In President Obama's recent State of the Union address, we heard repeated appeals to renew America's long-term competitiveness and to "win the future" against emerging rivals like India and China. Similarly, in the decade following Ruth Simmons' hiring as President in 2001, Brown has seen a heightened ...
About the middle of last December, I was pleasantly surprised to read that libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, had taken up the defense of WikiLeaks founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange on the floor of the House. "Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the ...
"Idle reader..."
This past December, as the "lame duck" session of Congress rolled back the Clinton-era "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy regarding the service of gays and lesbians in the military, elite universities were encouraged to rethink campus bans on Reserve Officers' Training Corps programs that resulted from ...
After 18 years, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was finally repealed by a Senate vote of 63 for and 33 against. This historic legislation marks the end of an almost two-decade period when gay and lesbian members of the armed forces had to face a dishonorable discharge if they divulged their sexuality ...
Brown is universally known as the rebel Ivy — standing apart from the entrenched educational elite by embracing progress and challenging the prevailing norms of our time. This reputation has served us well — if not always in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, then certainly in the ...
Imagine that you had never been accepted to Brown — would it make sense to pay not to go there? Of course not, but this seemingly ridiculous policy officially governs Brown's relationship to study abroad.
Here at Brown, "patriot" is a four-letter word. For this reason, many people question my abiding faith in American greatness. I try to make my case by explaining the transcendent beauty of our founding documents, our genuine commitment to human rights and our monumental foreign policy successes. Unsurprisingly, ...
I have no doubt, dear reader, that you are a fabulously multicultural melange of intellectual vivacity and animal charm. We live, I heard somewhere, in an increasingly interconnected world, where groovy beings like you nibble Spanish pastries while sipping Argentine yerba mate tea, tapping your Chinese ...
In a recent column, Elizabeth Perez '13 decried Amazon's endorsement of the free exchange of ideas while bending to consumer pressure to remove highly controversial books from its offerings ("Corporate power trip," Nov. 29). While this may make Amazon's corporate leadership disingenuous and two-faced, ...
I would like to offer an alternative perspective to Susannah Kroeber's '11 column ("Why the athletics department is bad for Brown," Dec. 1). It is understandable why she would have such a negative view of sports, as her feeble attempt to list the benefits of athletics is dismal. Her reasons for playing ...
This October, many in the Brown community may have been delighted to hear that Brown University tied for first place in the 2011 Green Report Card, a report by the Sustainable Endowments Institute that profiles the environmental and social initiatives of over 300 American colleges and universities.
I used to be a believer in the project of "sports." Sports bring people together, allowing people to see others as equals on the field, regardless of all the other markers that differentiate us in everyday life. In high school, sports were how I felt I could earn the respect of my classmates, how I ...
Etiquette, especially that at universities, has slowly declined over the years. Academic regalia has been confined to commencement rather than required attire year round and people will give you funny looks for showing up for dinner in a dinner jacket rather than for arriving without one. It is generally ...
Of the myriad results of The Herald's recent student poll, I was most pleased to find that students at Brown frequently interact with professors outside the classroom ("Herald poll: interactions with profs vary beyond the classroom," Nov. 22). Indeed, such a high level of interaction between the vast ...
There's a certain soul-searching proclivity among students who take an active interest in university politics, an inevitable tendency toward crises of justification for spending time — despite everything else we could be doing — on something that might seem so provincial.
The next time you find yourself purchasing a product using the convenient services of Amazon, consider whether it is discomforting for you, as the consumer, to know that they were recently the sellers of "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure." Some may consider Amazon's initial decision to protect ...
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