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(08/09/17 2:49am)
When I started to write this column, I intended it to be about freshman seminars. Apply, I was going to say, because they are the best courses you will ever take. I began to relate my experience — how my first freshman seminar professor let me join him at his home on the coast of Tuscany, or how my second professor had been a trailblazer in the field of science she now taught.
(11/28/16 3:26am)
In today’s editorial, the Majority argues against a proposal that would require students to “take at least one course with international content and one course that explores the intersections of culture, identity, and power.”
(04/13/16 7:36pm)
Princeton University has a branding problem. Our undergraduate education is reputed to be the best in the country, but the world does not know it. Harvard University, for example, has a world reputation three times as great as our own, according to a 2015 survey of scholars by Times Higher Education.
(03/02/16 7:17pm)
Yesterday, 17 students published a convincing letter in support of Professor Michael Barry. I have never met the man, but I am convinced that dismissing him would be wrongheaded. No one at the University can replace his expertise.
(02/07/16 4:38pm)
Whereas Beni Snow argues that the obligation to report cheating should be struck from the Honor Code, I firmly believe that it should stay. Reporting cheaters is the right thing to do, and there is precedent for its obligation.
(01/05/16 1:39pm)
When a friend of mine from Israel traveled to Berlin for vacation, she mailed me a postcard. The cover, a stock photograph of Brandenburg Gate, was pretty, but she uploads her own professional quality photographs to Facebook often. Hearing from her was pleasant, but she could have messaged me on WhatsApp. Really, technology has made the postcard obsolete. This, of course, is the reason her postcard was so special.
(12/14/15 7:30pm)
What if I told you that the University is tracking your every move? It knows whether or not you’re skipping breakfast, which dorm you visit to see a partner, whether you go back to your own room for the night and, if you do, the exact time you get there.
(11/12/15 6:38pm)
In this column, I argue that freedom of expression is a good and worthwhile thing. It is an uncontroversial stance on the face of it, for our country guarantees the freedom in its Constitution. It should be altogether less controversial at academic institutions where freedoms are yet more important. There is, however, a growing call from university students who demand severe restrictions to individual expression and the cultural crossover that results from it.
(10/12/15 10:17am)
A Sept. 23 report from the Princeton University Office of Communications states that a review by the Office of Civil Rights “has been concluded with a determination that the University did not discriminate against Asian applicants on the basis of race or national origin.”
(09/30/15 6:11pm)
One woman, two reporters and a slow news week was the right mix to turn the scandal surrounding Rachel Dolezal, former president of the Spokane, Wash., NAACP, into a national media sensation.
(09/27/15 10:28am)
My grandmother and I were on the floor, our legs stretched out where the coffee table should go. I was happy because she rolled a six. Rolling a six meant landing on Boardwalk and my hotel, and it meant counting her money stack to see if she still held $2,000. She didn’t. I grinned and shouted and paraded my victory as 5-year-old children do, but my grandmother only sighed.
(04/13/15 5:30pm)
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, rates universities on their commitment to free speech. Green is good, yellow is cause for concern, and Princeton earns a “Code Red.” It is the lowest score that FIRE gives.
(03/23/15 6:20pm)
When the day comes that the stones of Whitman College combust spontaneously, I will be ready. I will know where my door is because no posters obscure it. I will know how to exit the building because I practice in the University’s regular fire drill rituals.
(03/05/15 7:10pm)
The night of Sunday, Feb. 15 was cold. The wind was biting. It was the kind of night my Tennessee mother fears I won’t survive. In short, Feb. 15 was a terrible night for leaving a cozy quad. But my roommates and I strapped on our trapper hats and marched off campus humming a battle anthem, forging past the dead souls of Princeton Cemetery until we reached our promised land: Hunan Chinese Restaurant.
(02/16/15 7:15pm)
Harvard, Yale and Princeton had been educating America’s elite for 200 years when, in the 1920s, the Big Three began to have a problem: Jews.
(02/02/15 6:13pm)
There are over129 million different books, according toengineers for the Google Books project. That’s so many books! If you read one book an hour without sleep, it would take you 15,000 years to finish them all. But a super reliable source (Wikipedia) tells me that approximatelytwo million new titles are published each year, so you would need to read 228 books every hour just to keep up. I can’t read that fast. Not even University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 can read that fast, and he has superpowers.
