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(05/15/17 1:02am)
As of writing this, two weeks from now I’ll be sitting on a beach somewhere. Three weeks from now, I’ll be enjoying my last Reunions as a student. And four weeks from now, I’ll probably be at home, waking up and wondering if this was all a dream.
(04/27/17 12:43am)
As Princeton prepares to welcome the Class of 2021, the latest in a perennial series of the increasingly diverse, well-qualified cohorts, current students — even us post-thesis seniors long removed from the days of admitted-student lanyards and peer academic advising — will be sought out to provide lessons learned and parting words of wisdom to those about to replace us on this campus. This is a question I’ve recently been facing a lot at home as well, as my sister prepares to enter her freshman year at Boston College. And while I hope to save my final thoughts for my soon-to-be final column, in the few weeks left before college decision day, there’s one message I hope the incoming class, at Princeton and elsewhere, will take to heart: Throw yourself in, with reckless abandon.
(02/27/17 3:30am)
On last week’s episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” the host — a liberal comedian known for his blunt bludgeoning of the right and controversial statements about Islam — invited Breitbart editor and conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos to be his opening guest. Maher used the entire interview to hammer home the single point on which the two admitted they can agree — that free speech is good, even when hateful, inaccurate, stupid, controversial, or evil. This is a point with which essentially everyone does, and should well, agree.
(02/13/17 2:18am)
In an era of unified Republican control of government, where the main levers of power are manned exclusively by factions of Ayn Rand conservatives and authoritarian populists, there is certainly much cause for wallowing in defeat. Constitutionally and procedurally, this defeatism is rational — aside from filibustering major legislation and Supreme Court nominations, there truly is little liberals in and out of government can do to stop the privatization of public education under the bafflingly incompetent Betsy DeVos, the almost-certain rollback of civil rights enforcement under the once-too-racist (for a federal judgeship)-but-now-apparently-not Jeff Sessions, or the unabashed and admitted “destruction of the state” under “alt” white supremacist Steve Bannon.
(10/10/16 6:30pm)
Editor’s Note: This article does not representthe views of the ‘Prince’.Let’s just get one thing straight. There is, to any rational observer, no possible sense of equivalence between the flaws of Donald Trump and the flaws of Hillary Clinton. Period.On Friday, a tape was released of the Republican nominee for President of the United States proudly bragging about sexual assault. Not “locker room banter” or Bill Clinton golf-course chatter, to quote Trump himself. That’s not what groping a woman without her consent is. It’s sexual assault, full stop.In case you’ve been under a rock for the last 15 months, this from a man who opened his campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, seeking to ban all Muslims from the United States, insulting tortured veterans like John McCain, mocking a reporter’s disability, saying a judge couldn’t do his job because his parents were Mexican, claiming black people in this country were all “living in hell,” attacking a Gold Star family, retweeting white supremacists, and calling women “slobs, dogs, and pigs.”And now, from the man who would be the most visible role model to millions of children across this country, overt praise of sexual assault. Beyond the tagline quote of “when you’re a star … you can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy,” I urge you to watch the full 2005 clip from The Washington Post.If you do, you’ll hear the insolent mind of a 15-year-old, from the mouth of a man then in his late 50s. The mind of a man impervious to facts, rationality, decency, or basic human respect. The mind of a man for whom women are objects to be taken, to be won, to be conquered, to be judged solely on how quickly they make blood flow to his whatever.The only shocking thing about the fallout from this video — with GOP leaders across the country pulling their support and openly calling for their own nominee to drop out of the race — is that it took this level of overt, base infancy for them to finally pull the trigger. Insulting Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans, the disabled, the poor, and others was apparently not enough, given that GOP candidates like Sen. Kelly Ayotte (NH) referred to Trump as a “role model” as recently as last week. But the thing is, disgusted though we are morally obligated to be, is anyone really surprised by this video or that it exists? Of course we knew Trump thought this way; we’ve known that about him since literally the first day of his campaign.But Hillary sent some emails, so “both candidates are deeply flawed.”More than anything else, it is this false sense of equivalence that drives me crazy in this campaign. Yes, both candidates have lied, but to quote Nick Kristof, “if deception were a sport, Trump would be the Olympic gold medalist; Clinton would be an honorable mention at her local Y.” Yes, both have flip-flopped on political positions, but Trump frequently doing so within the span of a paragraph simply does not compare to Clinton changing her mind on gay marriage over a period of years. On this and a thousand other points of comparison, there simply is no comparison to be made. Just because they are two people running for the same job does not mean that whatever they both do is equally controversial, or flawed, or disgusting, or disgraceful.One candidate has incited violence at his rallies, knows nothing about anything, is the least qualified nominee for President in modern history, and has been endorsed by the Klan. The other hasn’t. One candidate’s only accomplishment is running a business sustained mainly by tax breaks and bankruptcy laws, the other is objectively the most prepared presidential candidate in the history of this country. One candidate can barely finish a sentence, can be baited by a tweet, thinks women aren’t people, and lost a billion dollars in a single year. The other candidate has spent her entire professional life fighting for children and families, and yes, her own political ambitions. One candidate has lost the support of leaders of his party, been called the “textbook definition” of racism by the Republican Speaker of the House, and is now facing open calls by senators and congressmen in his own party to drop out of the race for the decency of the country.Yes, Hillary sent some emails, gave some speeches, and held back the truth more than she should have. But to call the two equal, or equally flawed, is to ignore the definition of the term.Ryan Dukeman is a Wilson School major from Westwood, Mass. He can be reached at rdukeman@princeton.edu.
