To be honest, this is something I’m ashamed of. If there is one thing that characterizes our generation, it may very well be this love of irony, this dull, hip avoidance of our emotions. Over the past four years, I’ve watched as my friends and I respond, over and over again, to serious life questions with cynical quips and eye-rolls. This is easy and amusing, yes, but it’s also avoidant.

When I left for college four years ago, I continuously maintained that goodbyes were an unnecessary and dramatic exercise. In my mind, the pang of leaving something I loved was going to happen regardless of whether or not I acknowledged it verbally. I held this position fervently, until I was sitting alone, cross-legged on my brand new extra-long twin comforter in a dorm room filled with boxes, and opened the letter that my best friend had handed me shortly before we left. It said everything I had been afraid to say: The fear that things will never again be the same, the meaning contained within collective memories of a time and place.

Another high school friend of mine is fond of saying “It’s not ‘goodbye,’ it’s ‘see you later.’” In an age of text-message groups, Twitter and Skype, this may very well be the case. But substituting “goodbye” for “see you later” conveys the idea that our opportunities to be sentimental will be infinite. The thing that is hardest about using the word “goodbye,” really using it, is that it acknowledges that these opportunities are limited.

About a week ago, two of my friends and I rode our bikes to the Arch late at night under an uncharacteristically cold April sky. We stood on top of fluorescent lights and waved at our shadows in the stainless steel—steel that reflects, too, the light of the boats on the Mississippi, boats that move back and forth in currents, even when they are anchored down.

For me, my shadow was a reminder that our impressions of time and place are fleeting, always, despite our most concerted attempts to make them stand still. And as the wind off the river whipped our hair, the symbolism couldn’t have been clearer: Sometimes what we need most is, simply and sincerely, to reflect.

The older I get, the more fervently I believe that a real awareness of our movements in life ought to be the thing that defines us. Perhaps it means writing a letter to say goodbye, or even taking a second to watch our shadows. In any case, there is meaning and significance for us in May 2011—we’ve known this all along. The sensible thing, it would seem, is to say our goodbyes, and to say them well.

Romer’s address highlighted the importance of reducing unemployment in the U.S. She argued that the government needs to do more to boost economic recovery at a faster rate. The speech was followed by a panel discussion with four Washington University professors.

Romer spent much of 2009 and 2010 working on economic policy in Washington, advising President Obama and leading efforts in health care reform and financial recovery.

Her most recently published works concern the effects of tax structures on long-run economic growth, and she holds a research and teaching appointment at the University of California, Berkeley.

Student Life sat down with Romer to talk about tax structures, government spending and the economic policy issues that will face our generation.

Q&A With former Obama economic adviser Christina Romer

In light of this past weekend’s threat of government shutdown, can Congress pass a budget that will allow the U.S. to move forward and strengthen the economy?

The fact that last year’s budget was so hard to settle makes me nervous, because the questions that are looming are much bigger—they’re about the long-run deficit, about what we’re going to do about revenues and about what’s going to happen to entitlement spending on things like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security. What makes me optimistic is that we are finally talking about the long-run budget problem.

It seems like bargaining between political parties isn’t the most efficient way of arriving at a good outcome. Having worked in Washington, what is your level of faith in our political process? Should we leave policy decisions up to Congress?

Democracy is messy—isn’t that what we often say? It’s not always pretty and the debates are not always at the highest level. I do still think it’s the best way we have to make decisions.

My generation’s coming of age has been characterized culturally and politically by a rapid growth in income inequality since the 1980s. What needs to be done or should be done to reverse that process, and what is plausible for us to see in our lifetimes in terms of that inequality being repaired?

The most fundamental [change] is to make people more equal in terms of their opportunities and their starting point when they enter the labor force. Dealing with educational disparities across communities and making sure that every child has the option of a good education and going to college.

And then I think something we haven’t talked about enough as a country is the role of progressive taxation—that part of the way that you deal with inequality is to tax people more at the top of the income distribution. That was reversed during the Bush administration. That’s something that I certainly don’t agree with, and I know the President thinks that letting taxes go up at the top of the distribution makes sense not only from a macroeconomic standpoint, but also I’m sure from an equality standpoint.

What would you say needs to be in place culturally for that kind of progressive taxation to be supported by a majority of Americans?