(01/04/15 7:39pm)
I love puns. My ninth grade classmates can attest to this, for I would begin each day with my corniest new discovery. Without fail, my jokes would set off a chorus of groans. Today I have a groaner to share with you: What did the grape say when the elephant sat on it? Nothing, but it let out a little wine.
(12/09/14 7:41pm)
African-Americans suffer severe discrimination from policemen and prosecutors, and I believe more University students should take an active role in fighting it. But I did not participate in the walkout last Thursday, because I am not angry at the grand jury’s verdict in the Michael Brown case.
(12/02/14 7:10pm)
The belief that freshmen should not write opinion columns is apparently widespread. It lurks in the comments section of The Daily Princetonian’s website, as Sarah Sakha noted in her column “Just keep scrolling.” On Yik Yak, I have seen the same post soar past 100 up-votes, so it cannot be written off as a fringe belief of angry Internet denizens. Reading the paper, I have even found myself agreeing: We freshmen suck at this.Sakha dedicated a brief paragraph to defending the freshman voice, but I want to justify it thoroughly. First, writing is the cure to our inexperience. My own first column demanded extensive revisions from an associate editor, and after that revision process, my writing was a little stronger. Hopefully, I have continued to improve with every article. Yet growth is slow. Newcomers to any field —be it singing, dancing, juggling or opining — start without really knowing what to do. If you judge them by their first few attempts, they’ll seem terrible. Their first few failures are necessary, however, for them to learn and improve. I suspect that my writing quality would have been no better if I had joined the ‘Prince’ as a sophomore, so writing as a freshman will allow me to produce better quality work for the next three years. In fact, I wager that if everyone joined as a sophomore, our website would be home to comments that claim, “Sophomores shouldn’t write opinion pieces.” Whatever our age, our writing will be a little below par when we’re newbies.Another argument that purports to justify anti-freshman sentiment goes like this: Freshmen just got here, so they don’t know what they’re talking about. For a lot of subjects, this holds true. Last month, in a comment to Logan Sander’s article “Privacy should be a right,” I wrote that men’s bathrooms should not have locks because men do not want them. Although this seems to be the overwhelming consensus among male freshmen and sophomores, another student informed me that men in upperclass dorms are frustrated with women frequenting their bathrooms. I had not known this. My freshman experience had precluded a viewpoint as nuanced as his.In spite of this, the perspectives that freshmen offer are worth hearing. By the same token that my voice should not matter with respect to locks in upperclass dorms, a junior’s frustration should not influence what happens to bathroom locks in residential colleges. The experiences of freshmen and sophomores aren’t less valuable; they’re just different. It is crucial that first-year students have a voice, too, so that fresh minds can puzzle through issues that our older brothers and sisters have accepted as inevitable inconveniences of life in the Orange Bubble.A 1967 study on the behavior of rhesus monkeys illustrates the pitfalls of ignoring the youngest group members. Five monkeys were put into a room where bananas rested atop a ladder. When a monkey tried to climb the ladder, they were all sprayed with a cold shower. Before long, they learned to avoid the ladder altogether. Then, one member of the group was replaced. The naïve monkey tried to climb the ladder, but the other four pulled him off and beat him in order to avoid the rainy punishment. Experimenters continued to replace the monkeys one-by-one, all of them beaten by their group when they reached for the bananas. Eventually, none of the four senior monkeys had been there to suffer the showers, but they still beat the new arrival who moved to climb the ladder. They couldn’t have known why they did it — they only knew that this was the way things were done. Silencing those with the least experience had created a culture where everyone accepted and perpetuated torment without knowing why, and this same phenomenon would cause progress to stagnate for student life if freshmen did not have a voice.I am not defending the quality of any particular piece nor do I believe that freshman writers should be shielded from criticism. Sometimes in our haste to meet the obligations of the article cycle, we settle upon a bad idea. Other times we execute good ideas poorly. Sometimes we’re just wrong. Whatever the reason for a bad column, our failures are part of a learning process that will see us become better writers for the next three years. We’ll get better, and in the meantime, some of us will think of incisive ideas that only freshmen could have. Prepare for us to make a few more mistakes, but know that our voice is valuable.Newby Parton is a freshman fromMcMinnville, Tenn. He can be reached at newby@princeton.edu.
(11/12/14 7:50pm)
I am the reason my friend almost did not get to see “The Lion King” on Broadway last night. She had joined the line at the Whitman College Office an hour early; I joined 10 minutes after her. We were among the first 25 to stake a claim in line, and the office had 45 tickets to sell. We were set.