The demonstration included students dressed up as Soviet guards or prisoners and a faux gulag made of two-by-fours and chicken wire. Participants played the Soviet national anthem and gave speeches against capitalism and Washington University, a “tool of the capitalists.” We found the gulag offensive on all counts, which was its aim in trying to show “the realities of socialism,” according to Dirk Doebler, president of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL). The language in the speeches was irate but unclear, and we felt that the demonstration trivialized and misrepresented the actual human rights violations that took place at Soviet gulags.

But while YAL could have handled their message better, so could the University. YAL has the right to free speech on this campus, and the University must ensure that its communication about policies is crystal clear. Multiple University administrators used multiple reasons for telling the group to take down their structure, including an art installation policy, an amplified noise policy and, finally, the idea that the structure itself was not safe. But Doebler asserts that the group filled out paperwork beforehand, reserving the space in front of the Women’s Building for the protest. They checked the amplified-sound policy, as well as the banner and ad policies. After not finding any outdoor policies that restricted building—other than a regulation that applied specifically to Bowles Plaza—the group built their structure.

The official position of the administration, according to an e-mail sent out the day after the demonstration, is that the gulag was dismantled because of safety reasons and because the students had not alerted the administration that they were planning on a constructed installation. But the administrators did not approach the group until three hours into its demonstration. And if safety was the administration’s main concern, we have to ask why the University deemed it unsafe to construct the gulag and unsafe to keep it erected but nevertheless told the group to take down the gulag themselves instead of charging them and hiring professionals to dismantle it.

We understand that regulations regarding protests are necessary and advisable. We have no problem with rules regarding the safety of structures on campus—in fact, we appreciate the regulatory efforts that the University has made toward making ThurtenE construction safer. Our confusion stems from the University’s paradoxical concern over the students’ safety and the fact that a firm regulation was never invoked. Video shows a University official admitting that he cannot explain where to find the art installation policy. The administrator who shut down the demonstration is heard on camera saying that she does not have proof of an art installation regulation on her, but is willing to show the student in her office or send the policy via e-mail. Doebler asked that a copy of these regulations be e-mailed to him but, has not yet received a copy.

This is where the real problem lies: Students need easy access to policies that affect their lives on campus, especially those that could be potentially be interpreted to block their rights of free speech.

When asked if the students had a right to be there, one administrator answered, “We’ll see.” The existence of a right should not be contingent on the safety of the structure that seeks to manifest it, and students should have the right to demonstrate regardless of the political nature of their protest. If student demonstrations are to be governed by rules and regulations, these policies need to be easily accessible, and the University administration must be able and willing to explain them.

(Kelsey Eng | Student Life)

Oh, yeah! It’s that time of the year. Christmas ads start to taunt you through the television screen. Hanukkah ads don’t exist. Nor do those for anything else really. The generic “Happy Holidays” reigns supreme. Turkeys start gobbling knowing that their short and fairly meaningless lives are going to end in the culmination of their entire purpose: to feed an entire nation on one day. Poor, poor turkeys.

Luckily for you, the rest of this article will not be adding to your holiday cheer. This is a more ominous look at the wondrous holiday that is our Thanksgiving. Rather, this is an introspective look at the madness that ensues prior to our departure for Thanksgiving break. On top of the irony of celebrating a holiday in which we spread horrible diseases to the native population and stole their food, which they taught us to grow, there is still more to learn about the dark side of the onset of the holiday season.

Problem number one: The most important and all-consuming spectacle of Olin Library. Over the normal course of the semester, Olin is a quiet refuge for timely and efficient study. But hell hath no fury like the last two weeks of a semester at Wash. U., and the library becomes a black hole of soul-sucking depression. The blank faces of student zombies wandering the B-stacks in search of scholarly sustenance are enough evidence to bring in the Ghostbusters. Someone revive us!

If I could be so bold as to suggest that a student would prefer not to spend every waking moment either in class, slaving over a paper or studying for an exam, would I be venturing too far? Caffeine-infused binges and furious attempts to finish projects leave us rattled and crying for the days of pre-school. How I yearn for block-building, naptime and a refreshing glass of apple juice.

It has gotten to the point, at least for me, where the library has become the antithesis of productivity. It is incredibly difficult for me to enter the library and set myself to work, solely because the environment is near poisonous. There has been no change of scenery at all, and I suspect this applies to a few others as well. The reason I say this is because at this time of the year, there are so many people crammed into cubicles that the Internet crashes. Screw library bandwidth. What about our mental bandwidth?

