Tuesday, March 6, 2007

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD T UESDAY,

Volume CXLII, No. 28

ARCH

6, 2007 20 07

Since 1866, Daily Since 1891

Jamaica Kincaid speaks on Columbus’ impact on present-day Caribbean

Students, administrators doubt efficacy of U. writing requirement

BY ISABEL GOTTLIEB CONTRIBUTING WRITER

When Antigua-born prizewinning author Jamaica Kincaid reads Christopher Columbus’ accounts of his first voyage to the New World, she sees “with terror, his present and our future … it makes our presence now seem inevitable.”

Kincaid read from and commented on the journals, which she called a “founding text” of her own work and life, in Salomon 101 last night to kick off Caribbean Heritage Week. Kincaid spoke about how Columbus’ initial impressions of the Caribbean set the template for how foreigners — specifically, white Europeans — continue to see the region today and what it has meant for people of Caribbean heritage.

Born in Antigua in 1949, Kincaid came to New York when she was 16. After working and attending college for several years, she continued on page 6

BY NICK WERLE CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Fewer than half of Brown students believe all undergraduates fulfill the University’s English requirement, which mandates “competence in reading and writing,” a recent Herald poll found.

Many see the current requirement, which is being reviewed by the Office of the Dean of the College, as toothless.

THE HERALD POLL

Chris Bennett / Herald Acclaimed writer Jamaica Kincaid kicked off Caribbean Heritage Week with a reading from the journals of Christopher Columbus.

Banner mock registration kicks off

Possible new dorm chair has wow factor, drawbacks

BY MATTHEW VARLEY C ONTRIBUTING WRITER

Most students who stopped by the Office of Residential Life last week received the same instruction: Have a seat.

ResLife was testing a new model of desk chair loaned to the University for student evaluation.

At first glance, the chair appeared ordinary — essentially a standard swivel chair on wheels with an upholstered seat and back.

The chair’s distinguishing characteristic, however, was a delight to many. With the pull of a lever, the chair separates from its base and, when placed on the floor, rocks on two semicircular beams.

44 percent of students polled agreed that all undergraduates satisfy the requirement, while 38 percent disagreed. 18 percent either didn’t know or didn’t answer.

Conducted from Jan. 29 to Feb. 2, the poll has a margin of error of 4.7 percent with 95 percent confidence.

The writing requirement does not currently have any curricular enforcement mechanism.

When professors record students’ grades at the end of each semester, they can indicate that a particular student needs to work on his or her writing by putting a check in a particular column. These data

BY CHAZ FIRESTONE SENIOR STAFF WRITER

The chair’s flat-surfaced base becomes a small table useful for a laptop computer.

“Check that out … that’s a little impressive,” said Jamal Shipman ’07 on witnessing the transformation of the chair into a small workstation. Shipman was critical, though, of the chair’s lack of armrests. According to Barbara Ross, an administrative assistant in ResLife, Shipman’s critique was a common one.

“Everyone says it needs arms,” Ross said.

The chair — named Trey by its manufacturer, Sauder Education — was designed specifically

Mock registration, a week-long process designed to ensure the smooth implementation of Banner’s online course registration module, began Monday as students and professors tested the system.

Members of the Undergraduate Council of Students, Meiklejohn peer advisers and various professors were given scripts that instructed them to enter and misenter data and then report Banner’s response.

“The process is going smoothly so far,” said Lisa Mather, associate registrar for registration services and organizer of the mock registration program. “But we

continued on page 4

have a whole week planned, so we’ll see how things turn out.”

Participants Monday began the pre-registration phase, which was staggered by semester level and will continue today until registration closes at 10:00 a.m.

A “summer,” which will begin at 12:01 p.m. and end at 4 p.m. today, will simulate Orientation, allowing only those playing the roles of freshmen, transfer students and new graduate students to register.

“The idea is to fit the entire semester and more into one week,” said Thomas Doeppner, associate research professor of computer science and a participant in the program.

continued on page 6 Student opinion on whether all undergrads fulfill the University’s English requirement Don’t know/ No answer

18% 18 %

44%

Yes

38% No

continued on page 4

Scientists speak out on their religious beliefs Christian faith can reconcile with evolution, students and scholars say

BY FRANKLIN KANIN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Though tension between scientific discovery and religious belief can prove divisive, Brown students and professors say the two are not mutually exclusive — studying one can drive interest in the other. Many scientists maintain their faith because, they say, they believe texts such as the Bible and tools like microscopes hold different, but equally valid, truths.

Joses Ho ’08, a neuroscience concentrator and member of College Hill for Christ, said part of his reason for studying neuroscience is his faith.

“I believe that man is made in the image of God, so there’s definitely something special about

Courtesy of saudereducation.com The Office of Residential Life is considering a large-scale purchase of Sauder Manufacturing Company’s Trey chairs, which convert into floor rockers and stools when disassembled.

