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JerseySmarts.com

2007 NJ Province Fall Workshop a Success!

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On Sunday, September 23rd, over 110 undergraduates and more than a dozen alumni volunteers from Sigma Pi Fraternity gathered on the campus of Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey. These undergraduates represented some 37% of the total undergraduates in the New Jersey Province of Sigma Pi Fraternity.

The purpose of the annual fall workshop is to focus on the various keys to success for each of the chapters in the province. While we generally have a broad array of presenters speaking on a variety of issues, this fall we took a different approach. We invited Josh Orendi from Phired Up Productions, LLC to come in and run the entire workshop.

I’m pleased to say that Josh and Phired Up hit a home run in New Jersey!

Some of the feedback regarding Josh and his outstanding Phired Up presentation:

He really had an effect on the chapter here at FDU and we’re already putting into effect his recruiting methods. Also his methods turned the little wheels in our heads and we are tweaking some of our previous ways of doing things into a combination of his system and our own to make it work best for the chapter.

This is just one of the bits of feedback that we’ve gotten from our undergraduates. From an alumni advisor’s perspective, the Phired Up team is easy to work with and presented no problems in setting up this workshop. And while I’m going over the workshop, the team from Rowan University’s conference services was great to work with, too. I highly recommend working with both Rowan University and Phired Up!

Corruption in Ocean Township!

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Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Monmouth University, a group of students and I led a public relations battle against Ocean Township and their excessive abuse of our civil rights as residents of the town. Police officers routinely opened our front door at all hours of the day and night and walked through our house “just to see what’s going on.”

We had police officers come to our house with two or three cars during the prime party hours on the weekend and tell us to keep the noise down. When we invited them into our house to see the 3 guys who were hanging out playing Tiger Woods Golf on PlayStation 2, the cops would put their tails between their legs and tell us that they had better not have to come back. Yeah right. And we had better not have to get the FBI to investigate that police station (again). Oh yeah – we had the FBI investigating Ocean Township well before the township’s corrupt Mayor, Terrance Weldon, was indicted.

I am only bringing all of this up because of the recent corruption talk in New Jersey…and because the story hit recently that Ocean Township is considering suing their corrupt former Mayor:

The township is weighing the option of suing former Mayor Terrance D. Weldon for violating his oath of office in accepting $64,000 in bribes from developers.

“We actually have a firm that has approached us about litigation and we are considering that,” Mayor William F. Larkin said at a Township Council meeting Wednesday night. “There is actually a firm that wants to represent us without cost.”

That was from the Asbury Park Press. I feel compelled to bring this stuff up because seven and eight years ago a bunch of college students and I SAW the corruption, we lived through the corruption, and (most importantly) we publicly called these administrators out on their corrupt ways. And what did we get in return? A group of local residents and activist-for-the-sake-of-being-activist students who condemned us for using the word “corrupt.”

Bullshit on them. We were right. The Mayor of the town has been indicted and in his wake the Police Chief left his post and the housing inspector left, too (among other officials). All of these folks were in on the crap going on in Ocean Township and we saw it all before anyone else would believe it. Now we’ve been proven correct.

I want my apology!

Another Reason to Love Ocean Township…

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Some of you may remember last summer when I was repeatedly posting all of the bad things that happen in Ocean Township, New Jersey. My purpose was to constantly spin these “bad” news stories against the completely horrific manner in which Ocean Township singles out and goes after college students. Monmouth University students are – by and large – a credit to the community. They engage in mandatory community service for many of their on-campus organizations as well as bolster the economy by living in what would other be vacant housing. I’ve got news for all of the pompous homeowners that hate these rental houses…vacant housing doesn’t pay the property tax bill and the less property taxes that are collected, the more YOU have to pay to make up for it.

In any event, I digress. Another story popped up in my favorite local paper the other day, The Coaster. Seems that TWENTY-TWO underage kids were arrested at a “drinking party” during the last week or so of August. Now, I don’t condemn the kids as much as I condemn the parents in these situations. I do, however, think that there is an alarming situation in Ocean Township.

That is, I think it is absolutely crazy that these types of stories are looked at with wonder and amazement by the local adults. What? You guys were never kids? You never gathered at a friend’s house and got drunk when you were in high school? Okay, I submit that kids today are much stupider and generally more likely to drink and do experimental drugs than ten, twenty, and maybe even 30 years ago. I’ll give anyone that in the argument.

