Read a book!

Preferably one on this list.

Round of reaction to Ahmedinejad at Columbia

We are appalled by the invitation and by President Bollinger's transparent attempt at self-aggrandizement. Here's what others have to say:

Opinion: A Sampling of Views on the University's Choice and Monday's Encounter

Even before he stepped on the campus of Columbia University on Monday, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had become the focus of a firestorm of controversy from those who objected to the university's giving him a platform to speak. Once there, Mr. Ahmadinejad faced hostile attacks -- not the least from Lee C. Bollinger, Columbia's president -- about his views on the future of Israel, human rights and academic freedom in Iran, and the Holocaust (see article). Following is a sampling of views about the Iranian leader's visit, before and after:

Mr. Bollinger: To those who believe that this event should never have happened, that it is inappropriate for the university to conduct such an event, I want to say that I understand your perspective and respect it as reasonable. ... As one of the more famous quotations about free speech goes, it is "an experiment, as all life is an experiment." ... This is the right thing to do and, indeed, it is required by existing norms of free speech, the American university, and Columbia itself. (Comments before introducing Mr. Ahmadinejad on Monday)

Joe Klein, columnist: This was a terrific event. Columbia President Lee Bollinger totally, and very effectively, trashed the guy in his introduction. I would have liked a sharper question on the Holocaust: What specifically do you think is incomplete about the current research? Do you believe that six million Jews were killed? What do you think further research might reveal? And how to do you evaluate Adolf Hitler as a national leader? Bottom line: This sort of freedom always works to our benefit. Those who screeched that an Ahmadinejad appearance would be terrible, a travesty of something or other, seem sort of silly now. (Actually, I thought they seemed sort of silly before.) (Swampland, Time)

Jonah Goldberg, columnist: I was against the invitation, I still am. I am no great fan of Bollinger's. But I must give credit where due. His opening statement is about as hard-hitting and tough as one could hope for. This may still be a debacle, but there's a possible benefit more plausible than I imagined just minutes before this began. If the video of Bollinger's statement is distributed throughout the Middle East in general and Iran in particular, it could have a very positive effect. Time will tell. (The Corner, National Review Online)

Deborah E. Lipstadt, Emory University: Bollinger was first rate. He told [Ahmadinejad] his Holocaust denial makes him ridiculous. He attacked him for his persecution of scholars, women, and dissenters. He called him to account for his threats to destroy Israel. It was powerful, and it was moving. If this event had to happen, this was the best beginning possible.
I am sure there will be those who will critique Bollinger for being so hard-hitting. I say bravo, but also dissent from his attempt to say this appearance is a fundamental reflection of free speech. As soon as Ahmadinejad began to speak, it was clear that he was not prepared for such a statement. He made it sound like he did not even know who Bollinger was. Said it was insulting to have to listen to such things. Ahmadinejad probably never had to sit through such a hard-hitting critique of his record. (Deborah Lipstadt's Blog)

Hugh Hewitt, blogger: Whenever Lee Bollinger steps down as Columbia's president, some poor fool will toast him for his "stirring" speech today, for speaking truth to power, blah blah blah. Nonsense. President Bollinger gave Ahmadinejad a microphone and a stage and then tried to use the underbilling to redeem his university's sorry complicity in the legitimizing of this fanatic's place in the world. Columbia ... can deliver stern lectures that go unheard in the Islamist world, but it won't remove the stain on its own reputation: It played a role of accessory to many lies today, delivered by a killer of our troops. (Townhall.com)

Andrew Sullivan, blogger: I haven't gone off on the Columbia invite because it seems superfluous. I take a very broad view of free-speech rights in America, but I would never have invited a dictator and religious extremist like Ahmadinejad. So far, it seems his usual blend of glibness, guile, and gall is exposing him to ridicule, as it should. If there are no gays in his country, why is he hanging so many of them? But I wonder: Would Columbia ever invite a right-wing extremist with the same views as Ahmadinejad on women, gays, Israel, and the Holocaust? Or do you have to be a brown-skinned, terrorist-enabling, nuclear-proliferating, certifiable nut-job to get the invite? (The Daily Dish, TheAtlantic.com)

