The American siege on science
On Fridayafternoon, an Alumni-Faculty Forum titled “Science Under Attack!” convened with a panel of five graduates to discuss the national mood regarding science and science literacy in the country today.
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On Fridayafternoon, an Alumni-Faculty Forum titled “Science Under Attack!” convened with a panel of five graduates to discuss the national mood regarding science and science literacy in the country today.
I grew up in a suburb of New York City, about 15 minutes from uptown and 45 from Midtown, factoring in a plausible amount of traffic. My childhood was punctuated by dinners on the Lower East Side with my family or field trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with my class, but I didn’t start going into the city by myself until high school when I had to trek up to Columbia University for classes or coffee shops downtown for interviews.
Earlier this year, a new fitness regime made headlines. Broga — a yoga class taught by men, aimed at men. The “Brogram” (this is a real, copyrighted phrase found on the Broga website) aims to strip away the girly stigma associated with regular yoga classes so that men can touch the floor in downward facing dog (downward facing dawg?) without worrying about their reputations. Perhaps after class, bros can join their instructor for frozen brogurt, which is just like frozen yogurt, except the crushed walnuts are swapped out for shaved wood chips and the chocolate syrup for motor oil.
At noon on the afternoon of Aug. 9, Michael Brown was shot to death in Ferguson, Mo. The event spurred days of rioting and unrest in the Southern city. Media coverage of the turmoil was extensive, but both the actual events that transpired and the manner in which the media was covering the events were shrouded in controversy. The protests and rallies continue both in Ferguson and across the country though the mainstream media has begun to spend less time covering them. This past week, the University held a candlelight vigil for Brown.
On Sept. 10, The Daily Princetonian published a news article, "Student charged with drug possession at Princeton Stadium," about an undergraduate student who was arrested by the University's Department of Public Safety for allegedly being in possession of marijuana and psilocybin, a compound found in psychedelic mushrooms, at the Princeton Stadium. The article clearly stated both the student’s full name and class year and reignited an age-old debate about whether the 'Prince' should publish the names of students in articles regarding their arrests, particularly when they have only been charged, and the case has not yet been adjudicated.
If the Internet were a physical form, the darkest and slimiest grottos would be home to Reddit. Reddit has compiled and contributed to the world some of the most heinous pictures and comments, including subcommunities called: beatingwomen, jailbait, and most recently TheFappening. Though all these groups have since been banned, all have done their fair share of damage. TheFappening was one of the internet forums that hosted the dozens of recently hacked celebrity nude photos.
The internet has been buzzing recently with the controversy regarding a middle school in Evanston, Ill. that imposed a set of addendums to its dress code. The new policy bans girls from wearing leggings and yoga pants because such tight-fitting clothes are “too distracting” to their male peers. The girls, in retaliation, picketed their school, claiming that the administration was “slut shaming.”
Last Sunday, news broke that a sophomore at Princeton was suing the University for disability discrimination after it allegedly made him withdraw from school following a suicide attempt. The decision to essentially kick the student out of the school came after the student apparentlytook 20 pills of Trazodone, an antianxiety medication, before checking himself into the hospital.
The College Board recently announced that the SAT is getting yet another facelift, the most drastic set of changes since the March 2005 exam debuted with an entirely new writing section.The rise of the ACT has done good things for the college admission process. Whether the ACT is better than the SAT or if it is any more reflective of a student’s raw intelligence is beside the point. What’s important is that it has shattered the College Board’s monopoly of the college admission exam market and is spurring the company to enact changes.
In the seventh grade, my communications teacher pronounced my name “Chutney.” Even with eight years’ retrospect, I don’t think he was being racist; I just think that he saw my name on the roster, the thick conglomeration of consonants up front and all 13 letters of my undulating surname, and froze up. My seventh grade communications teacher was a strange man. As we sat in silence and read every day during class, he would scrutinize a dictionary. Often, he’d be crying by the end of the hour. Moved to tears by the power of words, I think.
As a molecular biology major, after every name/hometown/department introduction, I inevitably get asked, “Oh, so are you premed?”
