Opinions
Adrienne Langlois '10: Something to think about
By Brown Daily Herald | April 7Time to get meta. What's the opinions page for, anyway?
Columns
Opinions
Sarah Yu '11: When lawyers and dentists teach the kids
By Sarah Yu | April 6Last month, the Texas Board of Education approved of a series of curriculum changes in the social sciences for public elementary, middle and high school programs. These changes will lay out a set of guidelines for textbook publishers that may affect a larger demographic than just Texas students, as ...
Opinions
Yue Wang '12: A more serious commitment to physical education at Brown
By Yue Wang | April 6Adding to the numerous buzzing construction sites on College Hill, the ongoing project of the new aquatics and fitness center seems to appeal to everybody. For varsity athletes, it means a permanent home for the swimming and water polo teams, a much less crowded strength and conditioning area, separated ...
Opinions
Mike Johnson '11: Hey, we have humanities here, too
By Mike Johnson | April 5Recent efforts to approve a proposal to create an engineering school are laudable. Approval would increase the intellectual capital of the University while simultaneously helping Brown join the ranks of all the other Ivy League institutions with engineering schools. It will pull graduate students to ...
Opinions
Brian Judge '11: Greater expectations: the case against indiscrimination
By Brian Judge | April 5The opposite of discrimination isn't indiscriminateness. In our quest to create an inclusive, pluralistic society, we have abandoned the standards and expectations that give us a vision of how to conduct oneself properly. This isn't an inevitability. I firmly believe that there is a way to hold one ...
Opinions
William Tomasko '13: D.C. - safe from democracy
By William Tomasko | April 4Starting college is always a significant transition. Students are — often for the first time — experiencing roommates, sharing bathrooms with strangers, figuring out how to work laundry machines and spending months at a time away from their families.
Opinions
Emily Breslin '10: They're not all made out of ticky tacky
By Emily Breslin | April 4The statement that investment bankers have replaced lawyers as the most hated professionals in America has become a common throwaway line, but it makes me wonder why lawyers apparently occupied that place to begin with. Like many Brown graduates before us, many of my friends and I will probably be headed ...
Opinions
Simon Liebling '12: Grin and bear it
By Simon Liebling | March 24Another year, another tuition hike, another chorus of compliant students racing to be the first to thank our benevolent administrators for once again balancing their budget on our backs. Judging just by the gratitude some of us expressed for the Corporation's infinite financial wisdom, you'd think they'd ...
Opinions
Susannah Kroeber '11: Unfortunately, Harvard doesn't always get it wrong
By Susannah Kroeber | March 24Five years ago, Lawrence Summers, then-president of Harvard University, made a remark at a conference that ended with his resignation from the post. Many students now in their junior or senior years of college might remember this as the mar on Harvard's name at the time they were applying to colleges ...
Opinions
Hunter Fast '12: Young's banishment gets old
By Hunter Fast | March 23Many of my friends at other colleges have related to me stories of Christian fundamentalist protestors visiting to lambast them for the sins of showing their ankles and listening to hip-hop music. In light of this, they are invariably surprised and disappointed that I have had few interactions with ...
Opinions
Dominic Mhiripiri '12: How do I love thee, o math at Brown?
By Dominic Mhiripiri | March 23Unpredictable as they may have been, a few of the greatest feuds in recorded history occurred safely outside the realm of ancient Roman wars or the hard-line rhetorical exchanges of the Cold War. Science and mathematics, long regarded as essential learning for the most gifted in society (and somewhat ...
Opinions
David Sheffield '11: Stop promoting pseudoscience
By David Sheffield | March 22Over the weekend, the Haitian Student Association held an event for dowsers. It had two purposes. The first was to raise money for water filtration systems in Haiti. The second was to provide classes on dowsing (also known as divining or water witching). Playing with dowsing rods on Pembroke Green is ...
Opinions
Adrienne Langlois '10: More UTRAs, please
By Adrienne Langlois | March 21When we, as college students, go home for spring break (or, if we're lucky enough to be going somewhere exciting, when we call home) we're likely to be asked one terrifying question: "What are you doing this summer?"
Opinions
Ethan Tobias '12: Spring into action
By Ethan Tobias | March 21Where was everyone? Last Thursday, after what has been, in her own words, "an exceedingly difficult year for the Brown community," President Ruth Simmons delivered the first State of Brown address in four years to a mostly empty Salomon 101. To make matters worse, those few students who showed ...
Opinions
Tyler Rosenbaum '11: Why spare athletics?
By Tyler Rosenbaum | March 21Well, we've finally reached the big five-oh — the magic threshold of $50,000 per year in tuition and fees, that is. The increasing cost of going to Brown is, of course, as generally unwelcome as it is inexorable.
Opinions
Ethan Tobias '12: Time for credit
By Ethan Tobias | March 18On more than one application for summer internships, I was asked to list the number of course credits I had completed in various subject matters. The question was startling, and on the online forms I was filling out, there was no room for me to explain.
Opinions
Nida Abdulla '11.5: Go team?
By Nida Abdulla | March 18It's no secret that Brown lacks school spirit when it comes to athletics. If you want to see school spirit, you're better off going to an a cappella show than a football game. In the interest of full disclosure, I've never been to a football, basketball or softball game. I have been to a men's ice hockey ...
Opinions
Anthony Badami '11: The language of Brown's Israeli-Palestinian exchange
By Anthony Badami | March 17The quandary of Israel and Palestine is nearly inescapable for Brown students. Because of a personal connection, I have been witness to plentiful dialogue efforts, lectures, panels and even had the opportunity to dispute current Israeli security policy through a Janus student debate. The assorted and ...
Opinions
Kshitij Lauria '13: Engine of change
By Kshitij Lauria | March 17On April 6, Brown faculty will vote on a two-year-old proposal to dignify Brown's Division of Engineering with the title "School" and other ancillary benefits. If this happens — and the Corporation backs it up with its cash and blessing — Brown Engineering will get 12 new faculty members, ...
Opinions
Sean Quigley '10: Appropriate for the occasion
By Sean Quigley | March 16It has been said that during the period in which King Edward VII of the United Kingdom reigned (1901-1910), humanity last knew a proper attention to sartorial choices. Yes, His Majesty's approach was perhaps a little too fastidious, but in a time when jeans are king, especially on college campuses, ...
