Charles Moskos was one of a few celebrity professors at Northwestern, the kind that students chose for the name and not for the course description (”You haven’t had Moskos yet?!”). He drafted “don’t ask, don’t tell,” wrote for the New York Times Magazine, and hung out with Wesley Clark. Like other celebrity professors (Gary Saul Morson), he taught his classes using a lot of one-liners, and his tests were never very hard.

But Moskos didn’t act like a celebrity professor. Students didn’t talk about his lectures the way they revere Morson’s—they talked about him as a person. Even during lectures, Moskos would spontaneously start individual conversations with students. When North by Northwestern wrote a profile of Moskos last year, SESP senior Rachel Bitman remembered what was most different about him as a professor: “He speaks to students, and not just because he’s been teaching for so long…He would spend two hours talking to any one of the 200 students in his class.”

It was easy to feel like you were Moskos’ friend, even if he didn’t know your name. Before class one day, I was eating a C-Store sandwich outside Tech Auditorium and said hi to him from across the street. “Why are you out here?” he said, “Don’t you want to go inside?” So I silently picked up my things and followed him. He asked me where I was from (”What do you mean?” “Where did you go to high school? That’s where you’re from.”), he had trouble opening the door so I helped him out (it was easy to forget that he was both 74 years old and suffering from prostate cancer). And then I never spoke to him again.

But even though he was as much a part of Northwestern as anyone else, he never completely fit in here. He was a self-proclaimed economic liberal and social conservative, a category that represented exactly two percent of the last 600-person intro sociology class he taught. His rationale for “don’t ask, don’t tell” (which he figured would be gone by 2010) was bizarre—he told Lingua Franca “fuck unit cohesion…I should not be forced to shower with a gay.” (His original title for the policy also said, “don’t seek, don’t flaunt.”)

A few people liked to call Moskos a bigot, but like most students, I didn’t spend much time thinking about Moskos’ politics. Most of the kids in his class liked to think of him as their crazy uncle—”he’s not homophobic; just old.” The truth is that Moskos’ politics didn’t really matter. Few people at Northwestern (liberal or conservative) are very dogmatic, and Moskos’ eccentricity was part of what made him so likeable. He put the people in his class before his own agenda, he was always curious about others’ opinions even if he didn’t like them—basically, everything the military, and its flawed but workable policy on homosexuality, stand for. Who knew such an army man would end up being Northwestern’s hero?

Whatever you think of University President Henry Bienen the man — whom you probably don’t know and probably don’t care about — he’s arguably Northwestern’s biggest booster since he started the job in January 1995. (Hell, he went to court for us against the City of Evanston.) That’s not to say that Bienen has much to do with what Northwestern stands for. The underlying irony behind everything Bienen has done for the school is that, at times, it seems like he could be doing it for anybody. A squash-playing, foreign-policy egghead with an Ivy League pedigree, Bienen has almost nothing to do with a laidback research university smack-dab in the Midwest, more reputed for its engineering school than for its political connections. Other than during his annual address to freshmen, Bienen is rarely seen, rarely heard.

But his expert tactical maneuvering can be felt just about everywhere on campus: the outpouring of money that has brought endless construction; the remarkable rise in applications and SAT scores; and the resulting prestige that, for the first time, landed Northwestern as one of the top 10 American universities in a 1997 issue of U.S. News and World Report. We also appreciate his sentiment (alluding to Thomas Jefferson) that institutions must be “refreshed regularly with new leadership,” as he said when announcing that he would step down next year, even if we suspect that it’s a bit of a cop-out. Oh well. Northwestern may not be Bienen’s real home, but we won’t forget him easily. Here are a few fond, and not-so-fond, ways to remember our future ex-president.

1. As a moneymaker

For any university board of trustees, the indelible mark of a president is his ability to raise lots of money. Medill alumni with a bad case of John Lavine Sour Grapes may put their wire transfers on hold for the moment, but Bienen has still made plenty of cash in almost all places where it counts. Launched not long after Bienen’s arrival in 1995, Campaign Northwestern raised more than $1.5 billion in five years, largely thanks to Bienen’s ability to put on large-scale, hyped-up events. And he hasn’t put that Rolodex of rich friends to waste, either: No doubt through some good old-fashioned sweet-talking, he netted about $10 million from the deep pockets of the Pancoe family alone.

