EDITORIAL

The right track on alcohol

The news of a decrease in reported alcohol-related incidents involving Hopkins students represents an overwhelmingly positive step for the University and the surrounding community. The work of Carrie Bennett, as usual, is to be applauded, along with the pragmatism of Dean Boswell and her associates in the Office of Student Life. Where many would demand that students simply not drink at all, Dean Boswell, Bennett and the rest of the administration realized that cracking down on alcohol consumption is a fruitless avenue. Hence, Bennett spoke to freshmen, virtually all of whom are not of legal drinking age.

The truth is that college students, here and everywhere, will drink and get rowdy. Hopkins' approach to the matter of student drinking, the decision not to ignore underclassmen, represents not only a progressive method, but also an effective one.

We are also pleased to learn that Mary Pat Clarke, long persona non grata on the Homewood campus, and her constituents are responding to the administration's measures as well as the students have. Her support of the University's progress is an important sign that old rifts are beginning to close. The University and the city of Baltimore exist in a vital symbiosis -- one that cannot survive without the support of our nearest neighbors. It is particularly important that town-gown relations remain strong during this transformative episode in the history of Charles Village.

Of course it is amusing that some members of the community seem to be disappointed that the police are not more involved in quelling local disturbances. This is Baltimore, one of the most crime-ridden cities in the country. Our police officers could do much more with their time than breaking up overly rowdy parties. It is comforting to know that this ridiculous complaint is not widespread.

Perhaps the most heartening element of this whole sordid affair is that students know the administration is taking a pro-active position on protecting our social lives. As for our livers, well, that is our concern.

Reinvigorating StuCo

The significant rise in voter turnout among freshmen during this week's Student Council class of 2010 elections signals a healthy trend -- not only are the campus newbies driven to participate in student government, but they're also motivated enough to mobilize their peers. Most upperclassmen remember past elections as marked by student disinterest, virtually invisible campaigns and uninspired platforms, not to mention the spate of fraud controversies that tormented the now-defunct Board of Elections. But the new freshman victors have shown they can indeed get out the vote, and we hope their energy and enthusiasm drives StuCo as a whole to become more visible on campus.

Although we applaud the Student Council officers and the Committee for Student Elections for running a smooth and efficient election, it is the candidates themselves who we should credit for the high turnout. Several candidates showed that they weren't afraid to use innovative ploys -- or shell out the bucks -- to make noise, using strategies like T-shirt distribution and person-to-person campaigning to promote their candidacies. While we certainly don't condone an increase in the campaign spending limit -- the current cap of 300 dollars is quite sufficient -- we do hope that students continue to explore new ways to communicate their views. These strategies can only benefit a campus that continually suffers from an isolated student body.

But a successful election is only the beginning. The next step for StuCo will be to utilize the energy of the incoming officers to effect real change on campus. It's not enough to go through the routine of meetings with administrators and holding rote conferences that only a select group of student leaders attend. It's time to develop a sense of grassroots community at Hopkins, whether it is joining together students who demand more campus events or advocating for greater political and social involvement. StuCo, whose utility on campus has always been considered dubious at best, can place its new members at the forefront of such change. If it doesn't, the momentum it has gained from the high turnout in this election will have almost certainly gone to waste.

A citizen's responsibility

Though you wouldn't know it from talking to the average Hopkins student, the country is now less than a month away from one of the most important midterm elections in its history.

To most, the notion itself is a contradiction: how can a non-presidential election, in which none of the races are national, be one of the most important in the country's history?

After all, there is certainly only a very small minority of Hopkins students who see even the fiercest of presidential elections as having a tangible impact on their daily lives. And so the question, from one election to another, inevitably becomes the universal justification for civic and political apathy: Why should we even care?

But this shortsighted rationale serves only to widen the rift between the average Hopkins student and the world -- or even the city -- around him. And that rift, a dangerous one in-and-of-itself, becomes even more urgent when you consider the current political environment of Baltimore and cities like it across the country, the influences of which the average Hopkins student simply cannot avoid.

Voters in Maryland, for example, say their highest priority heading into next month's gubernatorial election is finding a way to fix Baltimore's dilapidated public school system -- just as a new program at Hopkins aims to bolster its inner-city admissions rate and, in turn, reenergize some of the city's most disastrous public high schools.

And, in a series of recent polls, voters nationwide have voiced concern over what many think has become a meandering and aimlessly violent war in Iraq -- just as a new and highly publicized report from the School of Public Health this week claims that the Iraqi death toll has exceeded well over a half-million.

Officials in Baltimore are moving toward passage of a law that would forbid anyone under the age of 21 -- specifically college students -- from entering bars and clubs in the city. And, despite the recent decrease in party-related incidents, police and residents alike still remain poised, on any given weekend, to dismantle even the tamest of fraternity parties and distribute citations to the minimally rambunctious.

And so, next month's midterm elections -- in which Baltimore will elect a city council, Maryland will elect a governor and the country will elect members of Congress -- become crucial even to the average Hopkins student, whose vote will bear little influence on his sterling GPA or application to medical school.

But if we neglect the right to vote -- if we allow complacency to fester, apathy to spread and civic disinterest to become popular, whatever influence we may have been able to wield on the political environment around us will certainly have been lost.

And so, if you are not yet registered to vote, we implore you to do so immediately -- before the election is decided without you.

iClass

We've come a long way since the days of Netscape Navigator and the "information superhighway" -- a phrase now appropriately reserved for comic stabs at the early 1990s. Hopkins has long been at the forefront of technological advancement and is looking to stay there with the newly developed classroom podcasting program. The technology is a promising one, but there are reasons to wonder about its efficacy.

The most common concern among professors about the podcasting system appears to be the possibility of increased truancy. They are right to be worried. Many will surely opt to skip class in favor of private instruction in the sun, but students who figure they can derive as much from a podcast as a lecture in class are deluding themselves. There is no replacement for a real-live professor pontificating and turning the blank blackboard into a sea of notes and equations. This is not the response of some neo-Luddite -- it is a well-known fact that the classroom is the superior pedagogical setting. That is partially why a semester's tuition at Hopkins will set you back roughly $15,000, while a correspondence course will demand a far less prodigious outlay. To a certain extent, you get what you pay for.

The podcasting initiative is costing the school very little, so it is sensible to experiment with the tool, but our skepticism would be substantially assuaged if there were some indication of why this is actually a beneficial program. It would seem that implementation is based largely on what may be called technology fetishism -- an obsession with using emergent technologies simply because they are there. It is the same mentality that leads to Playstation Portable vending machines (yes, they exist), TVs in cars -- heaven forefend that children should spend 10 minutes without a screen nearby -- or a hovering automotive creeper. Why should a mechanic roll under a car on a pesky wheeled platform when he could just ride on air?

The concept of podcasting classes is probably not as useless as Sony's foray into automated sales, but it's getting there. We've come to Hopkins for many reasons, but somewhere on that list is going to class. A publicly available audio stream certainly sounds egalitarian, but that is not why we students are hemorrhaging money and incurring debt like some failed tech startup on that ol' information superhighway.