Granted, I am bloviating and spewing hyperbole all over the place like Mount Vesuvius, but I needed to fill a column with something in the midst of my scholastic marathon that will hopefully culminate prior to the break. Why not rant and rave like a lunatic if you don’t know what else to write about? Perhaps it is a waste of your time and of ink and paper. Perhaps it irritates you. Such are the petty inconsistencies in life. One day you’re curled up in the fetal position after writing 30 pages of papers; the next you’re feasting on cranberry sauce and turkey legs. Are those parallel? Not really. One could argue that they are both feasts—one literal, one scholarly—but who cares? Inevitably you will partake in both. Have a Happy Thanksgiving!
Charlie is a sophomore in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at chlow@wustl.edu.

I don’t like people to have bad working conditions. It makes them feel unhappy and lowers their productivity. However it is completely wrong to think, as many have been led to believe, that boycotting firms that don’t provide stellar working conditions is the best way to go about helping the workers. It’s quite the opposite actually: If you stop funding a company’s operations, in the short-run upper management will have to cut back on operations. How do they go about doing this? They fire workers. If you’re a laborer who has just landed a job on a farm paying a minimal wage and you intend to send money home to care for your family, getting fired would be pretty bad. Yet, when your company is being boycotted, that’s exactly what will happen.

Sweatshop labor is not ideal. It’s not even good. In fact, it’s pretty lousy. However the most important fact to realize is that a bad job with poor working conditions is, for destitute immigrant workers, far better than being stuck without a job and no source of income. In reality, Bon Appétit is hurting the workers it claims to be siding with.

I think that both the general public and the Washington University community should question the motives of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, as well as those of the group’s supporters. The CIW is trying to lure tomato farmers onto their program of supposedly “fair” wages and labor practices. Twelve lines of MacBeth will remind you: “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” Perhaps Shakespeare wasn’t speaking directly about tomato cartels, but the skepticism about supposed intentions is relevant nonetheless. Under the misleading guise of an “anti-slavery” campaign, the CIW is trying to get farms to sign on to their plan that will supposedly improve labor conditions.

The issue most relevant to the tomato debate is not labor. It’s the resulting price increases on food that come with the CIW’s plan. By imposing excessive conditions on farms, production costs will rise significantly. This in turn translates into a price increase. For every produce farm that signs on to the CIW’s scheme, the price of food will go up a little bit more. What about the poorest workers now out of a job? They can’t afford the more expensive food. The CIW seems counterintuitive, no?

To sum it up, Bon Appétit’s supporting the Coalition of Immokalee workers will have two results. Their cessation of tomato purchases will force farms lay off workers. In addition, Bon Appétit putting its weight behind the absurd premises of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers will give the movement more momentum, absorbing more farms into the mix and raising the prices of food. Before buying into the ridiculous “anti-slavery” story and supporting a tomato boycott, you should ask yourself: In a weak economy, do we really want to put people out of work, cut the food supply, and raise the prices of essential produce? I personally think that cutting jobs and raising prices on food is a deplorable idea. You, however, should make up your own mind.

Richard is a junior in Business. He can be reached via e-mail at richard.markel@gmail.com.

As we move into the professional world, accompanied by worries about interviews and making good impressions, we sometimes forget the social Internet footprint that we leave. We’ve all read articles about how some people mess up on online social sites like Facebook and MySpace, and later we tell ourselves that we are not stupid enough to do such things. But upon closer inspection, most of us have some incriminating photos or videos which can definitely come back to haunt in the future. How can we prevent this in a society where we feel a need to put ourselves out there with programs like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube?

More importantly, we should take a closer look at the direction our generation’s society is going in. In this day and age, information that we put on the Internet can be a double-edged sword: We are easier to contact, but that means our info is also easy to find. But you say, “I only use social networking sites for staying in contact with people.” How many of your Facebook friends do you actually stay in communication with? (And no, an occasional “Happy B-day” post or a “Like” does not count).

We seem to be getting closer to one another technologically, but we are getting farther from each other regarding social correspondences. E-mails to friends are rare and written letters are almost never seen nowadays, yet we see a constant need to add more people on our social networks so that we can “remember” them.