2. As a builder

If you want to be a prestigious research university in 2008, you better be building: Harvard, Yale and Columbia are doing it by the acre, and they’re all getting in on the molecular-biology action. Thanks to Bienen’s endless cash flow, Northwestern opened the doors of its Center for Nanofabrication and Molecular Self-Assembly in September 2002 — and it’s not stopping there. After kick-starting an effort to expand and renovate buildings, including Crowe and Annie May Swift, the university announced earlier this year its plans to construct a new home for the School of Music.

Of course, the holy grail of Bienen’s expansion efforts has been opening outposts of Medill and the School of Communication in Qatar, putting Northwestern alongside the likes of Georgetown and Carnegie Mellon. To anyone who cries “sellout,” we say you’re a xenophobe: Building connections with an oil-rich Middle East country isn’t just a sweet deal. It’s an investment in the future.

3. As a failed proponent of diversity

The stain of Bienen’s legacy will be his exceedingly complicated relationship with, well, minorities. This is true in just about every sense of his job: academics, recruitment and financial aid. It’s not that he doesn’t like them; he’d just rather not talk about them. In March, former Weekly editor Jordan Weissman revealed that Bienen was tense and “clearly unhappy to be discussing the topic” during an interview about Northwestern’s failing black enrollment (which has nearly halved since 1976). Later, he tried to explain the drop in black students by claiming, in full lawyer mode, that more applicants chose not to identify their ethnic background, and then chewed out The Daily Northwestern for not including the reasoning in its final article.

It wouldn’t be the first time he tried to get himself out of a sticky situation: The Asian American Studies program that recently hired the popular Nitasha Sharma only came about after a 1995 hunger strike, in which students demanded the creation of the department.

4. As a squash-playing, namby-pamby prepster

You can take the prepster out of Princeton, but there’s no getting the Ivy League out of Henry Bienen. Though he will have served as the president of a Midwestern university for 15 years, Bienen, who got his bachelor’s at Cornell in 1960, still wears his East Coast bias on his sleeve. He once told the Northwestern Chronicle he tries to play squash and tennis at least once a week, but finding time isn’t easy, you know, what with all those Wildcat games he doesn’t always attend. And he’s been known to act nostalgically about his 30-year stint as a professor at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs: carrying out research projects in Nepal and Egypt, swapping late-night gossip with Cornel West and all those other things they do in Princeton. We can’t say we really blame him, though. Sometimes we wish we had a position on the New York Council on Foreign Relations, just so we could board a jet and get away from the icy wind and drunk Cubs fans every once in a while.

So when Bienen packs away his rackets and balls in November next year (his effective exit date), the stakes will be both high and low. Whoever replaces him (Oprah? Donna Shalala, the Hobbit-ish president of University of Miami? Barack Obama?) should be a more charismatic fellow — maybe wear purple, and most definitely not play squash. But the real question is whether they can do as much for Northwestern as Bienen did for us. Bienen’s legacy is improving how we look to the outside world, so much so that we’ve actually started to resemble that stupid “Ivy of the Midwest” moniker we give ourselves. Maybe after he leaves we can even forget about comparing ourselves to the Ivies and just start acting like one. But first we’ll need to find a professor as cool as Cornel West.

A 20-year-old Northwestern student comes home from a party on Saturday, alone and a little drunk. He goes on Craigslist and posts an ad “looking for some guys around my age to have some discreet, clean fun.”

He lists brown hair, brown eyes, and a height of 5 feet, 10 inches. It has to happen “soon, before I pass out,” he says, but it’s about 3:30 in the morning so there probably aren’t many people online to read his post. The next night around eight o’clock, he’s studying in the library and thinks about it again. He makes another post looking for “a nice study break,” but it needs to be convenient — maybe in the bathrooms nearby. “Send me an instant message over AIM at ‘deeringboi’ right now to set something up — im waiting.”

Last year, Senator Larry Craig was arrested for allegedly propositioning an undercover cop by tapping his foot inside a bathroom stall — a code from the “tea room trade” of the 1960s and ‘70s. But on the Internet, there are more-advanced ways to anonymously hook up. An archive of male-to-male Evanston personals on Craigslist for last November shows that nearly 70 listings soliciting sex appeared to be posted by Northwestern students or men looking for Northwestern students — an average of more than two a day.