Bradley Burston, columnist: Let us look, instead, at what the Iranian president represents for us, the Jews who live in the state he has suggested he'd like to see erased. Let's face it. We need all the help we can get, on the diplomatic sphere as well as in the area of international understanding of our defense concerns. That's where our man in Tehran comes in. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is simply one of Israel's premier diplomatic and security assets. His expressed views make Israel look pragmatic, clear-eyed, non-paranoid. ...
Let the man talk. Let the Iranian president speak his mind, all he wants. You never know what favor he's going to do us next. (Ha'aretz)

William Kristol, editor: It should go without saying that the appropriate thing to do, when the Iranian ambassador called Columbia, would have been to say: No thanks. Or just, No. But that would be to expect too much of one of today's Ivy League university presidents. ...
Meanwhile: As Columbia welcomes Ahmadinejad to campus, Columbia students who want to serve their country cannot enroll in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) at Columbia. Columbia students who want to enroll in ROTC must travel to other universities to fulfill their obligations. ROTC has been banned from the Columbia campus since 1969. In 2003, a majority of polled Columbia students supported reinstating ROTC on campus. But in 2005, when the Columbia faculty senate debated the issue, President Bollinger joined the opponents in defeating the effort to invite ROTC back on campus.

A perfect synecdoche for too much of American higher education: They are friendlier to Ahmadinejad than to the U.S. military. (The Weekly Standard)

Juan Cole, University of Michigan: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly has become a media circus. But the controversy does not stem from the reasons usually cited. The media has focused on debating whether he should be allowed to speak at Columbia University on Monday, or whether his request to visit Ground Zero, the site of the September 11 attack in lower Manhattan, should have been honored. His request was rejected, even though Iran expressed sympathy with the United States in the aftermath of those attacks and Iranians held candlelight vigils for the victims. Iran felt that it and other Shiite populations had also suffered at the hands of Al Qaeda, and that there might now be an opportunity for a new opening to the United States.
Instead, the U.S. State Department denounced Ahmadinejad as himself little more than a terrorist. ... The real reason his visit is controversial is that the American right has decided the United States needs to go to war against Iran. Ahmadinejad is therefore being configured as an enemy head of state. (Salon)

Danny Postel, journalist: While Ahmadinejad occupies center stage, we would be well served to consider another Iranian, the dissident and former political prisoner Akbar Ganji, who has just issued an open letter to the U.N. secretary general that refuses what Slavoj Zizek calls the "double blackmail": Ganji describes the human-rights crisis currently gripping Iran -- the severe crackdown on dissent, the crushing of progressive voices; while at the same time he denounces the Bush administration's saber rattling and underscores that Iran's democratic struggle wants no financial assistance from the U.S. (or any foreign government), and is in fact put in grave jeopardy by such maneuvers.

The letter is signed by some of the preeminent intellectuals and writers in the world (Jürgen Habermas, Orhan Pamuk, Noam Chomsky, J.M. Coetzee, and, appropriately enough, Zizek).
It's dangerously easy to become distracted by the circus surrounding Ahmadinejad's visit, a disfigured drama in which right-wing political figures and their stenographers in the media feverishly attempt to whip up jingoistic feelings. That right-wing assault can run an interference pattern on our thinking, where we react by protesting Ahmadinejad's shabby treatment at the hands of a bellicose political and media establishment. (Comment Is Free, Guardian Unlimited)

No news from Bloomington today

... which is in stark contrast to how it was six years ago. We watched, stunned, along with the rest of the world, as the planes flew into the World Trade Center. That whole week, there was hush over Bloomington, as there was a hush over the entire country. No one has forgotten, but many of us have moved on. What is it like where you are?

Counterpoint

Now read this, from our vice provost for Enrollment Management, in today's Indy Star:

My view: Roger Thompson
More Hoosiers taking classes at Bloomington

Former Indiana University trustee Ray Richardson is sadly misinformed if he believes that qualified Indiana high school graduates are being denied admission to IU-Bloomington in favor of out-of-state students with higher SAT scores. And the data he cited in his Sept. 4 My View, "IU's goal misses the mark," are just plain wrong.

This year we offered admission to more Indiana students than we have in recent memory. Our in-state applicants were more qualified than ever before.