One of the psychology classes I took last semester had a reputation for being a pass/D/fail hotspot that caters to half-asleep seniors trying to get their last Social Analysis distribution requirement done before graduation. I can’t be sure, but I’d wager a guess that somewhere around 40 percent of the class took it P/D/F. In general, when taking a class P/D/F, it seems to be common courtesy to care the minimum amount. It’s the rational thing to, after all. If something toiled and sweated over gets you the same amount of credit as a shoddy, last-minute C-grade piece of work, why put in any more effort than you need to? Why not stick it to the man and artificially skew the grade deflation bell curve to help a (non-P/D/F-ing) brother out?
In her October 9 column “Skip the skimming,” Prianka Misra wrote about the increasingly prevalent phenomenon in humanities classes at Princeton to assign reading that far exceeds what is humanly possible for a student to complete. The Daily Princetonian’s editorial board later agreed. Misra wrote that course syllabi that proudly flaunt 200-300 pages of reading per week “beg for insincerity.” While it is certainly true that several hundred pages is a lot of reading — probably more than a student can feasibly do for a single class on top of other coursework, extracurricular obligations and sleep — I don’t believe we should be so quick to dismiss the idea of skimming.
After Thanksgiving dinner, I lay on a couch in a family friend’s house, sated and sleepy. Whoever was controlling the remote to the television was graciously interspersing the long stretches of football with periodic spurts of "Modern Family," to appease those of us who were less touchdown-savvy. A commercial came on, starring the well-coiffed members of One Direction. I assume they were trying to sell the perfume they were holding in bottles, but I can’t be positive because just as they came on the screen, a gaggle of prepubescent girls congregated by the sofas started squealing.
Princeton recently obtained another trophy to place right next to its rank as the No. 1 college in the country: top honors in Trojan’s 2013 Sexual Health Report Card. Trojan evaluated the student health centers of 140 colleges and universities across the country in 11 categories: hours of operation, availability of contraception, STD testing, HIV testing, availability of condoms, ease of student scheduling, quality of resources and information online, sexual education outreach programs, sexual assault programs, website usability and “extra credit.”
Last Thursday evening, I found myself in McCosh 50 for a talk delivered by Ryan Anderson ’04, called “What Is Marriage?” The fact that it was sponsored by the Anscombe Society — a campus group dedicated to promoting traditional marriage roles, family and chastity — gave me a pretty strong inkling of what wouldn’t be included in his definition.
The summer after freshman year, I reconvened with my friends from home to rehash details of the first year out of what would supposedly be the greatest four in our lives. We aggressively agreed with each other: Yeah, man, college is the best. It’s so great. I am having so much fun. And then one friend sighed: “Actually, I hate it. I’m thinking of transferring.”
It was around midnight one Saturday over the summer, and I was piled in a friend’s living room with about five other people. It was the night that George Zimmerman had been acquitted in the Trayvon Martin case. My friends and I had been watching some sugary B-rate teen movie, but upon realizing what had just happened, we switched the channel over to the news and began wordlessly scrolling through various forms of social media, gauging the nation’s reaction to the evening’s events.
For students who’ve either put off the summer job search for far too long, or have been sent back gentle rejection letter after gentle rejection letter, the month before finals was when desperation set in. No longer just limiting themselves to the modest postings on Tiger Tracks, students scoured the web for anything that even vaguely resembled something they could do for a stretch of six-to-10 weeks over the summer.
One afternoon late in August, I got an email about a start-up company that was launching a Princeton branch for their new social media app. The app itself didn’t seem too different from Facebook — something about meeting people and shared interests and liking things — but it spurred me to thinking about how social media has such a steely hold on our lives. New startups are always trying to break into the market. This is so much the case that every long-winded, declarative article that comes out in TIME or The Huffington Post about the Millennials cites our obsession with social media as our downfall. They claim that our fixation with posting photos and statuses of everything we’re doing is evidence of our narcissism and our increased use of online communication as opposed to real-time interaction is symptomatic of our crippling laziness.