Ticket demand was expected to be so great for
a February concert in the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center by
the New York Philharmonic that a hall administrator organized
a ticket lottery. Make that lotteries. One lottery was for tickets
set aside for faculty and staff, one for students, and one for
members of the South Bend community. Tom Barkes, the center's
director of audience advancement, said he sent out an e-mail on
December 23 announcing the procedures and by Christmas Day had
610 responses. There were ultimately requests for more than 2,000
tickets. The concert hall holds 961. . . . According to
a student familiar with such things, students of legal
drinking age regard particular bars as the places to go on particular
nights. Here's the barflies' itinerary: Monday, Club 23 on Notre
Dame Avenue or Bookmakers Pub (South Bend Avenue); Tuesday, Corby's
Irish Pub (East LaSalle); Wednesday, the State Theater Lounge
(South Michigan Street); Thursday, The Library Irish Pub, formerly
Finnigans (East Wayne Street) or Heartland Night Club (South Michigan
Street). There are no designated haunts for Friday and Saturday
nights. Many students throw their own parties on the weekends.
. . . Charlie Webber, the timekeeper at men's
basketball games since 1957 and at the women's games since the
1970s, has donated blood twice a month for 12 years, according
to a story in the South Bend Tribune. In February he
was expected to donate his 300th unit, not far behind the world
record of 340 units, credited to a South African as of last August.
Webber is able to donate so often because he does so through a
process called apheresis, which draws blood out through a filter,
takes out the platelets, and returns the rest to the body. . .
. In December, Street & Smith's SportsBusiness
Journal named Athletic Director Kevin White the 15th-most-influential
individual in collegiate sports. No 1 on the list was NCAA President
Myles Brand. . . . A team of MBA students
won an usual competition in February. The contest combined analysis
of a business ethics case with a downhill ski race. Notre Dame
bested teams from eight other universities to win the Daniels
Cup in the Daniels College Race and Case competition, which was
held at the Copper Mountain resort, 75 miles west of Denver. The
event was organized by the University of Denver's Daniels College
of Business. The Notre Dame MBAs finished second in the ski race
and won the case competition, which challenged students to prepare
an ethical response to a bill not yet voted into law. . . . Five
MBA students won the $12,000 first prize in the Fuqua
Produce Strategy Case Competition at Duke University. In the final
challenge, the group had 24 hours to come up with a strategy to
boost business for the lawn and garden care group of John Deere
& Company. The judges were managers with John Deere. . . .
Carlos Gutierrez wrote an open letter to the
Notre Dame community in December. Not Carlos Gutierrez the former
CEO of Kellogg cereals, whom President Bush had nominated to become
secretary of commerce. This was Carlos Gutierrez the senior finance
and political science double major. The student Gutierrez said
he had received 27 e-mails congratulating him on his cabinet nomination.
He wrote to explain that, unlike his namesake, he's from Mexico
City (not Cuba), he's never worked for Kellogg's, he doesn't have
a mustache, "[a]nd most importantly, I have yet to find a job."
. . . Former men's basketball coach Digger Phelps,
now an ESPN commentator, is moonlighting as an actor. Phelps appeared
in the past two Summer Shakespeare productions at Washington Hall
and in February co-starred in a production of Love Letters,
also in Washington Hall. The play, which debuted on Broadway in
1989, traces the friendship of two people over the course of 50
years and consists entirely of the two actors reading their correspondence
aloud. The performance raised funds for South Bend's Logan Center,
which provides resources and opportunities for people with disabilities.
. . . As a way to remind people to change their
computer passwords more and improve security, the Office of Information
Technology is using the analogy of a cat's litter box. The OIT
as put up posters showing a photo of a cat with text reading,
in part, "'Change the cat box? That's the cat's problem.' Problem
piles up. Property values go down." . . . Washing machines
on campus now cost $1.50 a load and dryers are $1, both
up 25 cents from last year. . . . After the University fired Ty
Willingham and Father Malloy declared publically that he disagreed
with the decision, it seemed like everyone had an opinion about
what to do next. In an editorial written before the hiring of
Charlie Weis, the South Bend Tribune said the "best solution"
would be to hire Willingham back.. . . . A new course
being taught this semester looks at ideas and trends
likely to affect society and business over the next 10 years.
The 1.5-credit course features eight guest lecturers on topics
including the baby boomers' impending retirement, the future of
water, and fundamentalism, peace and the Middle East . . . . The
role of sports within a Catholic university will be dissected
during a conference on campus the weekend of the Navy football
game, November 10-12. Speakers scheduled for the Catholic Identity
and Collegiate Sports conference include Murray Sperber, author
of Shake Down the Thunder, and two scholar-authors who
played football for the Irish: Michael Oriard '70 and Allen Sack
'67. The event is being planned by the Program in Catholic Social
Tradition, an undergraduate minor in Arts and Letters. . . . In
an Inside Column in The Observer,
staff photographer Kelly Higgins shared a couple of the jokes
she's heard that denigrate Saint Mary's students. One was, "What
is the first thing a Saint Mary's girl does when she wakes up
in the morning? Puts her pants on and walks back to campus." The
other was, "What does a Saint Mary's girl have that a Notre Dame
girl doesn't? A rejection letter." Higgins wrote that she's tired
of being thought of as a second-class citizen. She says chose
to attend Saint Mary's, it wasn't a fallback. She also says Notre
Dame woman students sometimes shoot Saint Mary's students dirty
looks, thinking the Saint Mary's women are all trying to land
Notre Dame men. "I am not spending my time scouring Notre Dame
for boys," Higgins wrote. "I don't want to steal them from you."
. . . Saint Mary's has closed its underground
utilities tunnels to pedestrian use. The tunnels, which connect
many of the buildings on campus, had been used for more than 100
years and were a welcome alternative during cold weather. Administrators
said they were forced to exclude pedestrians because of new safety
codes relating to the electrical and other utility lines in the
tunnels.
(April 2005)