Many of these came from repeat posters whose ads were vaguely similar, if not exact duplicates of each other: The 25-year-old graduate student with the Calvin Klein underwear. The 21-year-old student-athlete who’s curious about guys but “needs to be really discreet.” Craigslist, like a neighborhood bar, has its own regulars and drifters. “You could probably make a general consensus that people who post are usually older, they don’t do relationships,” says John, a sophomore who used Craigslist from April to August last year, when he became “bored” by routine sexual encounters with strangers. (His name has been changed for privacy.)

For a generation of gay men, online personals aren’t just a new form of advertising — they’re a new way to have sex. Though John lost his virginity to a man he met through Manhunt, another gay-personals site, he’s never actually heard the phrase “tea room” and he’s never had sex in a bathroom. On the Internet, he can connect to any number of men, and with a lot more security than at Fisk Hall or the main library, two of the more-popular tea rooms on campus. When John used to scan listings on Craigslist, he looked for guys around his age or ones with pictures, and as a rule he avoided regular posters or anal sex. To be safe, he would sometimes type a guy’s address into a Word document before leaving the house.

The careful anonymity of Craigslist also gives an outlet to men who might not otherwise feel like they have one, whether that’s closeted gays, uncomfortable bisexuals or the freshman who’s “not out yet” but wants to experiment. Of the 69 ads archived from November, the word “discreet” appears in 23 of them, far more than other common gay-personals terms such as “safe,” “masculine” or “D/D free” (drug- and disease-free). That suggests respondents either seek out privacy specifically or don’t want people to know that they’re using Craigslist to find sexual partners.

This emphasis on discreetness might make Craigslist look like a hideout for Northwestern’s collective closet. And in some ways it is. When John started trading e-mails with one prospective hook-up, the two realized that they knew each other from class. A sophomore fraternity member with a girlfriend, the other student also turned out to be a bisexual who’s not at all public about whom (or what gender) he sleeps with. “I know some people who have been outed because they hooked up with someone who didn’t keep their mouth shut,” John says. “It’s an issue of privacy, I think.”

But lots of men like to have casual sex for many different reasons, and so the issue of who uses Craigslist and why isn’t always clear. For a certain type of gay man, Craigslist may be more convenience than compulsion. “If someone is just out there doing it, and they’re deriving pleasure and not feeling it’s interfering with their lives, I’m not looking to tell them that they ought to change,” says Professor Fred Berlin of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic, “and they’re not usually looking to come in to try to change.”

Though John eventually found Craigslist and Manhunt unsatisfying, he doesn’t begrudge the gay man who uses them to get some action on occasion — as long as he doesn’t expect anything more. After all, John first logged on after it simply became too much work to find guys on campus. “I think once you start hooking up, if you stop altogether, it kind of builds up,” he says. “I’m a pretty lazy person.”

Sometime between 1980 and 1985, Kevin Leonard found a piece of paper wedged inside the glass display case in Deering Library, which today houses Northwestern’s university archives. It was an illustrated, black-and-white flyer that had been circulated around campus: “If you’re into any kind of man to man sex mutual or one-way stand by parking meter #1 in the lot just to the east of Kresge Hall.” Leonard, who has been working at the archives longer than he can remember, filed it immediately. “It’s an artifact of something that happened on campus,” he says. [Click here to see the undoctored flyer — but don't open it at work!]

When I first ask Leonard about his research into Northwestern’s history of anonymous gay sex, he sounds apologetic. “Unfortunately, this is all I have,” he told me. While Leonard, the university’s associate archivist, also remembers a newspaper advertisement that has been lost to time, the Kresge ad remains the only explicit reminder of a time during the ‘70s and early ‘80s when campus tea rooms had a reputation all their own, particularly in Deering, where men would wait on benches for their turn in the stalls. “It was known here, it was known all over campus,” Leonard says. “It was like Studio 54 — it was a happening place.”

Leonard’s discovery began as a way to explain Library Staff Announcement #824, a routine document about the closing of the Deering Library men’s room effective February 27, 1985. What the document doesn’t mention is why the bathroom was shut down or the controversy that ensued. Everything started, Leonard recalls, when a visiting scholar from another university went into the bathroom and was solicited for sex. “Apparently he raised hell about it,” he says, and a debate sprang up between two groups: those who still wanted to be able to relieve themselves in Deering and figured the university was overreacting, and those who felt more than a little skeezed out.

The lock installed on the Deering men’s room door in 1985 hasn’t been used for many years, though Leonard can neither remember nor find documentation on when it was re-opened. When you walk in now, the bathroom looks old and a little dingy but otherwise unremarkable. You wouldn’t guess that the university once hired a not-quite-undercover cop to sit in a stall fully uniformed, waiting for the action to come to him. “I get police reports,” says Al Cubbage, the vice president of university relations, when asked about anonymous sex on campus, “and I haven’t seen anything like that in years.”

