Photo by Josh Rowan Students displayed "Elephant in the Room" in Buntrock Commons to draw attention to alcohol consumption on the "dry" campus.
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 a “dry” policy) to construct a Volkswagen-sized sculpture in the student center.
“We have a pretty articulated policy that alcohol is not allowed on campus, and that applies to faculty and students,” Greg Kneser, vice president and dean of students, said last week, “That doesn’t mean everybody abides by it.”
Kneser said consequences for breaking the policy can range from the offender to pay $25 to complete a 90-minute program called “My Student Body” to expulsion, after multiple offenses. He said administrators also address a student’s behavior if Northfield residents or police catch him or her doing something inappropriate off campus.
Kneser said he does not believe the amount of problems associated with Saint Olaf students drinking on or off campus has changed in the 20 years he has worked at the school.
He guessed that the only change might exist in the attitude students and parents have about alcohol. They could be less conservative today, he said. So he believed there could be a greater percentage of underage students now who have at least tried alcohol.
In the Obama-Era, Plans Revive for a Northfield-Twin Cities Rail Line
By Logan Nash
With the national economy still a giant question mark, Northfield community leaders are pushing ahead to revive a long-delayed project to build a commuter rail line that would link the town to the Twin Cities metropolitan region.
The national economic downturn is precisely why a serious reconsideration of the commuter line, called the Dan Patch Corridor, is especially warranted right now, the line’s advocates say.
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.…
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…
It’s been a tough few months for many downtown businesses. First there were high gas prices cutting into families budgets, then there were the street projects complicating access, finally there was the Global Financial Contraction challenging the minds of the best and brightest.
As Radtke found out, local retailers are seeing some impacts on their customers. Pinched in the present and worried about the future, folks are being more careful about their money. Radtke reports that store owners have responded by cutting operating costs, working to build other income centers, and trying new promotions to get people into their stores.
Not all businesses are experiencing slowing sales. Some are holding steady and a few are even up slightly from last year. However, Radtke notes that even these business owners have contingency plans in place, such as a shift from luxury goods to more practical items.
Many local experts who spoke to Radtke believe that the media coverage of economic set-backs, a steady drumbeat featuring sub-prime mortgages in California, risky commercial loans in Iceland, and a store closing in Northfield can undermine consumer confidence. Feeding the pessimism, they warn, can extend the recession.
Radtke ends his piece on a positive note. Entrepreneurs, like the downtown business owners he interviewed, run on optimism. They’ll continue to make adjustments, and believe that economic conditions, and retail sales, will eventually improve.
Griff had suggested that I close the comments on this post and send them to my previous post on the Deep Economy. I’ve decided that I disagree. I hope that the comments on “Digging Deeper into the Local Economy” will focus on ideas for shifting some pieces of the economy from global to local in order to benefit the Northfield community.
For this piece, I’d like to explore the impact of the media on consumer confidence and economic conditions. Do you think the media’s stories on economic events have an impact on the economy?
Continue for the text of Myles’ article or see the PDF:
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…
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…
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…
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.…