(09/29/16 5:59pm)
In this campaign of ideological flip-flopping, white-hot anger, and candidates’ views that shift seemingly (as in the case of Trump during Monday’s debate) within the course of a paragraph, we would expect the deep polarization that we’ve seen in the electorate. We would expect to see hardened ideological rallying cries, a shrinking of the middle ground so necessary to running a two-party democracy, and a collapse of civil discourse. All of those things are woefully true.
(04/20/16 4:45pm)
The Woodrow Wilson School prides itself on being an internationally renowned and globally-oriented public policy school, one that aims to train its students to bring a “global perspective” to its curriculum. International affairs are clearly a core component of the Wilson School's identity, whether in the areas of expertise of its faculty, the research centers it endows, the courses it offers, or its undergraduate concentration areas. Yet somehow our vaunted international relations major, one of the only such programs at Princeton, and certainly the only social science or humanities major, that severely restricts the opportunities its concentrators have to study abroad.
(04/06/16 6:09pm)
As Marni Morse argued in her most recent column, a substantial barrier to many Princeton students pursuing internships or jobs in the nonprofit sector isn’t a lack of will, but rather a lack of access. Within the specific context of arguing for subsidized NJ Transit tickets for students, she wrote that it would especially benefit students who have to travel to New York or Philadelphia for interviews with nonprofits, since these organizations often can’t reimburse the cost of transportation. In turn, applying for those jobs and internships would become more feasible for low-income students and more palatable for students of all income levels.Funding for the internships themselves is obviously the most critical feature in expanding access to unpaid internships, and broadly speaking the University succeeds tremendously in this area with programs like the Student Activities Funding Engine and departmental funding, as well as other resources for internships and special projects. This column is not to say that the University is failing students who want to work in the nonprofit sector, especially compared to many of its peers. However, if the University truly wants to expand access to nonprofit internships and careers and make recruitment for these roles more comparable to the recruiting efforts performed by other (largely paid) industries, it should seek to tackle head-on the further barriers to access that, on the margin, work to stop talented students from pursuing careers in the social sector.I believe Marni is right in this context to argue for subsidized NJ Transit tickets, but I believe her contention should be generalized to include a broader fund for students with barriers-to-access problems for nonprofit recruiting. Students with interviews in the nonprofit sector or with application fees for fellowships and other programs could apply to this fund for small-dollar funding to pay for the associated, incidental costs of going through the recruiting process. These applications would be very brief, commensurate with the low level of funding needed, and could thus be subject to much quicker turnaround times than formal thesis research or internship funding applications currently are. This would allow both for more students to consider working in the social sector, and for students who do apply for positions in this sector, to apply for a greater number of roles, better allowing them to match their talents to a place that needs them.While this argument of course applies best on the margins, that is not to say that its impact is theoretical or minimal. Any time a student decides to take another interview with a nonprofit that requires them to travel, or applies to another opportunity, the chance is higher that they will end up working in that sector and being matched with an opportunity that best suits them. By making the application and recruiting process similar to that of the private sector then, on the margin, it is likely a few more talented Princeton students each summer and each year at graduation would be going into overrepresented industries and into the social sector than do otherwise. This benefit, while relatively small compared to most policy changes advocated in student opinion columns, would be far from trivial to the people and causes directly and positively impacted by the presence of more well-trained, motivated Princeton students working in the social space . This could also include an expansion of the Princeternship Program, which allows students to shadow an alumni practitioner in their field for between one and five days over a break. This program, while greatly beneficial to students looking to explore varied career options they may not otherwise have experienced before, currently is contingent on the student’s ability to pay for the costs. Even funding these programs around the edges (such as paying for travel to the city, or transportation to the work site, if not funding all costs of the stay) would make this a dramatically more attractive and accessible option for students, and open them up to new career opportunities, especially in the public and social sectors.Finally, the fact that a lot of this money would go to students who aren’t necessarily too financially disadvantaged to not be able to afford the costs otherwise is still not an argument that we should not provide them this opportunity at a subsidized cost. Over the last decade, the percentage of graduating seniors going into finance, for instance, has declined to around 25percent for the Class of 2014, from a peak of about 45 percent for the Class of 2006. Therefore, there is clearly a growing interest among the student population in pursuing alternative career paths, and Princeton’s resources, rather than focus on further developing that interest, could be better used removing barriers to access for students who are interested in such career options. The magnitude of this shift amounts to hundreds of students who could potentially benefit from access to opportunity programs for jobs and/or internships in the public and social sectors, and any improvement in such programs, even marginal like paying for transportation, could help connect talented Princeton students with public or social employers that could benefit greatly from their work.Ryan Dukeman is a Wilson School Major from Westwood, Mass. He can be reached at rdukeman@princeton.edu.
