News has an expiration date. This has become painfully clear to me once again during the vigorous debate over the New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly lecture and protest. In the past few days, especially in reference to the thoughtful and elaborate response the authors of the Kelly debate wrote in ...
President Christina Paxson recently announced she was starting an Environmental Change Taskforce. Now, I am not sure if this taskforce will advocate for anything more than local measures like asking people to take shorter showers, shut their windows, turn down their radiators and not divest coal, but ...
There seem to be no secrets kept anymore. Whatever we want to know is on the Internet, from news to movies to who went to whose party and what they did there. The Internet has opened a new world of knowledge for us, but it has also made us easier targets and has altered our notion of privacy. People ...
The introduction to the 1969 Magaziner-Maxwell Report, the document that led to the New Curriculum, states in part: “Conversations and written materials about education are steeped in meaningless rhetoric, issues are only partly presented, not enough time is spent in considering basic questions, ...
Which is more valuable, your time or your skills? This question lies at the crux of a debate that many universities and colleges engage in. Classes at most major institutions are based on the concept of credit hours: a weight of the value of the class in terms of the time spent in it. At some institutions, ...
I love my country. I really, truly do. I never cease to be moved by the words in the Constitution and awed at the grandeur of Washington, D.C. I’m the weirdo you see outside the White House with my face pressed against the fence. Last summer, I cried at a 9/11 exhibit. Does this sound cliched or ...
We are students who organized and supported the Oct. 29 demonstration against the University’s decision to provide a speaking platform to New York City Police Department Commissioner Raymond Kelly. We continue to stand by our actions and the anti-racist goals that motivated them. In view of the denunciations ...
As a child, I fell in love with science the first time I peered through a thin glass case at a Blue Morpho butterfly. Unabashedly iridescent and delicate, the butterfly shined in equal parts mystery and beauty. As I continued to explore as a teenager, science explained my visual world and provided a ...
At this time last year, I was a naive first-year and thought I would get a place in each of the classes in my Banner shopping cart. I figured that if something went wrong and I wasn’t able to register for a course, I would definitely be able to take it the following year. No problem. It was with ...
The tattooed, scrappy and enigmatic beardsmen of the Boston Red Sox glided through the streets of Boston aboard the city’s unique amphibious vehicles known as duck boats last Saturday, leaving in their wake a trail of confetti, popped corks and delirious fans. It’s a scene and feeling that Boston ...
The month of October saw events that shook Brown to its core. Between the Corporation’s decision to not divest the endowment from holdings in major coal companies to the protests against New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s lecture, the Brown community grew polarized, and beliefs from ...
This week, Provost Mark Schlissel P’15 announced the launch of an Environmental Change Task Force at Brown. He described the group as “charged with recommending actions that members of the Brown community might take, beyond campus-based sustainability efforts and discussion of divestiture, ...
You know what really grinds my gears? Brown Dining Services. I’ve been a little tense about how food services around here are run for a while now, but when a friend of mine talked to me about what food is like at Boston University, it pushed me over the edge. In comparison to BU, Brown University ...
On Sept. 22, 2011, I thought I killed someone. We were hiking in a group in an extremely rural part of India’s northern border. We were supposed to stop to camp. I strongly advocated that we continue. Eventually, I convinced our daily leaders of the merits of continuing. One person never made it ...
Prior to the Ray Kelly incident, Zach Ingber ’15 expressed his concern that the Brown community does not adequately take “conservative” ideas seriously. He claimed that the campus makes it difficult for conservatives to express opinions without immediately being cut down by liberal dogmatists, ...
I’ve always fancied a certain similarity between my new home of Rhode Island and my old home, the Netherlands. The founding stories of both certainly emphasize a tolerance that was far ahead of their times: Just as the Netherlands offered refuge to the persecuted pilgrims and Huguenots who would later ...
Last weekend, President Christina Paxson sent an email to the Brown community informing us that the University would not divest from coal. This was a setback for Brown Divest Coal, a group that has been working to convince administrators to remove the University’s endowment assets in various utilities ...
This past week showed an excitement and vitality that arguably hasn’t existed on Brown’s campus since the struggle for need-blind admission in the 90s. Despite highs and lows and victories and frustrations, the feeling that something important is happening on this campus is undeniable. This feeling ...
A few weeks ago, Zach Ingber ’15 wrote a column lamenting the prevalence of “intolerance for certain political perspectives” (“Free speech at Brown?” Oct. 20). Ironically, much of the student body received his plea for free inquiry with the exact type of intolerance that he described. And ...
It is telling that of all the reflections on last Tuesday’s events circulating on Facebook, The Herald and other media, those that only superficially engage the concept of “free speech” as an abstract principle and couch their arguments in the rhetoric of respect and civility bewail the protesters’ ...
Solutions by The State News
