Letter to the Editor 03/09/21
In response to “Why I quit SGA and why you should care” published on March 9, 2021:
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In response to “Why I quit SGA and why you should care” published on March 9, 2021:
In response to “We all miss campus, but making the return optional isn’t equitable” published on June 26, 2020:
We are two months into 2020, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that civilization itself hangs in the balance.
This year, our Student Government Association (SGA) sought to fix the student organization culture here at Hopkins. Unfortunately, they’ve ignored student interests at every step in the process, while failing at basic administrative tasks required to help student leaders adapt to the changes being forced upon them.
As someone who has been working on the student center initiative for over a year, I was disappointed by the way the announcement on Tuesday night was handled. While the University celebrated and announced that they had finally nailed down a donor, filling the Beach with food trucks and seesaws to win a large crowd for their thank you video, the lack of communication about what the student center entailed left students with pressing and important questions.
To the Hopkins Undergraduate Student Body:
This past Labor Day, tens of thousands of workers employed at Amazon fulfillment centers appreciated one of their few days of rest. It was doubtlessly a needed reprieve from working conditions so strict that Amazon fired a worker for seven minutes of unproductivity, forced employees to walk over 15 miles a day and caused one employee to state that [Amazon] kills you mentally and physically.
This Sunday at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Michelle Wolf’s comedy routine delivered an unflinching roast to many of the people in attendance.
For decades, Hopkins students have yearned for a student center: a central space for the collective pursuit of our social and mental wellbeing. Hopkins is an outlier. A student center exists at nearly every other college and university campus in the United States (including the 33 peer institutions to which Hopkins compares itself), but not here. More schools have a student center than an armed private police force.
Most people raised in the U.S. were taught the same thing about the purpose of testing in our education system: to prove just how much you know and to give you a grade based on how much of the class material you’ve successfully learned and memorized. Of course, some people are better test takers than others, and their scores reflect that. But nevertheless, tests still served as a measure of knowledge. For a while, in high school, that logic continued to hold true. As classes got harder, some tests would have a curve to boost lower grades to reflect the fact that if everyone in the class got a low score, it was likely a function of an overly difficult class rather than the students’ failure to learn. However, once in college, all that reasoning seems to have fallen to the cruel whims of the Bell Curve.
It’s a well-known fact that for many people, Hopkins is a stressful school. There’s probably only one place in the world where you’ll see students streaming directly into the library after their University holds a campus-wide ceremony and light show, and that’s Hopkins! Now before I get into this, I want to emphasize that Hopkins is a great place to be, and tons of people love it here. So do I. This piece is about making a great place even better.
What else is there to say about guns? In 1999, 12 students were fatally shot in Columbine High School. There were protests, rallies and calls for gun control. Nothing happened. That year concluded a decade in which 64 schools experienced shootings and 85 students were killed. In the next 10 years, the nation grieved over 60 school shootings.
At the end of the fall semester, our Board of Trustees finally released their decision on fossil fuel divestment. In an email to the Hopkins community, President Daniels lauded their decision to divest from companies that make more than 35 percent of their profits from coal, rather than follow the Public Interest Investment Advisory Committee (PIIAC)’s recommendations to divest from companies that profit from all types of fossil fuels.
In response to "Free speech is a vital part of social progress" published in the Nov. 30 edition of The News-Letter.
It’s already been a bad few weeks for President Trump. Two of his former campaign workers got indicted on corruption charges and a couple more are under serious questioning from the FBI for their possible roles in Trump-Russia collusion. His legislative agenda has gone nowhere as per usual. By any metric he isn’t doing well, but the only metric that matters is what the voters think. And last week, on Nov. 7, they showed us just how angry they are.
Vaping has become incredibly ubiquitous over the past few years. It’s been showing up at parties, on campus and pretty much anywhere else you’d expect people to be. CDC statistics show that 38 percent of high schoolers and 13 percent of middle schoolers have already tried vaping. Vapes have been allowed to proliferate with virtually no oversight by any public health or government agency.