Fellow Students

WHEN YOU'RE A college student, the campus cafe plays a big part in your life. You hang out there. You meet people there. And you chow down on real food, fixed by experienced cooks.Justin Thomas and Nathan Wagoner, sophomores at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, told me this the other day, as they ate salads spiked with grilled chicken and servings of roasted potatoes at the Center Cafe, the cafeteria in the renovated College Center on Mount Royal Avenue near the light-rail stop.I spoke with them and other institute students about the role of lunch in their lives, and about other food issues.

Fellow students, friends and family members yesterday mourned the death of Marc David Levy, a promising painter with an eccentric flair who was killed Friday when a driver fleeing police slammed into his car.Levy, who turned 21 last month, was a senior at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, a school of 1,200 in downtown Baltimore, where he majored in painting.He was driving his Honda Civic when a 1999 Nissan Altima with at least two police cruisers following it ran a red light at East 27th and St. Paul streets and broadsided him.Yesterday, relatives gathered with Levy's parents, Stephen and Miriam, and their other son, Jason, 17, at their Reisterstown home amid oil-on-canvas self-portraits Levy had painted.

Moving from Buenos Aires to Baltimore last summer, I expected many differences between college life in Argentina and in the United States.But I wasn't prepared for the drinking scene.The first Friday of school, the lobby of the Winwood Towers student residence at Loyola College had a parade of staggering students. Some students were lying on the floor and sprawled over the couches. Empty cans, spilled beer and vomit littered elevators and corridors.I had always thought that "Animal House" was a Hollywood fantasy, but that night I was in the middle of it. And the movie ran all year long.

Like many in the Class of 1998 at Towson University, Irv and Sylvia Cohen have spent the past four years lugging heavy books around campus, typing dozens of papers with pesky footnotes and studying countless hours to earn baccalaureate degrees.And, like college sweethearts everywhere, they have been known to hold hands between classes and sneak smooches in the hallowed halls.But there are a few differences. The Pikesville couple, who have been married 58 years, are more than a half-century older than their fellow students -- and among the oldest graduates in the school's history.

IN October, Mississippi police accused teen-ager Luke Woodham of taking a rifle to school, killing two and wounding seven. In December, in Paducah, Ky., Michael Carneal, a 14-year-old, was charged with attacking a group of fellow students and killing three. Again, the news brings another tragedy with two boys -- 11 and 13 years old -- accused of killing four girls and a teacher in Arkansas. In each instance, initial reports portrayed these students as social outcasts who had been ridiculed or rejected by their peers.

Albert Girshik shifts from foot to foot as the video camera trained on him records and his fellow students watch expectantly. This is his first appearance this semester before the whole class, and Girshik feels the discomfort of a sixth-grader giving a book report.But this student is a 46-year-old Russian immigrant, an engineer in his old country, a clerk in his country of choice. He's in school, as he tells his classmates, because "right now I'm a small glass of water in a sea of English."

Johns Hopkins University students Rex Chao and Robert Harwood Jr. were two young men with promise. One was a passionate violinist who knew he wanted to go to law school. The other, a high school valedictorian, dreamed of public service after graduating this May.Two shots ended one student's life. The other student sits in a Baltimore booking center, facing a murder charge.Mr. Chao, a devoted musician who had just been named chairman of the campus chapter of the College Republicans, lies dead.

Jurors in the sex-abuse trial of former Catholic schoolteacher John J. Merzbacher won't be able to examine personnel records that showed the teacher received superior evaluations during at least part of the period when he is alleged to have raped and molested a female student.M. Cristina Gutierrez, Mr. Merzbacher's lawyer, yesterday withdrew her bid to enter the evaluations into evidence after Judge Robert I. H. Hammerman said he would allow the Baltimore Circuit Court jury to see some, but not all, of the documents she had gathered from the personnel files through a subpoena.

Taking precisely measured steps, Emily Axeford Murphy advanced in cap and gown into the Prince William Room of St. John's College library this month. Her name was called out by a faculty member, but this was no commencement ceremony.This was trial by ordeal.Ms. Murphy had to face a three-professor panel that tugged at the stray threads that threatened to unravel her painstakingly woven paper on the abolitionist crusader Frederick Douglass, President Lincoln and their stances on American slavery 125 years ago. Her topic is considered quite modern by classmates, many of whom focused on Plato, the Bible or "The Canterbury Tales."

CHICAGO -- Minority students are more likely than whites to study with, dine with and date students from different racial and ethnic groups, according to a nationwide study to be released tomorrow.However, students of color are much more likely than whites to feel excluded from school activities because of their racial or ethnic identity. And they are more likely to report racially based insults or threats made by faculty or fellow students, according to the study conducted by researchers from the Universities of Michigan and Arizona.

