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(02/19/16 7:19am)
This year, University students will vote on whether to re-affirm the single sanction or move toward a multiple-sanction honor system. I’m writing today to urge you to vote in favor of maintaining our current sanctioning policy.
(02/08/16 5:15am)
Last year, three important referenda were passed with regard to the Honor System. The first mandated that a popular assembly be held every two years to “gauge student body opinion” on important issues. The second, put simply, mandated that polling questions with majority student body support be translated into constitutional amendments to be put to a vote the following year. The third was a question polling student body opinion on whether the Honor Committee should “consider implementing a multiple sanction system.”
(03/03/14 7:21am)
Recently, we published a piece by one of our new Viewpoint writers, Ben Rudgley, entitled “End Women’s Studies,” which called for dissolving the Women, Gender, and Sexuality major at the University. To briefly summarize his argument: Rudgley contended that the existence of a department devoted to the study of such divisive issues is itself divisive, in that it largely fails to attract and include the very people who need exposure to WGS, and it distracts us from incorporating such ideas into our other studies. It was a controversial piece, and rightly so — Rudgley made a number of provocative claims. We’re not writing in response to the merits of his piece, however, and this is not the first time we have published controversial material.
(01/23/14 1:21am)
Americans’ perceptions of where tax dollars are spent are notoriously wrong-headed. According to a 2011 CBS/New York Times poll, only 9 percent of Americans can correctly ascertain that the federal government devotes less than 5 percent of the budget to foreign aid (the actual figure is 0.6 percent). Most wildly overestimate the amount. Twenty-one percent of Americans could identify the range of welfare spending within 10 percentage points — and only a quarter could do so with Social Security funding. These misperceptions are significant. Although the vast majority of Americans claim to support spending cuts to reduce the budget deficit, only 38 percent can name a program they would be willing to cut. The “bloated government” theory holds great sway over the voting public. Just where this bloat occurs is less clear.
(01/16/14 3:56am)
On Feb. 1 of this year, the Mississippi State Penitentiary plans to officially end the practice of allowing married prisoners to spend time alone with their spouses. These brief “conjugal visits,” which were introduced in the Jim Crow south under the racist assumption that the passions of black men would be tamed through sexual intercourse, are a rarity in the United States. Only five other states allow inmates to have time alone with their spouses: California, Connecticut, New Mexico, New York and Washington. Officials in Mississippi, uncomfortable with the idea of a child being conceived by an inmate, plan to end what they see as a wasteful and indulgent privilege. They are wrong to do so.
(12/05/13 4:16am)
Little is more integral to the prosperity of a nation than its ability to educate the next generation. Economists and sociologists alike have long championed the development of “human capital” — the collective skills and knowledge of a population — as increasingly important to economic growth and rising standards of living. President Barack Obama has made it an explicit goal of his administration to increase the number of Americans graduating from college. In a world dominated by the necessity for highly skilled labor, where the greatest growth is coming from high-tech industries, creating and sustaining an educated workforce is imperative to remaining competitive.
(12/02/13 4:14am)
On Sunday, voters in Switzerland roundly rejected one of the boldest regulations yet proposed for tackling astronomically high executive salaries. The bill, dubbed the 1:12 Initiative for Fair Pay, would have capped CEO salaries at 12 times that of the company’s lowest-paid worker. With all 26 cantons (member states) reporting, approximately 65 percent of Swiss voters rejected the measure, which was conceived in an atmosphere of growing wealth inequity in the small European nation.
(11/21/13 5:24am)
This past Sunday, The New York Times published an opinion article by two German politicians calling for their country to grant Edward Snowden asylum. To jog your memory: Snowden was the former employee of an National Security Agency contractor who, in May of this year, leaked up to 200,000 classified documents about U.S. surveillance programs to a British newspaper. He subsequently fled to Hong Kong and now resides in Russia under temporary asylum. Malte Spitz, a Green Party politician, and Hans-Christian Ströbele, a member of the Green Party in the Bundestag (German parliament) called on their nation’s leaders to offer asylum to the man who they claim has “opened the eyes of the world.”
(11/15/13 3:49am)
Is America exceptional? Never has the answer to this question been more relevant. With China gaining power and foreign policy theorists foretelling the end of global hegemony and the emergence of multiple poles of power, it seems as though the United States no longer has any grounds upon which to claim that we are in any way exceptional when compared to our peer nations. Indeed, we are told that cosmopolitan, sophisticated people would never subscribe to the jingoistic view that America is “the best.” That’s the jargon of the blind patriot.
(11/07/13 2:37am)
It’s once again that awkward and exciting time of year. We’ve just finished a solid three days of Halloween festivities, Thanksgiving calls longingly to our weary hearts and Christmas is suddenly a thing again. The Wal-Mart on Route 29 has already placed a Christmas tree near the front doors to woo the seasonal shopaholics. With so much festive spirit in the air, it’s time to resurface that perennial debate: which holiday is the best? Is it the raucous debauchery of Halloween? The joy of Thanksgiving? The timelessness of Christmas?