What I think is interesting is if you looked at the studies, the majority of Americans were supportive of letting taxes for high-income earners go up. So I think most Americans do see that as sensible policy, especially as our budget deficits become more severe over time. But I think policymakers definitely have a role to play. You referred to culture—we need people out there saying that this is sensible policy. Part of making the case is saying that we’re not talking about going up to very high numbers or what you might see in European countries. We’re talking about going back to what we had during the Reagan years or the Clinton years—times when the economy was doing very well.

What is the most important economic issue for students to be aware of and how should they deal with it after graduating?

Let me start with a short-run issue, which is how important it is to get the unemployment rate down. That’s not just important for students finding jobs—it’s important for everything from our social cohesion to our level of growth to our budget deficit.

But the broader picture that everyone needs to be thinking about is how do we as a country, at least on the economic level, continue to grow and get stronger so that our best days are in front of us and not behind us. The main thing that you’ll hear economists say there is that it’s all about investments—from firms’ investments to investments in education to the government’s investments in basic scientific research. It’s all of those things that matter for our long run health as an economy. I’d love it if a whole new generation of voters took that long-run approach—instead of cutting everything, to preserve the government spending that will make us richer and stronger in the future.

Michelle Nahmad | Student Life

Rachel never formally or informally accused the male student in question of rape, but many of the comments that have been posted on Studlife.com since the article’s publication would suggest that Rachel committed the most heinous of crimes by telling her story.

What those who commented on the article—particularly male students—seemed to be afraid of is a culture in which any male who takes a female home under the influence of alcohol can be accused of rape the next day, regardless of what she says immediately before sex takes place. And in turn, they seemed to fear that spreading dialogue about rape and labeling what happened to Rachel in these terms would in some way tarnish the “hookup culture” that many Washington University students partake in.

More than anything, I think the comments demonstrate that hooking up involves quite a bit of grey area and zones of comfort that vary immensely from individual to individual. And in any situation that involves such shades of gray, dialogue is especially important. Definitions of what the word “rape” implies may vary, but a larger point has been lost in this conversation: We need to talk about hooking up and we need to talk about sexual assault. Regardless of whether or not we feel that Rachel was “raped,” we need to spark conversation about how we each individually define the forced manipulation of a comfort zone.

Some of the students and alumni who commented on the article seemed to feel that Rachel was at fault for getting drunk to the point of blacking out—that she should be blamed for what happened to her. This is particularly dangerous language. We ought not to speak of rape in terms of “fault” and “blame,” because we all collectively inhabit the social fabric that allows stories like Rachel’s to take place. We are each responsible for perpetuating a culture in which we are too embarrassed to discuss our definitions of consent and will admonish a girl for telling a story that, regardless of its objective facts, involves a lot of subjective hurt and guilt. These are emotions worth listening to, and both hearing them and preventing them from happening to others is not only within our purview as members of her community, but also within our zone of responsibility.

And it may be said that all we really need to do is listen. We need to ask questions and get answers about comfort and emotion from whichever sexual partners we have, regardless of whether we court them romantically or take them home from Morgan Street. We need to seek consent if it’s not offered, and respect when it is not—and we need to do so whether we are men or women, drunk or sober or in the gray area in between.

Formal and legal definitions and accusations aren’t the point. The point is to take responsibility for what we do, in both action and dialogue.

WU-SLam placed second to Macalester College in the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI), beating out 36 other collegiate poetry slam teams from across the nation. The competition was hosted at the University of Michigan.

WU-SLam’s team for the competition, which consisted of seniors Naia Ferguson, Gerald Jackson and Aaron Samuels and freshmen Josh Aiken and Tabia Yapp, was undefeated until the final round, despite competing against champions from last year and the year before in preliminary rounds.

The team also won “Best Performance Team” for the second year in a row.

“The competition is a fun part of what we do, but the highlight is being part of a national spoken word community,” said Samuels, who co-founded WU-SLam in 2008. “Teams were coming up to us, asking how we do our thing, swapping stories about what it is like to run movements on respective campuses.”

Washington University’s team also received support from its home community. Approximately 20 students from the University traveled to Ann Arbor to support the team.

“As an artist, it’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced, ever. Everyone there just really had passion for the craft,” Yapp said. “We had a lot of late nights and a lot of early mornings, but it was definitely all worth it, especially being one of the few freshmen there.”

