Education: Oddly Enough

Snow bawding: Princeton University's 30-year tradition of students frolicking nude in the first snow of winter turned into a drunken melee this year, prompting a probable ban on the "Nude Olympics" event. More than 350 naked students, many of them intoxicated, and as many onlookers converged in a campus courtyard at the Ivy League university, where they pushed, shoved and groped one another. A dozen students landed in hospitals with alcohol poisoning, and one was badly cut over the eye.

This week, Harold Shapiro, the University President, called for a ban on the event. "I believe we can no longer tolerate the risks that it has come to pose to our students," he said in a statement. "I am simply not willing to wait until a student dies before taking preventive action."

Sex education: President Bill Clinton's definition of sex is apparently shared by a majority of American college students.Almost two thirds of a group of 600 students at a major mid-western university said they did not think engaging in oral sex counted as having sex. The findings, timed to coincide with President Clinton's impeachment trial, were politically sensitive enough to result in the editor of the respected journal which published them losing his job.

Dr George Lundberg, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, was sacked for "inexcusably" thrusting the journal into the political debate over the Lewinsky affair.

The survey was conducted by doctors Stephanie Sanders and June Machover, from the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, in Bloomington.

Penny Pinching: A Utah teenager has admitted to stealing roughly pounds 500 from a middle school - the hard way. Stanley Nielson, 18, admitted to theft, burglary and criminal mischief as part of an agreement with the Cache County attorney's office. His crime was to steal nearly 87,000 pennies from Cedar Ridge Middle School. Students had amassed the one cent coins as part of their contributions to a relief effort for Honduran victims of Hurricane Mitch.

Eighty-seven thousand coins was their target figure after they estimated that that many would be enough when laid out in a line to stretch for a mile. They were almost there when the break-in occurred. Fortunately, donations have poured in following the theft, among them: a 30-year penny collection donated by an Arizona family. The school managed to turn over a cheque last week for more than pounds 3,000 to the American Red Cross.