INSIDE:

3 METRO

CHIPOTLE ARRIVES IN R.I. The popular fast-food Mexican chain is opening a restaurant in Warwick and plans to open another in Providence

www.browndailyherald.com

5 CAMPUS NEWS

MURAL MAKEOVER The SAO is sponsoring a contest to cover the recently painted-over walls in lower Faunce with a SAO-funded student mural

the brain that makes us different from animals and from chimpanzees,” he said. “Science has definitely got me thinking about the soul because I believe that we all have souls. Is the soul found in the brain or is this something found outside? That is where science is pushing me.”

FEATURE Luke Renick ’08, an engineering concentrator and another member of College Hill for Christ, said many elements of science lead people to religion. He cited the writing of Francis Crick, a Nobel Prize winner for his work on DNA. “(Crick’s) thing is when you

11 OPINIONS

195 Angell Street, Providence, Rhode Island

RADICALLY MODERATE Columnist Abroad Matt Prewitt ’08 examines the modern trend of moving away from radicalism toward more comfortable moderation

delve deeper and deeper into a cell, and into the origin of human life, and the building blocks of our life, it’s so incredibly complex,” Renick said. “Scientists are just baffled by the complexity, and so it leads a lot of people to say, ‘well, maybe there is a God behind this, maybe there is a designer.’”

Professor of Biology Ken Miller ’70 P’02, who is a devout Catholic, said he sees no contradiction in his professional and private beliefs.

“I think both science and religion are reflections of our very human inclination to try to make sense of the world in one way or another,” Miller said.

Miller has written textbooks about the theory of evolution and continued on page 9

12 SPORTS

W. WATER POLO TAKES 2ND The women’s water polo team made it to the ECAC Championship finals by beating Wagner and Bucknell but lost to No. 18 Princeton

News tips: herald@browndailyherald.com

TODAY THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

PAGE 2

WE A

T H E R

TODAY

TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 2007

Chocolate Covered Cotton | Mark Brinker TOMORROW

snow showers 27 / 14

cloudy 16 / 6

MEN

U

SHARPE REFECTORY

VERNEY-WOOLLEY DINING HALL

LUNCH — Shaved Steak Sandwich,Tuna Noodle Casserole, Parslied Rice, Stewed Tomatoes, Fudge Bars, Raspberry Yogurt Pie

LUNCH — Hot Ham on Bulky Roll, Vegetarian Pot Pie, Spinach with Lemon, Chicken Vegetable Soup, Vegetarian Roasted Butternut Soup with Apples, Fudge Bars

DINNER — Curry Chicken and Coconut, Basmati Rice Pilaf, Indian Green Beans, Whole Kernel Corn and Dill Rolls,Chocolate Pudding, New York Style Cheesecake

DINNER — Shepherd’s Pie, Vegan Vegetable Couscous, Baked Sweet Potatoes, Italian Vegetable Saute, Fresh Sliced Carrots, Onion and Dill Rolls, New York Style Cheesecake

SU

WBF | Matt Vascellaro

D O K U

Fill in the grid so that every row, every column and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 through 9.

Hi How Are You | Alison Naturale

Deo | Daniel Perez

Puzzles by Pappocom

CR ACROSS 1 Colorado, for one 6 At the apex of 10 Auctioned auto, often 14 Really angry 15 Designer Wang 16 British aristocrat 17 Peels Boscs?

19 Provoke 20 Whatever amount 21 Bulletin board material 22 Eurasian treeless plain 24 Hair product 25 “This __ war” 26 Complaints to Bo Peep 29 Deceive, à la a sales rep 32 Cantered 33 Aluminum giant 34 Dessert option 35 JFK landings 36 Derisive speech 37 Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s allies 38 Fr. holy woman 39 Prospector’s beast of burden 40 Either of two 1903 Physics Nobelists 41 Australian island 43 Snowman of song 44 .0005 tons 45 Whence Homer Simpson swipes an occasional beer mug 46 Cold and damp 48 Old-time actress Theda 49 To’s partner 52 Traditions 53 Extra jungle movie prop?

56 Part of NBA: Abbr.

57 Waste, as time 58 Cheer to the max 59 Hair No More alternative 60 When repeated twice, et cetera 61 Pampers, with “on” DOWN 1 Philbin co-host

O S S W O R D

2 Turkmenistan neighbor 3 Fluctuate 4 Lazy season on the Loire 5 Invalidate 6 Sidestep 7 Durable East Indian wood 8 Bobby of hockey 9 Turns down, as an invite 10 Regret one’s sins 11 Mimics at the O.K. Corral?