(02/16/16 5:00pm)
Of all that’s been written about the ramifications of the unexpected death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia – from its effect on upcoming cases before the court to Senate races in November and even to the presidential race, to which Ted Cruz ’92 is now referring to as a “referendum on the Court” – comparatively little has been said about its effect on other legislative issues that would have otherwise dominated this year. On the domestic side, the President’s final year was supposed to be spent on criminal justice reform, which just a few months ago seemed like a real bipartisan possibility, and lobbying for congressional approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive free-trade deal that covers 40 percent of the world’s GDP that the administration signed last year. Instead, the year will now be consumed with what The New York Times is already calling a “battle royale” for the soul of the court for a generation. As Scalia was a reliably conservative vote, if President Obama is able to successfully fill his seat with a liberal, the Court’s balance would shift 5-4 in favor of Democratic appointees, reversing its decades-old conservative majority.To most Americans, the Supreme Court’s role is mostly seen as one of importance to domestic affairs. Almost all of the ‘textbook’ Supreme Court cases – Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Roe v. Wade, et cetera – deal with issues of domestic policy and constitutional rights in the United States. Rarely do people outside of the legal realm think of the Court as having much to do with foreign policy and, in truth, the Court is less frequently involved in foreign policy than Congress or the presidency. However, even if the Court never would have been involved in the TPP with Justice Scalia alive, in his death he just might be the one to kill the deal.Obama has called the TPP the top remaining item on his foreign policy agenda and the “most progressive trade deal in history” at a recent press conference; in his year-end press conference last year, he expressed cautious optimism that the United States would ratify it during his presidency, in no small part due to support from Senate Republicans. When the President barely won Trade Promotion Authority last summer (under which Congress agreed to vote on a trade deal up-or-down, without offering amendments or changes), he did so thanks almost entirely to a Republican caucus that remains pro-free trade. Democratic support has evaporated due to a dislike of the North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade deals seen as having killed union manufacturing jobs in America. As a result, any strategy for winning congressional approval of the deal itself will have to rely on a similarly Republican-heavy vote-count.This seemed reasonable to expect just a few months ago, even though it would still be an election year: Republicans not only agreed with the President on trade, but they also would have leapt at the opportunity to create a wedge between the President and the Democratic party going into November. Republicans had further incentive to approve the deal with Obama in office, since Clinton and Sanders have come out against it, and the GOP presidential candidates, while in favor of free trade, have not campaigned about it and must still play to the overwhelmingly populist sentiment dominating this election cycle.Now, however, the entire year will be spent on the nomination fight, period. The battle to fill Scalia’s seat, which Obama has vowed to do despite the Mitch McConnell’s, Senate Majority Leader, promise not to even consider whoever he ends up nominating, will be so intense, brutal and prolonged that it will deplete all the oxygen in the legislative atmosphere for the rest of this year. This fight will be historic and unprecedented in modern history – Elizabeth Warren has even predicted that the ensuing obstructionism over the nomination will be a “threat to our democracy itself.” It is hard to see how there will be any remaining appetite among congressional Republicans to work with the President on anything at all for the rest of his term.Additionally, the people Obama was specifically relying on to pass TPP – the Republican caucus – are now the most inclined to work against him on his entire agenda, in order to remain united in stonewalling his predicted appointment. It therefore seems that in one final act of defiance towards a Democratic president whose agenda he voted against at every turn, Justice Scalia in death will deal a fatal blow to the President’s last major opportunity for a legacy-making achievement.Ryan Dukeman is a Wilson School Major from Westwood, Mass. He can be reached at rdukeman@princeton.edu.
