Category Archives: Colleges

Carrying a Torch for Kids Who Dream of College

December 2, 2008 – 10:25 am

Matt Hart, a student in Doug McGill’s journalism class at Carleton College, has written a piece titled Carrying a Torch for Kids Who Dream of College (PDF - full text below).
Carrying a Torch for Kids Who Dream of College
By Matt Hart
In 2001, two third-grade girls from Northfield had a dream.
They [...]

By Griff Wigley | Also posted in K-12 Education, Non-Profits & Civic Orgs, People | Comments (0)

A Small Town with Big Ideas on Citizen Journalism

November 28, 2008 – 11:57 pm

   
Mackenzie Zimmer, a student in Doug McGill’s journalism class at Carleton College, has written a piece titled A Small Town with Big Ideas on Citizen Journalism (PDF - full text below).

A Small Town with Big Ideas on Citizen Journalism
By Mackenzie Zimmer
On any given day at the Goodbye Blue Monday coffee shop [...]

By Griff Wigley | Also posted in Blogosphere, Media | Comments (1)

St. Olaf students address drinking on and off “dry” campus

November 25, 2008 – 4:46 pm

Members of the Saint Olaf College community have been talking about underage binge drinking this month after a student wrote a column titled, “Hi, my name is Ole and I’m an alcoholic” in the student paper, and after a group of students collected enough liquor bottles and beer cans strewn around the campus (which has [...]

By Bonnie Obremski | Also posted in RepJ Stories | Comments (0)

CAC and CEL team up again to raise awareness of homeless

November 22, 2008 – 7:46 am

Once again, the Northfield Community Action Center and the Civic Engagement Program in the Center for Experiential Learning at St. Olaf teamed up on National Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week.
One of their awareness strategies has been to camp out overnight in a public space in Northfield, as they did in 2006 and again in 2007.
On [...]

By Griff Wigley | Also posted in Non-Profits & Civic Orgs, volunteerism | Comments (12)

Google map mash-up: Northfield-area community organizations

November 18, 2008 – 11:37 am

Nate Jacobi, Assistant Director for Civic Engagement at St. Olaf’s Center for Experiential Learning, has alerted us to their Google map mashup “highlighting over 50 Northfield-area Community Organizations (nonprofits, schools and city/government agencies).”
Attach a comment if you see any problems with it or if there are resources that should be included.
 
View Larger Map

By Griff Wigley | Also posted in Non-Profits & Civic Orgs, Technology | Comments (0)

Carleton’s ‘Save the Penis’ campaign goes limp

November 14, 2008 – 7:07 am

  In September, LG commenter Anthony Pierre kept bugging me to take note of what was happening with the recently poured sidewalk at the Carleton College corner of the intersection at 2nd and Division. I drove by, saw the construction, and saw nothing unusual. I just assumed the workers were digging up the new concrete in [...]

By Griff Wigley | Also posted in Arts & Culture | Comments (4)

Veterans Day events

November 10, 2008 – 9:44 am

 
Left: There will be Veterans Day ceremony tomorrow, Tuesday, November 11 at 11 am at the Northfield Area Veterans Memorial in Riverside Park.
Right: The Carleton College exhibition Winter of the World: Remembering the Great War ends tomorrow (exhibition in Gould Library). There’s an all-day remembrance vigil at Skinner Memorial Chapel from 9-5.
And for [...]

By Griff Wigley | Also posted in Non-Profits & Civic Orgs | Comments (1)

Stealing lawn signs: an act of civil disobedience or amazing stupidity?

November 1, 2008 – 6:45 am

In an Oct. 30 article in the Huffington Post titled, Confessions of a Lawn Sign Stealer, St. Olaf visiting professor Phil Busse (theatre dept) wrote:
If I need to justify my actions, I could argue that I was trying to achieve some great public service for rural voters. In his 2004 book, What’s The Matter [...]

By Griff Wigley | Also posted in Elections | Comments (103)

RepJ reporter teams with Carleton student on story

October 29, 2008 – 1:47 pm

Hi, my name’s Ben Haynor. I’m a math and physics major at Carleton College. I ended up in a journalism class this semester and began looking at Northfield’s opiate problem. I met Bonnie on Friday and we decided to collaborate on a story. We had already been gathering information, conducting interviews and looking at [...]

By Bonnie Obremski | Also posted in Community, Health, RepJ Project, RepJ Stories | Comments (3)

Podcast: Back at KRLX

October 16, 2008 – 7:12 am

We reconnected with our Locally Grown radio show roots by recording at Carleton’s KRLX 88.1 FM studio yesterday. KRLX station news director Brandon Walker coaxed us back. (Cameron and Morgan will be pleased, no doubt.)
We’ve not abandoned KYMN 1080 AM, however. Our show will air each week on BOTH stations, thus achieving our long-imagined-but-never-stated goal [...]

By Griff Wigley | Also posted in Podcasts | Comments (1)

Doug McGill’s journalism class at Carleton to focus on Northfield

October 11, 2008 – 7:44 am

Doug McGill, visiting instructor in English at Carleton, invited me and Northfield Citizens Online/Northfield.org board member Doug Bratland to his Truth vs. Power: A Journey in Journalism class this week to talk about our local experiences with citizen journalism, community media, and Northfield’s civic blogosphere.
There’s a good possibility that [...]

By Griff Wigley | Also posted in Blogosphere | Comments (8)

Carleton issues statement on finances

October 8, 2008 – 7:46 am

Higher education institutions across the nation, including Carleton College, have money invested in Commonfund’s floundering “Short Term Fund.”
But so far, Carleton administrators said they are far from panicked.
“Recent developments in the financial markets have caused for many of us confusion and uncertainty,” Carleton President Robert A. Oden Jr. wrote of the matter in a message [...]

By Bonnie Obremski | Also posted in RepJ Stories | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

St. Olaf says no more money for other non-profits

October 2, 2008 – 10:20 pm

Saint Olaf College administrators have decided to stop donating the institution’s money to Northfield non-profits.
“It’s ethically troubling in hard economic times, with rising costs of higher education, to take tuition money and capriciously gift that to other non-profits,” Steve Blodgett, Director of Marketing and Communications, said on Thursday

David Anderson, college president, met with the city’s [...]

By Bonnie Obremski | Also posted in Community | Tagged , | Comments (21)

“Slow Food” in Northfield

September 30, 2008 – 6:15 am

As a logical followup to my earlier post on the “Eat Local” challenge, I was reading a report of the Slow Food Nation conference in San Francisco earlier this month.
The “slow food” movement, which started in Italy in 1986 to protest a McDonald’s in central Rome, has picked up momentum, with foodie notables like Michael [...]

By Tracy Davis | Also posted in Arts & Culture, Community, Environment, Health | Comments (2)

New college buildings go for LEED platinum, gold; any other buildings in Northfield?

September 2, 2008 – 7:17 am

According to the Wikipedia, “the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System, developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), provides a suite of standards for environmentally sustainable construction.”
 
St. Olaf is aiming for LEED Platinum for its Regents Hall of Natural and Mathematical Sciences building, opening today. (Left [...]

By Griff Wigley | Also posted in Environment, Government | Comments (3)