This final installment sets a critical eye to the implementation of diversity programming on campus and the question of whether or not diversity can be compulsory.
Using our talents, passions and personal interests to create social change is a primary legacy left by Kopp. We should all be incredibly proud of Teach for America, but we should also be proud of students such as Satok and Friedman and perhaps take inspiration and motivation from them to be creative and be our own vehicles for global change.
The University should continue to welcome students from every corner of the world, from every background and with every set of values. However, the administration should beware of shiny statistics and those ticked boxes. Numbers are one thing, reality another. Without real integration, “diversity” will result in a shallow pretense of unity.
Having asked multiple humanities majors about their future career options, most casually respond that, if they do not end up with a job in their respective concentration, they can always go into finance as a backup. As a backup. Even science and engineering majors are ostensibly starting to consider finance as a secondary plan for their future careers and internships. This trend is perceptible among Princeton students.
I walked into the fair with a plan. I knew which three groups I wanted to scope out, and I was ready to power through the crowd. Get in, get signed up, get out. Oh, how clueless.
The policy of minimizing religious differences adopts the political correctness of indifference to skin color, nationality or sexual orientation and applies it to religion. You’re an Orthodox Jew? We won’t tell. And yet — would a French student appreciate being told that nobody will notice her accent? Why promise a gay teenager that nobody in his peer group knows of his orientation if he is open about his sexuality? These assurances imply that there is something embarrassing about the student’s identity. Moreover, religion, unlike the aforementioned categories, is a choice. If anything, the assumption upon encountering people with unusual religious practices should be that they are proud of their faith.
Princeton’s attempts to make me a crazed devotee of Butler are off-putting and confusing in their intensity and irrationality. In doing so, Princeton is asking me to bypass one of the most important parts of college: the discovery of who I am and what I believe in.
Bitterness about a loss in a tiff on social matters should not cloud out a reasonable appreciation of what Tilghman has contributed to the undergraduate experience.
Regulation might never be able to remove the risk from the dangerous enterprise of offshore drilling. The only path to true energy independence and greater national security is to decrease American energy consumption and to invest in homegrown renewable energy.
While some assume that we are supposed to come to campus with spectacular resumes, we must remember that truly extraordinary accomplishments almost always come well after college is over. The point is not to have accomplished great things before coming in, but to use Princeton’s resources to maximize our own potential after we graduate.
I learned the importance of teaching locals the tools to help themselves in the long term, but of also working with them to make sure what we wanted to implement was rooted in pragmatism and actual needs on the ground.
All sides of an argument must be voiced to have a productive dialogue. Islam should be discussed and understood. Furthermore, concerns about religious fanaticism should be addressed.
I am forced to conclude that the death penalty can be a tool that serves to bring justice and safety into the world, but it must be used with judiciousness and under extraordinarily intense scrutiny.
There are two Ferdinands in my life. The first, a nearly lifelong acquaintance, is a bull. Born 75 years ago, right before the start of the Spanish Civil War, “el toro feroz Ferdinando” was one of my favorite characters when I was a child.
There is plenty of fault to be had in the football team’s 10th consecutive defeat, the culmination of a full season’s worth of losses. But the defense should rank low on that list, after it was placed in an unwinnable position by a series of failures from the other units on Saturday night. In fact, the Tigers would have allowed more than the nine points they scored even if the defense had never conceded a single yard.