Team members say that this year’s competition was the culmination of three years of hard work and dedication.

“Every year, WU-SLam has grown and become stronger,” Samuels said. “I know that we have one of the strongest spoken word communities at a local level, and it’s great to know that we are officially being recognized as one of the best programs in the country.”

This is a practical answer that attempts to justify the choice of an impractical major, but I think there are things within it that make sense. I am an adamant believer in the notion that the study of words helps us to relate to others, to understand our own positions, goals and desires—in short, to make sense of the world around us. But I also think that at Washington University, and no doubt at other elite institutions of higher education, that the model by which the humanities are taught has largely abandoned that higher purpose.

In any given literature class at Wash. U., student performance is evaluated primarily by papers—typically, five-to-12 page beasts that require a fair amount of thought and observation and ask for a coherent argument about the texts in question. Students here generally put a significant amount of work into these papers, often taking several nights in the library to write them. And oftentimes when I hear the theses of papers my friends have written, I’m blown away by their creativity, piqued with enough curiosity to want to read their papers and alter my own argument on the basis of what they’ve said.

But sharing our papers is not a model that we’re taught to abide by—in fact, I would imagine that the American university system pegs sharing your thesis with a friend who’s writing the same paper as some latent variety of plagiarism. We are taught, instead, to print our papers out and turn them in silently after expending hours of time and energy on literary analysis. Generally, the only person exposed to our work is a professor, and generally, we get it back with a few check marks, a letter grade and some fairly succinct comments.

And even if these comments weren’t succinct, we wouldn’t be able to do much with them: As soon as we get one paper back, we’re already thinking about how to write the next one. Despite the amount of thought and energy we’ve put into our analyses, we are rarely given room for revision or expansion—requirements that could broaden our understandings significantly.

The scope of what we discuss in class and write about, too, often means that we are not learning from what we read the way we could. As human beings, we’re inclined to read not because we want to look for an author’s technique or find obscure allusions in his work, but because we want to better understand our lives and the lives of those around us. We ought to be reading not for canonical or historical significance, but for meaning. We ought to be looking both inward at ourselves and outward at the world, not sideways at what a host of literary critics have already said.

I understand that at some level of higher education, solo research papers in the humanities may be necessary. For graduate students, it may make sense to perform a careful analysis of criticism. But at the undergraduate level, I would ask humanities departments at the University to consider changing their model of instruction by allowing students to write papers in groups or pairs, by focusing class discussions on the moral and ethical debates or on the emotional meaning contained within the texts and by shifting focus to expansion and revision of already-generated papers.

Perhaps that sounds easy, or perhaps it sounds soft. The humanities have tried for a long time to avoid being seen as soft by the hard sciences with whom they share a university. Let’s face it: Done well, the humanities aren’t easy to study, but they are, unavoidably, soft. The study of human meaning and purpose isn’t rigid, and I don’t see a problem with allowing it its softness.

A popular student-run website was taken down after its host claimed that it used copyrighted material illegally.

Wash U Photo Captions, a blog started by senior Alex Christensen, has garnered up to 1,000 page views per day since its debut last December.

But on Tuesday morning, Christensen received an email from Tumblr, the microblogging platform used to host his site, saying that Wash U Photo Captions had been taken down because it used images copyrighted by Washington University.

Christensen is fighting back with claims that his blog used the images as parody. Legally, parodies are exempted from restrictions on copyrighted material.

“The point of a parody is that you want it to be as much a copy of the original as possible in order to make fun of the original expression,” said Denise Lieberman, an adjunct professor at the University and practicing St. Louis lawyer. “Saturday Night Live is a perfect example of this; so is Weird Al Yankovic.”

Wash U Photo Captions gives new, humorous captions to the background photos from the official Washington University website. The image on the official website is changed daily and depicts various aspects of life and education at the University.

For example, on March 25, the University’s official caption for a photo of students sticking their heads out of the Ridgley arches was “Students find fun in the beautiful Ridgley arcade. The university’s 11,834 full-time students and nearly 2,100 part-time students come to Washington University and to St. Louis from all over the nation and world.”

