A rainbow makes an appearance to the north of campus in Hamburg on Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2016.

The 88th Academy Awards will air this Sunday night, hosted for the second time by Chris Rock. What is your favorite movie, and why isn’t it Space Jam?

By Amanda Snyder

St. Bonaventure University President Sister Margaret Carney announced this week she’s battling cancer.
In an email to the St. Bonaventure community, she said she had recently been diagnosed with multiple myeloma.
The illness is “a cancer of the blood causing abnormal plasma cells to collect themselves in bones and the bone marrow,” President Carney wrote. She said she’s been undergoing tests at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo for the past several weeks, and will begin “an intensive course of drug therapy” this week. The treatment may last six months.
Hilbert College President Cynthia Zane shared President Carney’s letter via email with the Hilbert community on Wednesday.
Sister Margaret already announced last month she was stepping down as president of SBU. She said her diagnosis may slow her down but it is not going to keep her down. She said, “I will be able to continue to fulfill my role as long as I somewhat reduce my schedule. This will cause me to slow my 88 mph daily speed to a more respectable 55 mph!”
Sister Margaret is the 20th President of SBU and has held office since 2004. She has obtained master’s degree in theology and Franciscan Studies, with a doctorate in theology. She holds nine honorary doctorates, including one from Hilbert. St. Bonaventure and Hilbert are “sister schools” , sharing the same set of Franciscan Values. St. Bonaventure’s School of Graduate Studies holds classes on the Hilbert campus. The two schools discussed a merger in 2013, but the idea was eventually discarded.
President Carney concluded her announcement with the high hopes and a bright outlook on her future and faith. “It will come to no surprise to anyone that I intend to do everything possible to win this battle with cancer. I will also find in this many opportunities to ponder the fundamentals of the faith with which I was gifted in baptism.”
In an e-mail to the Hilbert community, Hilbert President Cynthia Zane asked everyone to “Keep Sister Margaret in your thoughts and prayers as she undergoes treatment.”

By Kyle English

In 2008, Hilbert College received a $2.5 Million Title III Grant that allowed it to establish their Foundations Seminar class, GS101.  It was with this grant that the wheels starting turning and an organized plan began to be discussed.

The Hilbert Blueprint was formalized in 2013, to differentiate Hilbert College from other colleges, both in the immediate area and around the country.  The blueprint is an outline that every student that comes to Hilbert will share as a common experience.

Dr. Chris Holoman, Denise Harris, and Jim Sturm are the three co-creators of the Hilbert Blueprint and they explained that the process was surprisingly easy because everything incorporated in the blueprint already existed on campus.

This four-step outline indicates what each student will be doing at every level of their college education.  It outlines a major goal for each year they are at Hilbert.

Some departments already had their own departmental goals and capstone experiences. This new Blueprint made it mandatory that all departments added this to their goals.

Sturm is an advocate of leadership and he was eager to point out that the Hilbert Blueprint incorporates the path to becoming a good leader every step of the way.

“Dr. Holoman always used the arrow to illustrate our intentions and the growth of the student.  From there, we just filled in what goes where,” Sturm said.

Sturm noted that students will partake in GS101, juniors take PS402, seniors have their capstone, but sophomores did not have a primary focus.

“Most students transfer, or leave college during their sophomore year, so we needed to find something unique to keep them engaged,” Sturm said.  Hence, the creation of sophomore service in the Hilbert Blueprint.

The primary method of tracking the success of this blueprint, long term, is having the students create an E-Portfolio.  This is advantageous for the student, the college, and potential employers, because everything is in one place.

The students can email their portfolio to their potential employers and the founders of this plan can track the success of this implementation by seeing the quality of students’ work, and experiences throughout their four years at college.

Recently the Hilbert Blueprint underwent an analysis, using various assessments and evaluations, to evaluate its early success rates.  The results yielded exactly what administration had hoped for.

“It is a clear pathway for success,” Harris said.  “It gives the parents of our students comfort knowing that the college has a plan for their child. ”

By Mary Kate Wirfel

I have been going to Hilbert for three years now and I have had my run-ins with bad weather. My first year, I dormed here and what I noticed that this college never closes.

My freshman year, we had cold weather and bad roads and yet there was still school.  Immaculata Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school, located within walking distance of the Hilbert College campus was closed, but the college was still open.

I now commute, even though I don’t have my license, my family members volunteer to drive me.  From time to time, I was almost involved in several car accidents caused by the weather.

The commuter students outnumber the residents.  Some of these students commute from places like Springville, Arcade, and Tonawanda which are long enough drives and the snow makes it even harder to get here.

Professors here have an attendance policy and the students get penalized for not showing up to class.  Where the students are really getting penalized is in their paycheck.

The tuition here costs a fortune, over $20,000 per year.  In order to spend your money wisely, you have to show up every day and go to class.  The only break you get is if the professor cancels class, because they cannot make it in.

It’s okay for professors to cancel class and not show up because of weather but not for students to miss class because of the weather.

The only time this school was closed, while I was here, was during the epic November snowstorm in 2014.  If there was not a travel ban in Hamburg, I believe school would have still been open.

