The Statesman printed this piece in their first issue of volume 13 on Friday September 19, 1969. It was printed in a special feature section called “The Freshmen Herald.”

As man and boy I have watched Stony Brook evolve from a drive-in movie theater to a used car lot. The rumors that it exists is being investigated. Stony Brook, is itself being investigated; SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] is being investigated; the Statesman is being investigated; and State Senator Ozzie Mandias is going to investigate you, kid. You will inevitably be investigated because you are ripe for investigation. Which brings me to the point: you can always find yourself in hot water if you do not know how to…

RULE NUMBER ONE: Be cool. As man and boy I have watched John Toll for two years, and he watched me for two years, which brings us to the year 1965 when my parents were complaining about taxes and prices and the Prices, who lived next door, were complaining about me. It seems that I fell into the habit of watching the chimney on Christmas Eve, waiting for Santa. Little did I know that Santa was down the street visiting the children who had been perceptively better than I, which brings us to…
RULE NUMBER TWO: Santa will not find you, you must find Santa. You will all graduate in 1973, and by 1973 we will either have a new president or we will have the same president. In either case, the sun will not set on some discontent. Now if you were good kiddies, and read The New York Times, you read that we had a sit-in, and a riot, and an ad in The Times. But no matter how hard you read, and no matter how tediously you scoured the articles, you will never know what happened here. Why? Because you weren’t there. I was there and even I don’t know what happened. And if I don’t know what happened, how can anyone know what happened. And no matter what you read here, we’re not sure.
RULE NUMBER THREE: Be there. Whatever side you’re on be there and don’t hit anybody. Hitting is in direct violation of rule number one. And now down to the brass tacks, which can be painful or helpful, depending on how you use them. Stony Brook is the metaphysical midpoint between Harpo Marx and a premature baby. Stony Brook was not conceived, bred, passed through embyonic and fetal stages, and then born. No. It sprang from the brow of Nelson Rockefeller fully armed and fully confused, and it was thrown upon the world like an eight foot giant with the mind of a two year old. Which brings us to the observation that very often we deal with six-foot giants with the minds of two year olds; in the faculty, Administration, and even in the student body. And the best way to deal with a two-year-old is to…
RULE NUMBER FOUR: Give him his bottle. You take it from there.
Oh yeah, Social life, dating, broads, guys, the whole bit. The best thing you can do is to read Harold Rubenstein’s movie reviews and to take it from there. When the right movie comes up, get working. Remember dances are moods, not hops. A Hop is something that went out long, long, ago. And girls, if you’re looking for a respectable husband who will serve you well, John Toll is single. Which leads us to believe that…
RULE NUMBER FIVE: Nothing is impossible. This freshman class is probably the most sophisticated that this school has seen. You probably don’t need any advice. And when you finally come to the point where you are standing somewhere and tell yourself, I don’t need any advice, you will either be made a university president or you finally won. It certainly paid to buy Park Place didn’t it?
- EVERETT EHRLICH

Source: Statesman vol. 13 no. 1

I remember posting a Facebook status way back in the first week at Stony Brook all in caps; something to the effect that Stony Brook had been awesome, and I was hoping that it would remain as awesome as it had been in that first week. As I sit here around midnight on a regular rainy Wednesday night I am listening to the wonderful sound of a guitar from Sanger, the next building over. I recognize the song immediately and it is one of my favorites from Explosions In The Sky; “Your Hand In Mine.” I am reminded of why I loved Stony Brook so much in that first week and why I love it even more today.

Once again, Tabler is in flames…

A look back at freshman year at Stony Brook

This story began when I found out that our Career Center is a close partner with the scam widely known as Vector Marketing. They are a company that uses college students as independent contractors to sell Cutco knives. Although their current business model is considered “legal,” their practices are less than ethical not to mention their recruitment methods, which you have all experienced first hand. Although the word about this particular scam has reached most of us, the Career Center at Stony Brook has a very different opinion about Vector Marketing, which throws the legitimacy of this Partnership Council into question.

My biggest issue with Vector Marketing is the way they attract students, both in the content and quantity of their posters. It is usually advertised as part time work, big money and $17.25 for something (sounds awesome to me). I shouldn’t need to remind you. We find this all over campus, in bus stops, on student poster boards, in academic buildings and right outside of the career center. They also tile the posters, which is specifically in violation of the “1 poster per board” policy. I have yet to find out if they have permission from the university to hang any posters at all, which is an entirely separate issue.

I had an interview with the Career Center, who has been vehemently defending Vector Marketing via email. They continued to defend them without much regard for my concerns today. They mostly did this by claiming that all of the companies they work with have had questionable histories, and that it is not their position to judge these companies. They persistently diverted the focus from Vector Marketing to other direct sales companies who they assumed I would trust. About 20% of students who try it out have success with Vector. Apparently Vector is justified in having vague advertisements because of the stigma that is associated with sales. They hope students will come with an open mind If they don’t reveal that it is sales, or commission pay. The career center says this is an excellent marketing technique because it makes students look for more information. They think this is perfectly ethical.

Well, maybe not perfectly ethical. The Assistant Director of the Career Center did sympathize with me to some extent. She says they have had multiple talks with them over the years about their advertising techniques on campus, including a meeting just in January. Since then she claims they have reduced the number of posters they put up because “more posters doesn’t mean better results,” although I think a marketing company should know that. She also says that they monitor Vector’s table at career fairs to make sure they are not misleading the students. I am at least happy to hear that someone is keeping an eye out, but they still maintain a firm partnership with these people.