Christensen’s caption? “After WUPD had to break up several disputes started over what it means to be ‘found,’ philosophy graduate students were banned from playing Hide and Go Seek in Brookings Quadrangle.”

Though there has been no direct communication between Christensen and the administration, Christensen thinks that the University sent a cease-and-desist letter to Tumblr asking for the blog to be shut down—a phenomenon that, legal experts say, is not uncommon.

“It’s easy for large institutions to bully the little guy, especially when the little guy’s content doesn’t reflect well on them,” said Scott Granneman, an adjunct professor of law at the University.

Phone calls from Student Life to the Office of General Counsel were not returned Tuesday afternoon.

Granneman speculated that the University is likely making a Digital Millenium Copyright Act claim. Under this law, online service providers such as Tumblr can be held liable if they are found to be hosting illegal uses of copyrighted material. As a result, Granneman says, hosts such as Tumblr, Blogspot and YouTube often act instantaneously upon receipt of a notice.

“These hosting companies often shoot first and ask questions later. A lot of them will react directly without asking questions. I’d say that Tumblr isn’t doing a responsible job of looking into this,” Granneman said.

Granneman added that Christensen should be able to continue to maintain the site, especially if he adds a notice stating that the blog’s use of copyrighted material is done exclusively for the purpose of parody and that the blog has no affiliation with the University.

However, it is possible that Wash U Photo Captions may not fall under the legal definition of parody because Christensen’s captions often pose alternative meanings for the University’s photos instead of amplifying their initial expressed meanings.

Regardless of the University’s role in shutting it down, Christensen hopes that he will be able to reinstate the site in the near future.

“I’m just really disappointed that it’s been taken down,” Christensen said. “I think it’s useful to have something that is openly mocking about the student experience at this university because that’s really something that people can be open about and reflect on. This is a place where we share ideas, and the University has presumably come in and tried to shut that off.”

Students say that they’ll miss Christensen’s captions. “Wash U Photo Captions gave character to the University’s formulaic and hokey pictures of a lab coat-clad professor and a student pointing at a computer screen in unison. I’m sad to see it go,” sophomore Peter Birke said.

Christensen said that the site brought a newfound sense of irony to what many students consider the University’s inferiority complex.

“We’ve become a really important institution in the past 20 years or so, and we’re still coming to grips with that. A lot of people here think that Wash. U. is a great school, but there’s still something in them that makes them think it’s not as good,” Christensen said. “The University is very self-conscious about its image, and accordingly, it has this brand new website with these photos that are a little silly and corny. Wash U Photo Captions brought out the humor in that.”

Correction: In the original posting of this article, it was reported that Scott Branneman is an adjunct professor of law at Washington University. The professor’s last name is Granneman. Student Life regrets the error.

Josh Goldman | Student Life

Alyssa Beebe, left, and Margaret Tudor, right, dance, while other members of Boomshaka, the student drum, dance and rhythm ensemble from Northwestern University, keep the beat outside the Danforth University Center on Tuesday afternoon. The group decided to spend their spring break at a friend’s house in St. Louis and came to the University to lighten the mood during midterms.

Matt Mitgang

U.S. Reps. Russ Carnahan (D-St. Louis) at left and Jo Ann Emerson (R-Cape Girardeau), the two co-chairs of the Center Aisle Caucus, joined Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay (D-St. Louis) on campus Thursday in a conversation about how to make political discourse more civil.

U.S. Reps. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Cape Girardeau), Russ Carnahan (D-St. Louis) and William Lacy Clay (D-St. Louis) told a public forum in the Knight Center that the way politicians interact with one another holds major implications across political culture—from environmental policy to congressional potlucks.

And they said part of an increased lack of civility in politics stems from an increasingly polarized and sensationalistic news media.

“The media gives too much attention to negativity and fighting and not enough to conversations like this one,” Carnahan told the audience at the discussion, which was sponsored by the Danforth Center on Religion & Politics.

Civility in politics—or a lack thereof—has entered the national spotlight since U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) was shot and wounded severely during a public appearance in January.

In opening the panel, moderator Wayne Fields, the center’s founding director and a professor of English at Washington University, pointed to the recent shooting as a catalyst for the representatives’ conversation. But he also cited something more deeply ingrained in American culture—“a widely expressed longing for a more civil society, one in which our behavior is consistent with our most fundamental religious and civic values.”