Of 7,208 members of this year's freshman class, 4,237 -- or 59 percent -- are from Indiana high schools. That is down 156 from last year when we had our largest freshman class ever, but still well above most previous years.

What caught us by surprise this year was that applications from out-of-state students were up dramatically, and more than expected actually enrolled. However, the Bloomington campus has always served more Hoosier undergraduate students than are covered by state aid, which has been capped for the past 10 years. Funding to cover this shortfall -- more than $7 million for 731 students last year -- came from the tuition paid by out-of-state students. Thus, they are not supplanting Indiana students but actually subsidizing them.

Richardson's claim that IU spent $20 million on scholarships for out-of-state students to entice them here is just plain wrong. In fact, our freshman scholarship budget stands at $14 million, of which more than $1.5 million is new money to provide funding exclusively to low- and middle-income Indiana families. Next fall, we will add $3 million for scholarships for high-ability Hoosiers. We are confident these new scholarships will make IU-Bloomington substantially more attractive to Indiana's top-performing high school graduates and thus raise our in-state percentage by several points.

Richardson is also incorrect in alleging that IU-Bloomington adopted a more selective admissions policy to bolster its rankings in U.S. News & World Report. Instead, we were more selective this year because our applicant pool grew by 18 percent to more than 28,000. This applicant pool also grew in terms of academic quality, with both grade-point averages and test scores increasing. It was inevitable that our average SAT score would rise accordingly.

It is reasonable to question the direction of our admissions process. I simply ask that when engaging in this dialogue we base our opinions on accurate information. The future of our state depends on an educated work force capable of competing in a global economy. I strongly believe we are excelling at this endeavor at Indiana University. Increasing the quality of the freshman class and educating more Hoosiers than the state funds does not "miss the mark," as Richardson contends. Rather, it supports the citizens of Indiana and enhances the value of every IU graduate's degree. I believe IU-Bloomington is precisely "on the mark."

Point

A former IU trustee had this to say the other day in the Indy Star:


IU's goal misses the mark Ray Richardson

Indiana University has focused great effort on increasing the average SAT of its incoming freshman class on the Bloomington campus. IU officials recently announced that some increase had occurred: 25 points of a total of 1600.

But there is a very serious downside to this effort that has not been publicized. It was achieved by replacing, when fully phased in over four years, 3,500 graduates of high schools in Indiana with 3,500 graduates of out-of-state high schools who have higher GPAs.

To get those out-of-state students, IU has had to pay $20 million to them in scholarships -- money that could have been used to reduce overall tuition or to help less-affluent Hoosiers through school. Another serious downside is that those 3,500 students from out of state are much more likely to leave this state after graduating than native Hoosiers would be. Our state ranks 44th in the percentage of residents with college degrees. The decision by IU to educate fewer Hoosiers can only make that ranking worse.

Should it not be one of the obligations of a state school to assist the economic well-being of the state? If there was a hope that the Hoosiers denied admission to the Bloomington campus would enroll at one of the seven other IU campuses, that did not happen; the total enrollment at those campuses remains the same.

Did IU decide to educate fewer Hoosiers because they were concerned about their ability to graduate from the Bloomington campus? That has not in fact been a problem, since the 72 percent graduation rate at Bloomington was high enough to receive bonus points in the U.S. News & World Report ratings.

So what could have been the motivation for denying admission to 3,500 Hoosiers? It was likely this very U.S. News ranking of colleges. Perversely, the Bloomington campus will now receive extra points for denying admission to students. Bloomington will now also receive points for the somewhat higher GPAs. So IU decided to spend $20 million to attract out-of-state students with higher GPAs, while ignoring the cost to the state's economy, not to mention the devastation caused to the denied students.

Focusing exclusively on a goal without paying attention to the side effects can cause great collateral damage.

Campus doings

Freshman Family Weekend is coming up September 14-15-16. Good luck getting a hotel reservation in town...

And in recognition of the fact that this is such a great place, day in and day out, October 13-21 has been designated as Celebrate IU Week. It's going to cover everything great about IU - academics, arts and athletics. Should be fun.

