Twenty years ago this fall, a group of 500 college graduates took jobs teaching in areas with some of the largest racial and socioeconomic academic achievement gaps in the country — places like Los Angeles, New Orleans and rural North Carolina — as part of a new teaching corps called Teach for America, which focused on promoting educational equality for children in underfunded schools.

Because of her commitment to addressing injustice and providing passionate teachers to underprivileged children, Marquette U. invited Wendy Kopp, TFA’s founder and chief executive officer, to speak at the class of 2010’s commencement ceremony on May 23.

Her desire to speak at Marquette stems from the university’s commitment to TFA’s success in Milwaukee, she said in an e-mail.

“(College of Education) Dean (William) Henk and the (College) of Education have been instrumental to our local efforts in Milwaukee,” Kopp said. Marquette and Cardinal Stritch University offer courses for corps members interested in pursuing a master’s degree in education.

University President the Rev. Robert A. Wild said in a press release that the decision to bring Kopp to Milwaukee was also based partly on the yearlong Centennial Celebration of Women at Marquette.

Kopp proposed TFA in 1989 as her Princeton U. undergraduate thesis. While at Princeton, Kopp observed that she and her classmates had a drastically different set of study skills when they arrived on campus.

After some research, Kopp learned only half of America’s 14 million impoverished children graduated high school, and even those graduates only had the equivalent of an eighth-grade education.

“I could not believe that, in a country that aspires to be a land of equal opportunity, millions of kids were not receiving the chances they rightly deserved,” Kopp said.

Kopp knew many of her peers wanted to make a difference, so she decided to create a national teaching corps to pair America’s struggling schoolchildren with America’s next generation of ambitious schoolteachers.

College students, educators and financiers embraced the TFA concept, and Kopp’s ambition to have a starting corps of 500 members in 1990 came to fruition in six placement locations.

Since then, TFA has expanded into 38 locations from New Jersey to New Mexico. The 2009-’10 school year was the first for Milwaukee’s TFA branch.

The organization decided to come to Milwaukee because education leaders felt strongly that TFA could help close the well-documented racial achievement gap in Milwaukee Public Schools, Kopp said.

Tom Schalmo, a corps member who graduated from U. Wisconsin-Madison with a journalism degree, said helping to close the achievement gap in Milwaukee was one of the reasons he applied for TFA.

“TFA’s mission really fits in here,” he said. Schalmo is in his first year teaching sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students at Luther Burbank School, 6035 W. Adler St.

Martha Elson, another corps member and a Brookfield, Wis. native, teaches four-year-old kindergarten at Richard Kluge Elementary School, 5760 N. 67th St.

Elson, who graduated from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass. last year with a double major in education and psychology, applied because she believed in the program’s mission and saw it as a way to give back to the community where she grew up.

“For corps members, it opens our eyes to issues we might not have considered otherwise,” Elson said.

Elson and Schalmo saw TFA as a new challenge to overcome, and both have taken positive things out of the experience.

“There’s joy in seeing our kids grow and improve in academics,” Schalmo said.

Kopp has not decided the specifics of her commencement speech, but said she “would like to encourage the class of 2010 to channel their talent and energy toward tackling some of the world’s biggest problems.”

TV cannot manage get college right. Flashback to my youth (the start of TV shows failing to capture college and the college process correctly) and a fascinating episode of Saved By The Bell where Zack Morris (swoon) does surprisingly well on his SATs, receiving an astonishing 1502. Um, I don’t know about the SATs you took, but all of my scores came with nice even numbers with zeroes at the end.

After Zack aced the SATs he went off to film Saved by the Bell: The College Years that flopped after one season. I watched — obviously — and what I can remember doesn’t seem all that logical. For one, the boys and the girls all lived in one dorm room with a common area. How convenient for the show and progressive of California U. (other schools are finally following suit) but it was certainly nothing I experienced here at Cornell.

I also remember an affair between Kelly (who should have been with Zack) and her professor. I remember thinking that this had to be the norm on college campuses. And while this possibly realistic, I can’t say I know anyone who has had a scandalous affair like that. The other odd thing I remember about this show was a dorm advisor / RA character who was incredibly involved with the students’ lives. My RA was nonexistent and when she did appear it was to yell at us to shut up. We were not friends. Maybe that was just Balch…somehow I doubt that though.

This phenomenon of TV shows failing to capture college years is not unique to Saved by the Bell. Don’t even get me started about the downward spiral of The O.C. post-graduation. Currently Gossip Girl is doing a miserable job of showing its viewers the best four years of your life. The show should have done like One Tree Hill which was forced to make a jump from high school and ended up fast forwarding their characters to the age of 22. Gossip Girl could have had a lot of success with this move.

Looking at the unrealistic factors in Gossip Girl — Serena van der Woodsen doesn’t even go to college? Hello — she is the daughter of a Columbia alum and got into Brown! Not exactly bum material … but she has no job and despite stints in politics and PR seems to do nothing more than hang out with her boyfriend Nate. And while you can’t blame her, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Blair Waldorf, ever the overachiever doesn’t even speak about NYU other than complaining about it. Not to mention the fact that it is weird that she goes there in general. There are far more schools between NYU and Yale (rejected!) that would have been a better fit. Dan and Vanessa seem to be the only ones concerned with school, but even they don’t do that much. Chuck is running a company without any higher education, something that baffles my mind. How the board of directors allowed this I’ll never understand. I guess that’s the magic and mystery of television.

