Tag: Joe Fitzgerald
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Challenging JMU with a Slingshot
by Joe Fitzgerald The reasons Jake Conley might win are moral and the reasons he might lose are legal. Jake Conley is the Breeze editor suing JMU over FOIA requests the student newspaper made for the location of Covid cases on campus. Call it the Dorms to Avoid suit. JMU declined to provide the info,…
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Delta Dawn at JMU?
by Joe Fitzgerald More than 1 in 9 James Madison University students was infected with Covid-19 during the school year that ended in May. To date, the university has accepted little responsibility for those illnesses or for any associated spread in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County. President Alger and members of the Senior Leadership Team have…
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Eating the Bait
by Joe Fitzgerald Eating The Bait is the improbable story of Harrisonburg’s Golf Course, and how it came to be, told in a decidedly non-linear fashion by a non-objective observer. The whole sick, sad, silly, sorry, sordid story of the destructive, polarizing, maddeningly frustrating and ultimately hilarious battle over whether a city in the Shenandoah…
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Calculus and Jury Duty
by Joe Fitzgerald Calculus is like jury duty. Everyone agrees that it’s essential, and any sensible human being will try to get out of it if they can. But panicked right-wingers are currently cluttering the internet with claims that a change in high school calculus teaching is the latest threat to Western Civilization. I write…
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Inside the Bubble the Slightest Breeze Is a Threat
This is the fourth column in a four-part series about COVID-19 at James Madison University. by Joe Fitzgerald The Breeze was always the “award-winning student newspaper” in JMU public relations — until the paper began filing Freedom of Information requests with the administration. The battle became public when the school decided to give the local…
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Incautious Messaging and Cautious Optimism
This is the third column in a four-part series about COVID-19 at James Madison University. by Joe Fitzgerald Except for the occasional late-night Facebook message, James Madison University has rarely responded to anything I’ve written. And those messages are like drunk dials from an ex; I appreciate the attention, but I wish they still loved…
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Everybody’s Next One
This is the second column in a four-part series about COVID-19 at James Madison University. by Joe Fitzgerald JMU was a first choice for many of its students, but has a perennial reputation as Virginia’s safety school. The joke is that JMU stands for “Just Missed UVA.” The acceptance rate has been rising since the…
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The Franchise and the Rat in the Cream
This is the first essay in a four-part series about the COVID epidemic at James Madison University. by Joe Fitzgerald The franchise. When the next friendly history of JMU is written, the booster writing it may include a chapter about the two visits by ESPN’s “Game Day” and how they helped introduce to a new…