The opinions presented below are solely the views of the author and do not represent the views of The News-Letter. If you are a member of the Hopkins community looking to submit a piece or a letter to the editor, please email opinions@jhunewsletter.com.
This coming Saturday, the J Street U student Town Hall will be happening on our very own campus. Over 300 students from across the country will gather with experts, activists, and prominent political figures to stand united in support of U.S. leadership to achieve a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The widespread use of contraceptives has indeed harmed women physically, emotionally, morally, and spiritually — and has, in many respects, reduced her to the ‘mere instrument for the satisfaction of [man’s] own desires.’” It’s hard to believe that anyone actually thinks this, let alone declares it as fact. But this is just one example pulled from the 59 amicus briefs filed in support of Hobby Lobby, a for-profit corporation arguing for exemption from the contraception mandate of the Affordable Care Act on the grounds that it is an unconstitutional violation of “its” sincerely held religious beliefs.
In Teller’s latest film, Tim’s Vermeer, the Director/Producer explores Johannes Vermeer as the Master Dutch painter of reality. The question that many art historians and scholars alike have asked is: “How did Vermeer paint photo-realistic paintings so many years before the advent of the photograph?”
The close of the twentieth century saw the rise of what Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk called “neo-Soviet imperialism” in his op-ed last week. With the reanimation of the still-warm corpse of the Soviet Union as its ultimate goal, this ideology has been at the center of the Kremlin’sgeopoliticalagenda, and is the driving force behind nearly every action the Russian Federation has undertaken. Fueled by rapidly increasing global energy prices, the Russian Federation under Putin has become more aggressive in its pursuit of an empire of the former Soviet republics. Russia’s involvement in the domestic affairs of Ukraine, then, is only the most recent and most poignant result of a Kremlin that may have overplayed it’s hand. But a closer analysis of the developments in Ukraine in the context of the Kremlin’s long-term imperial aspirations indicates that Russian intervention in Crimea might be more than just miscalculated power projection. What started as civil unrest in a neighboring nation could prove fatal to the geopolitical goals of Russia’s elite in the long run.
With construction enveloping the east side of campus, students can often be seen remarking on the effects such construction has upon their common routes to and from class. While the fences erected around these construction areas can be quite inconvenient, the Editorial Board is nevertheless encouraged by the prospects of the final outcome of this Charles Street Reconstruction Project.
On April 11, the Johns Hopkins Hospital’s service workers ended their three-day-long strike for living wages. Seventy percent of Hospital employees are paid less than $14.91 an hour, a rate that qualifies a family of four for food stamps. Bonnie Windsor, the Hospital’s Vice President of Human Resources, has maintained that the Hospital will not publicize its wage bargaining process out of respect for the workers.
This week at Hopkins has been marked by a number of events concerning Middle Eastern affairs. Over the course of a few days, Hopkins has hosted four Middle East-related events, which were sponsored by over half a dozen organizations and attended by hundreds of students and community members. J Street U, a national collegiate organization advocating a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, hosted a Town Hall this weekend. The event was their largest yet and attracted hundreds of students from dozens of colleges as well as numerous experts and speakers. Hopkins Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), in conjunction with two other organizations, received guest speaker Patrick Bond, a political economist involved in global justice, who compared the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to South African apartheid in the latter half of the 20th century. Hopkins American Partnership for Israel (HAPI) partnered with the Foreign Affairs Symposium (FAS) to hold a dinner and presentation event where Middle East policy expert Aaron David Miller discussed US-Israeli relations in the broader context of the Middle East and US foreign policy. FAS, American Enterprise Institute Executive Council and the Department of Military Science sponsored a panel discussion on Iran and al-Qaida.
On Wednesday, in an event hosted by the College Democrats, Peter Engel of the Housing Authority of Baltimore spoke to Hopkins students about the unique set of challenges he faces as Deputy Commissioner of Project Finance and Development. Our historic city is now home to over 16,000 vacant and unlivable homes. To make matters worse, most of these squatters’ havens are both privately owned and located deep in the heart of distressed neighborhoods. Engel suggests that these properties are beyond repair and that the only solution to this problem is a cohesive approach of acquiring, demolishing and repurposing these residences one by one.
Every year, after reviewing the platforms and conducting interviews of each candidate running for SGA Executive Board, The News-Letter Editorial Board determines which candidates to endorse. The Editorial Board endorses the candidates that best suit the position, provide the most relevant experience and demonstrate a plan for successfully enacting meaningful improvement. This year, there are two groups running as tickets and one independent candidate running for treasurer, junior Maxwell Dickey. One tickets is composed of junior Janice Bonsu (president), sophomore Kyra Toomre (vice president), junior Will Szymanski (treasurer) and freshman Adelaide Morphette (secretary). The other ticket consists of juniors Justin Whalley (president), Jake Rogers (vice president), Mahzi Malcolm (treasurer) and freshman Ope Olukorede (secretary).