(02/02/16 10:48pm)
This week, the Iowa Caucuses marked the first votes cast in the 2016 presidential race. While Hillary Clinton won with 49.9 percent to Bernie Sanders’ 49.6 percent, on the Republican side a clear pack of three emerged — Ted Cruz, the winner; Donald Trump; and Marco Rubio — in a much more telling race. Rubio had been locked in a four-way battle with Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and John Kasich to be the establishment alternative to Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, and the results from Iowa have given Rubio backers significant reason to believe their candidate will emerge from that pack as that alternative candidate. While we are still a long way from having a nominee on either side and the results later this month in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina could shift the direction of the race dramatically, the one thing that can definitively be taken away from Iowa is that the country's pipe dreams — and pipe nightmares — have both been kept alive.Even though Bernie Sanders came in an unbelievably close second in Iowa, the fact that he was this competitive with Clinton — and will almost certainly win in New Hampshire, which votes next — was almost unthinkable last summer when he launched his campaign. Clinton was the picture of the establishment, had the support of 100 percent of declared superdelegates and had pledged to raise an eye-popping $100M by the end of 2015. She also had near-universal name recognition, something the firebrand Vermont senator did not. Bernie Sanders, and his ideas, were ridiculed as pipe dreams, feasible in Sweden (as Marco Rubio said), but never electable in the United States. The extremely liberal Huffington Post even went so far as to publish a blog post, the opening line of which was “If you think Bernie Sanders will be the Democratic nominee for President in 2016, you're out of your mind.”In poll after poll and fundraising total after fundraising total, nothing has proven further from the truth, a result Iowa has only confirmed. With few and minor exceptions, Sanders has taken large bite after large bite over Clinton’s national lead, shrinking it from nearly 40 points in August to roughly 12 today. His campaign has received more individual contributions from more individual donors than any in history to this point, all while eschewing super PAC money and traditional, well-staffed fundraising apparatuses. Sanders’ performance in Iowa and his likely win in New Hampshire in a few days have shown that his supporters, often much younger than those of Clinton, are willing not just to tweet about #feelthebern, but to actually vote, caucus, donate and engage in a political system they otherwise normally feel has disengaged itself from their interests and input. His campaign is therefore historic and provides a much-needed infusion of actual voters and their interests into the country's political system, regardless of whether he is the Democratic nominee come this summer.On the Republican side, the ‘Iowa Rule of 3’ can provide a sketch of the rest of the campaign for the nomination. With the exception of one candidate, no eventual nominee for either party has come in worse than third place in Iowa since 1972, and those third-place finishers all either had special circumstances or, like Rubio, finished extremely close to the first and second place candidates. While the Democrats’ pipe dream of Bernie Sanders is now still clearly a realistic possibility, so too is liberals’, centrists’ and elite conservatives’ nightmare of Donald Trump. While he may have hit his “ceiling,” as conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote on Twitter, Trump has now clearly demonstrated that he is not a media phenomenon with no real support in the form of actual votes. With a finish only roughly three points behind Cruz and just one and a half ahead of Rubio (whom betting markets favor to be the GOP nominee), it is clear that Trump’s supporters are not straw men and that they are willing to turn out and actually vote for their candidate on election day. He will remain a serious candidate for weeks, if not months, even if no longer the obvious and clear-away front-runner he has been for most of the last six months.Ryan Dukeman is a Wilson School Major from Westwood, Mass. He can be reached at rdukeman@princeton.edu.
(12/09/15 7:33pm)
In the days after President Obama’s rare Oval Office address to the nation in the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist attack, the Republican presidential candidates’ pushback was predictably racist and horrible. Ted Cruz ’92 and Jeb Bush doubled down on their absurd and unenforceable Christians-only refugee idea, and Mike Huckabee claimed the President cared more about the “reputation of Islam” than the security of the American people. But of course, none was more repugnant than Donald Trump’s idea to ban all Muslims from entering the United States for any reason.
(10/13/15 6:30pm)
The House Republican Conference, by its own admission, is now in a state of ungovernable chaos. As Republican Peter King recently said on the record, “We look absolutely crazy.” Whereas 15 Republicans are currently running for President, the job listing for Speaker of the House may as well as be posted on Craigslist. Nearly three weeks after John Boehner announced his resignation, zero serious candidates have emerged for the job thirdin line for the presidency. Which begs the question, what has sparked this historic and immediate collapse in the House Republican Caucus?
