite punch lines, sure to illicit appreciative laughs from an otherwise quiet classroom.

Most of this lies beneath the glossy surface. Visitors are more likely to hear of our stunning parks (it is the Pacific Northwest, after all), chalk-art festivals, Ski to Sea relays and vibrant dining scene. While such drug use, lunacy, and manic liberalism may not make the brochure, it’s integral to the true Bellingham. There’s a face of this town, beyond the child licking a Mallard’s ice cream cone on the cover. It’s the man in the ski hat, spinning with his arms wide open and his eyes tightly shut. Both welcomingly accepting and blissfully unaware.

Speaking to a nearly full Owen L. Coon Forum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chabon reflected Monday about his childhood obsession with a rather grisly American author.

Chabon’s appearance was part of the Great Authors series organized by the American Studies program each year. According to Weinberg senior Mark Shpizner, who helped bring Chabon to campus, the series brings a contemporary American author to discuss another American author who has had a considerable impact on their writing.

“I’m a big fan of his,” Shpizner said of Chabon.

Previous speakers include Dave Eggers, Art Spiegelman, and Adrienne Rich.

Chabon has authored seven novels, and several collections of short stories and essays. In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Where Chabon’s early work spoke mainly to his own life, his recent writing has veered into the fantastical.

Pushing down on the podium and shifting his weight, Chabon crafted a tale of his childhood love and adult appreciation for one of America’s darkest writers. For someone who steers clear of the butcher’s raw meat at the grocery store, Chabon was not drawn to Poe’s signature blood and gore, but rather, a sense of connection.

“[Poe was] bookish, homely, clumsy, friendless, and self-pitying. I was all those things,” he said.

Chabon also drew connections between the lyrical qualities of their respective works. While Poe switched between poetry and prose, Chabon saw all of his work as holding the same poetic cadence. “Poe rocked the American language.”

Like Poe, Chabon said he believed that “words are the sworn enemies of stale thinking.” “I am a poet. My enemy is dead language,” he added.

Interspersed with several passages of Poe’s own work, Chabon spoke of the escapism Poe’s writing provided a young and bullied boy from Baltimore. Like the modern obsession with Harry Potter or the X-men, “it affirms your secret worth,” Chabon said.

Some in the public were willing to ignore the focus on Poe in order to hear a beloved author. “I’m not really a huge Poe fan truth be told,” said graduate student Daine Stevens. “[But] I really like Michael Chabon as an author.”

For others in attendance, it was the combination of unique American author perspectives that was so appealing.

“Michael Chabon is one of my favorite writers, and Edgar Allen Poe was my favorite author as a child,” said Christine Ranieri, a University of Illinois at Chicago student.

“It was like reliving things I hadn’t thought about in a long time,” she said, clutching a recently signed copy of Kavalier and Clay. “I remember reading, being so excited about this bigger world…you want to share it, but you also feel special because you understand it.”

It was this sense of belonging that Chabon loved as a child, and hoped to emulate in his own work. “The point is to feel yourself a part of something greater.”

When Vail Kohnert-Yount saw the admission e-mail from Northwestern in her inbox, she debated whether or not to grab her parents before clicking the fateful link.

“I remember thinking, ‘Well, it’s just Northwestern. If I get rejected, it’s not a big deal,’” Kohnert-Yount said. She opened the email by herself and saw a bold-lettered “Congratulations!” on the screen. While she quickly realized that her initial response to Northwestern was silly, Kohnert-Yount had yet to “fall in love” with the school, and hadn’t awaited its reply with as much anticipation as she did for letters from other colleges.

Kohnert-Yount’s good news from the Medill School of Journalism followed similar acceptances from the University of Texas, Wellesley, and Georgetown’s prestigious school of Foreign Service (where, she points out, Madeline Albright teaches). A deferment from Stanford’s early decision applications had come earlier.

After four acceptances and an acceptable deferment, the senior from Houston was feeling particularly pleased. Her mood shifted the following day, when she received rejections from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as a wait listing from Brown.

“That was pretty harsh. I was kind of expecting to get in to at least one or two of those places, [and] I was really hoping for Stanford,” said Kohnert-Yount, a newspaper editor, soccer team captain, freelance journalist and D.C. intern when not a student at St. John’s School. “I cried for maybe seven and a half minutes … then I got over it. I’m so excited about the four of the other schools I got into.”