12 Keep from falling, with “up” 13 Shoppe modifier 18 Ping-__ 23 “Cheerio!”

24 Father’s Day gifts 25 Prefix with economics 26 Fabulous time 27 Main artery 28 Grammarian’s rest period?

29 Indigenous plant life 30 Establish a maximum for 31 Author Ken 33 Unpleasantly pungent

36 Feature of a perfect beach day 37 Twosomes 39 Oz creator 40 Like just-ironed pants 42 Second cousin?

43 Pebble Beach warning 45 Donald’s second ex

46 Highland family group 47 Finish second 48 Hardly hairy 49 Accomplishment 50 Hotel posting 51 Tram car fillers 54 Newscaster Lindstrom 55 Org. that officially recognized the State of Israel in 1993

Deep Fried Kittens | Cara FitzGibbon

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Cloudy Side Up | Mike Lauritano

xwordeditor@aol.com

3/6/07

T HE B ROWN D AILY H ERALD Editorial Phone: 401.351.3372 Business Phone: 401.351.3260

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once in July by The Brown Daily Herald, Inc. POSTMASTER please send corrections to

Mary-Catherine Lader, Vice President Ally Ouh, Treasurer Mandeep Gill, Secretary

By Timothy L. Meaker (c)2007 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

3/6/07

The Brown Daily Herald (USPS 067.740) is an independent newspaper serving the Brown demic year, excluding vacations, once during Commencement, once during Orientation and P.O. Box 2538, Providence, RI 02906. Periodicals postage paid at Providence, R.I. Offices are located at 195 Angell St., Providence, R.I. E-mail herald@browndailyherald.com. World Wide Web: http://www.browndailyherald.com. Subscription prices: $319 one year daily, $139 one semester daily. Copyright 2007 by The Brown Daily Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.

METRO TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 2007

$790 million plan to renovate Providence schools awaits approval by city and state

BY PHILLIP GARA STAFF WRITER

After releasing a $792 million master plan to redesign Providence public school facilities in December, educational consulting firm DeJONG Inc. is gathering local feedback before implementing the large-scale renovations.

The group’s plan, titled “Realizing the Dream,” calls for the renovation of Providence’s 42 public schools, the construction of 19 new schools and the closing of five schools. DeJONG is awaiting approval from the city government and Rhode Island Department of Education. The city will finance the changes with either $50 million per year over 37 years, $70 million over 20 years or $95 million over 13 years.

The Providence Journal reported Jan. 28 that Mayor David Cicilline ’83 is strongly promoting the 20-year plan, which would be nearly double the city’s average investment in school construction over the last 10 years.

“This is the first comprehensive thinking that the Providence government and schools did about the facilities ever,” said Frank Locker, DeJONG’s director of the Providence project.

“The facilities are going to get better and smarter to support learning, and the facilities will make it easier to have programs to run in addition to classroom spaces,” Locker said of the renovations, which will include teacher support spaces, collaborative conference rooms, special education rooms and analysis rooms to go along with the proposed flexible, pod-like classrooms.

“Those are the kind of things that old school buildings don’t have because they were built long before we had any of those needs,” he added.

DeJONG is a Chicago-based private educational planning firm that focuses on facilities planning in urban and rural areas. DeJONG is working on 40 projects nationwide, including the redevelopment of the Long Beach Unified School District and Mt. Lebanon, Pa., schools.

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Chipotle plans Providence restaurant

BY RACHEL ARNDT SENIOR STAFF WRITER

Courtesy of DeJONG Educational consulting firm DeJONG has proposed a series of changes for Providence schools, including grouping each grade together into pods.

Carolyn Staskiewicz, DeJONG’s vice president of operations, said the firm aims to “develop flexible spaces that can accommodate inevitable changes in educational pedagogies” that include projectbased learning, schools within a school and partnerships between public and private institutions that encourage real-world experience beyond the classroom.

Prior to contracting DeJONG, the city government hired an architectural firm, Gilbane Inc., to evaluate the conditions of Providence’s school buildings. The city then contracted DeJONG to look at the buildings from an educational point of view in order to discern “the capacity of the schools, the learning conditions and how many students should be there,” Locker said.

“We invited community leaders, advocacy groups and people from universities and local schools to discuss the interface between schools and community, like walking distance, school size, districting, et cetera,” Locker said.

According to DeJONG spokeswoman Rebecca Pazienza, the company worked with groups like

Providence After School Alliance, Volunteers in Providence Schools, East Side Public Education Coalition, the Providence Preservation Society, the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce and the Urban Education Policy program at Brown.

Since announcing the plan in December, DeJONG coordinators have hosted community and special interest meetings to solicit local feedback, Locker said. “We are in a listening mode right now,” he said.

DeJONG has also set up a hotline for Providence locals to call with recommendations and made copies of the “Realizing the Dream” master plan available on its Web site.

“The critical next step is to develop the liaison with the state Department of Education, because they have a responsibility to do their part of the funding,” Locker said. “We are pretty much done and now we need to hear comments from the city and the schools to figure out whether there are any adjustments that need to be made.” continued on page 4

Brown students hungry for massive burritos will soon be able to satisfy their urge — Chipotle Mexican Grill will expand to nearby Warwick this summer and plans to eventually come to Providence.