Carnahan and Emerson are the co-chairs of the Center Aisle Caucus, a forum founded in 2005 to build relationships between members of both parties. They said the shooting had delivered a major wake-up call, one that made the caucus’s mission more important than ever.

Emerson emphasized the importance of a culture of civility within Congress, citing her close personal friendship with U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) and the weekly potlucks she hosts on Sundays for a group of five couples that include members of Congress from both sides of the aisle.

“I’ve learned how not to judge people based on how they vote,” Emerson said. “We have conversations about family and faith….Quite frankly, I love not talking politics.”

Emerson recounted a time when she and Wasserman Schultz appeared on the MSNBC show “Hardball” with Chris Matthews. Emerson said she and her friend managed to remain civil on the show, despite what she perceived as Matthews’ effort to incite a heated debate between the two. “I think it should be our responsibility to promote [civility] on those shows,” she said.

When Fields asked about the fast and often contentious pace of today’s media and the role of social media in democratic politics, the representatives responded that new media has become a powerful tool—but added that it has its limitations.

“People in new media, they tend to be self-selecting information that they don’t agree with, and a lot of times they’re not seeing the broader part of the debate,” Carnahan said. “Still, we’re seeing [new media] topple dictators and military forces across North Africa….We need to be involved in that. In democracy, it’s a tremendous tool.”

When Fields asked about the current protests in Madison over public-union rights legislation and about how to tackle hard issues with civility, all three representatives cited conversations they’d had in Congress about health care.

Emerson said open forums in Congress started by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) have helped encourage civil dialogue on the issue.

But all three added that the civil parts of the debate over health-care reform in the previous Congress were overridden by contention, especially as the process was portrayed by the media.

“The process itself really got demonized throughout,” Carnahan said.

Senior Toby Shepard said that attending the event broadened her perspective on the way politicians interact.

“I thought it was interesting,” Shepard said. “I didn’t feel that any of them said anything particularly concrete or groundbreaking, and they didn’t necessarily do much in the way of coming up with solutions, but they definitely brought up important issues.”

Sophomore Anna Appelbaum agreed.

“As someone who considers herself to be very liberal, [I thought] it was especially interesting to listen to Jo Ann Emerson speak,” Applebaum said. “It drove home for me the point that civil discourse is incredibly important. Seeing her say things that I could agree with really spoke to what this entire event was trying to accomplish.”

Courtesy of Lukas Liquor Superstore

Located about 30 minutes west of Washington University in Ellisville, Mo., Lukas Liquor aims to make itself worth the trip, according to Shelby Durham, a spirits and beer consultant at the store.

“Since we’re in the boonies, we know that our customers will really be venturing out here for the store. We’re kind of geared towards a higher-end clientele that wants more than just the mainstream stuff,” Durham said. “We sell pretty much everything, and we’re for all kinds of customers, but our stuff is definitely unique.”

The store offers the services of five wine consultants, five beer experts, four spirit advisers and one cigar expert. Customers can pick their own six-packs of beer from the store’s hundreds of options, and the store offers over 50 different varieties of kegs, available for orders upon request.

Lukas can be an educational experience in different brands and varieties of liquor, with everything from obscure foreign beers to whiskeys from small Midwestern distilleries.

According to Durham, customer service is a priority, and the store attracts many regulars. Owner Gary Bilder has worked in retail since the age of 15 and practices a “customer is always number one” philosophy.

“They were fantastic,” said senior Brett Simon, who visited the store last month. “They offered to help get our many bottles of liquor and beer out to the car. I thought it was very helpful and very classy.”

Despite the adult nature of the store, the owners maintain a family-friendly environment. Lukas is located next door to a Chuck E. Cheese’s, and there are lollipops at the checkout for children of all ages.

And despite the store’s high-end selection, prices are low. Durham said that managers scout prices in the area about once a month to ensure that prices are always kept lower than those at local supermarkets, such as Schnuck’s and Dierberg’s, and other liquor stores.

For Wash. U. students, the novelty is what makes the trip worthwhile.

“It was more about the social experience of going all the way out there and sharing the experience of being in the biggest liquor store I’ve ever seen with some good friends,” Simon said. “The experience can be overwhelming, but that’s also the beauty of it.”

With additional reporting by Hana Schuster.