Student Life Archives

Over the past week, there has been controversy over the school denying Barack Obama access to campus for a rally this Saturday. I spoke to Jill Carnaghi, assistant vice chancellor for students and director of campus life, briefly today when I saw her in Whispers in order to get a feel for the situation and to squash any rumors.

She told me the school was concerned about being fair to all of the candidates. The school felt they could not logistically provide the opportunity to speak on campus to all of the candidates. OK, great, sounds like a good policy, but what about all the times the school hasn’t been fair and balanced? I remember watching the election returns in November 2006 and looking for the results for the stem cell research ballot measure. I noticed as they were interviewing people who supported the measure, the reception for supporting Amendment 2 was at the Knight Center. That’s right, on campus. Did they anticipate the opposition wanting to reserve space? Hmm, probably not.

OK, you say, the University had a special interest in stem-cell research because it would greatly help our medical research. Correct, but that isn’t the only time the school has been involved with political endeavors. According to opensecrets.org, in the 2006 Senate campaign, the school gave $30,600 to Claire McCaskill, a Democrat. Also, in 2002, the school gave $35,400 to Democrat Jean Carnahan in her Senate race. Poor Republican Jim Talent; he ran in both races and even went to Wash. U. but was given nothing. Too bad I didn’t dig deeper, I’m sure I would have found tons of other donations. So, we’ve established that the school is uber-excited about giving Democrats money, but that still doesn’t change the fact that the school doesn’t want to get involved this round because they may have to provide a facility to everyone.

On Monday, Chelsea Clinton paid a visit to St. Louis by visiting a site at UMSL and stopping by Kayak’s at the corner of Skinker and Forest Park Parkway for a campaign rally. According to the school’s Web site, they own the building that Kayak’s is in: www.wustl.edu/tour/danforth. In case you didn’t catch that, I just told you that the Clinton campaign made a stop on the property of Washington University in St. Louis, not to be confused with University of Washington or the George Washington University.

The event on Monday has opened the Pandora’s Box of opportunities for candidates to speak on campus, the same box the administration was trying not to open. What happened to the days when the school was concerned for educating its students politically?

This year’s election is important to hundreds of students on campus, so why not open the dialogue for students to compare the candidates? What happened to the days of canceling finals for the students to protest Vietnam in Forest Park? I hope each and every one of you who is outraged contact the administration. I look forward to seeing Barack Obama on Saturday, regardless of the venue he ends up eventually choosing. Hopefully, the school will realize its mistake and make our lives easier.

William is a junior in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail [email protected].

As a New Hampshire resident and voter, I take issue with Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld’s editorial regarding the electoral system. Yes-something is fundamentally wrong with the way our country votes. However, I don’t think that my “colder, whiter” state (as both Steinert-Threlkeld and Jon Stewart noted) is the root of the problem. When I was home for the summer, I had the opportunity to see three candidates speak (Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Barack Obama and Governor Bill Richardson) and could have seen several others. The buzz about Richardson was on equal footing with the other candidates-no one really knew who was going to be the nominee. Until the debates and intense media coverage began, that is.

The media and debate moderators directed the vast majority of their attention to the “big three”-Clinton, Obama and Edwards. The remaining candidates had to fight to answer debate questions, and they were scarcely mentioned in the press. Ridiculous coverage of ridiculous events dominated the political news and entirely distracted people from the main campaign issues. (A female candidate has cleavage? Is Obama really black enough? How much does Edwards’ hair really cost?) Did it matter to CNN that Senator Biden had an entirely original plan for Iraq? Did it matter that Richardson had successfully negotiated with Saddam Hussein and between Israelis and Palestinians? Did it matter that there was far more to Congressman Dennis Kucinich than being a goofy liberal?

Apparently not. So, what I knew when the time came for me to vote over winter break was that Richardson was far behind in the polls and that Obama, Clinton and Edwards were extremely close.