Though Chipotle will begin with just one site in metropolitan Providence, the company never goes into a market “with just one restaurant,” spokesman Chris Arnold wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. “Warwick gets us into the Providence metro area and there will be others sprinkled around the area as well.”

The restaurant mainly serves burritos wrapped in 13-inch flour tortillas and tacos. Some of the produce the company uses is organic, and the pork comes from free-range hogs. It also uses allnatural chicken and beef in some markets.

The restaurant already has locations in many college towns, including Berkeley, Calif., Austin, Texas, and Ann Arbor, Mich. Still, college students are “not a majority” of the customers, Arnold wrote, though he noted that the company appeals to college students because they can get a lot of food — a burrito usually packs over 1,000 calories — for not much more than $5.

College students have a “philosophical alignment with what we do with the food,” Arnold wrote, referring to the company’s treatment of animals and its movement into “organic and locally grown produce.” But in general, college students “come to us for the same reasons” other people do — they like the food, Arnold wrote.

Most Chipotle restaurants also have liquor licenses and sell bottled beer and margaritas. “It’s part of the overall mix,” Arnold wrote.

Jorge Chiguila, manager of Gordito Burrito on Thayer Street, said he was unsure what effect Chipotle will have on area restaurants. “I never tried the food, so I don’t know,” he said. But Chiguila

added, “people around here don’t like” the notion of Chipotle getting a liquor license.

Students are excited about Chipotle’s arrival. Though Dennis Kozee ’10 said he has only eaten at Chipotle twice, he likes the restaurant. “I love Chipotle because every time I eat something from there, I don’t have to worry about eating for another four days. It’s great,” he said.

Bryan Smith ’10 also said he is excited about the restaurant’s upcoming arrival. “I love Chipotle, and I’m glad they finally realized how well one would do in Providence,” he said.

Chipotle began in Denver, Colo., in 1993 and was founded

by Steve Ells near the University of Denver. It then became a subsidiary of fast-food giant McDonald’s. Last October, the Mexican fast-food chain became independent again when it separated itself from its parent company as McDonald’s moved away from owning other brands.

Most Chipotle restaurants are structured so customers order and receive their food at a counter and can eat in or take away.

Chipotle restaurants can be anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 square feet, and Arnold said the restaurant in Warwick will probably fall somewhere in the middle in terms of size. According to the company’s Web site, “Each Chipotle uses the same basic materials — wood, concrete, raw steel and metals — but no two look the same.”

The company recently expanded to Boston, and there is one restaurant in Medford, Mass.

— near Tufts University — that is currently the closest location to Brown.

In addition to Rhode Island, the company also plans to move into the Salt Lake City and Birmingham, Ala., markets. Arnold said the company considers “a lot of variables” when determining where to expand. The 573unit company opens a new restaurant every four days, according to a February article in BusinessWeek magazine.

Many in Jewelry District would welcome Alpert Medical School

BY ABE LUBETKIN STAFF WRITER

Except for light morning and noontime crowds, business is slow at Olga’s Cup and Saucer on Point Street in the Jewelry District. A few blocks away, at Nobody’s Bar and Deli on Bassett Street, the delicatessen is empty on a Monday afternoon.

The Alpert Medical School may soon change all that. The University is planning to use a portion of a $100 million gift from the Warren Alpert Foundation to fund a new building for the Med School, likely in the Jewelry District.

University officials have not yet announced publicly where they will expand the Med School. But the University announced last October that it would acquire seven buildings in the Jewelry District — about two miles from campus — and has little free space on College

Hill, suggesting that the neighborhood is a strong contender for the Med School’s expansion. Residents told The Herald they would welcome the Med School, so long as it doesn’t ruin the Jewelry District’s identity.

Richard Spies, executive vice president for planning and senior adviser to the president, wrote in an e-mail to The Herald that University officials will have a better sense of its expansion plans in a few months.

“We have been talking about a new medical education center and, yes, one possibility is to locate such a facility in or near the Jewelry District,” he wrote.

Despite its name, the neighborhood is not glitzy. Buildings are generally well-kept, but “For Lease” signs adorn windows on nearly every block. The only University-owned building in the area

the Med School currently uses for lab work — a six-story facility at 70 Ship St. that houses the Laboratories for Molecular Medicine — stands out as particularly modern and inhabited.

At Big Fish seafood restaurant on Richmond Street, typical weekday lunch crowds are “modest,” said manager Brian Walach. Having the Med School nearby would be good for his business and the neighborhood, he said.

“This area is nice, but it could use a little sprucing up,” he said. “I could only see good things coming from a move like that.”

Michael Hogue, who lives in the Jewelry District and is president of the Jewelry District Association board, said the Med School would boost the area’s economy.

“The Jewelry District would expand dramatically, both economically and vitality-wise,” he said.