The Partnership Council is essentially a fundraising outlet for the Career Center. They invite companies whom they have worked with for many years to join this council in order to funnel money into the Career Center’s events and such. Seems fair enough, as long as the companies on the council are making a legitimate effort to serve the students. Our discussion came down to a difference of opinion. Even considering their arguments for the legitimacy of Vector Marketing, I feel that Vector Marketing operates unethically in order to recruit students. The Career Center sees no problem with it, and explicitly denied my requests for them to have further discussions with Vector about their on-campus marketing. They fundamentally disagree with my position, and most students’ opinion about this scam.

A few years ago at a retreat, students and faculty came up with this idea of a free period of time each week that clubs would use to host major events, and the campus could connect at a personal level. They were addressing the issue of campus community, an issue that has faced this campus for as long as we have been here. Many colleges have similar issues, so they throw money at it, and people are content. We don’t have such luxuries, so we need to be a little bit more creative. I love the idea of “Campus Lifetime,” but they have forgotten one important detail; you actually need to tell people about the events you are hosting.

A student rally during Campus Lifetime

It is 12:30pm on a Wednesday today, just a few minutes before campus lifetime, and I am sitting in the basement of the union writing this article. I would be leaving for my physics lab that is scheduled during campus lifetime, but we have the week off, so I am looking for something to do with my day off. I started looking in my own calendar, nothing until Rev. Billy tonight. Then I went to Facebook, same results. I looked at all the Facebook events for today, and I only found some kind of career fair for liberal arts people. Finally the University has a little secret “Student Life” calendar. I won’t link to it, see if you can find it yourself. I use this as a last resort. It is usually full of junk from the fitness center, as it is today. I found out that there will be a table for Alternative Spring Break, and an SAB event. That’s funny, I had no idea there was an SAB event. I didn’t even find that on Facebook. Well it doesn’t look interesting anyway, but at least I know about it now.
I checked SAB’s Facebook group for it, and it turns out that it was rescheduled for April 15, although the official Student Life calendar hasn’t been updated to reflect that. Turns out there is a Baseball game against Hofstra after campus lifetime, so I might go to that.

So here I am, and it is almost campus lifetime, with no plans. I have been talking to some friends as I write this, and they also don’t know about any events going on today. Almost everyone is out of class with nothing to do. I am sure there are plenty of club meetings, but I can’t even find a current list of clubs no less their meeting times and locations. We have a serious problem here folks.

What we need is a central location for students and clubs to post events. Stony Brook needs a social network, and I think I just may have the solution. I started developing http://sbulife.com a few weeks ago with this grand vision. Clubs will create profiles and post events in one central location that students can check at any time. It works almost exactly like Facebook, and you can even use your Facebook account to connect with it instead of creating a new account. It’s not out of beta yet, but sign up now if you like the idea. We are still working on design and branding, so I am very open to ideas. Feel free to comment below.

After nearly 2 weeks of planning and a few days of hard work to promote a massive protest against budget cuts and tuition hikes, we had the event in modern Stony Brook style; the style that has earned us the title “Most Unhappy Students” for several years now. Make no mistake, these recent protests are nothing like those that once made Stony Brook “The Berkley of the East.” Something indeed has been missing for a long time since then, and it has been my mission to determine what it is.

1. Motivation: This recent economic crisis has been the most recent driving force for outrage at Stony Brook, although not dissent. Even outrage may be too a strong word considering that only a small percentage of students seem to care enough to rally for an hour of their day when nobody has class.

2. Number of affected students: Statistically this is much better today than it was a few decades ago, because a tuition hike directly affects most of the students and a budget cut affects 100% of the students, faculty and staff. Yet we see statistically insignificant crowds showing up. Compared to a protest against a war or the administration, where very few students are directly affected, this hardly counts as a protest.

3. Promotion Method: Again we see a clear advantage today with the advances of the Internet and Facebook, as well as easy and free printing for posters. I spent all day yesterday putting up more than 80 posters around campus and promoting it everywhere on Facebook and through email lists. At least we know that a massive number of people were aware of the event.

4. Organization: The Students for a Democratic Society at Stony Brook of the 1960’s would bring out 300 students and faculty just to a meeting, just imagine how many they would have at a protest. We are lucky to get that many just to click “join” on Facebook. Our events are also planned differently. They are sponsored by the Undergraduate Student Government (yeah, quite lame). There is more of a focus on crappy music and speakers than student activism. Modern Stony Brook protests are too passive. Perhaps students would be more committed if it involved a risk or some immediate call to action.

5. Context: This gets more into my own speculation, but I think context is important. There once was a trend of activism among young people, espicially for civil rights which was a major issue at Stony Brook. We protested about issues that were both national and local. Although that dissenting spirit may have helped to start major protests on smaller issues as well. Students were in a dissenting mindset. Today we have less activity in general, and a greater trust in authority.

6. Generation: Without any hard facts and numbers left, I will refer to an interesting article that I read about our generation. We grew up in a fairly peaceful decade and we were raised by the television and the internet. Students are so busy they they “don’t have time” to care about important issues any more. We are a selfish generation. We have been spoiled for so long that we don’t know what it means to dissent from authority and cause real change. Why is it that we only protest against people who are too far away to care? When was the last time you heard of an occupation at Stony Brook? The better the school gets, the more people like to complain. We went from being mudville and the Berkley of the east, to having a beautiful campus and some of the least happy students in the nation.

So then the question remains; what is wrong with kids these days? Stop worrying so much about little things like conformity and time management, and start worrying about #1 and #2: Rights and Money! We are rapidly losing both every day.