Guest Column: Grading the State of the University
If President McRobbie thinks criticizing students for being unthoughtful while offering thoughtless solutions will appease students, he’s deluded.
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If President McRobbie thinks criticizing students for being unthoughtful while offering thoughtless solutions will appease students, he’s deluded.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Uri Horesh was an IU instructor arrested on a Red Cross bus after protesting the policy of not taking blood donations from men who have sex with men.Sidney: Is there anything you’d like to address about the events of that day? Uri Horesh: The main thing I wanted to address was one allegation in the police report that was widely reported and was completely false, and from my point of view, the most troubling for two reasons — that one, it didn’t happen, and two, that it accused me of something immoral and violent. Specifically, I’m referring to the charge that I spit on one of the Red Cross workers. As someone who all my life has practiced a philosophy of nonviolence, I would never spit on someone or do something rude and insolent like that. I know for a fact I did not do it and so when I know for a fact that the only reason that I am charged of it is because the person that accuses me of it knew that I was gay, because I told her so. This event is even more troublesome and shows you how the policy of the Food and Drug Administration is so antiquated and, in an essential way, goes beyond assuring that the blood supply is not tainted with HIV. It goes into the mindset of even the educated people who work for the Red Cross, who are supposed to know how HIV is transmitted, who are supposed to know that people can be gay and healthy. And yet, this woman — for the sole reason of me being a person who was trying to uphold the University’s own nondiscrimination policy — decided that I was a violent person. This is something that upsets me very much and upsets me even more than the University police, who came to the site with no intention of listening to what I had to say, without any intention of listening to my side of the story, without any willingness to uphold the University’s own nondiscrimination policy. Now I want to ask the chief of police, if the Red Cross or any other guest of the University brought a bus to campus and decided that they wanted to discriminate against minorities, say no Jews in our facility on campus — would he still allow that? Would the University allow that? If they said no women allowed in our bus, would they allow that? If they said no African-Americans, would they allow that? I strongly doubt that. But for some reason, when it comes to gay men and LGBT people, for some reason that is acceptable and that is acceptable because in our society homophobia is not yet risen to the same degree of unacceptability as other forms of bigotry, such as misogyny and racism. I think that is something we should be really cognizant of and very much aware of and it’s upsetting that the university has a nondiscrimination policy that includes sexual orientation, yet it doesn’t uphold it in the same manner that it upholds in other domains.SF: Do you believe that IU should institute a ban on Red Cross bloodmobiles on campus?UH: I think they should do one of two things. They should either not allow blood drives to occur on campus if this is the policy that is in place, or they should stipulate that if blood drives occur on campus then such a ban should not be implemented. There are some universities and colleges that when they host blood banks, they stipulate that they must occur off the grounds of the university. They have to occur outside the gates of the university in order for their nondiscrimination policies not to be violated. And if that had been the case, I would have not done what I did. I would not just go into a Red Cross building anywhere and do what I did. I did what I did because it was in a university where discrimination on the basis on sexual orientation is prohibited. Such discrimination is not prohibited in Indiana at large, it’s not prohibited in the United States at large, but it is barred at Indiana University. IU does not allow exclusion of participants on the basis of sexual orientation on any activity in the University. That’s something IU should uphold regardless of who is sponsoring or subcontracting that particular activity. And anything that the University or the administration or the police chief is saying that is trying to sidetrack us from that fact is nothing but a very sorry excuse for not upholding IU’s own policy because the values and interests of the University are to fight on the side of its own people including minorities like sexual minorities on campus. SF: Why do you think the FDA still has this discriminatory policy in place?UH: The FDA has this policy because in 1982 when it was implemented, the only thing people knew about AIDS was that it was the “gay cancer.” People really don’t know anything about it. The virus HIV was only discovered years later and only later was it discovered how it was transmitted and that anyone can contract HIV. What people knew was that it was the gay disease, because patient zero was gay, and the people contracting it were gay males in Europe and San Francisco and so forth. And indeed the people who were at high risk for many, many years were in the gay community and there’s no doubt about that, nobody’s disputing that. However, in recent years, there has been so much awareness, so much education among the LGBT community and particularly among gay men that there’s been a decrease in infection in the LGBT community and an increase in other communities. People within the gay community are aware, they know. I could have come to the blood bank with a document that I have from two months ago showing them that I was tested, because I get tested two or three times per year because that’s the norm within the gay community. You have to get tested. This policy was put into place so long ago, over just about 30 years ago when all people knew was that AIDS equals the gay disease. In most of the United Kingdom, just a few months ago the ban was changed to a 12-month deferment, meaning if instead of asking if you have ever had sex with another man since 1977, they ask if you have had sex with another man in the last 12 months. But that’s still quite discriminatory because you don’t ask that question of heterosexual people, even those that are in HIV high-risk groups. So I still think that there is a lot of homophobia behind the policy. SF: In the IDS article, Vice Provost Tom Gieryn said, “Our primary concern is for the students … Students might be curious why he was arrested, or students might be concerned when they learned the nature of his behavior.” Do you agree with Vice Provost Gieryn’s argument that faculty’s ability to protest should be controlled by student expectations? UH: I have no idea what the hell he’s talking about. I completely disagree. If I interpret what he’s saying correctly, he says that the First Amendment does not apply to University faculty, and that’s pure interpretation and I think maybe what you should do is call someone from the law school, maybe someone who is an expert in constitutional law, and ask them how they interpret this because I clearly have no freaking idea what the fuck he’s talking about.— sidfletc@indiana.edu