Even if the Med School comes to the Jewelry District, it’s not clear whether professors and students would live in the neighborhood, as well. Currently the area has about 150 to 200 residents, Hogue said.

Realtors who work in the Jewelry District say there is minimal additional housing available.

Sharon Steele, who sells commercial and residential real estate in the Jewelry District, said locating the Med School in the area would fuel the need for additional residential construction.

“There would be a resurgence of interest in residential use of the district,” she said. She predicted that real estate values in the area would stay constant or go up.

But not all district residents are convinced that a greater Brown presence would benefit the community.

“It’s just my hope that (the dis-

trict) doesn’t get too gentrified,” said Cesare De Credico, a 23-yearold who has lived in the district his whole life. “It’s a nice, small, calm place,” he said. “To lose that identity in the city — I don’t think that’d be a good thing.”

Thomas Deller, Providence’s director of planning and development, said the city appreciates the potential for new jobs that a medical school in the Jewelry District might bring, but he said he worries about lost property tax revenues.

Brown’s tax-exempt status means that the city would collect fewer tax dollars from the University than it would from a commercial enterprise occupying Jewelry District buildings.

“We’ll compromise where we have to compromise,” he said. “The important thing for us is that development is happening in a way that is good for the city.”

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 2007

Banner tested with mock registration this week continued from page 1 Kyle Evans ’08 was the first registrant Monday and had to register for five courses, including one requiring written permission.

“I got into the four classes without any problems, but then Banner wouldn’t let me get into an English course because it was ‘written permission required,’ ” she said. “A professor logged in to give me the override, and I got in.”

Evans said her experience with Banner was positive.

“I was concerned that it would be difficult to use, but the user interface is very similar to WebCT, which everyone is used to using,” she said. “It’s like three clicks, and then you’re done.”

A concern frequently raised by students has been the process of receiving restriction overrides from professors, but Doeppner said the process is very simple from a professor’s point of view.

“Granting the overrides was pretty simple,” he said. “Anybody who uses the Web shouldn’t have a problem.”

Doeppner also said Banner’s user interface — another hotly debated feature — wasn’t a problem for him.

“I had some minor concerns coming in, but the user interface was fine,” he said. “Each time you

did something, the system made sure it was the thing you wanted to do.”

Kaitlin Lemei ’07.5 also participated in the mock registration program, playing the role of a senior planning to live off campus. “According to my script, I hadn’t provided my new address information, so I couldn’t register for classes,” she said. “But once I did, I was able to register.”

But Lemei ran into a problem when she tried to access Banner from Miriam Hospital, where she works.

“I couldn’t log on through the link that they gave me,” she said.

“Both Internet Explorer and Mozilla would time out before I was able to connect.”

Mather said she and her team were aware of the bug and received notification from Lemei and others with the same problem.

“A bunch of people off campus were having some trouble accessing Banner,” she said. “We’re working to fix it.”

But one student who was testing the system from overseas was able to log on without a problem, Mather said.

Gordon Pels ’08 is currently spending a semester in Paris and offered to test Banner remotely.

“Registering itself is very fast and easy,” Pels wrote in an e-mail to The

Herald.

But Pels said he felt the interface could be circuitous at times.

“You almost always have to return to the main menu to do anything,” he wrote.

Lemei, a lab consultant supervisor for the Help Desk and a Meiklejohn peer adviser, said she was pleased with Banner’s interface but foresees a few problems for those unfamiliar with it.

“The menus on Banner could be a little more streamlined, but for the most part, I didn’t have trouble negotiating them,” she said. “I would definitely advise freshmen to poke around in Banner before registering.”

The pre-registration period is just the beginning of the mock registration process. All of Wednesday will be spent simulating shopping period, Thursday will simulate the third and fourth weeks of classes — when students can no longer add a course but can drop courses and change their grade options — and Friday, the last day of mock registration, will simulate registration after the fourth week of classes, when students can drop courses but are no longer able to change grade options.

“Our staff has used the system extensively,” Mather said. “So we expect the process to go fairly smoothly.”

Providence schools to undergo $790 million renovation continued from page 3 Pazienza said the Providence School Board, Providence Public Schools Superintendent Donnie Evans and Cicilline are working closely on the process of financing the program and expect there will be “some type of public announcement in March or April” regarding the plan’s progress.

“We created a launching pad to get the schools to think critically about their needs and get it right.

Our goal is for them to carry on the program, embrace it and make it their own,” Locker said.

It is unclear how the DeJONG plan will affect community outreach programs run by the Brown

community and how the plan will measure its success. The University announced Feb. 24 that it will create a $10 million endowed fund to support local schools, in addition to other initiatives.

The University’s recently appointed director of education outreach, Lamont Gordon ’93, said much remains to be seen in terms of the plan’s impact on community outreach.

“As the specifics and the timeline become clearer, we will know better how to respond,” he said.

Professor of Education Kenneth Wong said there must be interim evaluations for the renovation plans.

