In case you were wondering about American women’s pageants…

The only value this woman has is entertainment–at how clueless she is. Women–and men–deserve more respect than to be placed on a pedestal for looks alone. At least some semblance of mental functioning should exist for us to admire someone.

For those unaware, an engineering higher up sent an email Saturday to all electrical engineers that had an Excel spreadsheet of 5300 engineer’s names, GPA’s, racial identity, campus address, and campus phone number.

?? Yeah, exactly.

My big question: is everyone happy with their favorite columnist’s GPA? Unlike most people, I keep my racial identity to myself on all documents and apparently I lacked even a campus address whenever Linnmeyer (currently leading the pack for most boneheaded act of the academic year) compiled her list. I’m getting off easy compared to people who are not enthusiastic about their GPA’s and would rather not share their addresses that readily.

Yes, most of the info in the spreadsheet (address and phone number) is readily available to the campus by other means, but that undermines the fundamental facts. Ms. Linnmeyer needs to go. This is an egregious violation without precedent (to my 5 years of campus experience) and a rather public disclosure of rather personal information. At least her list lacked vital information like Social Security numbers. That would be really bad.

Still, I demand to know what that list was doing on that woman’s computer. For what purpose did she have those 5300 names compiled? Are we on a campus watch list for potential vigilantes? Is it the 5300 most beautiful people in engineering? Was this list put together by Banner or a special hand-assembled project (hint: it better be the former else the CoE has some explaining to do)?

I’m sure there’s a perfectly good reason for this list to exist. Yet somehow, I cannot understand how someone could accidentally send it to a large number of students. When I screw up email attachments (a frequent occurrence), it’s usually by not attaching anything, not attaching 5300 people’s personal info. Unless there’s some very justifiable explanation (random computer virus comes to mind), this is an unacceptable use of our personal information. How can we hope to have a respectable global campus when we can’t even send out emails properly?