Kohnert-Yount is now faced with choosing between four very different college experiences. She has already ruled out Wellesley because she feared it wouldn’t give her a classic college experience. “If the guys at MIT are what you get excited about,” she said, then it wasn’t the place for her.

“Georgetown is kind of what I’m leaning toward right now,” Kohnert-Yount said. After interning for a Democratic congressman in Washington, D.C. last summer, she became familiar with the area. Kohnert-Yount is tempted by the Science, Technology, and International Affairs major. “Georgetown is a great fit for me,” she said.

But the politically minded senior has yet to pass judgment on Northwestern, a school she knows very little about. “It’s not a place where Houstonians flock to,” she said. Kohnert-Yount intends to visit soon and see for herself. In a car conversation, Kohnert-Yount recounts her mother saying, “I can’t think of a reason why you shouldn’t go to Northwestern. Besides the fact that it’s very very cold.”

The recognition, based on both poetry writing and instruction, awards the recipient a $10,000 prize.

The O.B. Hardison Jr. award is considered one of the top poetry prizes in the country. A panel of three judges nominates and selects a winner based on those nominations.

Kinzie has written seven poetry collections, and two volumes of critical essays. Her work has been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council and MacDowell Colony.

Kinzie has been a member of Northwestern’s faculty since 1975. In 1979, she became head of the creative writing program. Kinzie also teaches, specializing in reading and writing of poetry, Victorian and modern literature, the reading and writing of fiction, American women poets, and the history and theory of prosody.

The award’s namesake, O.B. Hardison Jr., was a poet, essayist, and professor at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He later served as Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

A new report has indicated that Northwestern President Henry Bienen received twice as much total compensation for the 2006-07 school year as the year before, an increase that university officials attributed to Bienen’s lengthy tenure and a preplanned bonus.

Bienen received $1,742,560 for the 2006-07 school year, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education report, making him the third highest-paid president of a private university. President Bienen ranked behind David J. Sargent of Suffolk University and E. Gordon Gee of Vanderbilt University.

Bienen received $814,572 for the 2005-06 school year, according to the report. For the 2004-05 year, he received $774,004.

Bienen’s salary was $1,342,595 of his total compensation and $590,929 of that compensation had been deferred from his previous ten years in office. “My salary is not twice as high,” Bienen said in an e-mail, referencing the inclusion of his previously deferred payments. “My salary is a fraction of the sums they list.”

Almost all of his benefits package for this year will be deferred to a later date, and with President Bienen scheduled to retire Aug. 31, 2009, it may be subject to forfeiture.

Vice President of University Relations Al Cubbage attributed the large increase in compensation to President Bienen’s long tenure. Early in Bienen’s presidency, the compensations committee decided that certain benefits from past years would be paid in 2006, Cubbage said. The rise in President Bienen’s salary is a result of these predetermined benefits, which he had earned and accumulated over his first 11 years in office.

According to Cubbage, a better metric of President Bienen’s salary would be to compare it to that of other longstanding presidents of research universities. The highest paid president of a major research university in 2006-07 was Chancellor E. Gordon Gee of Vanderbilt, with a total compensation of $2,065,143. Gee retired in 2007 after a seven-year term.

The practice of deferring payments serves as incentive for presidents to remain at the university, explained Cubbage. The compensation committee of the Board of Trustees sets salaries every year for university officials, based on both job performance and salaries at comparable universities.

“You get a raise if you do a good job,” Cubbage said. “President Bienen has done a remarkable job for Northwestern. This university has been transformed in many ways during his leadership.”

As of Tuesday, 74 black students have applied early to Northwestern, compared to last year’s 48 percent — a 61 percent increase — Associate Provost of Enrollment Management Michael Mills said. Early applications from Latino students have risen 58 percent, while total Early Decision applications have jumped 15 percent.

After harsh criticisms Friday night at the State of the Black Union address by students of FMO, the Office of Enrollment assured the black community that it was “working hard” to increase minority enrollment.

“Northwestern doesn’t understand diversity,” said Mark Crain, former FMO coordinator, at Friday’s event.

