Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.

Opinions

Opinions

Simon '16: Brown's Iron Curtain

The Soviet Union. That pretty much sums up everything I know about the Soviet Union. History was never my forte. I rarely found myself beating down the doors of my high school history classes to discover just which Peruvian fishing village was ransacked, who in France was beheaded or exactly how many ...


Opinions

Esemplare '18: Consider life, not the humanities

Sitting in an English class last week, I was struck by a comment my teaching assistant made to a fellow student who had asked how to find the Department of Comparative Literature building. My TA half-interestedly described the building as a “mausoleum” hidden next to the imposing Science Library. ...


Opinions

Doyle '18: Big girls still cry

I still remember my biggest fear about entering high school. I convinced myself that I was finally too old to cry in school. “What am I going to do if I get hurt in gym class?” I worried. I got over this idea fairly quickly. I cried the first day because I missed my middle school friends. And the ...


Opinions

Asker '17: Investing in people and places that matter

Late Friday night, the entire Brown community, including parents and alums, received an email from President Christina Paxson P’19 announcing the University’s new fundraising campaign, “BrownTogether.” The ambitious plan to raise $3 billion is meant to make possible many of the objectives outlined ...


Opinions

Mitra '18: Writing a wrong

At first glance, the English literary world looks more diverse than ever. With new publishing houses and a wider audience, we have embraced authors from a range of cultures and backgrounds. In the last decade, minority writers like Junot Díaz and Jhumpa Lahiri have captured the imaginations of readers ...


Opinions

Malik '18: Halloween and horror

Halloween is almost here, and as the holiday that I have loved since I was a small child approaches, I am excited by the sweet candy, scary movies and smiling jack-o’-lanterns that await. The fact that festivities begin at Brown a whole week earlier than the actual holiday thanks to Halloweek is icing ...


Opinions

Editorial: A sensible Mailroom makeover

When Brown students received an email this summer letting them know that Mail Services was undergoing a dramatic restructuring, many of us were nervous. In an effort to make the postal system at Brown more efficient, the University was eliminating students’ physical mailboxes and instead treating ...


Opinions

Montoya '16: The importance of bibliophiles

Students have no shortage of works to read. From our very first days of kindergarten we are led through exercises that shape our understandings of letters, words and sounds, with the ultimate goal of teaching us to read. But with reading presented as a school-related task, many students come to dislike ...


Opinions

Mitra '18: Why I still miss Jon Stewart

Like many members of my generation, I learned to love modern political satire by watching “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” I discovered “The Daily Show” very late — I was a senior in high school when I finally started watching Stewart’s monologues on a regular basis. But I quickly became ...


Opinions

Editorial: Come back, Professor Ruth Simmons

This coming weekend, President Christina Paxson P’19 will unveil the University’s new comprehensive fundraising campaign that will fund her vision for Brown, as laid out in her 2013 strategic plan, “Building on Distinction,” and detailed in the operational plan released earlier this semester. ...


Opinions

Letter: The Herald should have supported Maier

To the Editor: I write to express my disappointment with The Herald’s unwillingness to support M. Dzhali Maier ’17, its embattled staff columnist, and publicly defend both its commitment to free speech and editorial independence. Responses to Maier’s columns by students and administrators correctly ...


Opinions

Seoh '14: Not all free speech is created equal

Between 1839 and 1849, Samuel George Morton published results of an ongoing study on differences in brain size between races. His now widely discredited theory of craniometry asserted that different races had differing brain sizes that correlated directly with intelligence. He concluded that because ...


Opinions

Simon '16: Pimp my university

Like too many Brown students, I find myself critical of President Christina Paxson P’19 more for sport than because I actually have any reason to be. If I’m being honest, I hardly know anything about her save that she went to Swarthmore College, prefers vegetables to pepperonis on her pizza and ...


Opinions

Editorial: Sorry, Malia Obama

The college application and selection process is stressful for most students who go through it, but one can only imagine how much the stress multiplies when the whole nation is watching. That is what Malia Obama is experiencing right now. News outlets as prominent as the New York Times are covering ...


Opinions

Kenyon GS: Brown — a leaderless university

In an era of breaking glass ceilings, it still remains that a Brunonian has yet to break through to the highest elected office in the land. Last Tuesday, the Twittersphere was abuzz with commentary on the first Democratic primary debate of the 2016 presidential campaign cycle. The two Democrat front-runners, ...


Opinions

Irving '16: Let’s make memories, not headlines

As I am sure many people now know, Malia Obama came to visit Brown during Fall Weekend. On Friday, a Snapchat photo of Malia at a party, standing in front of a beer pong table, was leaked to the press. The story was promptly picked up by Buzzfeed, Maxim and the Daily Mail, among many other major news ...


Opinions

Letter: Race does not cause cultural and social variation

To the Editor: Your call for responses to M. Dzhali Maier’s ’17 Oct. 5 column “The white privilege of cows,” and your own editorial comment, have — rightly — focused on the issues of racism and free speech. First, I would like to say that Maier’s essay was “clear,” contrary to your ...


Opinions

Editorial: Balancing midterms and life

It is no novel idea to note that college is hard. For academic, social, personal and other reasons, college often feels like a balancing act. Now that we have passed the halfway point in the semester, which occurred last Friday, midterms can be an additional point of stress and anxiety for many students. ...




Powered by SNworks Solutions by The State News
All Content © 2026 The Brown Daily Herald, Inc.