John Rechy’s 1963 City of Night is known as the first major novel about gay sex. In it, a nameless hustler moves from one city to another, briefly entering the lives of scores, queens and other “youngmen” in parks, bars and — sometimes — bathrooms. With each new place, there is the sense that Rechy’s character tries to erase what came before, even as he continually repeats himself. “Then it was over,” he says about one encounter. “The orgasms have made us strangers again. All the words between us are somehow lost, as if, at least for this moment, they have never been spoken.”

Following World War II, City of Night spoke to the slow emergence of a national gay identity, when furtive glances and handjobs in late-night movie theaters turned into the Stonewall riots of 1969 and, finally, the AIDS crisis. For the first time, homosexual men recognized themselves as a group. If the university hadn’t closed the Deering bathroom, Leonard wonders, would men still have had sex in it? “In the mid-‘80s, that was just when people first started talking about AIDS,” he says. “It was a busy place then. If you go in there now, you won’t see anything.”

Gay men, at least at Northwestern, don’t have anonymous sex like they used to. Rainbow Alliance, which started as a closely guarded support group for closeted members in the 1970s, has become a platform for open gay culture, such as drag shows and speaker events. But what’s left of that world, existing mostly on Craigslist and Manhunt, remains an open secret. The occasional tea room listing still shows up, whether it’s for the library or the basement of Fisk, where you can sometimes find notes and phone numbers written on the walls.

Scanning the posts on Craigslist, it’s hard not to think of Rechy’s hustler codes. Though most straight personals avoid sex, at least directly, male-to-male ads usually request it by the act. There are the older “scores” looking for young guys and the emphasis on “masculinity” or “straight-acting” men, which appears in 21 ads from November. Because Northwestern’s gay community is so public, it’s easy to forget that another community of active homosexual men exists almost exclusively online. “The ones I hooked up with were gay. I don’t know how closeted or not closeted they were, but they weren’t active in the gay community, or else I wouldn’t have hooked up with them,” John says. “They wouldn’t identify with the gay community.”

Craigslist makes finding hook-ups a lot easier, but convenience can’t be the only reason people use it. Would a gay man use Craigslist — with the risks and embarrassment that it entails — if he could meet gay men in everyday life? Most of the men who come to Dr. Berlin deal with some kind of identity conflict. “I see people who want to be faithful, who don’t like the sneaking around, they worry about the detection,” he says. “Obviously there’s something pushing them to do that, but then there’s this other part of them that’s trying to resist. I don’t mean to trivialize it, but it’s almost like the dieter who tries not to eat and yet their appetite keeps pushing them until they give into temptation.”

When I ask John about his sexuality, I’m surprised to find out that he doesn’t identify as gay, even though he’s only had sex with men and never dated a girl. “I don’t know,” he says before pausing. “I don’t really like to limit myself. I am attracted to girls, and there are girls who I would want to be in a relationship with. But I think sexually, it’s a lot easier to hook up with guys, because I don’t get as emotionally attached to guys. There have only been one or two guys I’ve fallen emotionally attached to.”

Everything that’s true offline is true online — it’s just a lot easier to play the game. Even though Deering isn’t the tea room it used to be, anonymous sex at Northwestern hasn’t gone the way of the past. Men still like to have lots of sex, and some gay men still put discreetness before everything else. For them, Craigslist is the best of both worlds: You can find someone to sleep with on your way home from class, you can see what they look like and where they live—and no one has to know about it. “If you’re just looking for sex with no strings,” John says, “then it’s completely gratifying.”

ASG allocates more than $1 million annually in its student activities fee budget. Between $15 an $20 thousand of that pays for MLK Day speakers alone, while most of the rest goes to A-status student groups for guest speakers and other events, like A&O Productions concerts. That’s a difficult number to unpack, since groups don’t generally reveal how much they pay a certain speaker or musician.

But it raises another question: How much does the average student actually get out of the $132 he pays annually in student activities fees? Tickets for Office star B.J. Novak’s A&O-sponsored performance sold out within 45 minutes, but last year no more than 20 people showed up to watch actress Kathleen Turner speak when the NU Women Filmmakers Alliance brought her to Norris.