I do love it here. But I think you have to be safe. If the school is open and the weather is bad, just stay home you can make up your work later.

Your safety is more important than school even though you’re paying for it.

By Evan James

W/ Contributions From Connor Kirst

As Kanye West himself once said on Tyler, the Creator’s 2015 song “Smuckers,” “They say I’m crazy but that’s the best thing going for me.” If this statement is true, then The Life of Pablo should have been his greatest album to date, because the promotion of this album has been a year-long roller coaster ride that only sped up in the past two months.

After constantly changing the album’s name, revising track lists, changing the songs around, tweeting short bursts of nonsensical rants, and being vague on the album’s release, many fans are wondering if the album they have is even the final product. Whether it is or not, what was released this past Sunday (exclusively on Jay Z’s mess of a streaming service, Tidal), is a sound representation of this decade’s biggest musician going through a midlife crisis.

Many of the songs on the album show Kanye reflecting on his past relationships, romantic or otherwise. “30 Hours” talks about a friend with benefits he used to have, many songs pertaining to his marriage to Kim Kardashian and his two children, North and Saint, and even more about his mother, Donda, who passed away in 2007 from elective surgery.

The simplistic, heavy in reverb, piano ballad “FML,” a collaboration with popular R&B singer, the Weeknd deals with the media’s desire to see Kanye fail and be embarrassed, much like the buzzing “Feedback.” The somber “Wolves,” and a collaboration with Ty Dolla Sign called “Real Friends” are also an expression of West’s inability to trust people because everyone wants something from him. Seeing as this is just the tip of the iceberg, this is clearly a man with issues that run deep.

Sonically, this album continues Kanye’s trend of never making the same album twice. Working with producer Metro Boomin, a producer who has made beats for popular hip hop artists like Future, Drake, and Migos, gives the album a trap sound that’s just unique enough to not sound like what every other rapper is doing now.

Much like the modern day sequel to your favorite 80’s/90’s movie, the featured artists are almost better than the content itself. Frequent collaborators Kid Cudi, Rihanna, and Frank Ocean return, but so do newer artists like Desiigner, Kendrick Lamar, and the 23-year-old Chance the Rapper.

Born Chancelor Bennett, Chance the Rapper has what many consider to be the best verse on the album on the gospel influenced “Ultra Light Beams.” This song (along with “Highlights”) was played on Saturday Night Live this past weekend, when at the end, in an unintelligible mess, Kanye grabs the microphone and tells the audience the album was then out on his website and Tidal, a move he would later retract, announcing the album would never be for sale or streaming anywhere but Tidal.

The Tidal move worked, getting it to the number 1 spot on the Apple Store, but not for long. The service has been described as broken and problematic to put it nicely. Many fans are upset, especially with Kanye tweeting out he was $53 million in debt, and the album has allegedly been pirated over half a million times now. Due to Kanye’s erratic nature, even his most loyal fans can’t tell if he’s going to stick to his guns or not.

All controversy aside, this album is enjoyable and holds his own with anything else he’s ever released. If you can look past West’s ridiculousness, its undeniable. Kanye West is the truest definition of a rock star in 2016. Many may say that he has an ego, but if you listen to the music, he definitely backs it up.

Standout Tracks: Ultra Light Beams, Waves, FML

What do we say about ‘Ye?

Related: Album Review, The Life of Pablo

By Dan Higgins
Faculty Adviser
Like we said before, Hilbert College News is a generic name. It’s a placeholder name, because our ambitious publication schedule was faster than we originally anticipated. Pretty good, huh?

And now that we exist, there’s a place online where we can reach out and speak to the campus community. And we mean the whole community: Students, Faculty, Staff, and Administration.

What we’re hoping you’ll do is help us choose a name. The first step is to get a pool of suggestions. Please think carefully and submit the form below.

Next, a panel of experts — including some current and former journalists — will narrow the list down to a few finalists, and we’ll come back to you for a vote.

What we’re hoping for: Something that will stand the test of time. Something that has a bit of weight behind it. With all due respect to our last student newspaper, “The H Files” sounds dated, here in 2016.

So, what did you have in mind?

Thanks,

–Dan

Survey puts dorms at 81st in the nation. Some residents not so sure.

by Adam Heftka

The website Niche ranked Hilbert College second in New York State and eighty-first nationally in its rankings of the best college dorms released in December.

Niche included 1,713 colleges and universities in their national rankings of the best dorms. These rankings were done with data collected in four categories, including average housing costs, housing capacities, campus crime rates, and responses given to surveys by Niche users. Survey responses were given the most weight when completing the rankings.

The Student Housing Crime Rate at Hilbert was at 0 per 1000 as reported by the college.

Hilbert was given an average survey response of 4.1 out of 5. This survey response number was reached with 18 respondents from the Hilbert College residents.

Looking at our rivals, they didn’t even place in the top 35.

Continue reading Hilbert Dorms Ranked Second in State →

This week in Hawks On:

What did you expect when you came to Hilbert? What surprised you?