Shortly after the Iowa caucus, I had an interesting conversation with a Kucinich campaign worker that may shed light on the way New Hampshire votes. When he asked about my voting plans, I explained that, in light of the probable distribution of votes, it was more important to me to try to keep Clinton from being the nominee (with a vote for Obama) than to cast a vote for Richardson which would be essentially useless. The campaign worker laughed, and said, “I figured I would work for the candidate I prefer and vote for the candidate I think is electable.” Had the media and polls stayed out of the race, I think results in Iowa and New Hampshire could have been very different. If all of the original candidates had been given equal respect by the news, perhaps they ALL could have emerged from the New Hampshire primary as “electable.”

Steinert-Threlkeld offers several alternatives to our current system. I have a few more. First, spread the primary out more. Don’t make people cast votes for a candidate 10 months before the actual election. This gives all candidates time to articulate their stances, gives the media ample time to report these stances and gives voters the necessary time to mull them over. Second, get polls out of politics. As we all saw after New Hampshire-the polls were (and are frequently) wrong. I answered questions for polls back in July-I changed my mind in the intermittent six months. My father didn’t decide on his candidate until the day before the primary. There is simply too much power given to statisticians playing the number game, and they shouldn’t get to choose who the president is.

Finally, the way we actually cast votes is flawed. Having the ability to rank candidates on a ballot would have allowed that Kucinich campaign worker to support his candidate of conscience and someone “electable.” New Hampshire voters are generally very well-informed and have listened to or interacted with a startling array of candidates. The electoral system may be flawed, and New Hampshire voters may have an exaggerated voice in the country’s election, but that voice is one we take very, very seriously.

Erin is a sophomore in Arts & Sciences. She can be reached via e-mail [email protected].

Scott Bressler

Here’s a story (hypothetical): Kid writes stupid, sexist, racist or whateverist letter to the editor to Student Life because he thinks it is funny. It gets laughs from some of the more cretinish persons on campus. Kid goes to class and acts dumb for a couple of years. Kid gets to senior year, graduates, and starts looking for a job. Kid Googles himself and finds this ridiculous letter to the editor he wrote a couple years ago. Kid thinks said letter is a poor way to represent himself to the employing community and tries to get Student Life to take it off the Internet.

Poor kid, right? Similar situations have been brought up in the Sweeney household back in Cincinnati, and my dad makes this argument: People change; a person shouldn’t get destroyed for the things they do when they are stupid and young. His case in point is a good one. Some kids like playing with fire (don’t we all), so they decide to build a small bomb and blow up some playhouse in one of the kids’ backyards. They videotape it. Two of the kids hide behind a tree and the other kid has the camera. The playhouse explodes. The kids behind the tree are fine, but the kid who is trying to film it is killed. In the final analysis, the kids doing this with him actually have to go to jail for being a part of their friend’s death.

The question is: Aren’t the kids going to feel enough regret for the rest of their lives about doing this one, stupid thing that killed their friend? Isn’t it going to haunt them beyond any punishment law could provide? Was it their fault any more than it was the kid’s who was killed?

We know the answers here. It’s a tragedy that is no one’s fault. A few people getting together and acting stupidly. First of all, nobody deserves to die for that kind of stupidity, although the reason that it is stupid is because death is possible, and second of all, nobody deserves the blame for collective stupidity like that. None of these kids needs to be held accountable for their stupid, momentary decision which nobody wanted to turn out the way it did.

The distinction between this situation and the letter to the editor writer is this: The kids playing with fire were being stupid, but only because there was a risk of a really bad result; the letter writer was being stupid and not just risking a comparatively less-bad result for the future but confirming it. The kids with the bomb were taking a stupid risk; the letter writer was being purposefully idiotic. His stupidity comes from the fact that if he had any kind of foresight at all, he wouldn’t have written the letter. You should be held accountable for your decisions that will clearly have future implications if you totally fail to take those future implications into account.

But it doesn’t matter if you should be held accountable or not. It matters that you will be. Most of us in college act as if we are totally immune to the real world. And it’s true that we are not actually there yet, but it is a mistake to think that there is not a bridge of causation that goes from college to real life. We don’t suddenly get a new body and a new history when we graduate-we remain accountable for everything we did in college, even if at the point when we did them we were livin’ free and not thinking about the future.