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>It takes a lot to get me angry about politics.You see, as someone who reads an unhealthy amount of political news, I find it pretty easy to disregard controversy as the media’s latest hissy fit — the histrionics of an increasingly irrelevant system. But last week’s report in the New York Times detailing the Ricketts Plan — a $10 million “super PAC” ad campaign proposed to billionaire Joe Ricketts that aimed to use state-of-the-art visual effects and high production values to directly tie the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to President Obama — actually made me mad.One sentence found in the plan’s text that truly got to me, and a couple other columnists, was classic Republican tripe: “The metrosexual black Abe Lincoln has emerged as a hyper-partisan, hyper-liberal, elitist politician...”Excuse me?I’m not sure what part of this sentence stuck out most. Was it the heteronormative suppression locked up inside the slur “metrosexual”? Was it the direct invocation of President Obama’s race? Was it the out-of-place reference to Abe Lincoln, who everyone seems to have forgotten almost lost the Civil War? (“Team of Rivals” was about more than just how Lincoln formed his team.) Or was it the view of what President Obama has become, an insight into the ever-increasingly tenuous grasp Republicans have on reality?The truth is that it was probably all of these and none of these, for to focus on any one of these elements detracts from what this plan really was: a (real) high-tech lynching.Some of the actual details were lost in much of the media coverage of the plan. The plan was to use the latest video technology to graft Obama’s computer-generated face onto an actor for use in the ad.Combined with high production values (to indicate this was no “ordinary” advertisement), the ad would have sought to fashion Rev. Wright into a noose for Obama, to hang him in broad daylight in the eyes of the nation during the Democratic National Convention. Perhaps voters weren’t ready to hate President Obama yet, but maybe the good ol’ grab-your-pitchforks mob mentality would get voters ready to run him out of town.It’s difficult to imagine what else these conservative strategists had in mind because the ads weren’t much different than any of the current ones.For the record, let it be said that this plan was a lot closer to implementation than anyone in the GOP is claiming. When the New York Times asked on Wednesday, they were told decisions were still being made on advertisements — and Ricketts’ opinion on this sort of campaign was very clearly in favor. They already had a spokesman — it wasn’t “dead on arrival.”It was only in the ensuing imbroglio and the swift denunciation by other conservatives that the plan was magically transformed into “yet another bad idea” from strategist Fred Davis, the creator of “I’m not a witch.” Give me a break.And while I think it’s good that Mitt Romney said, “I repudiate that effort,” did anyone else think that was an awkward choice of words? I repudiate their actions, sure, but I repudiate their “effort”? Who says that? It’s as if Mittens is trying to disguise what he’s saying to his supporters with big words but can’t seem to use them properly.Fools and charlatans, all of them.They have become trapped in their own closed loop of thinking, fed by their own BizarreStream Media, which spent the week focusing on some more birther nonsense.They’ve lost the ability to think logically. In the Indiana Daily Student last week, a young conservative columnist claimed that “marriage should not be a federal issue.” This sort of reflexive retreat to “states’ rights” when you disagree with an issue is intellectually lazy and, in this case, laughable. For starters, if you think that, you have to think the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia wrong, meaning you think states should have the right to prevent whites and blacks from marrying. So, your argument is either ignorant or bigoted. Or both.Finally, the Republicans have no plan and no ability to stick to a plan. The Keystone pipeline previewed in Mitt Romney’s first ad is not a jobs plan, and neither is stripping away regulation. This week in healthcare, the House GOP was forced to tear up its secret plans when a POLITICO report revealed that House Speaker John Boehner was considering keeping the most popular provisions of Obamacare, and far right conservatives revolted.It’s clear the GOP has become a rabid dog with its teeth in America’s throat and foam running down the rivers. This leaked ad was only a preview of what’s to come. We should fear for the health of the Republic.— sidfletc@indiana.edu
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Dear Mr. President,Congratulations on your re-election.I mean, let’s not get ahead of ourselves; you still have a tough race to run this year. Karl Rove and the Koch brothers are going to throw everything and a kitchen sink at your head, and you’ve just got to convince Soros not to fund a get-out-the-vote operation.But take a step back and look at your opponent. OK, laugh a bit. Yes, Mitt Romney is not a very good politician, but worse than that, he’s a design-by-committee candidate. He’s got all the killer features thrown together in a box with no vision whatsoever. He’s like Windows ME — except the windows to his soul keep throwing an Etch A Sketch data corruption error.If you look at recent presidential history, America doesn’t elect design-by-committee candidates if it can avoid it. So, feel good (if not too good) about your chances at this point.That brings me to the actual point of this memo: selecting your team for the upcoming term. Despite being a bigmouth, Joe Biden is a good-hearted, honest person. Besides, his name is already printed on the yard signs. He’s going to be your VP.Next in importance comes Thomas Jefferson’s job, the Secretary of State.Now, Mr. President, you made history last term when you picked your arch-nemesis Hillary Clinton to be your Secretary of State. And by all accounts, it was a great choice.She’s done a fantastic job, wearing herself and her plane ragged from all the travel, as well as winning accolades for being a sensible, diplomatic human being (aka what Republicans like to call “apologizing for America”).But Ol’ Hillz wants some time to relax, and who can blame her given that she’ll be running for president again in two to three years? So, you need a new SecState.Let’s run down the list again. The media and insiders are currently pushing three people to the top of your list: John Kerry, Susan Rice and Tom Donilon.John Kerry, former presidential wannabe and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is a guy who clearly wants the position and is undoubtedly going to be helpful in taking down Romney. But really, John Kerry? The man’s been “auditioning” for the State position since he came out of his mother’s womb and realized there were other countries out there. You really want to reward that?Susan Rice, your Ambassador to the UN, is a sharp foreign policy hand with an impressive resume and a lot of trust in the West Wing. But haven’t we seen this movie before? Her name was Madeline Albright — ring a bell?Finally, Tom Donilon is supposedly regarded as the best political/policy head out of the three, but do you really need a political guy as Secretary of State? Does putting Donilon in that position move things forward?Mr. President, it’s time to think a bit outside the box. If indeed you win your election, it’s going to be a thoroughly partisan affair after which Republicans are going to be cruising for a bruising.You should throw them a bone — not a very big one, but at least extend a favor and appoint a Republican Secretary of State. And if there’s any question in your mind, there’s only one man for the job.Dick Lugar is as honorable a man as you could find in Washington and would make a great Secretary of State. Perhaps he’s been branded as more of a RINO, but I don’t think that’d matter to him. If being big and post-partisan is still your thing, then Dick Lugar is the way to do that. Please think it over.— sidfletc@indiana.edu
In Suzanne Collins’ saccharine “Hunger Games,” Katniss and Peeta come within an inch of death to prove to their overlords in the Capitol that they will not be another pair of pawns in the Capitol’s games. In their real-life Hunger Games, Palestinian prisoners have gone even further.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>It is a special calling for all the victims of the Holocaust to heal the world and ensure that a new holocaust never happens to any people, wherever they are. Israel has made a mockery of this commitment.In a comically immature letter in response to the activist “Welcome to Palestine” campaign, Israel “welcomed” activists to Ben-Gurion Airport by telling them, “You could have chosen to protest the Syrian regime’s daily savagery against its own people, which has claimed thousands of lives,” but instead you chose Israel, “the Middle East’s sole democracy,” since obviously democracies never do anything wrong.This ridiculous piece of hasbarah begs the question: Rather than nagging and refusing entry to people who might disagree with Israeli policy, why hasn’t Israel sought to make Syria the “object of its humanitarian concerns”? Where was the Israeli support for the Arab peoples fighting for their independence last year? And why does Israel continue to barrel toward a war with Iran that will kill innocent civilians by the thousands?This last point is especially relevant. In his Yom HaShoah speech this year, Binyamin Netanyahu departed from tradition to beat the drum about Iran, saying he will never let Jewish children face the peril of another Holocaust. At the American Israel Public Affairs Committee this year, Netanyahu waved the 1944 letter in which the United States war department rejected a request by Jewish leaders to bomb Auschwitz.Netanyahu has raised the spectre of Auschwitz to further his own trigger-happy tendencies, turning the Israeli military doctrine of ein breira — there is no other choice — into the Bush 1 percent doctrine. Netanyahu’s willingness to rain a series of bombs upon the innocent Iranian civilian population proves he has learned exactly the wrong lesson about the Holocaust.In his doctrinaire Zionism and his aversion to humanitarian concern, Prime Minister Netanyahu insults the memory of all those who died in the death camps and the ghettos, spitting on the disintegrated bones in the mass graves of Dachau. We must oppose this with open hearts and memories, so that we are not doomed to repeat history. We must stand up defiantly and shout “never again!”, so that the memories of all who lost their lives are a blessing to the living.— sidfletc@indiana.edu
