Rototom Sunsplash: July 2nd-11th

This event could not be left out of The Badger’s coverage for summer festivals. This year will see the 16th annual reggae festival in north eastern Italy with no let up in the high calibre of performances due to take to the stage this year. The legendary Skatalites play on the 2nd of July but if you want to get there a bit later then Buju Banton and Beenie Man play on the 7th and 8th respectively, amongst many other big names from Europe, Africa and the other side of the Atlantic.

The event is not like your average 3-4 day festival in England as Rototom brags impressive mountain scenery, a refreshing river for cooling off in the afternoon and a forte half way up the mountain, which makes for a real good chill out. Although if you want it lively the dancehall stage keeps it jumpin late into the night with several other sound systems around the festival site.

Tickets are for sale online until the  10 June so you have limited time to get your ticket sorted at the slightly cheaper advanced price, although there are plenty of tickets for sale on arrival.

The Badger guide to summer

With the end of term looming, and sun-soaked days just around the corner, The Badger has taken a look at some of the best of this year’s festivals to help you decide where to spend your summer…
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Resident’s anger as Westdene area dropped from proposed South Downs National Park

Residents living nearby the highly acclaimed rural landscape at Green Ridge have reacted furiously to news that the location, deemed an area of outstanding natural beauty by the countryside agency, has been removed from the proposed South Downs National Park. The tiny strip of meadowland lies between Brighton’s Westdene and the A27 and is located less than six miles from the University of Sussex campus. The controversial exclusion means that the spot will not be protected against any future land development.
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Cut admin costs, not teaching!

John Denham, the Universities Secretary, has sent letters to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) urging universities to make savings in administration and waste costs, rather than cutting teaching and research funding. Denham wrote: “I am confident that we can find efficiency savings whilst protecting the quality of teaching and research.”
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3D? No thanks!

I’ll say it as it is; for people who claim to truly love the cinema, the introduction and preoccupation with the new 3-D craze can be nothing but an annoyance. The movie-going public have been bombarded of late with new ‘special event’ and ‘limited screenings’ of 3D films such as Bolt and Monsters vs. Aliens, not to mention the re-release of cult-favourite The Nightmare Before Christmas. Is all of this really necessary?
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Engineering for society

When I first arrived at Sussex at the end of September 2008, I was very quickly overwhelmed with the excitement that surrounded my degree programme. Students and staff alike felt like this was the start of a new, futuristic concept.

It is a degree, one of the first of its kind, which enables students to combine engineering with development studies or environmental sciences. Creating a degree that adapts engineering to a globalised world and to the humanitarian and environmental concerns that society is facing today seems like an obvious step.
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Students set to withdraw results from National Student Survey

In an attempt to force management to respond to their demands, linguistics students are campaigning for final year students to withdraw their National Student Survey (NSS).

The NSS is a questionnaire that runs across all publicly funded higher education institutions in England. Only final year students can take part in the survey which is meant to rate their overall experience during their degree. NSS data is completely anonymous, and will have no effect on the students who choose to participate in the boycott. The results are published on Unistats.com, a website designed to help prospective students in deciding where to study. However, since the NSS responses from linguistics students would be listed under “Languages”, the withdrawal would affect a number of courses beyond linguistics and, potentially, the university as a whole.
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The shape of things to come?

On Sunday 10th May, a distinguished panel met at the Corn Exchange to discuss the sweeping motion that ‘Human history is characterised by moral progress.’

Chair Polly Toynbee set out the format: each speaker had eight minutes to argue their case, to be followed by audience questions and brief concluding comments. The structure did not stipulate an attempt to define the term “moral progress”; an unfortunate oversight which severely hindered the debate.
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Chameleon car

A design student has made her old, worn out Skoda magically vanish. She has not done it through computer images but by painting it to blend with the background.

Sara Watson, who is currently in her second year studying drawing at the University of Central Lancaster (Uclan), took three weeks to complete the task and produced it in the car park outside her studio.
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The Badger – Year in review 2008/2009

Tradition dictates that the outgoing communications office and editor-in-chief(s)  write a small summary of the past academic year. These summaries have gained a repuation for distilling the mood of a whole cohort of graduands, whilst simultaneously providing a soapbox for the people who spend a year being neutral.