Crain and current coordinator Zachary Parker focused mainly on the university’s “pathetic” enrollment of 81 black freshmen in the class of 2012. Crain attributed this issue to Northwestern’s failure to draw students from minority high schools. “Students in Chicago public schools today largely look at Northwestern as a country club [to] which they can never gain access,” he said.

A member of Friday night’s audience, Vice President of University Relations Al Cubbage says the university has responded to FMO’s allegations. “The university is working with FMO and other student organizations to resolve most of these issues,” Cubbage said.

According to Cubbage, the university has been making “significant efforts” at predominately minority high schools. On Friday, Crain alleged that the current programs were not enough: “Lets not exaggerate and make it seem like this issue is a crisis for the administration because frankly it’s only a crisis if you care. When I say care…I mean showing me real concrete ways that you want to solve this problem.”

Northwestern’s Office of Enrollment Management hopes to present to Crain and others the “concrete ways” they’re looking for. When Northwestern realized their minority enrollment numbers were falling last spring, “that triggered a series of conversations all the way up to the president,” Mills said. “That’s our top priority for next fall: to make sure that that number grows.”

Mills outlined a series of programs the university is undertaking in order to reach out to minority high schools. Leading these efforts is a partnership with QuestBridge, a non-profit organization that attempts to connect low-income students with high-ranking universities. Northwestern has agreed to provide 15 full-ride scholarships for students through the program. “[Joining] QuestBridge [is] probably the single most important gesture that Northwestern could make,” Mills said.

Other enrollment efforts include waiving applications fees for students from Chicago public schools, and two new preview programs that target African-American and Latino students: Why NU and Symposium. The office also hopes to “work more closely” with Northwestern students through Ambassador and CLAVE, student organizations that specifically target potential African-American and Latino undergraduates in the time preceding application deadlines.

Northwestern students scrawled comments like these across a white linen banner in Norris Wednesday with “What do you love about your body?” written on it. The Delta Delta Delta sorority posed the question to passersby as it launched its chapter of Reflections, a new “sorority body image program” that targets eating disorders. Northwestern’s Tri Deltas were selected as one of 12 chapters nationwide to pilot the program this year.

“There’s always rumors running rampant about how common and prevalent eating disorders are within sororities,” said SESP senior Carryn Christianson, president of Tri Delta. Though she believes poor body image isn’t a sorority-specific problem, “When women tend to be eating around other women, it makes you a lot more self-conscious about the choices you’re making. Obviously, a sorority is a group full of women. You have that pressure.”

The idea, started by Dr. Carolyn Becker at Trinity University, is to use the “unique structure of sororities as an ideal vehicle” to improve body self-esteem, according to the program’s Web site. Becker “noticed that a lot of girls get to school, face body issues, and sadly, develop eating disorders,” said Weinberg sophomore Rohini Menezes, Tri Delta’s Reflections co-representative.

The focus on Wednesday was “fat talk.” The national Tri Delta organization calls the current campaign “Fat Talk Free Week,” “a 5-day public awareness effort to draw attention to the damaging impact of ‘fat talk’ on women of all ages and their impossible pursuit of the ‘thin ideal,’” according to a national Tri Delta statement.

Menenes and a fellow representative, SESP sophomore Cailie Lauesen, will travel to Arlington, Texas at the end of October for a two-day training on how to implement Reflections here at Northwestern. The national branch of Reflections will be visiting campus this January.

Susan Woda, the senior director of operations for Tri-Delta, said the problem isn’t limited to the Greek system. “Sororities don’t cause eating disorders,” she said. “It’s not a sorority problem. It’s not a college women’s problem. It’s a women’s problem.”

Communications freshman Alex Young, who wrote on the poster that he liked his nose, said this was a male issue as well. “Guys are less open about it,” he said. “Girls just like to talk about it more.”

For Weinberg freshman Lauren Sachar, Tri-Delta’s involvement in the Reflections program helped debunk that misconception. As a freshman, Sachar said she was nervous about the approaching the recruitment process based on what she had seen on TV. “Those stereotypical shows on sorority life [show them] judging you based on appearances,” Sachar said. “The fact that this was sponsored by a sorority makes me think it’s different here.”