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>As children, we learn how to count on our fingers and our toes — one, two, three and so on. Then, as we begin school, we are taught about the negative numbers, the violent creatures which cancel out our “natural” numbers, and the fractions, for those times when we only need half a minute. Then we learn about the irrational numbers, those mystical entities which stretch out toward the horizon and never end.But at their core, what are the numbers really? How do we know a number such as pi — the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter — really exists? Intuition lies to us if we listen too closely, so it is not enough merely to assume the real numbers exist because we can see them. We must define them to understand them.It all begins with a single element. This lone quantity, the empty set which we assume exists, becomes the number zero, the basis for our cathedral of arithmetic.Now we add a fearsome function into the cauldron to build something from this nothing that we’re given. This function has two special properties to make it work: One, that it can never give zero as a value, and two, that it’s one-to-one, meaning that if we know it spits out five, we must have given it four or six as an input but not both.Because of this, the function is a bit like the gift that just keeps on giving. We give it zero, and it gives us some new element, which we define as the number one. Then, we give it one, and it gives us some different element, which we define as the number two. On and on, it goes, giving us more and more natural numbers until we have an infinity of them, all the counting numbers.With these in hand, we can define what addition means. To start off, we say that any natural number plus zero is itself, so that zero has the “identity” property. Then, any natural number plus another number can be defined by taking the second number and stepping back a rung on the ladder of the natural numbers but then applying the function. In other words, if we wanted to add eight to a number, we could say this was the same as adding seven to the number but then applying the function once, or the same as adding zero to the number but then applying the function eight times, just like we’d expect.From this we can go on to build the integers, the set of all these natural numbers with the negative numbers. We form pairs of two natural numbers A and B, writing (A,B), and think of this as the difference between A and B. Every natural number A corresponds to the pair (A,0), and its inverse “-A” corresponds to (0,A). To add, we simply add coordinate-wise.But, the problem is that both (0,0) and (1,1) equivalently represent “zero,” so we have to throw these together into large storage bins called “equivalence classes,” which then become our integers.To form the rationals, we repeat about the same process, thinking of (A,B) as A/B and defining the fractions as equivalence classes of these pairs. Now we have more fractions that we know how to deal with, with our rationals forming a dense speckle of numbers on the real number line.But this isn’t all the real numbers. As the Greeks knew (and killed each other because of), the square root of two is irrational — it can never be represented as a fraction. So, we must perform one more procedure to get all the possible real numbers.Unfortunately, a problem emerges: There are too many irrational numbers. Paradoxically, there are exactly the same number of fractions as there are counting numbers, but there are many more real numbers than both combined. Because of this, the process from above will not work, so we need something else.One way mathematicians deal with this is a “limiting” procedure. Because we have the fractions, we can begin to pick a sequence of numbers - ½, ?, ¼, ?, and so on that each step gets smaller, approaching zero step by step, inch by inch but never equaling zero. In fact, the terms in this “Cauchy” sequence are said to get arbitrarily close, meaning that if we go far enough out in the sequence, we can pick two terms whose distance is smaller than any number we pick.With a little more work, we can pick a Cauchy sequence in the rationals such as this one that will approach the square root of two, even though its limit of square root of two is not in the set of the rationals. This is exactly how we find the reals, all the Cauchy sequences of the rationals together.And just like that, we can build the real number line out of the zero element, making something serious emerge out of nothing.— sidfletc@indiana.edu
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Once upon a time, there was a school called IU. It was a good college — not the best one — but a good public university that one could be proud to have graduated from. It served its students in good times and bad with a quiet humility and a certain Midwestern charm.But of course, as is apt to happen on occasion, out of the ever-changing environment of college came a new atmosphere of irresponsibility that would grow and infect everyone connected to the University. This is a story about that irresponsibility.It’s a story that begins with a state legislature — one that has forgotten the value of investing in education. Two decades ago, the state provided almost 50 percent of IU’s funding. Today, that is down to 18 percent and is expected to fall to 10 percent by the end of the decade. This is unsustainable.Even as legislators continue to pay lip service to the promise of affordable education, they have betrayed this in their proposals of tuition caps. Combined with funding cuts and an opposition to letting universities become private, they have set the stage for the university funding model to crumble and higher education in Indiana to collapse.With their cronies at the Indiana Commission for Higher Education, they have pushed “performance-based funding” as a way to set universities against each other in a brutal “Hunger Games” style rather than encourage collaborative self-improvement. But they are not the only guilty parties.This is also a story about the Board of Trustees, the legal governing body of IU. They knew all of this and did nothing in response, failing to try to bend the cost curve at all. Their best proposal so far has been a laughable student summer tuition discount that in present form will do little to offset rising student costs.This is, in fact, a distraction because their real response has been to squeeze students for more tuition money, to quietly ax things and people without regard to their value to the University and to cross their fingers, hoping that in the long term everything will magically resolve itself. As this is actually not a fairy tale, it’s unlikely this will happen.In addition, the trustees have let themselves be reduced to spectators and lobbyists in the University they legally own. Long ago, they ceded day-to-day authority to the administration and in doing so dissolved an important system of checks and balances between themselves and the administration, a dereliction of duty. This, too, is a story of an administration that simply doesn’t give a shit about students. Despite some good people in positions, the administration is led by a man, Michael McRobbie, whose aloofness and utter inaccessibility to students is baffling at best and criminal at worst, and this sets a tone that reverberates through every corridor of power.It’s a story of a faculty who once were brave and powerful but have become complacent even as their very vocation erodes around them. They have let their students down and let their voice diminish, obsessing about the minutiae of mass email policy rather than sending mass emails to make a difference.And, most importantly, this is the story of a student body that refuses to use its voice for change. Tuition is set to rise 5.5 percent this year again, marking a 45 percent rise in the past five years. Residential Programs and Services fees are set to rise 8 percent for certain dorms, and some of these are the dorms that still don’t have air conditioning. We are losing the battle for the right to affordable education right here, right now.Where are the people who know or care? Where is the mass outrage? Where are the student leaders to declare this unacceptable? It’s unclear. We’re still waiting.This story is like that scene in “Harry Potter” in which Harry sees his father cast the Patronus spell to save his life. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. To save our education, we must reject irresponsibility and seize upon our own rights as students. We must protest.— sidfletc@indiana.edu