This year however, has seen the blossoming of a wonderful experiment: The Badger Online. (Thanks for reading by the way!) Accordingly, the tradition is in need of a bit of an update. Superficially, this is the first time that the end-of-year summaries have been made available online (scroll down). Perhaps more importantly though, you now have the ability to see all the articles they’re talking about, because they’re all stored here, on this site, preserved forever and ever.

For my part, I’d like to join the others in thanking all the contributors for allowing us to publish their work, the editorial team for curating this wealth of talent, Dan Higgins for imagining the site, Andy Spratley for constructing it and Lisa Murray for spending her Friday evenings helping me run it. You guys are all amazing.

Anyway, without any further ado, here are the real summaries:

Suki Ferguson

Suki Ferguson – Editor-in-Chief

This year, numerous events occurring on our humble campus have played out on a surprisingly national stage.

The students spurred into action by the conflict in Gaza proved that a good oldfashioned Sussex sit-in can simultaneously bring about significant policy changes and provide inspiration for fellow protesters across the UK. The recent campaign to protest against the management’s dodgy Linguistics-cutting tactics has garnered its own publicity, attracting the support of internationally respected academics. And our news agenda has proved inspiring for the broadsheets, who came to The Badger for leads on stories about the use of pep pills in universities. Clearly, The Badger plays an important role in the gradual evolution of how the world sees Sussex, and how we see ourselves as a student body.

Being involved with producing The Badger for the last two years has taught me several important lessons: how to write articles that provoke surprisingly rude and incoherent responses from the occasional loon; how to negotiate editing software that possesses only intermittent spellchecking abilities (sorry about all the typos guys); and that editing the student newspaper is almost always way more fun than working on my degree. In fact, loons and typos aside, writing and editing The Badger is an experience I can wholeheartedly recommend to any student with a few hours to fill and something to say.

One thing is certain: being involved in this newspaper guarantees that you will always have the scoop on the dramas and disasters that make university life so engaging. The Badger gives you access: access to student politics, access to free films, gigs and plays, and even access to the journalism industry (if you’re lucky!).

The joy of it is that if you want to write for The Badger, you can – all you need to do is show up at a writer’s meeting to pick up a story, or hand in your application for next year’s editing positions.

So, to sum up: I hope you’ve enjoyed our coverage of university life in 2008/9 as much as I’ve enjoyed working with the editorial team that produced it. And it’s good to know that even if us almostgrads soon won’t be able to read the paper version, at least we now have thebadgeronline.co.uk to console us should we ever need the occasional Sussex update.

Here’s to next year’s Badger!

Michael Holder

Michael Holder – Editor-in-Chief

First and last of all, a few regrets. There’s a slight chance that you’ve opened The Badger on a Monday (because you definitely always do that) and spotted another minor grammatical error, or the text doesn’t quite line up, or finally realised that you are an annoying pedant. We’re sorry, but beauty and perfection do not come often together. No one can have both. But I always notice these things and I regret that this year has turned me into such into an annoying pedant.

On a personal and far more important level, I regret that our interview with Scott from 5ive was never published. Now the full extent of the bitterness he feels towards his former bandmates because “they don’t want a reunion” may never be known. Can’t you see they’re busy right now, Scott? And anyway, Blue have reformed. We got his photo as well and he’s not all that, in case you were wondering. After the photo, he mumbled something about beauty and perfection not going together and then went off to sing ‘Keep on Moving’ to thousands of adoring Freshers.

This has been an excellent year, though, and massive thanks have to go out to everyone who has helped out: web editors Tom Wright & Lisa Murray; Andy Spratley; Suki & Dan; Nick Blumsom the photographer; all the proofreaders who come in every week to read our mess; the brilliant editorial team we’ve had this year; and of course everybody who has written and contributed to The Badger this year - without you, everything is irrelevant.

Dan Higgins

Dan Higgins – USSU Communications Officer

In a year which has seen linguistics courses cut, an occupation on campus, countless referenda, record-breaking election turnouts and the notion of “studentification”, The Badger has perhaps never been so important to campus life.

This year we have developed The Badger Online to allow readers to comment instantly on whichever article they choose. We have also branched out into social media with a facebook application and twitter feed. None of this development would have been possible without the assistance and technical expertise of Andy Spratley, the USSU IT and Web Manager, and I am very lucky we had someone ‘in the know’ who shared the same vision and had the ability to make it a reality. Through all this development, articles in The Badger are now being read on a regional, local and national level.

With a strong team next year and Michael Holder at the helm, The Badger will continue to grow and become a guiding force in student news. Over and out.