To illustrate what that $1 million looks like: You could buy 175,438 Chipotle burritos with the amount of money ASG spends on hosting speakers and other student group events – steak and pinto beans, tax not included. Click on the thumbnail below to see what we’re talking about.

175,438. And that would look something like this:

Listen to the conversation:

The project, which started last fall, aims to “engage the Big Questions of life that all human beings wonder about, and to learn about diverse and authentic Jewish responses to those questions,” according to its Web site, though you’d have to dig to understand that there’s a religious angle at all. Online and off, askbigquestions confronts students with abstract ethical situations and matters of everyday life – the kinds of questions you could imagine a Dostoevsky character asking himself over a glass of vodka: Where do you feel at home? What are you addicted to? Would you die for a cause? For one of its talks last year, the group even invited Professor Gary Morson, an expert on Russian literature who also happens to be, yes, Jewish.

The trick is that, once you jump on askbigquestions.com, you can read answers to these questions that reference Jewish theology. But there’s no attempt to drive home that point. Unlike the unfortunately named Cru (as in, Campus Crusade for Christ), which last year solicited students’ questions about God, Hillel’s project asks the big questions first and lets the scriptural perspective follow. An essay on home begins with an advertisement at Target and a baseball metaphor, and it ends with a Genesis quote about leaving your birthplace. It’s the difference between a group that presumes your interest in religion – what were you dying to ask the big man upstairs? – and a group that provokes your natural interest in questions that have everything to do with religion.

Askbigquestions is more provocative as a marketing campaign than anything else. The blunt, snappy flyers announce the issues, and the Web site creates an open forum for student responses. But as with any public discussion on this campus, the hardest part is directing the conversation. In the site’s most recent question, “What should we sacrifice to change the world?,” two juniors talk in videos about reducing our carbon footprint, minimizing our self-interest, and giving up “a little time and effort.” They go on for too long and don’t say anything specific or personal – a soapbox speech without the good rhetoric.

The past week or so has proved NU is nothing if not conflicted about how to express itself. The MLK Day banners were filled with loaded but mostly sincere comments about race relations on campus, and ASG’s (no doubt well-intentioned) resolution condemning the prosecution of the Jena 6 came out of left field. Askbigquestions’ success – its open-endedness – is also its failure, because students are never forced to make the issues relevant to their own lives. Instead they dispense vague talking points that sound about right but mean almost nothing. When you ask big questions at NU, you’re probably going to get small answers.

Martin Luther King Day started early at Northwestern this year: As long as a week ago, the planning committee was putting up banners around campus that asked students, faculty and staff to write their responses to the question “What would MLK Jr. say about race relations at NU?” It was just the kind of political probing that “apathetic” Northwestern students get a reputation for evading, but some still refused to budge. There was the guy at Norris who pleaded, “Chill out dudes…” (channeling MLK’s peace agenda?), and a more long-winded commentator who derailed the entire conversation in classic PC-style, saying, “I think focusing on Race draws more attention to segregation and actually creates more segregation.” Apparently Bobb-McCulloch’s answer to everything is “This is gay.”

One thing no one could agree on, of course, was what Martin Luther King Jr. represented in the first place. Two commenters quibbled over whether he would support affirmative action today. (Though he’s known for “I Have a Dream,” King’s writings toward the end of his life emphasized a need to redistribute wealth in order to correct racial and social injustices.) Arguably the biggest success of King, the ultimate march organizer, was using public consciousness itself as a solvent for America’s race problems, and the notes around campus reflect that ideal. On paper, Martin Luther King Day celebrates a single person, but in most ways King’s name has become a vague synonym for racial progress. Asking “What would MLK Jr. say about race relations at NU?” is more like asking “What do you think about race relations at NU?” Which is the question that’s really worth asking, anyway.

Maybe most of us feel better about sleeping in on Monday than seeing the former U.S. Secretary of Labor speak at 11 a.m., but judging by their black Sharpie notes, Northwestern still has no shortage of rants about this “overprivileged,” “self-segregating,” yet nonetheless diverse little bubble where we should be “proud to see the opportunity afforded to so many more people of color.” Here are some of the things people had to say:

The first issue of The Weekly came out Thursday, Jan. 17.