“I think the terms and the re-

view process, as well as the standards to assess their improvement, needs to be included,” he said of the DeJONG plan.

Wong suggested that one way to assess the plan would be to measure its impact on the greater community.

“There are now urban plans in schools that are creating the school as a hub — as a social, parental community hub after school hours — so that schools become a core center of activities for the neighborhood,” he said.

Wong added that Cicilline supports the plan and that it is now his responsibility to “make the plan acceptable for the Providence community as a whole.”

Convertible dorm chair tested by ResLife continued from page 1 for modern college campuses. The chair “reflects a two-year research and product development process” in which the company considered the academic and social needs of college dorms, according to a company statement. Released in late 2006, the company is now promoting the chair at schools across the country. Davidson College in North Carolina recently outfitted a residence hall with Trey chairs during a renovation.

Though he did not state an intention to buy new chairs for University dorm rooms in the near future, Thomas Forsberg, associate director of housing and residential life, said his office has “a tendency to solicit student feedback” that “guides us in our purchasing decisions.”

“It’s always good to get some information,” Forsberg said. Such feedback is also passed onto manufacturers. Forsberg said he has informed Sauder Education about the common complaint regarding the lack of armrests.

Forsberg recently presented the chair at a Residential Council meeting. Before a decision to purchase

the chairs could be made, however, it would have to be “vetted by a number of different offices,” Forsberg said.

Current desk chair models at Brown vary from one dorm to another, though the wooden upholstered “half-rockers” are perhaps the most notorious. Many students have strong feelings about the current models — a Facebook group about the half-rockers called “These Chairs are Bullsh*t” boasts a membership of 70.

Other dorm chairs are also unpopular. Sarah Tolan-Mee ’09 said her wooden dorm chair in Barbour Hall resembled those in the Sharpe Refectory and said it was “uncomfortable” and “too low for the desk.”

“I put (course) readers on the chair to make it higher,” Tolan-Mee said.

More test chairs may appear at ResLife in the future, as Forsberg said the University “will be approached by a number of different manufacturers” before placing a bid on any specific model. In any event, he said ResLife officials are aware of the need to purchase furniture that will satisfy students in the long

run. “When I buy for a building, it’s unlikely that I’m going to be going again into that building with residence hall bedroom furniture for 20 years,” Forsberg said.

Forsberg estimated the budget for an entire suite of bedroom furniture is between $1,000 and $1,500.

He said the average cost of a desk chair is “anywhere between $125 and $200,” though he said the Trey model is “a little more expensive than a standard chair.” The final cost of any furniture piece is a function of the quantity purchased by the University, Forsberg said.

Though Shipman said Brown students are “ready for new chairs,” he said he was “not thoroughly impressed” with Trey. He added that though the floor rocker might be “cool for watching TV,” it was insufficiently supportive and consequently “not a very comfortable work position.”

“I don’t feel special when I’m sitting in the chair,” said Shipman, who has a half-rocker in his Vartan Gregorian Quad suite. “For it to be as expensive as it is, I want to feel like I’m hugged and loved by the chair. I don’t know that this is the new chair we should be buying.”

CAMPUS N EWS TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 2007

NEW

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SAO sponsors Faunce mural contest A new mural will soon cover the freshly painted hallways of Faunce House’s lower level. The Student Activities Office is sponsoring a contest to replace the mural that previously decorated the walls of the hallway between Brown Student Agencies and the mailroom.

The application requires students to describe their vision for the space and provide a sketch of the proposed mural. The SAO will select a winner and provide the artist with materials.

For some, a new design will be a welcome change from the original mural, which portrayed Chris Bennett / Herald File Photo bears engaged in activities such The Student Activities Office is holding as washing themselves and a contest to select a new mural design for the hallway in lower Faunce, where hanging from trees.

“That mural was pretty weird. traces of the previous mural are still Replacing it is definitely going to visible. improve Faunce,” said Anthony Staehelin ’10.

Though the SAO could not pinpoint why, when or by whom the previous mural was painted, Deena Quitman ’07, assistant student manager at the SAO, estimated the mural to be about 10 years old and said replacing it with something nicer keeps with the spirit of improving Faunce — especially considering that expletives had been carved into the mural. One bear also had the word “pot” written on its stomach.

Proposals for the new mural must be submitted by Brown students and are due by March 15. The mural is projected to be finished by the end of April.

— Raphael Stern

Several car crime incidents reported last week

BY DEBBIE LEHMANN S ENIOR S TAFF WRITER

The following summary includes all major incidents reported to the Department of Public Safety between Feb. 23 and March 2. It does not include general service and alarm calls. The Providence Police Department also responds to incidents occurring off campus. DPS does not divulge information on open cases that are currently under investigation by the department, the PPD or the Office of Student Life. DPS maintains a daily log of all shift activity and general service calls which can be viewed during business hours at its headquarters, located at 75 Charlesfield St. Friday, Feb. 23: 4:10 p.m. Complainant reported that unknown persons smashed the front passenger side window of his vehicle on Elm Street and removed the stereo.

