A fire that broke out in a Poughkeepsie home early yesterday morning claimed the lives of two Marist College female students and a male friend. Four other people, two female students who lived in the home and two male students, managed to escape the blaze. The Poughkeepsie Journal reports that town police "said one of the Marist male students who was sleeping upstairs awoke at about 1:30 a.m., determined the doorknob of the bedroom door was hot. The student and the female who was in the room with him jumped out the second-floor window to safety." more ›

The Washington Square News, NYU's student paper, has a juicy article showing how their university artificially deflates campus crime stats by classifying 87% of its residence hall population as "off campus." The exposé sensationally notes that if you're a student who "gets murdered in Rubin residence hall, you were killed off-campus. You missed the cutoff by three blocks." Because it receives federal funds, NYU is required by law to publish its annual crime statistics, but only three of NYU’s 21 undergraduate dorms are technically classified as on-campus. Looking at NYU's report, you might think the school ranks a modest 61st out of the largest 180 universities for substance abuse violations. But when campus and "non-campus" incidents are compiled together, NYU is #2 in the nation (which sounds more like it). Professor Dennis Jay Kenney tells the News, "It clearly sounds to me that they’re trying to circumvent the reporting requirements." Now NYU officials say they'll change the way they present the stats, but it's unclear if this will affect their recent announcement that it would cut back on security. more ›