In the last week, 1,000 people in Indonesia died from two massive earthquakes. A million left their homes in India to avoid flooding. Rio de Janeiro was chosen to host the 2016 Olympic games. Al-Qaeda threatened the country with further attacks. The first doses of the H1N1 vaccine were delivered.

And The New York Times still found time to write an editorial on Binghamton University.

We’re a little honored so much attention is being paid to our small school, but mostly confused. To be blunt, isn’t there something else one of the nation’s top sources of news could be talking about? There should be.

If The Times in general, and Pete Thamel specifically (six of his last 10 articles have been about BU — does someone have an agenda?) insist on focusing the country’s attention on our school, we wish they’d at least present a slightly more balanced view.

BU does not begin and end with the basketball program. Our men’s soccer team, which advanced to the America East championship finals for six consecutive seasons, had the highest GPA in the nation among D-1 schools in 2007-08 academic year. The baseball, volleyball and tennis teams, among many others, are also extremely successful and drama-free.

We’re not too shabby on other fronts either: a freshman student recently won the opportunity to speak at the National Equality March in Washington, D.C. in front of tens of thousands of people.

No one is claiming that BU is the best university in the world, but we’re certainly nowhere near as bad as we’re being made out to be. To focus so single-mindedly on one aspect of the school and blindly ignore the rest seems curious, not to mention sensationalist and irrational.

We’d like to offer the same advice to Cornell University, regarding their Oct. 5 editorial “The Scholar and the Athlete.” As glad as we are to potentially serve as an example to “other institutions of higher education,” a more balanced perspective would have been nice. The situation with adjunct lecturer Sally Dear is uncertain to say the least, but to claim that sending text messages in class is a legitimate sign of academic troubles from the basketball team is ridiculous. By that reasoning, 75 percent of students anywhere are disrupting class at any given moment in time.

There is also the small matter of Dear being reinstated, albeit in another department. That seems relevant.

A little insight beyond what was covered in The Times story could have made the piece a bit more original — being featured in Thamel’s Twitter is nice, but it’s hardly a measure of credibility.

We are not the only school with issues, nor are we the only one to make the jump to D-1. The Times wrote an article about Harvard taking players with lower academic standing as recently as March 2008, going so far as to say, “Harvard has also adopted aggressive recruiting tactics that skirt or, in some cases, may even violate National Collegiate Athletic Association rules.” Sound familiar? And from a fellow Ivy, no less.

Finally, Cornell, it’s the America East tournament; not American East. How’s that Ivy League copy editing course going?