I hate to be Negative McNegativity over here, but the decisions we make now-both the good decisions and the bad ones-are decisions that have implications for our real life, even if we’re not actually living that real life yet. Drinking a lot now has implications for the liver you will have your whole life. Being a jerk affects what a lot of people are going to think of you until they die. Slacking off now has actual effects for you in the real world, not through grades but through its influence on your ability to think and work. And of course, writing stupid letters to the editor now gives the whole future an insight into stages you won’t be proud of.

So, it’s not always bad policy to do stupid stuff while you are in college, but don’t be selfish-think about how your future self will feel about what you’re doing, too.

Dennis is a sophomore in Arts & Sciences and a Forum Editor.. He can be reached via e-mail [email protected].

When was the last time a political controversy-other than the prepackaged presidential debates-raised the blood pressure of the Wash. U. student body a single millimeter of mercury? As Alberto Gonzales is fond of saying, “I can’t recall.”

The impending visit by our disgraced former Attorney General has provoked an array of objections. His $30,000 fee is much too large, his abuses of power too stomach turning. Student Life weighed in with an editorial entitled “Let Alberto Gonzales Speak.” Obviously I agree, but it is a cowardly defense of free speech that has to keep distantiating, reminding us how much it hates the speech itself. There is something vulgar in stating the obvious: We should let everyone speak.

I’m not worried about Student Life editors, who occasionally get things right, as they did on Friday in an eloquent smackdown on anti-intellectual crazy-Christian legislators. Of course, they ignore the obvious solution to the whole problem: privatize the public universities. But that’s not the point. The vast majority of your fellow students don’t even care about THAT. To them, the most exciting development of the year is the new green wool Banana Republic top coat. Regardless of the false sense of political involvement that Friday’s political poll claims, the majority of us should have checked the box marked “I am disturbingly apathetic.”

The subtle political minds overheard in Bear’s Den remind me of the vast right wing conspirator Paula Jones who once asked, “The Republicans? Are they the good ones or the bad ones?” Forty-eight percent of our network’s Facebook users do not even express a political view. Although I am usually loathe to quote Ann Coulter, “the swing voters [are] the idiot voters because they don’t have set philosophical principles. You’re either a liberal or you’re a conservative if you have an IQ above a toaster.” That’s true Ann, but if your IQ is above that of a jackass or an elephant, you’re either a libertarian or a socialist.

This article is an appeal to those very few to reconsider what a protest of Gonzales really means. The supreme irony of students protesting Gonzales is that our “right” to protest is the exact justification for the government’s response to 9/11, including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, illegal detention, wiretapping, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the use of torture, etc. Gonzales will say, “Look, this is why we have to torture enemy combatants, why we are above the law: so that American citizens can be free to protest our actions here at home.”

My view of protesting has been deeply influenced by the anarchist Peter Graeber, a professor of anthropology at Yale who was denied tenure for purely political reasons by the liberal staff. (He was too far left for them, adding to my bafflement at Neoconservatives who talk about a Marxist conspiracy in Academia. Very few academics are really radicals-they’re just left of center cheerleaders for State Power. To real radicals, Bush, Clinton and Obama are all the same.) His view is that participating in protest tacitly acknowledges that the State is the legitimate holder of power and user of force. By protesting, we beg our oppressor to be nicer to us, to treat us kindly. Instead, Graeber advocates a policy of “direct action, with its rejection of a politics which appeals to governments to modify their behaviour, in favour of physical intervention against state power in a form that itself prefigures an alternative-all of [which] emerges directly from the libertarian tradition.”

What would using direct action mean in the situation of Gonzalez? Firstly, it means that speech is not even an issue. The use of torture and illegal detention is the problem. Government has failed, and American citizens have a moral mandate to physically stop the abuses that are occurring at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay. That is why Clinton and Obama represent the same position as Bush: The first one of them to reject the appropriation bills that pay for war and for torture will be the anti-war candidate. As far as I know, the only candidates who voted against paying for war, and thus, are anti-war, are Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. As Robert Byrd once remarked, “there are few men of great courage.”

