Brown Falls In Line

Add Brown to the growing list of schools making financial aid reforms. From the school web site:

The Corporation of Brown University has approved a new financial aid policy that eliminates loans for students whose family incomes are less than $100,000, reduces loans for all students who receive financial aid and no longer requires a parental contribution from most families with incomes of up to $60,000. The Boston Globe carries the AP report here.

I'm no genius, but I'll say this: Something's rotten in Denmark that all these schools have suddenly found the ability to make these changes. Where have they been?

You know who I feel sorry for? The poor schmuck who fits the profile and just graduated with loans they'll be paying back for 20 years.

I staffed the Dartmouth men's basketball game against Princeton last night and when the struggling Big Green built its lead to 30 points over the Tigers I was struck by how low the mighty have fallen. The orange and black is shockingly lacking in talent.

Princeton (5-19, 2-7 Ivy) has to run the table over its final five games to avoid the first 20-loss season in school history. It will be interesting and instructive as a Dartmouth football watcher to see how long it takes Princeton to pull its flagship athletic program off the mat.

That's it for today folks, for a couple of reasons. First, that certain Hanover High sophomore is running in an open mile today at Harvard.

And second, my heart isn't in the blog this morning. A very difficult 12 months became even more difficult last night with the news of the sudden death of Paul Robbins, a longtime friend and a very decent man. Paul has covered Dartmouth football for the Associated Press for many years, sitting next to me in the press box for most of those Saturday afternoons. He covered all kinds of skiing, Nordic, jumping and the rest, and was the nation's foremost media expert on biathlon, that arcane sport of skiing and shooting he so loved. He did tremendous freelance writing work for the U.S. Ski Team for years and years, traveling the world and covering every Winter Olympics near and far. I recall being in Key West during one Olympics, sitting in an outdoor restaurant with my wife watching a TV broadcast from some frozen venue, and who popped up on the screen doing color commentary? PR. I reminded him of that story every few years and he always laughed at it as though he'd never heard it before.

I don't know how old Paul was -- somewhere in his 60's -- but in Robbins years he was still a little boy. No one, and I mean no one, forwarded more "humor" via email. He was shocked, but none of us on the receiving end could have been surprised, that he was wrongly accused by his ISP of being a spammer a couple of years ago. It didn't deter him. He just changed his email address and kept firing the stuff out. It was a little much (make that a lot much) but you never told him so because he clearly enjoyed those sophomoric stories and occasionally racy pictures so much.

His goal every fall, which he achieved no matter the temperature, was to wear shorts to Dartmouth football games until November. Perhaps you saw him rushing to the press box shortly before kickoff carrying his laptop computer. Believe me, if you saw him, you'd remember him. Several years ago he even showed up in the press box wearing a colorful beanie, propeller and all.

For the final football game of the year he'd usually bake some kind of treat to share with the rest of us in the press box. A couple of years ago he left out some key ingredient and apologized for it as he put the treats out. Those cookies were awful, but he brought them because that's what he always did. And we ate them because that's what we did. Paul, I'll miss those cookies next fall.