New York University officials announced Monday that Alfred Bloom, the current president of Swarthmore College, will lead its new Abu Dhabi campus in the United Arab Emirates.

The New York Times reports:

When N.Y.U. announced the decision last September to create a campus in Abu Dhabi, skeptics wondered if the university would truly be allowed to have a free exchange of ideas, especially in sensitive areas like religion and women’s rights.

Mr. Bloom, 62, said he was certain that censorship would not be a problem.

“I am convinced that we will be able to provide a vibrant environment which guards academic freedom,” he said.

Similar concerns over free speech arose this spring at UC Berkeley when the campus’s mechanical engineering faculty announced it was entering a $28 million deal with a new university in Saudi Arabia. Under the five-year plan, UC Berkeley professors would design the mechanical engineering curriculum for the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

Such arrangements are becoming increasingly common these days, according to the NYT: “The (NYU) campus represents a shift in how many top universities are thinking about their international brand at a time when there is increasing competition to attract top-flight students from around the world.”

The Berkeley Public Library hosted a public reading of banned books today, which have historically included even the Bible.

Berkeley City Councilmember Kriss Worthington opened the reading with excerpts from “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” by his favorite author Maya Angelou. The book was banned because of a scene, which he read aloud, in which the protagonist’s mother, who handmakes her children’s clothes, makes her daughter remove her own dress to show the stitching to a friend.

“What is so controversial about a mother making handmade clothing for people?” Worthington said.

Another banned book, “The Golden Compass,” was also released as a movie starring Nicole Kidman in 2007. Alene Chang, a regular of the teen department, read excerpts from the book,  one of her favorites.

As Chang was reading, a passer-by stopped, looked quizzically at her and went up to the podium, craning his neck to read the title on the book’s cover.

“‘The Golden Compass’ is banned?” he said, confused.

Visitor Rachael Trinklein read a banned children’s book called “A Rabbit’s Wedding,” which tells the story of a little white rabbit and a little black rabbit who fall in love and get married “forever and ever.”

Trinklein compared Banned Books Week to Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

“It’s a reminder of what happened, not of what is happening, hopefully,” Trinklein said.

With standards like those of the library, which, according to Teen Librarian Debbie Carton, has not banned a single book in her 20 year tenure and has only moved one book from the teen section to the adult section when the age-appropriateness of content was brought into question, books may one day no longer be banned.

“There’s a saying in library school that we all hold dear, (which states) that 30 percent of all books in the library should personally offend you,” said Carton. “We should have Mein Kampf as well as Obama’s
works.”

-Kat Murti

As a conceptual artist, Jonathon Keats admits that he doesn’t have much of a background in science, but that hasn’t stopped Keats from working with scientists to engineer God in a petri dish, or unveiling a temple dedicated to the worship of science in Downtown Berkeley—all in the name of art, of course.

In order to create a hymn for the temple to science, Keats thought it would be best to record sounds of the infant universe with the help of research done by Mark Whittle, an astrophysicist from the University of Virginia.

Whittle explains how he recorded the sounds of the infant universe in easy-to-read terms here.
Keats took these sounds and compiled them into a hymn.

He says it’s best heard with earphones, because “the universe speaks very quietly.”

Keats’ previous projects include:

– Copyrighting his mind.

– Producing canvas paintings from extraterrestrial signals in space.

– Orchestrating a ballet for bees by selectively planting flowers at a farm in Chico, CA.

He’s also generated a lot of press attention for his “thought experiments” in the past, proposing the logical law of “A=A” be written onto Berkeley’s law books, and some others.

The House of Representatives unanimously passed HR 2352 last night, a bill that would require UC Berkeley and other campuses that are recipients of federal student aid to conduct annual safety assessments and create response plans in the event of a disaster.

The bill is meant to enhance safety regulations that President Bush mandated more than a month ago, when he signed a law requiring college campuses to notify students “immediately” after an emergency disaster.

UC Berkeley’s WarnMe, an alert system that notifies students of emergencies through e-mail, phone calls or text messages, complies with such standards.  However, WarnMe is an opt-in system, meaning students’ participation is optional.

Along with coverage from both student and professional newspapers across the country, UC Berkeley’s tree-sit story has crossed international waters, appearing in publications such as Britain’s The Guardian.  The story has also been featured in several global sources including The Economist, United Press International, The Associated Press and the International Herald Tribune, among others.  With such a broad audience, this moment in Berkeley history will likely receive an equally wide-ranging array of opinions.

This November’s elections have not only changed the way UC Berkeley professors teach their current courses but have become the subject of new classes as well.

This fall, students were given the chance to enroll in the student-run DeCal “Media Bias and the 2008 Presidential Election,” a course focusing on how presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama, as well as their policies and ideals, have been portrayed by the media.  The one-unit course reached full capacity fast, but spots are still left in other politically charged courses like “Conflicts in the Middle East” and “Big Ideas on the Progressive Public Policy Landscape.”

StatFinder, a University of California website dedicated to statistics about the university that was launched in October of 2007, has now updated its content. Now, in addition to statistics about admissions, the site includes information about graduation data, GPA persistence—how constant GPAs remain throughout students’ time at the university—and time to degree. Check out the full story here.

The site, the first of its kind in the nation according to a press release by the university, allows users to answer questions to create a table containing statistics important to them. To create your own interactive table of statistics with information relevant to you, check out the StatFinder link here.

On Piedmont Avenue Tuesday, a crowd of more than 300–including a slew of local and national media outlets–gathered to watch construction workers build a scaffolding to remove the Berkeley tree-sitters. Just as they neared the top of the 90-ft. redwood, the workers unraveled this sign:

The banner received mixed reactions from the onlookers, which included tree-sit supporters, students, journalists and curious passersby. Some booed; others laughed.

After a court ruling gave UC Berkeley the green light to start building a controversial athletic center near Memorial Stadium, university-hired arborists started clearing the 42 trees Friday. The four last tree-sitters stayed put in their redwood until Tuesday, when they reached negotiations with the campus, came down and were promptly taken to jail.