Nearly everyone in the hallways and classrooms at North County High School in Glen Burnie knew Walter Brooks Jr. They didn't know him because he was one of the school's top athletes or one of its top students when he graduated last spring. He was neither. Most knew him because of an oversize personality that his friends and family say was matched only by the size of his heart. Brooks, 18, died Wednesday after a brief illness; his parents said they were told by doctors that the cause was swine flu. "Everyone loved Walter," said Andrea Hunt, who had known Brooks since the sixth grade and became best friends with him in high school.

Everything happens for a reason. And in my case, the reason stuff happens is so I can write it down in this weekly column documenting my joyful, unremarkable life. My son signed up in June to take the September LSAT, only to discover that all of the test centers in the Baltimore-Washington area were filled. My husband, whose turn it was to flog the dead horse of preparedness, remarked: "What does this tell you about the type of people who sign up to take the LSAT?" My son replied: "Obviously, they are a group of very uptight, type-A people."

BOSTON -- On the Johns Hopkins University campus, university administrators seem to be giving credence to an observation by Abigail Thernstrom, who categorized left-leaning, politically correct institutions of higher education as "an island of repression in a sea of freedom." Instead of functioning as marketplaces of ideas - "to protect the university as a forum for the free expression of ideas," as described in the Hopkins student handbook - universities continue to punish what they categorize as "offensive" speech and behavior that do not conform to the acceptable, liberal views of politics, race or sexuality.

Nearly a third of Century's first graduating class marked the end of their high school careers with presentations yesterday showing experiences that enriched their last year at the school. Kathy Ohlhaber, 18, screened The Seven Deadly Sins of High School, which she wrote, cast, directed and edited. Tallulah Pollard, 18, rode her chestnut stallion, Image, to school and talked about how she plans to own and run stables. And Sam Moore, 18, sat at a potter's wheel and crafted bowls from mounds of clay, a hobby that he said helped him relax while taking four Advanced Placement courses this year.

Students struggling in tougher courses As a junior at Chesapeake High School, I am not at all surprised to read the article "Teens struggle for a C average" (Dec. 28). Ever since this school year started, many of my fellow students have been falling behind in their studies, failing their courses due to course overload and switching books day to day. Some students have been unable to keep up with this schedule, including myself. What is the county planning on doing about this? It's absolutely appalling to hear that Dr. Eric J. Smith doesn't seem to worry about the drop in averages.

Ridwan Yaseen Tomhe is proud of his culture and his religion, but he knows that his family traditions set him apart from classmates at Boys' Latin School. A first-generation Arab-American and a Muslim, Tomhe doesn't go to parties. He doesn't drink or smoke. And he fasts from dawn to dusk during the holy month of Ramadan. He has enjoyed his time at Boys' Latin, where he is now a senior, an honor student and was one of the football team's captains. But his thoughts often turn to Sept. 11, 2001, a day when he says life changed for him, his family and other Arab-Americans.

DEAR STUDENTS: Like many of you, I am a member of the first generation in my family to go to college. As a result of the Nazi invasion of Poland and the subsequent Holocaust, my father lost his parents and sister and was deprived of even a high school education. My mother, who at 14 fled with her parents from Austria, was a splendid student even though she didn't know a word of English before arriving in America. All set to enroll in college, her plans were permanently derailed by the death of her father shortly after her high school graduation and by the need for her to find a job to support her mother.

Fellow students - and not only Sarah Bormel's high school classmates in Towson - often ask Baltimore County's youngest school board member: "Could you get other kinds of food stocked in the vending machines?" "A lot of the things they ask for are, like, silly," the 17-year-old recalled the other day, before a meeting at which the board considered classroom crowding and the school system's goals. "Stuff that the board really has no control of." Although Bormel may not be able to get bagels and granola bars sold in the vending machines at her school, Carver Center for Arts and Technology, she has brought a penetrating intellect to the board's bimonthly meetings.

Seventeen-year-old Danielle D. Adams has seen a student at Northern High School pull out a knife in the hallway. She has witnessed fights in the cafeteria and bathrooms and smelled marijuana in the stairwells. Once she saw a boy get attacked and thrown out the window of a bus. "You shouldn't have to go to school fearing for your life every day," she said. The Northeast Baltimore high school - where a freshman was beaten nearly to death in early November by a group that allegedly included fellow students - has spiraled out of control under new leadership this academic year, according to interviews with teachers, students and parents.

COLLEGE PARK - The natives were restless, but not unruly. Eight days after a plastic-bottle-throwing incident marred a game against Atlantic Coast Conference foe Duke, Maryland students responded - for the most part - with boisterous cheers and reasonable behavior during a 69-54 Terrapins win over Clemson at Cole Field House yesterday. The students, who couldn't escape the unwanted attention from local television outlets and newspaper reporters, refrained from the actions that got them in trouble - namely, the tossing of any bottles, ice or batteries at their visitors from South Carolina.