Law school monopolizes championship
In the finals of the National Trial Competition in Dallas, March 31-April 1, it was Notre Dame against . . . Notre Dame.
Two teams from the Law School defeated the rest of the field to face each other in the final match. The Blue team of Kelly Murphy, Shazzie Naseem, Ryan Redmon and Tamara Walker won the title by defeating ND Gold (Stone Grissom, Scott Kellogg, Steve Pratico and Matt Wolesky).…
The Graffiti Dance has been erased. Current students and younger alumni will recall this misleadingly named mixer that became part of Freshman Orientation Weekend about a decade ago. There was background music at Graffiti Dances, but hardly anyone danced. Rather, the event involved dressing new students in plain white T-shirts and having them assemble on the Stepan basketball courts. There they would go around asking people to write their names and phone numbers in marker on their shirts. By custom, you asked people of the opposite sex. On the plus side, people met. On the minus side, it was a meat market. Upperclassmen sometimes advised the newcomers to bring two colored markers with them to the “dance” — one color to give to desirables to write their name and number, the other for everyone else. “Students were asked to make value judgments about other students based on their appearances,” said Student Activities Director Joe Cassidy in explaining the problem with the event. Replacing the Graffiti Dance will be a festival inside Stepan Center that will include music videos and games in which people compete to meet the most people. Also eliminated from orientation weekend was a curious icebreaker that a couple of brother-sister dorms engaged in called the “tuck-in.” It involved male students visiting a women’s dorm at bedtime, reading a story and then tucking the women in. . . . Near the end of spring semester, Student Senate passed a resolution authored by Fisher Hall junior Phil Dittmar calling for Farley Hall to be turned into a 24-hour student entertainment center. The hall would be divided up this way: study and game space in the basement with music from the ’70s on the first floor, from the ’80s on the second floor, from the ’90s on the third, and “a mix of Marvin Gaye and Barry White” on the fourth. . . . Like many other universities, Notre Dame has taken steps to block students from using the campus computer network to access Napster, the website that helps people swap MP3 music files. Usually the files are recordings by popular artists that people have copied onto their hard drives. In addition to concern over copyright infringement, Napster downloading was accounting for as much as 40 percent of the traffic on the campus computer system, slowing legitimate use. . . . More than a dozen students crowded into a corner of Reckers (the new all-night eatery behind the South Dining Hall) early one evening in April to talk with a priest about pornography. Father Bill Wack, CSC…
It’s late April, 2000, and Scott Malpass, vice president for finance and senior investment officer at Notre Dame, convenes a meeting of his investment staff.
He needs their help to finish preparing for the regular meeting of the Investment and Finance Committee of the Board of Trustees, four days hence. It’s a meeting, he knows, at which the Investment Office will have some explaining to do.…
First came The Scholastic, then The Observer, now NDToday.com.
Started last fall by three juniors in O’Neill Hall, this nifty, irreverent interactive website has quickly become one of the campus’s most popular sources for information and entertainment, as well as a lively forum for debate on everything from the presence of the ROTC…
It can now be revealed why bottled beer and beer from a tap tastes different from beer in a can.
Be forewarned: if you’re a six-pack enthusiast, you’re not going to like the explanation.
When you sip a can of your favorite brew, you are savoring not only fermented grain and hops but just a hint of the same preservative that kept the frog you dissected in 10th-grade biology class lily-pad fresh: formaldehyde.…
If you’re thinking about going back to school to get an MBA, Forbes Magazine says Notre Dame’s MBA offers one of the most rapid returns on investment.
A report in the magazine’s February 7 issue ranked the top 25 national and top 25 regional business schools by comparing the salary gains the schools’ typical MBA…
Dozens of talented student athletes swarm beneath the Dome, but baseball captain Aaron Heilman, a junior this past year, stands apart. How many other Domers can say they turned down a minor league contract with the New York Yankees to attend Notre Dame?
That’s exactly what Heilman did after being selected by the current world champions in the 54th round of Major League Baseball’s1997 amateur draft. The right-handed pitcher would have accepted the Yankees’ invitation after high school, too, but for a recruiting trip to Notre Dame that caused him to fall in love with the place.…
If you watch the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, in mid-September close your eyes and listen for a while. All the music you’ll be hearing was composed and arranged by Notre Dame Director of Bands Kenneth Dye.