Finally Nate, who goes to Columbia and plays on the lacrosse team seems to never go to class or practice. College athletes, is it really like that? I didn’t think so. And now Blair is transferring to Columbia because of Chuck applying on behalf of her. Definitely realistic.

OK so maybe watching Chuck struggle through a Freshman Writing Seminar wouldn’t be the most interesting thing in the world. And as aesthetically pleasing as watching Nate practice lacrosse, preferably shirtless, would be, it might make viewers a little bored. But watching Blair navigate through a legitimate fraternity party would be hilarious. Do TV writers think college is boring? Or is it in actuality too risqué for their audience? In a world where just about anything merits a TV-14 rating, can the realities of college not only be difficult to captured by writers who forgot the best four years of their life, but inappropriate for the bigwigs at the major networks?

MTV made a valiant attempt at capturing college with their reality shows in the early 2000s — Sorority Life and Fraternity Life. The shows led to disciplinary action for many Greek houses on the shows — both schools on Fraternity Life received disciplinary action from their respective schools (U. Buffalo and UC Santa Cruz) — and the show inevitably led to some bad PR for the schools. No wonder they didn’t last long. Fraternity Life lasted two seasons, whereas Sorority Life lasted three seasons, but angered a lot of people during that time.

In Alexandra Robbins’ book Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities she explains:

“The show had infuriated sororities nationwide, who believed that MTV had overly sensationalized life in a sorority house and concentrated only on the girls’ drinking and catty fights. ‘Because of the MTV show,’ the executive director told me, ‘all of the national sororities have decided on a blanket policy not to cooperate with any members of the media. It’s just not appropriate at this time.’”

So then there is the factor of lots of organizations — the NCAA, Panhellenic, the Interfraternity Council, the universities themselves — not wanting their precious institutions to be exposed.

This is just one factor that contributes to the continual struggle with major television shows to properly capture this amazing time. So maybe you just have to experience it to understand. No show could have captured my experience these last four years.

So while this isn’t my last blog, it makes me incredibly sentimental about my four years at Cornell, which truly are un-capture-able. From my first Orientation Week to the upcoming Senior Week — with the good and the bad, everything from sorority rush, compet at The Sun, Slope Days, Statler salad in between class, rushing with my roommates and friend to finish everything on the 161 list, wine tours, living in Balch Hall to making the Olin-Uris migration on rough studying nights — I know for certain that nothing could have properly shown the world what an amazing time I had here. So to everyone who made all of the experiences above happen, enhanced my experience at Cornell and who made me the person I am today, thank you; you know who you are. I am the luckiest.

I don’t need a television show to remind me of my time at Cornell — so to the shows scratching their heads on what to do after the cast graduates, fast forward them to 22 if you can. It kept One Tree Hill going this whole time, and that is quite a feat …

Seattle-based indie rock band Minus the Bear’s fourth album, Omni, starts strong. The opening track is intriguing. It begins with a strange video game-esque ’80s keytar. The pop rock chorus is balanced out with quirky synth undertones, promising equally adventurous but palatable tracks to follow. Unfortunately, the album grinds to a severe halt, leaving you painfully bored and unfulfilled.

The vocals and lyrics are generic. Sure, lead vocalist Jake Snider can sing pleasantly enough but it’s nothing special. And most songs are heavy on rhyming couplets and cheesy one-liners like “How you are dressed puts me into a trance.” A few good ones appear later on like, “a city living hard, this ain’t no one-bar-town,” but are padded with repetition to the point of annoyance.

The music does little to counteract the lyrics. At moments Omni sounds like toned down Modest Mouse with its whammy-bar distortion. The album’s consistency lies in the rock and funk elements produced by the electric guitar. But there is something lacking that’s hard to describe. There’s just no spark.

The beginning track sets up certain electronic expectations that are only minimally met throughout the album. The only other highlight is the third to last song “Animal Backwards,” which cleverly starts with rewinded sounds in addition to lyrics likening the love interest to a wolf. It gratifies the electro craving induced by intro track “My Time” while no others do.

Omni fails to hold the average attention span, merely bookended by unique tracks that create the illusion of a successful album. Maybe Minus the Bear should have just released a single with a strong b-side. Sometimes short and sweet is better if you can’t deliver the goods.

The title of the New Pornographers’s fifth album suggests inclusiveness and solidarity. The Canadian super-group’s Together is an effort to include a wider array of musical influences, but in doing so the band has strayed from their power pop roots.

Unfortunate, because Challenger showcased how the singing talents of Newman, Neko Case and Dan Bejar could work so well when complemented with a capable string section. Together swaps the violin for the metal guitar. The song “Your Hands (Together)” features a heavy reverb, which fits better on Rock Band 3 than Vancouver. Yet the New Pornographers actually acquit themselves of heresy on this first single, successfully infusing a new sound into their repertoire. However, every other song attempts to incorporate these heavy chords as well, without as much skill. Ultimately, these other songs fail and tear Together asunder.