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The United States is famous for its tripartite system of government — three independent branches with differentiated power connected by a system of checks and balances to limit the power of any one branch.Across the country, student governments have adopted this system as a model for their own governments, with distinct executive, legislative and judiciary branches. But is this model necessarily the best way for students to express their voices?After all, the very nature of the power that student governments wield is different than that of the United States government.From ancient Greek, “to govern” means “to steer,” as in, a ship, which implies a sort of sovereignty and a set of policies to control. But in a university, student governments are excluded from the power hierarchy made up of the board of trustees and administrators, with faculty fighting like hell for the few scraps of power left behind.Instead, student governments exert power in two ways: as incubators of ideas and as policy advocates.As incubators, student governments serve as the source of “risky” ideas that need to be test-driven and proven financially viable with student money before universities are willing to accept them. As policy advocates, student governments sometimes attempt to influence issues that matter to students by lobbying administrators and lawmakers. Most student government activity can be placed in this rubric.For instance, in a recent letter to the editor, three IUSA officials cite, among other things, the SRSC, the Campus Readership program, Hoosier PACT and the Indiana Lifeline Law as accomplishments of student government. Students often also cite fall break and the campus bus tracking system. Let’s take face value that these are all things essential to students at IU. If so, could we accomplish these things more efficiently without the hassle of messy elections every year and the sprawling bureaucracy in the three branches?We should start by asking ourselves what model of government best suits our needs.In a 1975 “Peabody Journal of Education” article, Don Creamer, dean of students at El Centro College, suggested five models for student government: the representative model, the town hall, the urban community model, the adhocracy and the student syndicate model. Call them the five contenders.Our current system, the representative model, has the advantage that it’s the most obviously democratic of the lot. Another variant of the representative model, a parliamentary system (like in the UK), might help fix the generally awkward relations between Congress and the executive branch.However, a general weakness of this model is its lack of continuity — a one-year or even two-year term makes it hard to accrue enough power within the institution.A town hall-style system solves this problem by having a campus administrator run a town hall empowered to make decisions on issues that matter to students. Unfortunately this requires administrator buy-in.On a side note, even if it were just an open forum, students should demand that the new provost position include having a monthly forum for students to air their concerns.An urban community model in which citizens from around the community and even surrounding high schools participate in decision-making, makes the most sense when college students consider themselves primarily citizens of the community or are raising families. This probably doesn’t apply to IU.An adhocracy model entails a central committee that creates on-the-fly committees to deal with specific issues. This model solves the problem that not every student cares about every issue, or should care about every issue, in an efficient manner. Unfortunately, the system is pretty open to criticism. All it needs is someone clever to dub it the condom model, “Use once and flush,” and it’s ruined forever.Finally a student syndicate, like a labor union, could put huge amounts of pressure on administrators if it could convince students to do things like strike.Could a future IUSA do this? Who knows? But the possibilities are endless, and by having these conversations, we reaffirm our commitment to student rights and student voices.And in the end, that’s what student government is all about.— sidfletc@indiana.edu
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The year was 1630, and things were not going well in merry olde England. The king was corrupting the Church of England, tinting it with Catholic papism, and the Puritans were not going to put up with it any more.And so they left, some for the Netherlands, where expatriates had been for 40 years, and, more famously, some left for the New World.They came to America not just for religious freedom but to create a new “redeemer nation” under a theocracy. As John Winthrop put it, they came to be a unique model of Christian charity, to serve as a “city upon the hill” that would enlighten the depraved world. They came to start the world anew and to change mankind in what can only be described as a utopian fantasy.This quickly went to hell, and the colony they helped found became the liberal bastion of Massachusetts.But the dream of utopianism that animated the Puritans and so many others became rooted in the American psyche and through time became distilled into one dream: the American Dream.Shockingly, today there are those who would seek to deny this heritage and decry its effects.In his New York Times bestseller “Ameritopia,” conservative author Mark Levin turns on utopianism and specifically what he calls statist utopianism (best understood as radical egalitarianism) as the explanation for what’s wrong with America today.In a work endorsed by Sarah Palin and praised by Rush Limbaugh, Levin argues that it is this liberal utopianism that is the enemy of liberty and the promoter of tyranny in America, and that its continued appeal to young leftists puts this country in graver danger than anyone could imagine.Levin couldn’t be more wrong.For 400 years, utopianism, both the “liberal” and “conservative” varieties, has driven America forward to higher heights and to a better form of itself, and they continue to do so today.Some, such as the Puritans’ suffocating experiment and the crazed community led by George Rapp in Harmony, Ind., have pointed the way toward a new work ethic and economic productivity. Others, such as Fanny Wright’s Nashoba, which educated and emancipated slaves, have pointed us toward undervalued human rights and new, better forms of government even in their failure.But if there is a finger to point at utopias that verged on tyranny, it is the former utopias, the “conservative,” not the egalitarian, utopias that threatened the liberty of their citizens.Sure, there are examples and ideas in the literature of liberal utopias that might be considered tyrannical. The work of utopian socialist Charles Fourier comes to mind.But I suspect that if Levin were to ask young leftists about their utopias, he would discover that nothing could be farther from the truth.Leftist utopias are a libertarian’s paradise. What Levin has overlooked is that unlike his staid biases, egalitarians believe it is not necessary to have an overbearing state to enforce equality of condition, and that it is the state that causes inequality.It is people such as Levin, who claim to be on the side of liberty but want to take women’s rights to control their own body and want to continue the clear economic bias of the state in favor of the rich, who are responsible for statism and for creating the problems in America today.Levin decries utopia as the fantasy of the left, but in doing so he ignores his own desired utopia: a utopia led by the perversions of the memory of the Founding Fathers in which all those annoying minorities would just go away.As this is America, he is entitled to his opinion, and there is nothing more valuable than that right. But to deny that he has his own utopia is folly that should be met by laughter — for we all have our own utopias in the United States.After all, “utopia” might mean “no place” in Greek, but there is no place in the world like the U.S.— sidfletc@indiana.edu