Still, there are worse things out there than Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Remember the good old days when you had to have an AIM account or another instant messaging account to meet random people in chat room? Now, sites like Omegle enable us to start a conversation immediately without any input of information. My curiosity got the better of me when I checked out the site, and I began a conversation with a stranger. The ease with which we can meet strangers online today is extremely disturbing, but paired with the fact that we put our info out in cyberspace, they increase the danger of information falling into the wrong hands.

In the end, we still have enough of decency and sanity to realize that social networking programs are tools for safe enjoyment. However, Wash. U. students tend to forget that we live in a bubble that does not exist in the real world. So remember, as you leave the bubble to seek outside jobs, click the “remove tag” button on that photo that you barely remember taking of you kissing a Ronald McDonald statue.

Aditya is a junior in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at asarvesh@artsci.wustl.edu.

I think it’s safe to assume that most people take Limbaugh’s rant with a heavy grain of salt, just as most people differentiate between the humor and the politics in “The Colbert Report.” I do think that Limbaugh has a point, and that he brings a voice to the political arena that should be taken seriously. However, while I think many people have no problem digging through Limbaugh’s outlandish rhetoric to the underlying political point, the problem is that an equal number of people just don’t get it and actually take him seriously.

The result? There are several: OBAMA as an acronym (Oppressive Bloodsucking Arrogant Muslim Alien), slogans such as “The Anti-Christ is living in the White House” and even children as young as 10 years proudly flaunting t-shirts with slogans such as “The cure for Obama communism is a new era of McCarthyism.” The most disturbing part, as I found out personally while driving through Kentucky over the weekend, is that these people actually believe what they are saying.

Of course, this isn’t to say that only Republicans partake in this kind of extremism without actually knowing what they’re talking about. I’m positive that depending on the state, one could find all sorts of similar examples. The point I’m making is not to demonize the Republican Party or any aspects thereof, but rather to raise the question: who are we to blame? Do we blame the polemical pundits, who use hyperbole to make a point but are taken at face value? Or, do we blame the people for being idiotic enough to use those slogans and wear those T-shirts? After all, I am positive that a 10-year-old who was born after the Gulf War—let alone the Vietnam War—has no idea what McCarthyism was really like, and it’s just as unlikely that his parents appreciated the impact of the McCarthy era.

Ultimately, I think that the blame lies with all of us—we value entertainment more than we value factual accuracy. After all, it’s much more entertaining to watch an angry conservative rant and insult the Left, or a liberal comedian making fun of the Right, than it is to listen to the encyclopedic facts.

The problem, however, is that regardless of how hard it is to stomach, what we actually need is simply that: just the facts. Sure, facts can be manipulated; we need to be aware of the biases within any statistics, and at times we need to question their presentation and challenge their authority. As it stands, however, almost anything is an improvement from the butchered set of political commentaries that we have today. Hopefully one day we’ll be able to look back at extreme acts like Limbaugh’s and take them for what they are: jokes.

AJ is a sophomore in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at asundar@wustl.edu.

Though the incident has become funny, I still found myself waiting for two hours at the City of Clayton Municipal Court to pay my tickets last night, nervous about the two assignments I had to turn in today. When my name was finally called, the judge informed me that I would be getting four points on my license, and that I could reduce the number to two if I took 20 hours of driving school.

I thought realistically about the next six weeks of my life—Thanksgiving, incessant paper-writing, cramming for finals, Christmas and then a semester abroad—and immediately shook my head. “No time,” I said, “I’m sorry.” The judge raised her eyebrows. “Your insurance will go up, you know.”

I nodded—my parents, I was sure, would understand that I don’t have time for traffic school—and walked over to pay my ticket. As I handed the clerk a credit card, I glanced over at the woman next to me. Clad in the nylon jacket of a low-wage security guard, she was telling the judge, her eyes downcast, that she needed a little more time to be able to pay her ticket—that she was working, but supporting a family, and couldn’t apply for any more loans.

A security guard at a parking garage makes $10 an hour at most, and at a salary of $400 a week, it’s no wonder that this woman couldn’t afford to pay $100 for a traffic ticket. I looked around the room again and realized that almost everyone in the courtroom—in Clayton, easily the wealthiest part of St. Louis—looked similarly destitute. When you have to live off minimum wage, it’s hard to justify paying an extra $200 to get your ticket “fixed,” and you go to your court date.