Can't put a price on beauty

There is an apocryphal story about an IU administrator, frustrated by lack of funds, looking at out window during a change of seasons, watching the landscape crew at work pulling out old flowers and planting the new set. How much, the administrator wanted to know, do all these flowers on campus cost. The story continues that an intrepid staffer, more loyal to IU than to the administrator, answered: "The flowers are priceless."

We were reminded of that story this morning as we walked into the office. The landscape truck was out early, making its rounds to water the huge hanging baskets of rieger begonias that adorn the campus. We're still having hot weather in Bloomington, and there hasn't been much rain. But the begonias are doing just fine, thank you. The campus is beautiful.

Feel like you are hovering a bit?

You're not alone. More and more parents are finding it difficult to cut their very close ties with their college-age children.

Getting hammered at college

We here in the College held a bash (ha ha ha) yesterday to welcome new students to campus, get them acquainted with faculty and staff in College departments, and generally show them a good time. I don't think they bargained for getting hammed on the bed of nails, courtesy of the IU Department of Physics, but some brave souls went through with it and survived. They'll do just fine in college!

Kinsey was in Bloomington - no coincidence!

IU is RED HOT. Too darn red hot, if you ask most people around here in Bloomington. Is it any surprise that Kinsey had his revelation (made famous by Cole Porter) while he was here in Bloomington? We think not.

According to the Kinsey report

ev'ry average man you know

much prefers to play his favorite sport

when the temperature is low

but when the thermometer goes way up

and the weather is sizzling hot

Mister GOB for his squab,

a marine for his queen

a G.I. for his cutie-pie is not

Cause it's too too too darn hot

It's too darn hot

It's too darn hot

But we don't need to tell YOU that, do we? You were here in town moving your kid into the dorm. How did it all go???? Elvis and Elvira are interested in your feedback.

Welcome to the new school year!

We've mostly taken the summer off, along with all the students, but now that the students are filtering back into town, we are back online.

This fall we have a new president at IU, Michael McRobbie. The new prexy has big plans for the place. In Bloomington we have a new provost, Karen Hanson. Karen is a scholar and a caring teacher and will have the students' best interests at heart. We here at Hoosier Parents Online are big fans of the new provost.

Words to the wise: Are you bringing your freshman to IU this week to check into the dorm? The big box stores in Bloomington have everything a student could ever need or want, but the lines are going to be lo-o-o-o-o-ong this week. Better to give your kids some cash and let them take the Midnight Madness bus and do the hauling themselves.

Free the IU 25!

The search for a new provost is on, to replace Michael McRobbie when he assumes the presidency of IU on July 1. Per Fred Cate, professor of law and chair of the search committee, 25 viable candidates have been nominated.

At on open forum this week, Prof. Cate conceded that secrecy will be impossible, especially regarding the group of 5 (or 6 or 7...) that the committee selects for interviews. However, he was adamant that the search committee members won't be the source of any leaks.

Since this is an internal search and only current, tenured faculty members are eligible, the latest game craze to sweep campus is this: Name the 25!

The best of weekends, the worst of weekends

Spring is making a comeback in Bloomington and Little 5 weekend is upon us, and yes, we know it is only Wednesday. But we have reliable sources informing us that the serious partying started days ago. So as we lucky people in Bloomington gird up for "The World's Greatest College Weekend," our hearts and thoughts go out to our friends at Virginia Tech. Arguably, this will be the world's worst college weekend for the school that suffered such terrible violence and loss this week. As we walked to our car this evening, we said a cheery "Hello" to the IUB Dean of Students, Dick McKaig, who happens to be one of our favorite people on campus. Dean McKaig is a true friend to Indiana University students; we were touched to see that he was wearing a memorial ribbon in the Virginia Tech colors, because in truth he is a friend to all students. The horror at Virginia Tech has brought us stories of heroism and extreme sacrifice from some unexpected quarters. We cannot read the biography of the professor who barricaded the door with his body so his students could escape without weeping at the senseless loss of such a good person.

April is the busiest month

We, Elvis and Elvira, are trying to make it through the final month of the IU academic calendar with our faculties (ha - get it?!) intact. National decision day for next year's class of incoming freshmen is May; this translates into April being National Decision-making Month, which translates into a LOT of work for Elvis and Elvira.