The Daily has been having trouble since the fall, when it was forced to combine its city and campus desks. A lack of campus coverage was frequently filled by superfluous wire stories — I remember at one point seeing two facing pages reported entirely by the Associated Press. PLAY, which had originally been 12 pages, was cut to eight, but still looked sloppy and indulgent: There were those editors’ photos with accompanying thought bubbles on the latest in pop culture, and there were still too many reviews written in preening critical prose like, “It’ll be sure to enthrall.” (Full disclosure: I wrote an article for PLAY in 2006.)

Now The Daily looks like it’s getting its act together. Last quarter, senior Jordan Weissmann, who had never actually been a PLAY editor, was asked to revamp the magazine, one of several signs that The Daily wanted to shed its own skin. Weissmann handpicked his own editorial board without applications, saying in an e-mail to the PLAY listserv, “We’re going to be doing some tinkering.” Two regular PLAY contributors told me they were indignant at being unilaterally ignored in the process, but I also admired how well-contained the whole project seemed. When I mentioned the changes to a Daily reporter near the end of the quarter, she just glared at me — “Something’s happening to PLAY?”

Whatever you think of his tactics, Weissmann’s overhauled magazine, now known as The Weekly, hasn’t just saved PLAY — it might save The Daily, too. The Weekly announces itself in big, bold letters, with smaller preview headlines running across the top in different configurations, New York magazine-style. According to what two former PLAY editors told me, New York and the online media gossip blog Gawker were two names thrown around in early meetings for The Weekly. It’s not new, but it works — The Weekly has a real voice that’s blunt but also playful, smart without taking itself too seriously.

The Weekly, which has been bumped back up to 12 pages, relegates culture coverage to digestible lists, including music review blurbs that humorously designate recent releases for different readers’ tastes — Spice Girls is lowbrow, Nancy Wilson is highbrow — also influenced by New York magazine’s entertainment listings. The magazine’s main currency is campus life and gossip: A somewhat far-fetched “What If” feature (this one posits Lindsay Lohan coming to NU), a catty “Confirmed & Denied” gossip column, and a meatier, 2,500-word cover feature that is unlike anything normally published on this campus. I mean that in a good way.

The huge photo on the cover of The Weekly features the face of a WNUR host profiled inside but, in a way, it’s also a face for Daily readers to finally grab onto. The Daily’s biggest problem has always been its lack of personality, a fact made evident when DIY campus gossip outlets like Overheard at Northwestern started online last year. Even most of The Daily’s news sacrifices narrative for mechanically written inverted-pyramid stories. Features (on campus and off) have become almost nonexistent, and where they do pop up, it’s difficult to gauge whether the newspaper is in fact parodying itself.

What The Weekly does right is talk to Northwestern students in a language they can understand about the things they want to read. At what point before now would the newspaper let a (hilarious) quote from a sophomore about sorority rush stand on its own, or publish a photo of “Fuck Frats” spray-painted by the Rock without a didactic, “What is the administration going to do about this?” story to go along with it?

The design and construction are still shoddy, and some features (like the ticker tape of news bits scrawled on each page) are awkwardly placed and designated. But where the magazine takes risks, it also invents — or, more accurately, re-invents — in ways that didn’t seem possible for The Daily a few months ago. When I asked Jordan Weissmann why he didn’t accept applications from staffers already in the PLAY hierarchy in an e-mail, he wrote, “The bottom line is that applications are not an efficient way to create what, essentially, was a startup magazine. If you’re going to have a guiding vision for the project, you need to have a sense of the people you want involved.” One thing The Weekly has is vision — and that’s exactly what it needed.

The dread wasn’t over. On Thursday, The Daily reported that a Jan. 24 preliminary hearing will be held for Darryl Deshawn Preston, accused of sexually assaulting a Northwestern student last May.

Evanston, unsatisfied with simply trying to block the installation of Northwestern-owned emergency blue lights on neighborhood streets, also said it has no plans to reinstate its free HIV-testing services for students or anyone else. Get raped, get AIDS, go somewhere else for help – welcome back to school, guys!

Freshmen were too busy rushing frats to think about what they contracted over break. By Thursday, a record 224 recruits piled out of Bobb and Elder to play old Sega games and eat crappy Chinese fast food with their new brothers. Sorority hopefuls have the whole weekend to stomp around the muddy quads in heels in order to find the house for them (getting in is a whole different story). But the new girls aren’t the only ones suffering: A friend told me sorority committees stay up as late as 4 a.m. organizing for recruitment.

At least there’s a silver lining for the university: Selling its royalty rights to a popular drug made it a whole lot richer. Does this mean they’re going to put in another Shakespeare Garden?