Describing people as “destitute” implies that I can mark someone’s appearance as a signal of a certain socioeconomic class, and this is perhaps what jolted me about my experience in the courtroom last night. At Wash. U., we live in a world that looks, for all practical purposes, very different from the socioeconomic world around us. We take classes where we learn what poverty looks like in America; we discuss structuring tax policy based on the writings of modern political theorists; we subject welfare programs to cost-benefit analyses. But we do this all under the protective umbrella of an institution that costs $45,000 a year and requires a measure of outside support to attend.

What hit me the most about what happened last night was that seeing that woman struggle to pay her ticket shouldn’t have been strange to me. In high school, I had a series of low-wage jobs, from bagging groceries to waiting tables, and my co-workers were often living evidence of the experiences that accompany American poverty. But I, like almost everyone here, have parents who—though perturbed at my abysmal driving—would bail me out if and when I needed to swipe away my ticket, and it made me realize something. In this environment, we get so used to our shared sets of comforts that we often forget that small privileges, like an extra $100 for a traffic ticket, are not universal.

When I returned to campus, I bought coffee at the library in preparation for a long night of studying, and the girl in front of me in the Whispers line snapped at the woman serving her cappuccino for calling her order loudly after the girl didn’t hear her the first two times. This would have troubled me ordinarily, but as it stood, I was infuriated. No one who stands for hours making coffee deserves to be snapped at.

We need to recognize the miniscule scale of our struggles here—for grades or “leadership” or “success” or whatever—and face the fact that these worries are small compared to those of a single mother supporting a family on $400 a week. And we need to recognize that people who face these struggles are the ones serving our coffee or our dinner, taking out our garbage or planting our much-lauded tulips. We may live in a bubble, but we need to recognize—and seek—a real awareness of the world outside of it.

Kate is a junior in Arts & Sciences. She can be reached via e-mail at kate.gaertner@studlife.com.

(Snow Powers | Student Life)

The American dream is that you can come into this country with nothing, get an education, start a business and a family, and live in comfort all by the sweat of your brow. Those who make it in life do so by their hard work and determination, and, conversely, those who do not make it in life fail by their laziness and lack of ambition.

This American dream is just that: a dream. There are people who live it out, but they always have a story about a break they got: the loan they received that paid for their night school, or the job that they got because of sitting next to a manager on the subway. All of our lives are ruled by chance and circumstance, and we ought to admit it: Many of us are here because we were born into the right families.

In Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, “Nickel and Dimed,” she tries to live out the American dream. She moves to a city where she knows no one and tries to make a life without using her college education, repeating this upheaval several times. The problems she encounters cannot be overcome through working harder, and she must always catch a break in order to be financially solvent. In some cities, she does not even catch a break, and ends up unable to break even despite her hard work.

As Wash. U. students, we worked hard to get here, but we need to stop looking down our noses at people who are not here or did not go to college. Many intelligent people are kept out of college because they need to care for their families or because they cannot afford to pay the tuition—or for any number of other reasons besides a lack of hard work and determination.

Thinking that we are here simply because we worked hard and others are not simply because they didn’t is naïve and should be avoided. We must keep in mind that we have been able to take many things for granted on our road to college: a stable family, enough money to pay bills, good health, and so on. Some of us have not enjoyed one or any of these things, but all of us have had some form of advantage that enables us to be here.

All of this privilege that we have engenders an obligation to give back to the community. Community service is one way to give back. More importantly, once we have graduated and have made a life, we must make sure that we help others to do the same—others who are less fortunate, in the most literal sense, than us. With our intellect and privilege, we will be able to offer them the breaks they need to achieve the American dream.

Earlier this year, a pregnant woman stood at the intersection of Forsyth and Skinker, holding a cardboard sign and asking for money. Though physically close to our campus, her situation is light-years away from the privileged environment that we inhabit. More than 18,000 people in the St. Louis metropolitan area are homeless, and the municipal government is notorious for its ill treatment of the homeless. In 2004, the ACLU won a lawsuit stating that the police had unfairly and unjustly attempted to remove members of the homeless community here for no reason.

The situation of the St. Louis homeless is easily stated, but difficult—even wrenching—to imagine. To know that it is you who enjoys a college education, relative financial stability, your own bed in November, and they who suffer the unimaginable daily indignities that attend American homelessness, engenders a vexing kind of guilt and shame. The fact that no one deserves what the homeless go through makes you wonder what you did to deserve what you have. Since you’re only a college student, the answer is nothing. So why you and not them? To say anything but “luck” seems like the height of vanity.