The other problem facing the band is how to go about fitting three very talented “lead” singers into 45 minutes of music. The three singers have each shown their ability to take center stage in their various side projects, but Together never really seems to synthesize their abilities like previous works did. Even worse, all these efforts of togetherness keep Case from belting out a great tune like “Valkyrie in the Roller Disco.”

Add into that cacophony a series of cameos from indie rock heavyweights like Zach Condon, Annie Clark and Will Sheff, the band might have an opportunity to redeem themselves. Indeed, with this firepower, one could expect an epic ballad from the album. Yet with all these unique and disparate voices singing, the New Pornographers can’t seem to harness the chorus and pull it together.

About 70 protesters remained camped out in front of California Hall at U. California-Berkeley Wednesday night, 60 hours into a hunger strike aimed primarily at convincing Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and other University of California officials to denounce a recently passed Arizona immigration law.

The roughly 20 students, workers and alumni who compose the “Hungry for Justice Coalition” say they will remain in front of the administrative building until their demands are met.

The group had agreed to have an informal conversation with Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer Wednesday afternoon, but according to senior Horacio Corona, the talk was called off when campus officials refused to let a union worker join the five students.

“We are going to stay out here until they speak to us in unison,” said Corona, who has been fasting since Sunday. “We represent demands that represent the coalition.”

The group is also demanding that Birgeneau make UC Berkeley a sanctuary campus for undocumented students, suspend the Code of Student Conduct until students can revise it, drop current conduct cases against activists, stop cuts to low-wage workers and commit to nonviolent means of ensuring safety at demonstrations.

The strikers and their supporters have been camped out in front of California Hall since Monday at noon, taking shifts at night to make sure noone is arrested for falling asleep.

According to UCPD Lt. Alex Yao, if any of the strikers or supporters fall asleep during the night, it is considered lodging and a violation of campus rules.

“Once somebody violates the campus rules, then the campus rules are enforced,” he said.

Marco Amaral, a freshman participating in the strike, said though the bill was passed in Arizona, university officials can have an impact if they publicly denounce it.

“Birgeneau and (UC President) Mark Yudof are the direct representatives of the students, at least at the top level,” he said Tuesday, 26 hours into the strike. “We want our representatives to represent and reflect our views.”

Campus spokesperson Janet Gilmore said in an e-mail Tuesday that Birgeneau is “sympathetic to the student’s cause,” but declined to comment on the other demands.

“We respect all forms of peaceful expression, but prefer not to comment further while UC Berkeley is addressing the situation there,” said UC Office of the President spokesperson Steve Montiel in an e-mail Tuesday.

As the strikers enter their fourth day-consuming only water mixed with lemon and sugar-Corona said the fast had “taken its toll.” But he maintained that the group was prepared to stay outside the hall until their six demands are met.

“People are suffering and they have to look at that,” Amaral said.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani spoke at Auburn U. Monday about his six principles of leadership and how they relate to young people.

“Most of the time in college, I don’t think you display leadership, you just learn about it,” Giuliani said. “This is the time to really acquire the basic knowledge that you’re going to use for the rest of your life. And I was taught one of the best ways to learn leadership was to copy it from other people.”

The first principle of leadership is to have a strong set of beliefs.

Giuliani said President Ronald Reagan was one of his role models. He said Reagan had a strong belief system and stuck by his beliefs.

“He didn’t let public opinion polls push him around,” Giuliani said. “He determined where he wanted things to go. He did the best that he could to move in that direction. And of all the political leaders in the last 40 or 50 years, I think he is the best example young people can have for how to be a leader.”

The second rule, Giuliani said, is to be an optimist.

He said people follow those who offer hope. He recalled the moment when he learned he had prostate cancer. He said he had a realization a few days after the news.

“I was in danger, real danger, before I knew I had prostate cancer,” Giuliani said. “When I was told I had prostate cancer, I was a lucky man.”

He said he was lucky because he knew about the cancer and had an opportunity to do something about it.

Giuliani’s third principle is to have courage.

“You don’t make any great changes without taking a risk,” Giuliani said. When in stressful situations, he said, focus on simple things that can be easily accomplished.

“My father taught me a lesson when I was very young that I use whenever I’m in a simple crisis or emergency situation,” Giuliani said. “The lesson that he taught me was that if you’re in the middle of an emergency—he used to say a fire—if you’re ever in a fire, he said, remain calm. And if you’re not calm, pretend you’re calm because you’ll be able to think better if you remain calm.”

He told the audience if they were afraid of something, they should put that energy into his fourth principle: relentless preparation.

The fifth rule is teamwork. He said the audience should ask of themselves, “What are my weaknesses?” and then find people who can help them.

“The final principle of leadership is communication,” Giuliani said. “A leader, after all, in many cases, is a teacher and a motivator.”

Though it was not listed among his six principles, Giuliani also stressed, “If you want to be a leader, you have to love people. You have to care about them.”