A pink ribbon. An inspirational YouTube video. A group of women dancing. What do these things have in common? While they are symbols of important movements, they are also symbols of a dangerous trend in activism: “slacktivism.” Slacktivism, as the name suggests, involves supporting a cause on an ...
In response to Zach Ingber’s ’15 column (“Not just another civil war,” Feb. 13) printed in The Herald: The Brown University Amnesty International Chapter is keenly aware of the silence on Syria — and it’s not only a contention on our campus. The calamity has sadly lost its pull in domestic ...
Kevin Carty’s ’15 recent article in The Herald (“Brown and its hidden conservatism,” Jan. 25) makes the provocative claim that Brown is secretly much more conservative than one might think. One of Carty’s main points is that most Brown students, despite growing up in a two-parent household ...
We have all heard the expression “you get what you pay for.” Around the United States, hundreds of thousands of students like us are paying nearly $60,000 to attend private colleges. Slightly over two-thirds of that sum can be attributed to core academic purposes, namely tuition and textbooks. According ...
Last week, The Herald reported that plans by the Office of Residential Life for future housing allocation have been slightly changed. Specifically, Hegeman Hall and Slater Hall will remain designated for upperclassmen, while sophomores will live in Perkins Hall doubles previously slotted to become upperclassmen ...
Lattanzi-Silveus '14: Yes I’m not going to argue that you in particular should not take a job in the financial industry. Nor am I going to judge those who do. The banks are one of the few places hiring — in fact they are eagerly recruiting — and many of us do need to pay off student loans or ...
Taking basketball from a childhood passion to AAU stardom to D-I dreams to a career is a journey very few ever complete. Almost everything has to go right — you essentially need to take the best qualities from Jude Law and Ethan Hawke’s characters in “Gattaca” — perfect genetics and unrelenting ...
The Herald published an article (“Econ dept. looks to curb grade inflation,” Feb. 7) and an editorial (“Fighting inflation, causing stagnation,” Feb. 12) regarding recent efforts by the Department of Economics faculty to combat grade inflation. Such efforts have been agreed upon by the members ...
Last Wednesday, the University’s Health Services and insurance administrators announced that in coming years, the student insurance plan will cover sex reassignment procedures for transgender students. This progressive move, which places Brown among a small group of 36 pioneering schools to offer ...
It’s an agonizing decision. To friend? Or not to friend? Facebook is the new flirting frontier, and the decision to make the move to solidify a virtual friendship is a crucial first step in establishing communication with your crush. It shouldn’t be. Nowadays it seems we spend more time clicking ...
What if there was a way to get all of your textbooks for free? How much would you save? $500? $600? $700, even? Try googling “torrent” and the name of your textbook. I am talking about BitTorrent networks: online tools that enable users to stream material from many different sources at once. These ...
It’s fair to say many Brown students are involved in activism, whether through the Swearer Center for Public Service, advocacy groups, student political organizations or any other number of causes. In a 2011 Herald article on student activism, a faculty poll showed 57 percent of faculty members believe ...
Sixty thousand people are dead in Syria. That number is three times the capacity of our football stadium, substantially more than the number of American soldiers who lost their lives in Vietnam and higher than the number of deaths in all of the other Arab Spring countries combined. Yet I have not seen ...
I have a confession to make. My parents are paying for every cent of my college education: $220,000 or more over four years. I am supremely in their debt. Sadly, I have no concept of what it truly represents. You could call me spoiled or ungrateful — and I admit sometimes I am both of those. In this ...
Several economics professors have expressed plans to follow new grade distribution guidelines — part of an effort to combat grade inflation, The Herald reported Thursday. In the recommended scheme, 30 percent of students in a class would receive As, 40 percent Bs, and 30 percent Cs. This would be ...
If the intervention in the West African country of Mali shows us anything, it’s that colonialism is still alive and well, though its form has changed somewhat. Its old colonial ruler, France, has directly intervened in Mali in the name of “humanitarian intervention,” claiming that if they do not, ...
Googling “religion anti-intellectual” returns about 3.6 million hits, most of them on the anti-religion side of the argument. In fact, the only article on the first page countering the assertion that religion is inherently anti-intellectual is from The Gospel Coalition, which, though a fine site, ...
In Kevin Carty’s ’15 recent column (“Identity politics is counter-productive,” Feb. 7), he argues that dismissing a person’s opinion as the product of privilege is detrimental. His argument consists of three claims. First, dismissing the opinion doesn’t win the argument. Second, it discourages ...
How do we work together? That seems to me to be the question for this new year. We’ve certainly spent more than enough time learning how to disagree. Just ask the United States Congress how much they know about that. I’ve learned a lot from them about disagreement and not working with others. U.S. ...
To the Editor: The Coalition for Marijuana Regulation held a press conference Wednesday announcing the introduction of Bill H5274 into the Rhode Island legislature, a bill that would regulate and tax marijuana at the state level (“Bill would legalize marijuana in R.I.,” Feb. 7). The bill will be ...
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