Student Union’s use of student funds to finance a speaker who most students find morally objectionable adds a delicious layer of irony to the debate. SU practices a smaller version of the exact same system advocated by our national government: wealth redistribution. Instead of allowing students to make their own decisions about how to use their dollars, SU knows better than we do. Not unpredictably, if you scrutinize the funding patterns of student groups, the rich tend to get richer and the poor get poorer. The Budget committee gets to practice petty favoritism, fully funding their friends’ groups, and the officers get to flesh out their curricula vitae with real technocrat experience.

No doubt, there is more than a typological difference between the SU and the US; the activities fee is consensual, taxes are enforced from the barrel of a gun. If I found the fee vehemently objectionable, I would have gone elsewhere. My point is that the same inefficiencies in a miniature command and control economy persist, and occasionally, in situations like the Gonzales visit, the moral objections to wealth redistribution emerge. Part of my activities fee is now going to support a supporter of state-sponsored terrorism. We all should be placed on the no-fly list.

For all of my sound and fury, I will always stand with the people of the street. At 6 p.m. on Feb. 19, students who care about our country and abhor torture will come together at 560 Delmar with our peace signs, our megaphones and our witty chants. Mostly, it will be an exercise in hipster fashion and the desire for an “authentic” counterculture experience. Some words of wisdom will be spoken; lots of stupid things will be said. You might even be able to tell your children one day that you have an FBI file.

Look for me there. I will be wearing my Ron Paul shirt and my tin-foil hat. One side of my sign will protest Gonzales and torture; the other side will protest the protesters who every day, through our benevolence and liberal hearts, tacitly agree that State is King. We perpetuate our subservience, speed up the loss of liberty, enable torture.

Steven is a senior in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail [email protected].

I was reading Monday’s Forum in Student Life when I found an article which truly hit home with me. Christian’s article arguing against distribution requirements reminds me of my hard time with the system. Specifically, I feel that the cluster system is unfair to transfer students and biased against certain majors.

As a junior transfer student who just arrived this year, I had the distinct pleasure of realizing that my schedule for the next two years would be dictated by the cluster system. Granted, I opted to finish two majors in mathematics and physics, but I was hoping that some of the distribution requirements that I had from my previous school would have let me focus almost solely on my majors. Unfortunately, I was hit with a barbed wire fence when it came to transferring credits into the cluster system.

As a junior, I am allowed to waive up to two clusters, but only at the approval of the Arts & Sciences deans (or whomever determines this sort of thing). I was able to waive the textual and historical studies cluster, but the administration did not give me any other clusters. Why? Although I had taken three semesters of a required seminar, which was a hybrid English/textual and historical studies system, I only had one semester each of musical composition, French and Gospel music; the last class specifically for cultural diversity (another requirement that cannot be waived). Since these classes are not in a strict, dictated, Wash. U. approved sequence, I was only able to waive one cluster.

Also, in the infinite wisdom that the system contains, I was able to waive my quantitative analysis course. I was very grateful that this was waived since almost every one of my math classes contains that label, and who knows what I would have done if I had to take another class for my major? Furthermore, this system does not allow people to waive the extra three credits required for each area on top of the cluster. So, as an incoming junior, I am set up to take three language and arts classes, three social sciences, another in textual and historical studies, one social differentiation course and a cultural diversity class. Using clever scheduling, I was able to reduce this to seven to eight courses (assuming no scheduling conflicts, another story entirely), which will require a large chunk of my time, given that I also have to complete two majors.

As I mentioned earlier, this system is also set up to help out certain majors and shun others. I wish I could be an East Asian Studies major since that would get me out of two clusters (TH and LA), whereas a Math and Physics major can only fall into the natural sciences division. As a Psychology major and French minor, I would be done with everything! Why is it that someone who happens to enjoy a major with two cluster headings is allowed to take fewer requirements than a student taking two majors with the same cluster heading, especially when the double major would need more leeway to schedule his/her major classes? In short, this system doesn’t make any sense and should be revised heavily. I am all for a balanced education, but at least make the system fair and balanced and with enough leeway to forgive perceived offenses such as an English major not finishing his writing intensive requirement.

Jared is a junior in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].