Letter from the Editor: Navigating the nation’s crosshairs
Editor’s Note: This piece ran in The Daily Princetonian’s Oct. 2020 print issue.
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Editor’s Note: This piece ran in The Daily Princetonian’s Oct. 2020 print issue.
Grace Rosenberg ’23 was sitting on the outdoor patio of a restaurant in August when she felt a sinking sensation in her gut.
For those of us taking our coursework remotely, this fall break likely came and went, noticeable only as a two-day reprieve from classes and a moment’s peace from cramming for midterms. But for the 300-ish undergraduate and 1,000-ish graduate students still holding down the Orange Fort, fall break was a gentle reminder that leaving the University is possible, but that doing so comes with a certain element of risk.
On Monday, University President Chrisopher Eisgruber ’83 wrote that the University is “preparing for the possibility that we will be able to welcome back significantly more undergraduate students in the spring.”
Last week, Princeton Mayor Liz Lempert and the Princeton Council encouraged local residents to download “NJ COVID-19 Alert,” a contact tracing app developed by New Jersey to ramp up COVID-19 mitigation efforts throughout the state.
Turning out to vote in an election is an important part of our civic duty (and, evidently, is an area for improvement among University students). Just as important, however, is educating yourself on what is at stake in the upcoming election. This fall, we are voting for more than just the next president; we’re voting for the future of our planet. Under a second Trump term, nobody wins except the oil operators, and even they won’t be spared from the growing effects of climate change.
The official Princeton transcript is not a pretty document, but it gets the job done. There, in 8.5 x 11 inches, I can visualize the entire last three years of my academic life, arrayed in neat lines of 12-point Courier font framed by a loud orange border that belies the intimacy of the words it circumscribes.
According to Gus Binnie ’21, president of Tower Club, one of the University’s eleven eating clubs, “there was no instruction manual left for dealing with a pandemic.”
The other day, I overheard my friend reveal to a family member that her friend had tested positive for coronavirus.
TikTok, a popular video-sharing app, was due to disappear from Apple and Android App stores last Sunday, Sept. 27, under President Donald Trump’s executive order. Just hours before midnight, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols temporarily blocked the ban.
The Office of International Programs (OIP) has “made the difficult decision to suspend undergraduate participation in semester study abroad programs for spring 2021,” according to an email from Study Abroad Program Director Gisella Gisolo to program applicants on Thursday.
Last week, the University debuted a COVID-19 Dashboard on its official Fall 2020 website. The dashboard reports that 14 University community members have tested positive since the beginning of the semester. No new cases were reported within the past week.
When I submitted my Princeton application in late December, little did I expect my freshman year to start in this manner. As I braced myself for the first day of classes, I was not sure what to expect. The already present “new person” feelings were now mixed with the wide array of emotions that came with “Zoom University.” I’ll admit, I was a mess.
On Friday night, upon receiving the news of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, I was devastated: my biggest role model had passed away. Justice Ginsburg’s work for the feminist movement is the reason I changed my major from Psychology to Anthropology and decided I wanted to go to law school.
The University’s Department of Religion and Program in Population Studies (PIPS) have announced they will not accept graduate school applications for the fall 2021 cycle in order to better support current graduate students.
In the United States, even viruses discriminate. COVID-19 is making the country’s health gap impossible to ignore. Headlines announcing “Minorities are Disproportionately Dying From Covid-19 at a Younger Age” and “Black and Hispanic Children are Impacted More Severely by Coronavirus, Research Shows” make national news. Highlighting disparities in Americans’ health is an important step in rectifying this inequality. But despite recent media attention given to minorities’ vulnerabilities to COVID, Marshallese Americans’ pandemic plight has failed to garner national, much less campus-wide, attention. We must act now to expand Marshallese access to healthcare.
On and off the field, college athletes, especially Black players who make up the majority of athletes in the revenue-generating football and basketball programs, have long been exploited for profit. As their coaches and schools make millions, athletes are forbidden from profiting off their skill and marketability. This was the status quo before the pandemic.
Last week, I read “Malignant” by S. Lochlann Jain, an ethnography about the politicization and sexualization of breast cancer for my anthropology departmental course. Jain had been battling breast cancer and was given the choice to have a single mastectomy for the cancerous breast, or to remove both for appearance’s sake. While personal considerations like comfort and aesthetics were important in her decision, either choice would also make a political statement about femininity and cancer. For Jain, there was no apolitical escape route.
On a particularly warm July morning, I interviewed Alexander P.G. Sittenfeld ’07 — who is currently running to be Cincinnati’s next mayor — for my summer internship. With Sittenfeld being a Princeton alumnus, our conversation at one point turned to the University’s July announcement of a partially virtual semester. Like many other community members I’ve talked to these past months — especially other alumni — he offered his condolences for the lost time on campus while, of course, acknowledging all of the other, much more terrible losses people have endured this year. I don’t recall my entire response, but I do remember suggesting this year was full of losses on many different levels, all deserving at least some of our attention and care.