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>In a noise that made the lounge where I was sitting burst into laughter, Sam, the female cheetah, moans out loud. Her friend Perry the elephant asks what’s wrong, and Sam says she’s “sooo hungover.” Being a bit of a lumbering creature, Perry feels compelled to ask her whether she drank too much last night. Sam ignores him, saying her head is “filled with seawater,” and she needs a Diet Coke. Perry then attempts to admonish her that she should have paced herself, but it’s too late. Sam is on the floor, having gone “fetal.”Just in time, the tag line appears — “Even cheetahs have to pace themselves. Know your limit and stick to it.” Welcome to college. This is Indiana. Animal style. The cheetah ad, one of four viewable on Youtube, is part of IU’s new ad campaign, Street Smart Party Animals. Developed by student interns in conjunction with IU Communications, the ad campaign follows twelve adorably cute animal figurines (Hank the giraffe, Minnie the panda, Ed the dog, etc.) as they quest across IU and get into sticky situations.According to its website, Street Smart Party Animals, a campaign with the slogan “Play it safe, party animal,” takes a light-hearted tone needed to appeal to students to address the serious issues surrounding campus safety.Well, they’ve got at least half of it right.In the past year, there have been at least four deaths, two assaults and two robberies on campus, and a student disappearance.Pedestrian safety has remained a worry since a student was killed crossing Fee Lane, and alcohol-related excess remains an accident waiting to happen.Of course, all campuses face these issues because crime and casualty are unavoidable in the real world. What is really happening here is a gradual shift in perception. Our idyllic paradise of Bloomington is becoming a place where people question when the next crime will occur.With some basis in truth, campus officials have been pushing back on that narrative, but I fear the Pandora’s box has been opened. The doubts about campus safety that lurk on the tip of parents’ tongues and in the back of students’ minds are here to stay. And with that, IU needs an answer.If this campaign is our answer, then we should be worried because there should be serious questions about the tone and the message of this campaign.In light of what has happened, how can we pay respect to victims with an ad centered on a poor analogy to cheetahs? In light of Lauren Spierer, how can the optics of this goofy campaign work? After all, they’re silly animals teaching us how to behave. If we need animals to teach us how to behave, what does that make us as college students? Protozoans?Furthermore, what messages are these ads promoting? In “Sam Pushed the Limit,” her friend tells her she should have paced herself the morning after. Might that be a little late?In another ad, “Panzebraphant,” Perry the elephant and Fred the bull have to carry the drunk animals home on their backs as they shout various ridiculous drunk things. Sign me up to be a designated driver right away!But even if we take the messages of these ads at their intended value, will they be effective? After all, college students know these things — to take a designated driver, to pace themselves — and they continue to ignore them with frightening ease.— sidfletc@indiana.edu
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Israel, O Israel, why hast thou forsaken me?You were a country I wanted to admire and respect.You were the birthplace of the kibbutzim — the socialist utopias that cultivated the desert and nourished the people.You were the stronghold of a union that stood firm for its workers, a country where strikes were integrated into the very social fabric.You were the harbinger of a new social justice movement, an Occupy Rothschild before there was such a thing as Occupy Wall Street.You were born in sin, but then again, who among us was not?And yet, somehow, along with the way, you began to shift and change.You have become a nation in which democracy is simultaneously under siege and on the run, those who question the government are denied licenses and those who oppose the government are investigated.You have joined the ranks of shame along with the United States in your use of unlawful “administrative detention,” a perverse distortion of justice.You have played with fire in the most volatile environment possible, allowing the hyper-delicate balance surrounding the Temple Mount to be manipulated by extremist Jewish groups.You have become the perpetuator of an occupation that deprives the Palestinian people of their right to a state, an occupation that every compassionate person knows is wrong.And your leaders? Where do I begin?Your Prime Minister is a liar of the first degree, by the words of Sarkozy. But worse than that, he is the man who murdered Rabin, who strangled the Oslo Accords and who has no intention of ever making peace while his father lives.And what’s more, your Foreign Minister is a radical lunatic, a former Moldovan bouncer whose vision of the Holy Land involves chucking all those who are not like him into the seas.And the valiant opposition? What opposition?Israel, you have become a country teetering on the edge of the abyss, moving in slow motion toward a future in which the Palestinian occupation never ends, an Israeli apartheid. And we all are standing here watching with our mouths open.But this year, as we pause to mark Israeli Apartheid Week, I still have hope.For 66 days, not a morsel of food passed between the lips of Khader Adnan. The baker of Arraba, ripped from his wife and children nine times to be placed in unlawful captivity, became the man who can’t be moved. Khader’s weapon against his administrative detention was not violence but satyagraha, the silent struggle of strength against a mountain of lies and distortions. Faced with the fragility of life and the mounting pressure of the world around, Israel agreed to conditionally release Khader.A small victory for a David, undoubtedly, but a source of hope for us all.There are those out there who say this is an intractable conflict, that as the years drip by, they suck away the dream of reconciliation — but they are wrong. For as long as there are brave men such as Khader in the Holy Land, the dream that one day Israeli and Palestinian children will walk together in the streets lives on.And on that day, the Palestinian people, in the breath of a people oppressed far too long, will cry out that they are free at last — free at last — thank the Lord, free at last!O Israel, return to thy true morals, for your sins have brought you down.— sidfletc@indiana.edu
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____> In a splashy front-page profile in Tuesday’s Indiana Daily Student, a picture of IU’s new presidential intern, Christian Hines, sits below the weighty headline of “Renovating the Undergraduate Experience.”Hines, the article informs us, is going to bring a Great Books program to us, the deprived undergraduates of IU.A Great Books program — in which students read much of the Western philosophical canon — will teach the weak-minded how to think and cause the apathetic to embrace their civic duty.According to the article, the program will “advance the undergraduate experience” and “benefit the kind of undergraduate that IU has tried harder and harder, in recent years, to recruit.”I hear it even slices bread for students in the morning.As it happens, this sort of thought is not confined to Hines, but is part of a larger Back-to-the-Future movement in education biding its time until the “choice” reformers burn out.At the New York Times, professional academic grump Stanley Fish has been championing his own education at Classical High School in Rhode Island as a model for improving education.At Classical, they learned “four years of Latin, three years of French, two years of German, physics, chemistry, biology, algebra, geometry, calculus, trigonometry, English, history and civics, in addition to extra-curricular activities and clubs — French Club, Latin Club, German Club, Science Club among many others” and amazingly, it was a perfect system for everyone.With that in mind, should we perhaps just skip the Latin lessons all together and go back to the days when only the elite few sat in a room led by a knuckle-rapping nun?Maybe I’m not giving enough credit to the proposals, for undoubtedly there