(09/29/15 6:16pm)
After Pope Francis’s speech to Congress last week, liberals and conservatives alike rushed to claim the mantle of the pontiff’s endorsement for their favorite causes. A columnist for The Hill wrote that “if Pope Francis could endorse a candidate, he’d choose Bernie Sanders.” Both Sanders’scampaign and his Senate office have explicitly touted the similarities between his campaign rhetoric and the Pope’s messages on economic inequality and climate change. And for their part, conservatives praised the pontiff’s (implicit and glossed-over) admonitions on same-sex marriage and abortion. In fact, just hours after the Pope left the Capitol, Republicans in the Senate held a vote to defund Planned Parenthoodwhich fell short of the 60 votes needed to advance.
(09/17/15 6:20pm)
The real danger of Trump isn’t that he might win, it’s that — at least for now — he doesn’t have to.
(04/23/15 6:14pm)
As was widely reported in January, students this year have for the first time figured out en masse how to view their supposedly-confidential admission records, thanks to a loophole in Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act discovered by several students at Stanford. Current students are now able to see “written assessments that admission officers gave of applicants, the numerical scores those officers assigned them on a range of factors,” and even sometimes notes from when their file was discussed the by admission committee.
(04/09/15 6:44pm)
As a recent re-adopter of Yik Yak and a (not so) proud Facebook procrastinator, I, like the rest of campus, have witnessed the explosion of social media discussion of racism on campus over the last few days. In fact, I am myself contributing “yet another Op-Ed complaining about racism,” as one angry Yak put it. However, despite the onslaught of opinions that have been voiced in light of recent events, it is a discussion worth having. One of the biggest problems in this discussion, however, has been the tendency for both sides to try to limit or delegitimize the speech of others, rather than rebut or respond to it. Declaring an argument “too offensive to be had,” rather than winning it, is as unproductive as declaring that those who claim offense at the actions of Urban Congo are “butthurt,” and everyone would do well to engage in dialogue:convince the other side, don’t silence it.
(03/29/15 5:14pm)
Several reports in the past year have rightfully pointed out that Princeton (along with Stanford, Yale and Harvard) earns enough in investment returns on its endowment each year to more than cover annual operating expenses (with significant amounts of money left over to spend on capital projects or put back into the endowment) and that the University could therefore make tuition 100 percent free for everyone and still make a massive profit.
(03/03/15 2:59pm)
Anyone who has held a senior leadership role in a University student group or organization knows, or will quickly learn, that the pace of University institutions is on an entirely different wavelength than that of most leadership terms. In many clubs, leaders take office sometime between winter break and spring break, serving for a year. Assuming that it takes roughly a month to fully acclimate to the swing of things and learn the ropes and institutional mechanisms, and taking away the summer months (since school is out of session, which is not to say that crucial behind the scenes planning doesn’t occur then), that leaves roughly 8 months for actual accomplishment and the effectuation of promised changes, new events and other lasting reforms.
(02/17/15 2:28pm)
Last week, guest columnist Theo Furchtgott (full disclosure: Furchtgott is a friend and fellow Governing Council member of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society) decried the “steep price” we Ivy Leaguers pay when seeking public office, since our top-ranked degrees are liable to come back and bite us in populist, anti-intellectual attack ads. While I agree with his assertion that receiving a rigorous education should not be seen as a bad thing, I think Furchtgott’s premise misidentifies the true root of this problem of perception. In my opinion, the reason for such bitterness against candidates with Ivy League degrees isn’t motivated by some vague jealousy or insecurity about one’s own intellect or education, but rather by the justly-perceived inaccessibility of these institutions.
(02/03/15 7:15pm)
By the time we arrive on campus freshman fall, we’ve all been told that “the Senior Thesis is a defining aspect of the Princeton experience,” so much so that we just expect it will significantly affect our time here. We begin to understand the consequences the thesis has on the structure of our final year: most of us will only take three classes per semester senior year, and most clubs’ leadership terms are done by calendar year rather than academic year so that senior leaders’ terms end in the fall, allowing them to dedicate more time to the thesis. While I believe it’s important to allot sufficient time and energy to one’s thesis, and to make sacrifices in order to do so, I don’t think this necessarily means that clubs have to set leadership terms by calendar year just so no one is President during senior spring while finishing a thesis. This is not to say that no one can handle these two responsibilities simultaneously, but rather to point out that, to many individuals who may consider running for leadership, this is certainly a serious factor to consider.