Dye, who succeeded the retiring Luther Snavely as band director this summer after two years as associate director, was commissioned to write the 10-minute band show that will begin the ceremonies plus 90 minutes of music to accompany the athletes’ parade into the stadium.…
One of the 88 people killed in the crash of an Alaska Air jetliner off the California coast in February was Stephen Wilkie ’84, ’86MBA, an executive with Levi Strauss & Company in San Francisco. The news recalled the sad sequence of events in 1996 when a Notre Dame junior, Patricia Kwiat, died along with her older sister in the explosion of TWA…
Years ago when I was going school in Iowa and happened to have John Cheever as one of my teachers, he told me that he published his first short story in The New Yorker when he was 17. I like being able to say that, as if he and I were close friends back then and regularly sat side by side in one of the literary taverns of Iowa City. Some of the other people in town those days were Raymond Carver, John Irving, Gail Godwin, Ann Birstein, Frederick Exley.…
If my father, Ernest Sandeen, were alive today he would remind me that the symbols and epiphanies of meaning of the poetic world await even the most unwary. I am rolling through the Danish countryside en route to my job as a guest professor at Odense University. It is now dawn, a pastel experience in a green and gentle country that I have come to know well since my father took the family to Aarhus on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1957. Suddenly, Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat major has come through my earphones, in the definitive Arthur Rubinstein rendition, the selection he wanted to be played at his funeral. Landscapes, associations, music — so much of what I remember of my life with a poet deals in symbols that transcend language.…
I saw the tarantula first. I saw only the black, hairy legs groping toward my face as I opened my eyes from a nap in the desert. Light-blinded and startled, my head flat to the earth, I watched it creep menacingly closer. The deliberate movements of its legs were robotic, exploratory, wary. I dared not move. I felt the burn of the sunlamp sky and felt the perspiration rise from the pores of my bare skin. Then, a few inches from my face, the tarantula stopped, stood still and rigid for what seemed like an eternity.…
Halfway between South Bend and Chicago, Brendan Bayliss is uncomfortable.
It’s January, the snow is coming down hard and Bayliss, a 1998 Notre Dame graduate and the lead singer and guitarist for Umphrey’s McGee, is squeezed into the back seat of a crowded GMC Suburban barreling west down Interstate 80. His discomfort, however, have less to do with his cramped surroundings than with the music blasting from the car’s stereo.…
“This class has ruined me,” my student says. Our creative writing class is nearing midterm, and she sits in my office in her limp sweater and unwashed hair, looking both forlorn and accusing. “Before I was in your class, I wrote poems all the time,” she says. “They just flowed. Now I can’t write anything. I can’t even get anything started.” She’s on the verge of saying: ¬_And it’s all your fault!_ but she amends it and says, “And I’m not getting any sleep either!”…
The handyman has the high-speed drill, the bit guide, the self-tapping screws and the mending plate, a short strip of rigid metal with pairs of evenly spaced holes into which the screws will fit. But Regis Haid, a 1978 Notre Dame graduate, doesn’t have a broken chair leg to fix. He has the neck of 61-year-old man with a vertical slice in it about the length of an index finger.…
The tools of the trade are modest: A spiral notebook and a Bic pen. After that, it’s a lot of sitting. Thinking, waiting, remembering, hoping that a moment that made you giggle will at least make the tourists from Topeka grin.
It’s not like there’s a magical funny well from which a comic can draw jokes like water. If there is, could somebody please let Jim Brogan know? He’s been doing it the hard way for more than 25 years.…
By the time John T. Houlihan, a 1966 Notre Dame graduate, joined Timex Corporation in 1979 as manager of design for digital products, he’d already put his stamp on some memorable products.
After studying automobile design at Notre Dame, he was hired by General Motors and played a key role in the Chevy Vega station wagon. As he recalls with some pride, the miniature car’s styling was “pretty cool” for its day.…
In 1993 Raymond Very, Notre Dame class of 1983, made the startling leap from manager of sales training for Fischer Scientific International, Inc., to apprentice tenor with the Houston Opera Studio. Since then, the man who had no formal voice training has established himself as an up-and-coming tenor in the world of professional opera. He has performed in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Houston, Oslo and Munich. Next year he will debut with New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company. Not bad for a guy who had never even seen…
The French New Wave cinema of the early 1960s, says Jill Godmilow, “made filmmaking look like anybody could do it.” So Godmilow and her painter boyfriend borrowed some equipment and made a feature-length film. “We made every mistake in the book,” she confesses. No matter. The Spanish-language film was sold to a distributor and a career was born. Now, 20-some nonfiction films and 20-some years later, the former self-described hippie who majored in Russian in college has just been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and her most recent award-winning film, What Farocki Taught…
Last January, the long-running off-Broadway show Late Nite Catechism appeared at Notre Dame’s Washington Hall. Even if you missed the performance, you can probably describe its highlights: a fully-habited “Sister” confiscates gum, reprimands whisperers and grills her “students” on the lives of the saints, taking particular pleasure in the grislier stories. Alternately terrifying and entertaining, the star of Late Nite Catechism…