(10/31/13 4:51am)
My fellow columnist Ashley Spinks recently argued for a rather drastic policy change across the schools at the University: stop granting credit or exemption for Advanced Placement (AP) scores. Ms. Spinks went on to elucidate the ways in which AP courses fail to prepare students appropriately for college and often do not even cover the same material as the courses they are intended to replace; she even cites an interesting Dartmouth study that convinced the school’s administrators to enact the very policy change she wishes to see at the University. She concluded by calling the granting of course credit on the basis of high AP scores an “empty or even fraudulent gesture.”
(10/24/13 3:05am)
As the gubernatorial race in Virginia draws to a close and Election Day approaches, many voters — this columnist included — are finding themselves highly uninspired by the options. No matter which political party you support, there’s plenty to dislike about the two major candidates in this year’s race. Given such general antipathy, it may be tempting for voters to opt for abstention: a huffy refusal to vote at all, for any candidate, because you don’t want to officially support any of the clowns on the ticket. The thought process behind this decision is understandable. Why cast your vote for someone you wish weren’t actually going to govern you?
(10/17/13 3:15am)
Last week, the managing board ran an editorial entitled “Political animals, political email-ers” that discussed political bias both in the classroom and on the Internet. The editorial argued that professors should not reveal their political inclinations to their students. It raised several important points, the most significant being that a student may feel intimidated or uneasy if it is clear that the professor’s convictions are opposite to those of the student. Students often feel uncomfortable sharing their own opinions in class for fear of upsetting their professors; and, whether we like to admit it or not, the specter of grades always looms over our heads, filtering our comments to the most acceptable common denominator.
(10/10/13 3:33am)
We live during an era in which people’s lives are increasingly conducted and documented on the Internet. Facebook profiles, Twitter feeds, LinkedIn accounts all attest to this reality: we share more and more of our personal and professional information with the rest of the world, often unaware of who can see the details of our lives. Recognizing this danger, many people have taken to keeping scrupulous care of their online presence. High school seniors applying to university purge their Facebook profiles of embarrassing or incriminating photos, occasionally even going so far as to change their name; many people routinely Google their own name to see what would show up if a potential employer wanted to do a little digging around.
(10/03/13 12:46am)
When I first arrived at the University last year, a number of traditions were new to me, ranging from University-specific customs — such as streaking the Lawn — to more universal college maxims: thou shalt celebrate “Thirsty Thursday.” Most of them I enjoy, and those I don’t generally elicit some sort of detached bemusement from me. I may not agree with all the choices my peers make, but I can understand where they’re coming from. For one tradition in particular, however, I continually fail to see the benefit: avoiding Friday classes.
(09/26/13 4:06am)
I’m an evangelical Christian, yet I refuse to vote or advocate against gay marriage. I’ll admit, there aren’t many people like me, especially south of the Mason-Dixon line. But that’s why this argument needs to be put before the Christians who read in the Bible an admonition against same-sex acts and who, as a consequence, politically oppose same-sex marriage. Disclaimer: for the purpose of this argument, I will be treating homosexuality as wrong or sinful, and I suspect that this alone will rankle some readers. They should keep reading. I am also not addressing secular arguments for heterosexual-only marriage. I aim merely to illuminate and question the assumption that Christian faith necessitates political opposition to gay marriage.
(09/19/13 3:01am)
Last spring, the University announced a partnership with Duke University that would allow the University students to take Haitian Creole while Duke students would take advantage of the University’s Tibetan language program. The technology facilitating this interaction was Cisco TelePresence, which allowed students to interact with each other via cameras, microphones, and television screens that project images of the other class. The goal of the partnership was to open up these specialized courses to a larger body of students, giving exposure to rare languages.
(09/12/13 2:47am)
My grandfather died about three years ago. His last several weeks were spent in a hospital bed, hooked into gleaming machines, undergoing countless tests and treatments that ultimately proved useless in the face of death’s advance. Watching him go through this process was painful for me, even at a distance. For my mother, who tended to him for months, it was even worse. Despite the best efforts of his doctors, my grandfather was not destined to stay on this earth for much longer. And we couldn’t know that until it was all over.
(09/05/13 2:28am)
Last Thursday, I wrote a column entitled “Bring back the literacy test” in which I argued for instituting a sort of test that all adult voters would have to pass in order to participate in federal elections. It is clear from the comments I’ve received and the conversations I’ve had that what I proposed deserved more explanation — and qualification — than what I had been allowed in an 800-word column.
(08/29/13 1:26am)
Many politically inclined writers these days—your columnist included—have bemoaned the dearth of political participation in the United States, citing depressingly low voter turn-out rates and a demonstrated lack of interest in political issues that touch on virtually every member of society. From elections as local as who will be on our Honor Committee to those as national as the presidential race, the pattern is familiar: a small minority of citizens are actively engaged, and the rest look on apathetically at best, hostilely at worst. Many Americans today pin their frustrations on Congress when part of the problem is an electorate too lazy or preoccupied to engage each other in substantive political discourse. But today I want to discuss an issue I mentioned only in passing when I last wrote about voter participation, in my March 6th article “Tip the vote over”: ignorant voting. Voting without knowing fully who or what you’re voting for. In that spirit, I want to propose that the U.S. institute a form of nationwide literacy test for federal elections.