There has been an awful lot going on around here:

• Student political leaders have, with the blessing and support of the administration and the city, put in a bid for the campus to host a 2008 Presidential Debate.
• The faculty have been vocal in their opposition to a statewide proposal to establish a one-man-one-woman criterion for legally recognized unions
• Two students majoring in the College were chosen as Goldwater Scholars
• The KKK (or someone claiming to have organized a group under this offensive name) says it is going to hold a march in Bloomington.

And so forth. In short - a busy end to a busy year, and we are keeping our heads down until after commencement.

Bring it on

We admire IU's president-designate Michael McRobbie for a lot of reasons. This is one of them. You want a do-something president who is not afraid of having his work reviewed, publically, year in and year out? Go ahead - make his day. He seems to welcome the scrutiny and thrive on the challenge.

Here's our bet: President McRobbie's annual reviews will be stellar and other universities will begin to demand the same sort of clauses as they hire new presidents. Business as unusual, indeed.

Sad end to Wade Steffey search

As his body is discovered on the Purdue campus. Our sympathy to Wade's family and friends.

No daffodils yet

But spring is definitely heading our way. Bloomington is enjoying mild weather; yesterday we had tons of sun and temperatures above 60. It's spring break this week, so town really started quieting down on Thursday. We were going to post a picture of an empty Bloomington street, but while we were googling around for that, we came up with something much more interesting. See you in a week!

Indiana b-ball is back!

At least it seems so tonight. Indiana KILLED Penn State in the last home game of the season. Assembly Hall was packed to the rafters. The current and soon-to-be IU presidents were both there, sitting on either side of the mayor of Bloomington. Our resident rock star, John Mellencamp, and his wife, Elaine, a former supermodel, were there with their kids.

There was a minor flap in town recently, with people wondering why Coach Sampson always wears blue button-down shirts to the games (side note: has Coach Sampson lost 30 or so pounds since starting at IU?). The hottest fashion item these days is the t-shirt pictured to the right. You can wear it to show your support for the coach.

Hand it to the trustees

The word is out that the IU Board of Trustees has selected interim IUB Provost Michael McRobbie as the next president of IU. This is good news for all of us - Provost McRobbie knows the institution and is a strong leader - exactly what we need.

"A" for effort turns out to be a good idea

A friend sent us this the other day:

"This article has rocked my world because the findings it outlines -- for example, that while praising children is good, the key is to focus on praising EFFORT, not intelligence -- have hugely powerful implications for educating children and are completely contrary to conventional wisdom.

Teachers at the Life Sciences Secondary School in East Harlem, because have seen Dweck’s theories applied to their junior-high students. Last week, Dweck and her protégée, Lisa Blackwell, published a report in the academic journal Child Development about the effect of a semester-long intervention conducted to improve students’ math scores.

Life Sciences is a health-science magnet school with high aspirations but 700 students whose main attributes are being predominantly minority and low achieving. Blackwell split her kids into two groups for an eight-session workshop. The control group was taught study skills, and the others got study skills and a special module on how intelligence is not innate. These students took turns reading aloud an essay on how the brain grows new neurons when challenged. They saw slides of the brain and acted out skits.

“Even as I was teaching these ideas,” Blackwell noted, “I would hear the students joking, calling one another ‘dummy’ or ‘stupid.’ ” After the module was concluded, Blackwell tracked her students’ grades to see if it had any effect.

It didn’t take long. The teachers—who hadn’t known which students had been assigned to which workshop—could pick out the students who had been taught that intelligence can be developed. They improved their study habits and grades. In a single semester, Blackwell reversed the students’ longtime trend of decreasing math grades.

The only difference between the control group and the test group were two lessons, a total of 50 minutes spent teaching not math but a single idea: that the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter. That alone improved their math scores.