9:56 p.m. DPS and PPD officers responded to a motor vehicle accident at Brown and Angell streets.

Both vehicles sustained heavy damage, and one of the two drivers sustained a minor injury.

Saturday, Feb. 24: 1:59 a.m. DPS and PPD officers responded to a noise complaint at Benefit Street. Upon arrival, the officers found a loud party in progress and about 100 people in the area. The officers spoke with two occupants of the house, and the PPD issued a summons. The party was dispersed without issue. The Community Director on call was notified.

CRIME LOG Sunday, Feb. 25: 2:38 p.m. Complainant reported that unknown persons stole her handbag sometime between 10 p.m. and 11:45 p.m. while she was attending a party at Young Orchard Apartments. There are no suspects or witnesses at this time.

Monday, Feb. 26: 12:54 a.m. DPS and PPD officers responded to the report of larceny from an automobile at Charlesfield Street. Complainant reported that sometime between 6 p.m. on Feb. 25 and 12:54 a.m. on Feb. 26 unknown persons smashed the passenger side window of his vehicle and removed his stereo.

Thursday, March 1: 1:53 p.m. DPS and PPD officers responded to the report of automobile damage at Hope Street and Lloyd Avenue. Complainant reported that unknown persons smashed a window of her vehicle sometime between 7:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.

There were no items missing from the vehicle.

2:55 p.m. Complainant reported that unknown persons removed his laptop from his room in Perkins Hall. The complainant’s roommate was sleeping with the door unsecured during the time of the incident. There are no suspects or witnesses at this time.

Friday, March 2: 3:08 p.m. Complainant reported that unknown persons removed her wallet from her coat that was left unsecured in a common area in Graduate Center. There are no suspects or witnesses at this time.

3:06 p.m. Reporting person stated that she left a University-owned laptop in Leung Gallery in Faunce House following an event held on Feb. 27. The laptop was later recovered.

Dining Services expands Brown student worker shifts at campus eateries this year, especially Jo’s

BY KARA APLAND CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Dining Services increased the number of Brown student workers at Josiah’s this year due to a temporary decline in interest last fall from culinary students at Johnson & Wales University.

Twenty-eight Brown student shifts were added at Jo’s in October, and an additional seven were added this semester, all in food production, said Angela Sherwin ’07, a student general manager for Dining Services. Additional student shifts have also been added to the Gate, Ivy Room and Blue Room for a total of 720 shifts each week available to Brown students.

Sherwin said there are several reasons for the increase — demand for food at the Blue Room is up due to the new Flex Meal Plans, while staffing was increased at the Gate in order “to focus on cleanliness and maintenance.” The most significant change — increased shifts at Jo’s — were created to replace positions previously staffed by JWU students.

“We had a real challenge retaining Johnson & Wales students,” Sherwin said, adding that Brown students have consequently taken on new responsibilities in food production.

Sian Kieran ’09, who works at Jo’s, said Brown students used to

remember the alamo

work mostly as cashiers, but their responsibilities are increasing. “I just do the deli, and I did quesadillas the other night,” she said.

Ann Hoffman, director of administration for Dining Services, wrote in an e-mail to The Herald that the late hours at Jo’s — closing time was extended to 2 a.m. in 2004 — have contributed to staffing troubles.

“I think our extended hours have contributed to the difficulty we’ve had keeping a full complement of Johnson & Wales student employees,” Hoffman wrote. “Working until 2:15 (a.m.) or later is difficult for anyone who has early classes but particularly for people who then have to travel some distance back to their campus.”

Alcohol-related disturbances at Jo’s on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday nights have also played a role in turnover, Hoffman added.

“I am aware of at least one female JWU student employee who, when she gave her notice, indicated that she didn’t ‘feel safe’ working in that environment,” she wrote.

But interest from Johnson & Wales students has picked up in recent months.

“The challenges that we were experiencing last semester are not as dark as they were. So now Josiah’s has more Johnson & Wales students doing food production,” Sherwin said.

Sherwin said Dining Services

plans to maintain the increase in Brown student workers at Jo’s, even with renewed interest from Johnson & Wales students. “I would anticipate keeping the level of staffing from both JWU and Brown students the same as it is now, as long as both programs prove sustainable,” she said.

There is a long history of student workers from Johnson & Wales at Jo’s — in 1997, Johnson & Wales students started working at Brown through a co-operative/internship program, said Retail Dining Supervisor Sean Debobes. “Brown provides a great opportunity because (it has) a wide variety of food service, especially if you’re interested in university food services,” he said.

Debobes was a co-op student at the Verney-Woolley Dining Hall while completing his degree at Johnson & Wales. “(The program) started to pick up more and more as Josiah’s was harder to staff with Brown workers in the late ’90s, so we started retaining co-op students after their co-op was completed,” he said. “It all started snowballing until we now have Johnson & Wales students who didn’t even work as co-op students.”