is some merit to these ideas, and they may even benefit some students.But renovating the undergraduate experience? Give me a break.Now, you could say a number of things about a Great Books program at IU.For one, in my small unscientific survey of Wells Scholars — whom I suspect are the “kind of undergraduate” Hines is referring to and for whom the program is designed — there was some serious confusion about what a Great Books program would be and a seeming lack of demand.But beyond that, in a world that is increasingly globally interconnected, why would we want to revert to teaching the same Greco-Roman mindset of dead white guys from the previous millennium? If our goal is to teach students how to think, why are the (Western) Great Books so valuable, besides the reason that they have been regarded as such for centuries?I suspect, of course, that these things don’t matter because, a bit like the organic food movement, the impetus for change is based on some sort of misplaced nostalgia — that we have lost some essential element along the way and need it back, rather than a basis in reason.I picture some sort of wizened professor shaking his pinched hand at the world: “Ah, if only we had a Great Books program here — everything would be better.” “Ah, if only we had better teachers — all our education problems would be solved.”It’s as if in their quest to stop modernity, these reformers have deluded themselves into believing the rhetoric that there is one simple solution, one honest get-rich-cheap scheme.It’s fine if this is their drug to deaden the pain of the world, but my reality suggests that only the tough stuff will lead to true improvement, things such as bitter work, talent, money and creating a cycle of excellence between students and faculty.Mr. Hines’s idea is commendably innovative and deserves our praise.But if it’s set up with the expectation that it will radically change the academic weaknesses at IU, then it’s doomed to fail.— sidfletch@indiana.edu
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>God was sitting on his throne, rubbing his temples in frustration.“What is it with people these days?” he wondered aloud. “When I gave people the ability to reason, I expected them to use it wisely.”God sighed and slouched in his chair a bit. An angel had brought him the news earlier that day that the Indiana Senate had passed a bill allowing school boards to teach Christian “theories of the origin of life,” such as creationism, in classrooms. Of course, God in his omniscience had already known that, but nonetheless it annoyed him. God was just sick and tired of politicians using his name to advance their own agendas. Unfortunately, the brand management consultant God had found in purgatory hadn’t really helped at all.God turned toward his right hand in search of some sympathy.Jesus looked back at him. “You know, people are free to believe what they want. After all, they have to come of their own free will to you and me.”“I know. It’s just—” God sputtered for a bit. “It’s just, this bill is a political stunt, and its sponsor Dennis Kruse is an embarrassment to me and to Indiana! Why do they take Genesis so literally? Can’t everybody use their reason and believe in evolution?” “Stop that!” snapped Jesus. “I know for a fact that you love each and every one of your children, despite all their faults. Besides, that’s not the real problem.”God nodded reluctantly.“You know politicians will be politicians,” Jesus said. “The issue is that the public and scientists just talk past each other when they discuss evolution.“You see, the public doesn’t understand the evidence for evolution or how central evolution is to modern biology. I mean, doing biology without evolution would be like doing math without a concept of numbers.“And worse, scientists don’t understand that science isn’t something empirical to the general public, and so beating people over the head with the data for evolution isn’t doing a lot of good. Until they understand that people mean it when they say evolution is a “belief,” it’s like talking to a brick wall. Right?”God nodded and said, “I know what you mean,” because, of course, he really did know.“Still,” Jesus continued, “I share your frustration with how unbecoming and unprofessional this bill is. Are you going to stop it?”God sighed, looking exasperated. “No, I have to restrain myself. If I interfered every time I was annoyed by something all there’d be left are Buddhist monks and a couple of cockroaches. Besides, it’ll all turn out well in the end. At worst, there’s no way the Supreme Court would ever overturn Edwards v. Aguillard — think of the public outrage! “No, who I’m really worried about is the high school science teachers who are intimidated to take a pro-evolution stance by this law and the students who might have to sit through this crap about ‘holes’ in evolution. “Actually, send a memo to Mary asking her to pray for them, would you?”Jesus turned to his administrative assistant angel and began dictating a memo.— sidfletc@indiana.edu
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The Great Orator has transformed before our eyes into the Great Ordinary. The man whose words caused him to soar above a thousand clouds has crashed down to Earth — just in time for his second launch.The One — the man they claimed had the golden gift of gab — was reduced to nothing more than an echo of his 2004 Democratic National Committee speech, to Elizabeth Warren’s “No one made it on their own” speech and a slogan, “An America Built to Last,” that sounded as if it was ripped from a 1960s Ford commercial.And the man President Barack Obama was thought to be was forgotten, crushed by the “pragmatism” of Washington.In a shocking moment of truth, Herman Cain actually said something sensible Tuesday night. As he put it, the President’s State of the Union was a “hodgepodge of little ideas” lacking any sort of bold, brave innovation.For a man who hated the Clintons and everything they stood for, his Mark Penn-approved, microtargeting checklist ought to cause a hard look in the mirror.Plea for the Hispanic vote with immigration reform and the Just a Dream Act? Check.Plea for the college vote by blowing hot-air about tuition increases? Check.Plea for the bitter people vote by getting tough on China and harking the Detroit bailout? Check.It’s no wonder that not a single signature phrase — no Great Society, Square Deal or even an Axis of Evil — is associated with Obama’s presidency.If such a smart man has been forced into this position all the while banging his tin cup, why would anyone want to go into politics?The visionary who wanted high-speed trains included in the stimulus has become the administrator clearing away the red tape for construction.And the man who was going to bring post-partisanship to Washington has become the defender of Democratic values with a sword of fairness.Of course, this all comes down to the Obama circle’s belief that, in the end, it is narrative story and not substance that wins in politics.And, God willing, if Obama wins a second term, that will truly be a story to tell.— sidfletc@indiana.edu
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>When I was young, my mother would always tell me the story of a boy shot in the face with a BB gun to remind me of the danger of guns.Someone needs to give President Barack Obama the same advice.Back in 1955, a battle over the soul of Israeli policy was raging within the walls of its government. At one end stood the activists, led by David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan. At the core of the activist school of thought was the belief that the world was a dangerous place and that the only language the Arabs would understand was the language of force, of the bayonet.At the time, the activists believed Israel was facing a deteriorating political situation and the only way to solve this was through a “preventative” military demonstration, specifically against Gamal Nasser of Egypt.At the other end stood the Sharettists, led by Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett. Although not opposed to military action on principle, the Sharettists were convinced that negotiations with the Arabs could be fruitful, and peaceful coexistence was possible in the Middle East.The Sharettists’ conviction that Israel had to play by the rules of international behavior led them to cast a suspicious eye towards Dayan’s increasingly reckless schemes to push Egypt into war.Of course, we know how this story ends. The Sharettists lost, and in a case of vomit-inducing imperialism, Israel colluded with the colonial-minded Britain and France to launch an attack