What I won’t give is that these kids are doing what kids do. Again, I’m no genius, but there has got to be a level of comfort between parents and their kids where the kids can hang out and begin to feel a degree of freedom, but are still safe in the process. I don’t have kids so I have little room to talk about what that level of comfort might entail.

I have, however, suffered through going to college while renting a house in Ocean Township and I have to make this point…

Maybe if the police and township officials and nosy neighbors didn’t spend September through May going after generally harmless (and of age) college students, they wouldn’t have a huge underage drinking problem with their “locals.” Just something to consider…

On Being an Adjunct Political Science Professor

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This week marked my first week back in the university classroom. The difference this time around, though, is that now I’m serving as a humble Adjunct Professor and not a student. I’m only teaching one class called American National Government and I’ve only been at it for one week so far, but I really like teaching!

I am attempting to make this class a combination of all the good things that I experienced as an undergraduate. The class is not writing intensive as there are only a total of 11 total pages to be written throughout the semester (yes, they are double-spaced). It is a lecture-based course and I plan on fully utilizing the internet and PowerPoint presentations in order to bring the information to the students. Last night I had my first class where I taught using a PowerPoint presentation and I think the students enjoyed it (no one fell asleep!).

Believe it or not, one of the most surprising parts of teaching is evaluating the textbooks that we use in class. Given the speed in which I was asked to fill this role, I was not able to totally evaluate the texts that are required for the course. The main textbook (which costs a whopping $100!) has poor definitions of conservative and liberal, casting each in a light that is not entirely fair to either party. The second assigned book contains nothing but selections of various political readings and it’s great – definitely something I will keep in the syllabus for the next time I teach this course. Yes – I’m done with the first of fourteen weeks of teaching for this semester and I’m already thinking about the next time I teach this course!

In any event, the students all seem like great folks and we’ve had some good questions come out of the presentations so far. This is a job assignment that I’m glad I took up when the offer was made. I think I’m going to have a lot of fun teaching these kids about our government and all of its inner workings! Obviously for reasons of employment and privacy, I can’t say too much about the course other than what’s in this post, but if something occurs that is able to be put out there in the public domain, I’ll be sure to post something up.

The Rider University Case – Here We Go Again

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For those of you that haven’t heard, there was a terribly tragic accident last spring at Rider University here in New Jersey. One of the fraternities on that campus had a “big brother/little brother” night and as one of their local traditions, each family tree had a family drink. Sticking to this local, and stupid, traditional one of the new brothers literally drank himself to death from vodka. It’s a sad, sorry case where fault can be placed on everyone involved from the fraternity brothers to the young man who died after he drank all of these drinks.

However, one location where you absolutely cannot lay any blame is on the administration at the university. And, in case you haven’t seen this in the news, both the university Greek Advisor and the Dean of Students were charged with hazing in this case. Now folks, unless these two individuals either were present for this drink-fest or had prior knowledge of the booze night taking place, they are absolutely not liable at all by any stretch of the imagination.

This is akin to your boss getting a reckless driving ticket because you were swerving in and out of lanes the night before. It’s like comparing apples to t-shirts. It’s crazy.

As a fraternity man, I know that many undergraduates hide their less glamorous, local traditions. Incidentally, this is also why I’m glad to be a brother of Sigma Pi Fraternity – we’re systematically eliminating our bad traditions regionally and throughout the nation and replacing them with good ones. It’s a great thing to be a part of, really. That said, there is absolutely no way that these young men would have put this disgusting tradition out there for the school to see AND there is no way that, once knowing about this, the university would have let the students carry on like nothing bad was happening.

It just doesn’t work like that. That would be like Lee Harvey Oswald telling the FBI, “Hey, I’m going to pop Kennedy in the head,” and the FBI letting it happen. The system just doesn’t work that way.

Should the students who facilitated the young man’s death be charged? Of course. Should the administrators? Good Lord no! The people who are to blame here are the young man himself and the students who facilitated the act. That’s it. I fully believe that the administration’s charges will be dropped. And, if the university had any cajones, they’d go after the Mercer County prosecutor just like those young men down at Duke went after Mike Nifong.

Talk about prosecutorial aggrandizement…