Also, be sure to read this part about the self-esteem craze. I've always thought that self-esteem should not be an INPUT, but rather an OUTPUT that comes from genuine achievement, so it's good to see the research backs this up:

Since the 1969 publication of The Psychology of Self-Esteem, in which Nathaniel Branden opined that self-esteem was the single most important facet of a person, the belief that one must do whatever he can to achieve positive self-esteem has become a movement with broad societal effects. Anything potentially damaging to kids’ self-esteem was axed. Competitions were frowned upon. Soccer coaches stopped counting goals and handed out trophies to everyone. Teachers threw out their red pencils. Criticism was replaced with ubiquitous, even undeserved, praise. Dweck and Blackwell’s work is part of a larger academic challenge to one of the self-esteem movement’s key tenets: that praise, self-esteem, and performance rise and fall together. From 1970 to 2000, there were over 15,000 scholarly articles written on self-esteem and its relationship to everything—from sex to career advancement. But results were often contradictory or inconclusive. So in 2003 the Association for Psychological Science asked Dr. Roy Baumeister, then a leading proponent of self-esteem, to review this literature. His team concluded that self-esteem was polluted with flawed science. Only 200 of those 15,000 studies met their rigorous standards.

After reviewing those 200 studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement. It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive,
violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.) At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”

Now he’s on Dweck’s side of the argument, and his work is going in a similar direction: He will soon publish an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further. Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: It’s so strong that “when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.”

By and large, the literature on praise shows that it can be effective—a positive, motivating force. In one study, University of Notre Dame researchers tested praise’s efficacy on a losing college hockey team. The experiment worked: The team got into the playoffs. But all praise is not equal—and, as Dweck demonstrated, the effects of praise can vary significantly depending on the praise given. To be effective, researchers have found, praise needs to be specific. (The hockey players were specifically complimented on the number of times they checked an opponent.)

Sincerity of praise is also crucial. Just as we can sniff out the true meaning of a backhanded compliment or a disingenuous apology, children, too, scrutinize praise for hidden agendas. Only young children—under the age of 7—take praise at face value: Older children are just as suspicious of it as adults.

Psychologist Wulf-Uwe Meyer, a pioneer in the field, conducted a series of studies where children watched other students receive praise. According to Meyer’s findings, by the age of 12, children believe that earning praise from a teacher is not a sign you did well—it’s actually a sign you lack ability and the teacher thinks you need extra encouragement. And teens, Meyer found, discounted praise to such an extent that they believed it’s a teacher’s criticism—not praise at all—that really conveys a positive belief in a student’s aptitude.

In the opinion of cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham, a teacher who praises a child may be unwittingly sending the message that the student reached the limit of his innate ability, while a teacher who criticizes a pupil conveys the message that he can improve his performance even further.

Weather 1; IU 0

Wow. IU is closed for the morning. Over the past 36 hours we've had rain, then sleet, followed by ice and then snow. Good call to close campus!

Ice, ice, baby

It takes an awful lot to close down IU, and today's ice storm didn't quite do it. Local schools and so forth are closed, the roads are not so much roads as wide sheets of ice, and power lines around town are snapping (or are being brought down by falling tree limbs), so right now 6,000 people are without power.

Our friends to the north have it worse, however. West Lafayette is under a snow emergency, and Purdue actually shut down for 24 hours. The IU-Purdue game, set for tomorrow night, might be postponed.

Time to stay indoors, put your feet up, and have some hot soup!

Who are they gonna call?

The IU presidential search committee has done its work and has turned over its recommendations to the Trustees. We have our guesses as to who will make the short list... and we certainly hope to see at least one internal candidate on the list in particular. So here are our questions for you: How important is the IU president to the institution? To the students? To the state? To you?

Why we love IU students

They take their responsibility to serve society very seriously. And they keep in touch.

Wade Steffey is missing

Wade, 19, is a Purdue student and a native of Bloomington. He was last seen in West Lafayette on January 13. Please help spread the word!

Who's yer Hoosier?

Take a number and get in line. Applications to IU are wa-a-a-a-a-a-ay up this year.

New Year, new semester

Same old issues dogging the campus. The trustees are interviewing candidates to replace IU President Herbert. Sorority rush is over, and by the way we think sororities are a great influence on campus and a wonderful opportunity for young women. The warm weather that blew in with El Nino seems to be over and we in Bloomington are feeling Mother Nature's full wintry blast. But here's good news:
warm fuzzy boots have replaced flip flops as the fashion statement of choice this year, so students don't look like they are suffering nearly as much as in previous years.