It’s no fun thinking like this. That, combined with the problem’s centuries-old recalcitrance, is what makes homelessness an under-examined issue even in as activist a community as Washington University. And this is why the efforts of the students who organized Homelessness Awareness Week are to be commended—all week long, the Student Alliance Against Poverty will be operating a campus-wide food drive with collection depots operating at the DUC, South 40 House, and the Village as well as various spots around campus to take canned food.

Homelessness Awareness Week kicked off with a screening of the documentary film “Tent City” on Tuesday night. Its organizers are also sponsoring two more events this week, a Hunger Banquet Thursday night at 7 p.m. at McMillan Café spotlighting the causes of global hunger, and a Holiday Dinner at the Bridge (run by the Centenary Church of St. Louis), a chance for students to share a meal with the homeless community.

We commend the organizers of Homelessness Awareness Week for the initiative they’ve taken in integrating the Wash. U. community in the struggle against homelessness. We’re going to try to make some of these events, and we hope that you will too. They’re doing a good job, and it’s up to us to ensure that an awareness of the pervasive problems associated with homelessness lasts more than a week. It’s important that we move beyond sponsored events with free food and toward activities that will make an impact—away from empty dialogue that declares homelessness a problem and toward actions that take steps to solving it. To do any different is to make Thanksgiving seem like just another opportunity to ponder the riddle of our own privilege.

That’s why I have decided to come to your rescue with a guide for selecting the perfect summer internship. I’ve managed to find some pretty great internships during my tenure at Wash. U., so I feel somewhat qualified to dispense advice. Keep in mind, however, that I am still just an ordinary student. I am not a career counselor, nor do I have an actual grown-up job. This is not the product of extensive reporting; instead, it’s a bunch of opinions based on my own experience. Take my advice with a full shaker of salt, therefore, and remember that mine is just one opinion out of many.

That said, here are my shiny pearls of wisdom:

1. Look for organizations that value youth. Any company or nonprofit that views young students as future leaders in need of development will be more committed to providing a high-quality learning experience for its interns than organizations that see college students as nothing more than free copy-making drones. These are the organizations that will offer regular lunches or lectures with industry experts, that will ask you to do substantive work, and that will be most willing to answer your questions and help you succeed.

2. Look for organizations with a record of success. There’s nothing wrong with working for an unknown start-up, but when it comes to your summer experiences, you might want to focus on organizations with reputations for being competent leaders in their fields. One of the most important goals of a summer internship is to learn, and therefore it is helpful to seek out knowledgeable teachers. Treat new internship programs or unknown nonprofits with a careful degree of scrutiny.

3. Seek out networking opportunities. Make sure your internship will allow you to meet a range of people, either inside or outside the organization itself. Once your internship begins, seize on every possible pretense to get to know people you find interesting or helpful or maybe even just people who have a pulse. Be sure to collect their contact information and keep in touch. These newly made connections can help keep you from having to read columns like this when searching for your next internship or job.

4. Do not be afraid to be ambitious. Sometimes going after a fantastic internship opportunity means turning down a more guaranteed option. Of course, every situation is different, but if you can, take the risk. We are all still college students; that means that we are still allowed to fail at the whole job-searching thing. Reaching for the more amazing position might be worth the risk of ending up with no internship at all.

5. Do whatever work needs to be done, and do it cheerfully. This applies to the internship itself rather than the search, but it’s still pretty good advice. No matter how great your internship, you will probably still spend quality time hanging out with copy machines or ruining your eyes by staring at spreadsheets. It might not be fun, but doing the little things well will help you earn more exciting projects in the future. Every intern has to do some “intern” work from time to time.

That’s my advice. Take it and watch as all your greatest dreams come true. Ignore it and, well, maybe living in your parents’ basement forever won’t be too bad.

I’m kidding, of course. This advice has served me well so far, but I think an essential part of the internship experience is also collecting pieces of career wisdom for yourself. You might also want to consider stopping by the Career Center and talking to someone with actual expertise.

No matter what you chose to do with your summer, good luck. And don’t worry too much about those relatives; I’ve been telling my parents since freshman year that I’ll probably be living in a box after graduation. It makes it easier to exceed expectations.