Midway through last week, the Hopkins administration announced several changes to the academic calendar. Beginning in the 2014-2015 academic year, Thanksgiving Break will be extended to a full week, and to make up the days lost, classes will begin two days earlier at the start of the fall semester. Furthermore, during Thanksgiving and Spring Breaks, undergraduate residence halls will remain open. Previously, Thanksgiving Break began the Wednesday before the holiday, and all residence halls except for Homewood and Bradford shut down during the two mid-semester breaks. The Editorial Board would like to applaud the University for these decisions.
The commencement speaker for the Class of 2014 was revealed on Tuesday and will be YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. Wojcicki, in whose garage the company Google was founded, has been named one of the 50 most powerful women in business by Fortune magazine, and one of the 100 most powerful women in the world by Forbes magazine. The announcement comes at the heels of controversy surrounding the commencement decisions in recent years, on topics ranging from speaker compensation, to prior Hopkins exposure to the speaker, to Dr. Ben Carson’s social conservatism. Wojcicki will not be compensated for her services (although we suspect that she, as CEO of YouTube and a founding member of Google, hardly needed the money anyway). Commencement will be held on May 22.
The Editorial Board commends the University and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences for developing and promoting the course “U.S. Intelligence Community: Theory and Practice.” We feel that it is vitally important that students at Hopkins expose themselves to environments that are highly similar to actual workplace situations. This course achieves this critical characteristic by transcending the usual discussion based style of learning to reinforce critical thinking skills through impromptu exercises that require intense focus and teamwork.
This past Saturday, five successful female leaders affiliated with Hopkins came to Homewood to share their wisdom, insight and advice with Hopkins’ female student body. Organized by the newly founded, eight-member undergraduate group Women’s Initiative for Social Equity (WISE), the event featured lawyer-turned-broadcast-journalist and NBC 10 Philadelphia news anchor Renee Chenault-Fattah as the keynote speaker. Chenault-Fattah, a 1979 Hopkins graduate, was followed by Mindy Farber (Class of ‘74), Joanne Leedom-Ackerman (Board of Trustees member) and Sarah Hemminger (BME PhD from Whiting) at the speaking podium. Before lunch, the 60 or so attendees were partnered with alumnae, faculty and WISE board members and given the opportunity to discuss issues faced by working women in a one-on-one conversation. WISE plans to host similar events moving forward, including a speaker series this fall and an informational meet-and-greet on March 31.
This past Wednesday, the Johns Hopkins Foreign Affairs Symposium kicked off their Spring 2014 series of speakers by hosting Governor Martin O’Malley, current two-time governor of Maryland, former mayor of Baltimore City, national political figure, and potential future presidential candidate. O’Malley addressed the overall FAS topic of “Idealism vs. Realism” by discussing an environmentally-informed economic vision for the future of the nation. After his speech, the Governor accepted several questions from the audience in an extended Q&A segment. It was during this period that the LaRouche PAC made its appearance.
“You’re in a sorority? Really? You don’t really seem like the sorority type…”
With February being Mental Health Awareness month, Hopkins students have recently been bombarded by Facebook statuses, emails, and flyers on the Breezeway promoting the topic. Most of us understand the gist of it: don't stress too much, talk to someone, look for red flags from our friends, etc. We are also aware, to some extent, of the prevalent role that mental health disorders and diseases play in competitive and ambitious environments.
The political undertones of the Olympic games occupy a spectrum, taking center stage in some years and a back seat in others. Famous examples of the former were 1936, when Nazi Germany used the event as a stage for their propaganda, or 1972, when Black September took 11 Israeli athletes hostage, resulting in all of their deaths. The Olympics cannot be expected to be a two week pause in international hostilities, where the olive wreath bestowed on the victors from ancient times is fully realized in all of its symbolism. Every two years, the course of current events is interrupted as a city, perhaps unknown before they were selected by the committee to host the games, scrambles to wash the dishes and make up the guest bedrooms before the world arrives. But in a flash, they are over, and the world picks up where it had left off with no competition to distract from the turmoil that was momentarily quieted.
I am an extraordinarily patriotic guy. I own American flag shirts, shorts, socks, shorter shorts, sweat bands, swimsuits, and even boxers. Occasionally, I will wear Ol' Glory on every part of my body at the same time. At major sporting events, you would need Seal Team Six to keep me from joining in on the National Anthem.
As students here at Hopkins, we have an embarrassment of riches — but we don’t seem to know it. There are too many fascinating symposiums, speaker series, seminars, colloquia, presenters, and speakers that go largely unnoticed and unattended by people disconnected from the subject matter, or just unlucky enough to not get word.
This week Hopkins will celebrate the 138th anniversary of Daniel Colt Gilman’s inauguration as the University’s first president in 1876 with Commemoration Day activities and the revival of the Commemoration Ball.
