Catching up on the week's wackiest stories

By Eric Horowitz

It was another eventful week at colleges across the country. Duke and alcohol are in the news together again, Columbia University helps alumni get drunk, Harvard gets some new art, and much more...

No, it wasn't the USC band that General Motors paid to shut up. It was some USC students making too much noise with their instruments. Bill Frakes/SI

Last week, some Southern California students lived the dream of getting paid to do nothing. An event planning company hired by General Motors gave numerous USC students  $10 to $20 to not practice their musical instruments near where GM was giving a media presentation. Some students began sending their friends there with instruments that they didn't know how play just for the sake of grabbing some of the dough. Students getting paid to do nothing...it seems to me like USC is the perfect fit for Rhett Bomar.

Columbia University went a step farther with its new alcohol policy for football games, announcing that while bringing your own is still forbidden, students over the age of 21 will be able to obtain up to four free beers from a concession stand outside the stadium. Despite the free suds, the policy has come under fire from students who say it favors the rich. They believe it's unfair that alumni who donate $2,000 to the football program get parking spots at the stadium and thus can bring as much alcohol to the lot as they want. Fair or not, Columbia is certainly on to something by using alcohol-based incentives for alumni contributions.

A poetry professor at Texas Tech has raised the stakes in her battle to keep cell phones from interrupting her class. Under her new policy, any time a cell phone rings, the entire class will be marked absent. You really have to feel for the few unfortunate students who will have to go a whole hour without ESPN Mobile fantasy updates on Alge Crumpler's groin.

Harvard's Fogg Art Museum will receive works of art that were allegedly painted by the infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper. Patricia Cornwell, a forensics expert who recently wrote a book that identifies the killer as artist Walter Sickert, has agreed to donate 82 of Sickert's paintings, prints and drawings. Jack the Ripper's work will be exhibited along with some of Freddy Krueger's sculptures and several early impressionist works by the Boogeyman.