college

Chris Knight's avatar

Last week my alma mater, Elon University, announced that it was merging with Queens University over a hundred miles away in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Which was a proclamation that had me – and many others it seems – scratching their heads.  What exactly is Elon’s angle here?  The last time that Elon made any significant branching-out was the law school in Greensboro some years ago.  But that’s vastly different from wholesale engulfing another higher-learning institution.

Along with the seemingly unceasing construction that’s been going on for as long as I can remember (I graduated in 1999), it’s now coming inescapably apparent that Elon has a voracious appetite for real estate and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

Current Elon student Alex Nettles has composed an extremely well-written, researched and articulated opinion piece that’s been published on Elon’s in-house news operation.  “The Elon Empire: Why the Queens University merger ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

 See?  I really do know how to write an op-ed piece that doesn’t honk off many readers!

This edition of Elon’s student newspaper The Pendulum came out right before spring break 1999.  I didn’t want to be on the cusp of that and deliver something that would be overly provocative.  There had been an article for Christmas a few months earlier and this new one needed to be on a happy note too.

So here it is, from two months before the premiere of Star Wars Episode I.  Note the special photo we used for the essay: me brandishing a toy lightsaber and wearing the helmet from a Darth Vader mask.  Click on the pic to enlarge and read!

 

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Chris Knight's avatar

My beloved alma mater, Elon University, has just been named #1 on the list of 50 Most Beautiful College Campuses by collegiate review website The Best Colleges. Also on the list are Duke University, Wake Forest University and UNC-Chapel Hill (all here in North Carolina), Texas A&M, Ole Miss, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Yale, and Princeton.

Yowza!

The Best Colleges cited that “this campus not only offers an exceptional education but has been the site of several films… Elon has been named the prettiest campus in the country on multiple occasions, including landing at the top spot in rankings by the Princeton Review and the New York Times. We can’t argue, and Elon takes the top spot in our list of the prettiest college campuses.”

I have to heartily agree… and I’d do so even if I were not a proud Fighting Christian errrr, “Phoenix” (still ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Virginia Tech grad student Bradford Wiles pleaded with school officials to allow students to be able to defend themselves by having guns on campus. To say that Wiles has considerable frustration with the Virginia Tech administrators would be putting it mildly…

Would my wife and family, knowing how much I have written and spoken about allowing me my most basic right of self-defense on campus, feel any comfort in the policy that supposedly protects me?

Larry Hincker, associate vice president for university relations, in response to a column I wrote in August asking that the university change its policy forbidding law-abiding concealed handgun permit (CHP) holders from carrying on campus, wrote the following in The Roanoke Times: “Guns don’t belong in classrooms. They never will. Virginia Tech has a very sound policy preventing same.”

Do you still feel the same way about your policy now, Mr. Hincker? Will your faith

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