after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.Enraged, the superpowers forced the three countries to withdraw from Egypt soon after. As an ultimatum, the Eisenhower administration threatened to cut off all public and private American aid to Israel and throw Israel out of the United Nations.More than a paltry history lesson, this battle has continued to play out over the course of Israeli history and has recently been reignited over the question of whether Israel should attack Iran.The chief public opponents of a strike have been from the older military generation and are led by former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who said last year that an Israeli air strike on Iran would be “the stupidest thing I have ever heard” and “patently illegal under international law.” But unlike on the road to Suez, all the modern Sharettists have left the government. Left behind are the trigger-happy hawks at the helm, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu — who would make a better GOP candidate than any of the current clowns — and Defense Minister Ehud Barak straight out of the Labor activist tradition.To these men, Iran is the symbolic existential threat to the Jewish nation, to which the basic solution is the overthrow of the Iranian regime.Thus, through the lens of this ideology, attacking Iran is a foregone conclusion. The only question is, how soon?Of course, as those of us beholden to different ideologies realize, Israel’s attack on Iran would be disastrous for the world.As Admiral Mullen has put it, an attack on Iran would be “a big, big, big problem for all of us, and I worry a great deal about the unintended consequences.” Because of our yoking to Israel, America would inevitably be drawn in. Also, because of our interests in Iraq and Afghanistan, there will be unavoidable mission creep. And let’s just say a joint Israeli-American regime change would not be welcomed with open arms, even if it didn’t start a world war.Today, there is only one man who can prevent Israel’s attack on Iran.In 2002, he was an obscure state senator who spoke against a “dumb war” in the Middle East as the drums of war were beating. Today, on the strength of that claim, that man is our president.In a world where the “Atlanta Jewish Times” is calling for Israel to assassinate Obama over Iran, there can be no prevarication, no hesitation, no options left open to Bibi.To save the world from the activists, President Obama must gather the strength to deliver a change and publicly declare that the United States will not militarily support Israel in an attack on Iran.I fear nothing else will save the world from the Bibi gun about to go off in our face.— sidfletc@umail.iu.edu
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>All over the Internet, business students are up in arms about Tuesday’s occupation of the doorway to a JPMorgan event at the Kelley School of Business, saying we’ll be lucky if the big banks ever return to recruit here. If this is indeed true, don’t save any tissues for me at the funeral service. You might have a better chance of finding me in the crowd shouting at the banks not to let the door hit their asses on the way out.In response to the protests, many have said — with an unspeakable amount of condescension — they, unlike the liberal arts majors, want jobs after college. Moving past the terror that this bravado conceals, the basic premise of this argument is the assumption that all careers which pay are worth pursuing. I, for one, beg to differ. Whatever I end up doing, I know I want to be making a positive difference in the world. At one time, I thought all college students would think the same thing because no one wants to see themselves as evil. My semesters at IU have proved me wrong. If you’ve never done it, listening to students defend their decision to pick a major like finance is fascinating. Since the financial industry does very little actual good for society, and it’s not cool to admit you’re a corrupt money-grubbing bastard, these arguments often come down to an appeal to philosophic capitalism and the greed motive. Tragically, this is a complete misunderstanding of what capitalism is.In “The Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith expounds on how a system of natural liberty (capitalism) is a highly efficient and productive system with which to produce wealth. This free market system, powered by the liberty to pursue self-interest, is guided to efficiency through the invisible hand.However, what the boiled-down version misses is Smith’s argument that capitalism must function in a community because it is through community that morality arises. In other words, man’s self-interest must include the maintenance of the bonds of community. Without this understanding, capitalism is an emaciated, immoral shadow of itself in which the selfish individual exploits and destroys the world around him.This is more than just an academic’s distinction. As globalization has stretched the bonds of community thin, the modern-day multinational corporation has put this emaciated capitalism into practice, producing a devastating effect.Nowhere is this more evident than in the financial industry. What’s wrong with Wall Street is that mega-banks like JPMorgan were more concerned with their fancy financial instruments than foreclosing on families and communities. And what’s truly outrageous is their refusal to repent. With their arrogance, investment banking firms like Goldman Sachs sully our campus with their presence. It’s high time IU bans recruitment by megabanks on this campus. No longer should they be allowed to peddle their evil morals and use our resources to sell students into a massive Faustian bargain.I know that there are those who would argue that banning banks from recruiting on campus interferes with students’ rights to go work for those banks. This is a silly argument. I acknowledge the right of banks to exist and for students to gain employment there. By the same token, I accept the existence of burglars and the right of people to associate with them in a free society. But there’s no way I would let a burglar into my home, and there’s no way we should let banks on this campus.Until IU adopts a sensible ban on bank recruitment, there will not be peace on this campus. There will be more direct actions. Expect it.— sidfletc@indiana.edu
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The season of gluttony has passed, and the season of giving is upon us. Thanksgiving came and went, and slowly, the mass of turkey I ate was digested. Black Friday/Cyber Monday is over, and eventually, I got over all the shopping I did (and money I spent). Now, it’s that wonderful time of year when we can focus on giving to others to show our true gratitude. However, every year during this time, I watch as people around me are forgotten about. I myself forgot to buy my parents a present this past year. So this year, I decided enough was enough; it’s time to speak out. Every year, people’s feelings are hurt as their friends and family members choose not to give them presents. Below, I’ve compiled a gift guide for people who never are touched by the Christmas spirit. I beseech you, dear reader, to find a place in your heart to give to these poor people. Not only will you be helping the local economy, but you’ll be making yourself a better person. Please, together let’s ring in the season of giving.1. Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card, Rating: 3.5 StarsThis vintage Chance card only looks like it was taken from your father’s Monopoly set. In fact, this small slip of paper is accepted as a valid “oops” by governments from Equatorial Guinea to East Timor. This gift is perfect for your friend about to go study abroad, who undoubtedly will do something dumb. Who among us hasn’t felt the heat of the Middle East coursing through their veins and gotten the urge to go join a potentially violent protest? Let’s offer IU student Luke Gates a warm welcome home with this gift card. An appointment with AA (Activists Anonymous) would also be appropriate. Note: Card not valid if stolen.2. Army Depot Pepper Spray, Rating: 4.5 StarsThis military-grade pepper spray release canister is perfect for your local campus administrator looking to water her grassroots. The patented continuous spray technology has undergone rigorous testing and is proven to help foster true dialogue and real democracy. But that’s not all this gadget can do. This spray doubles as a handy Black Friday shopping aid with the quick press of a button. And, as a Fox News-endorsed “food product,” the extracted liquid is an excellent condiment for late-night Jello shots or for use as a chaser. Stay thirsty, my friends.Note: The pepper spray manufacturer is not liable for injury.3. Live Teletubby Animatron, Rating: 3 StarsDaniel Bostic, age 25 of Bloomington, was recently sentenced to 315 years for creating child pornography with toddlers. As one of the most sympathized figures in our prison system, we’re offering a special deal on gifts: 25% off on live Teletubbies. To this incredible offer, we’re adding a 1000-year warranty on the Teletubbies to keep them running, chasing, and shouting “Eh-oh” for the rest of time. With four varieties to choose from (Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po), you can’t go wrong. And best of all, the Teletubbies are programmed to say “Naughty Noo-Noo” when touched.4. Magic Number 3 Pencil, Rating: 4 StarsAfter IU student Adam Justin was charged with taking the SAT for other students and surrendered to police during break, we can understand why you’d be depressed about standardized testing. Boy, do we have the solution for you. Using the novel InThink technology derived from brain studies of mice, our magic Number 3 pencil, if used correctly, is guaranteed to give you a perfect score or your money back. On test day, simply place the pencil in your hand and on the answer sheet and watch as it fills in all the correct answers for you. As an added bonus, when you press the eraser, the pencil will explain why standardized testing is inherently flawed and was a terrible replacement for the old system. Note: Terms and conditions apply. This might require serious studying.5. All-Expenses-Paid Trip to Siberia, Rating: 5 Stars Sponsored by our local chapter of the AFL-CIO union, this $10,000 vacation to Russia can be yours for only $50, perfect for a state legislator. As we all know, our state legislature just works so darn hard trying to bring jobs for this state. Why don’t you give the gift of a trip to beautiful Siberia to your burnt-out state legislator this Christmas? While in Siberia, they will have the opportunity to visit a Soviet-era Gulag camp and live on its premises. But not to worry, the camp has modern medical care, so any legislators foaming at the mouth will be well taken care of. Better yet, while in the forced labor camp, they will have the right to work.Note: This vacation might be subject to lobbying regulations.— sidfletc@indiana.edu
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Jacob Anthony Saydeh, the son of two Air Force veterans, was born one week ago on Nov. 11, 2011, at 11:11 a.m.. My sources in the mystical world tell me this entitles him to one extra-powerful wish. That’s good, because he’ll need it.This week, a group of Chinese academics selected Vladimir Putin as the winner of the Confucius Peace Prize. I hope we can all agree that Putin, best known for his brutal suppression of Chechnya and a free press in Russia, was this year’s most effective messenger of peace.In defense of Putin, his latest campaign ad involves a college-aged guy and girl registering to vote before hooking up in a voting booth. We all know how much more peace (and voting) that would bring. Back in China, the selection committee said Putin was chosen from a pool of eight, including Bill Gates and Kofi Annan, because of his (failed) efforts to keep NATO from going to war in Libya.Speaking of inane selection processes, this week Herman Cain, the man who would be president, had some of his own failed efforts concerning Libya.As he put it to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “I do not agree with the way he handled it for the following reason — nope, that’s a different one. I gotta go back to, see ... got all this stuff twirling around in my head.” In the words of Rick Perry, “Oops.”There’s this great moment in American mythology when the British come out to surrender at Yorktown with the military band playing “The World Turned Upside Down.” If only that band was here now.This week, we watched as our understanding of “going the Second Mile” was permanently flipped and scarred.We watched as Bunga-Bunga Berlusconi was finally turned out of his prime minister post. And, of course, we watched Occupy Wall Street members forced out of their tents by a secret, early morning police raid.You can be forgiven if your head is spinning a little bit now. If all the world’s a stage, the playwright’s going mad and this is the Theater of the Absurd. I, for one, don’t like it.Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that all around us, there’s a consensus developing in our generation that our adversarial system of politics and economics isn’t working.That’s the idea at the core of the 99 percent movement and an idea actually echoed by the early tea parties.That, too, is the idea behind college opinion columnists who write about “discourse” or “the two-party system,” a complaint you’re sure to hear about when the supercommittee fails next week. Once upon a time, there was a generation that had a similar dream. They were called the Baby Boomers, and they were going to save the world. They failed. They failed and here we are today with the world oscillating up and down.It’s up to us to figure out why they failed so we can put the Baby Boomers out to pasture. Every day we wait, the world gets a little worse and the problems a little more intractable.And we better hurry, because at some point, not even Jacob’s wish will be powerful enough to repair this world.— sidfletc@indiana.edu
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Most of you probably know IU recently announced it would cut tuition by 25 percent for the summer session. What you might not know is that this didn’t come out of the blue.Angry that — like five of the six other state universities — IU raised its tuition above the Indiana Commission on Higher Education’s recommendations this year, the Indiana Senate Appropriations Committee turned its guns on the universities at a September hearing. Reports have suggested the state legislature is serious about capping tuition increases next year by tying them to cost-of-living increases. This frightened universities enough to gall them into action, which accounts for IU’s emergency Board of Trustees meeting last Friday in which they approved the decreases.This seems to have quieted the statehouse. Sen. Luke Kenley, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, called the idea “a great concept” and “very creative thinking,” which I think is politician-speak for “hold your fire.”That said, don’t be satisfied with this just yet. In Terre Haute, Indiana State University President Daniel Bradley announced ISU will reduce its tuition increase from 3.5 percent to 1.5 percent next year to keep costs down for all undergraduates. In addition, Bradley created a task force on affordability to look at other rising student costs, such as housing and textbooks.Placed side by side, it’s pretty clear that we as IU students got the short end of the stick.The proposal to reduce summer tuition and move to “year-long education” doesn’t work for people who have to work a full-time job or do an internship during the summer. It doesn’t work for people who have already run through the limited catalog of summer classes offered. And since there’s a smaller number of faculty available to teach summer classes, it couldn’t handle the full undergraduate population anyway.I have to admit I’m confused as to why President Michael McRobbie and the trustees would choose this course of action.For the approximate 60 percent of students who don’t take summer classes, this proposal doesn’t do anything to reduce debt, which is what concerned the state legislature in the first place. Even if this proposal manages to raise summer enrollment, which has been dropping in recent years due to mostly unrelated reasons, then rising summer living costs will probably cut into the tuition discount. This seems like an $11 million recipe to get us back to square one in a few years, and that’s scary.After watching the Zionsville school district get cut down at the knees by legislated property tax caps, poor urban planning and voters who don’t value education, I think absolute legislative caps are bad news. The trustees should be working as hard as possible to avoid this.With that in mind, the smart thing would have been to do as ISU did and announce a voluntary promise to keep tuition in line with cost-of-living increases — with some wiggle room. This would’ve required tough budget decisions but also would’ve been the fairest solution for both students and the University.On second thought, this isn’t a “would-have, could-have” issue. It’s not too late to get this changed. All that it would take is us as students daring to declare we want fair tuition.— sidfletc@indiana.edu