Debobes said he is optimistic about the program’s future. “It’s a very symbiotic relationship. It’s a great program that we are happy to have,” he said.

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Jamaica Kincaid on Columbus and the Caribbean continued from page 1 began publishing her short stories in the New Yorker magazine and launched her literary career.

Kincaid’s major works include “At the Bottom of the River,” “Annie John,” “A Small Place,” “Lucy,” “Autobiography of My Mother,” “Mr. Potter” and, most recently, 2005’s “Among Flowers.”

After an introduction from President Ruth Simmons, Kincaid read from Samuel Eliot Morison’s translation of Columbus’ journals.

She then discussed the text’s implications for the modern Caribbean and answered questions from the audience.

Kincaid called Columbus an “Adam-like figure” and a “patriarch” in Caribbean history. But, she added, “Unlike most patriarchs, we don’t really like him,” provoking laughter from the crowd.

Columbus’ accounts, though written in the 15th century, “echo … all Caribbean centuries,” Kincaid said. The Caribbean “doesn’t yield for us the pleasure, wealth and imaginative richness,” it does for outsiders like Columbus, she said.

“We go to places like the West Indies to forget who we are, to take a respite from who we are,” she said. “Tourism is supposed to be an equal exchange. I am equal to Florentines or Parisians.

In Jamaica or Antigua, it is not an equal exchange, and that was evident from the beginning. Why?’ Kincaid encouraged the audience to consider this question over the course of Caribbean Heritage Week.

“There is the idea that (the Caribbean) is a source of something

for somewhere else — wealth, but not for the people there,” she said, describing a theme found in both the journals and her own work.

Kincaid read one passage in which Columbus decides to capture and bring home some of the “Indians” he encountered to show them to the king and queen and educate them in Spanish and Catholicism.

This passage sparked debate among members of the audience.

One audience member, who said she is working on a book about Columbus, said Columbus never used the word “slave” and restrained his crew from “raping and mobbing.” She added that the people he brought back to Spain lived in the royal court and “were subjects of the queen, so they could not be slaves.” The audience member also questioned the accuracy of the translation Kincaid read.

Kincaid responded that Columbus was “rather self-righteous” in his journals and that his behavior laid the foundation for Western exploitation of the Caribbean. Other audience members expressed indignation that forcibly removing people from their native countries could even be defended.

The theme of this year’s Caribbean Heritage Week is “Flip a Caribbean coin, the good and the bad,” said organizer Fedna Jacquet ’10. The week features events that “show both the Caribbean’s beauty, such as Jamaica Kincaid, who is a wonderful author, as well as some of the problems,” Jacquet said.

Jacquet said of Kincaid, “Anything she says, it’s a blessing to hear it.”

TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 2007

Q&A WITH JAMAICA KINCAID Before Jamaica Kincaid gave the opening address for Caribbean Heritage Week, The Herald talked to the prizewinning author about her Caribbean background, her work and why she became a writer.

imagined myself as a writer, but as a writer who was dead, like Charlotte Bronte. I liked Charlotte Bronte very much. I used to pretend I was her and that I was living in Belgium, alone.

The Herald: How do Christopher Columbus’ journals, which you will be reading from tonight, play into the theme of Caribbean Heritage Week?

Jamaica Kincaid: Columbus was the first language of our heritage, our present, the first account we have of what the place we live in was like, so that seemed appropriate.

What else did you read that influenced you?

I read “Jane Eyre” for pleasure, but the big influence on me were the things I had to read in school — the Bible, the King James Version, a dictionary my mother gave me when I was seven years old — and I read it. It was a birthday present. That was a big influence in a strange way.

“Paradise Lost” — I had to copy books one and two when I was seven as a punishment, and it had the desired effect — it made me admire Lucifer, and I wrote a book about a character called Lucy who was also very rebellious.

Also English literature, the grand, mainly the dead white men kind of literature. Lots of Shakespeare and English history. I really knew not much about the Caribbean and the place I grew up in so much as I knew about England.

How does your own Caribbean heritage figure into your work?

It doesn’t so much figure in it as it overwhelms everything.

Most of my work is entirely from the experience of being born of people who are from there, whose roots go deeply there, so it’s overwhelming. But I like to be overwhelmed.

When you were 16 and left Antigua — I was sent away.

When you were sent away, you didn’t know you were going to be a writer. When did you decide to pursue writing?

I was in college in New Hampshire, Franconia College, and I wanted to write. It wasn’t a decision — I don’t remember it as a decision. I just wanted to write. I left and moved to New York and said I was a writer and shortly after I began to be published. … It’s possible that I always wanted to write since I was a child, but there was no possibility, it was like wishing you were a princess or something.

I always read, and I always

You’re teaching at Harvard now.

What is it like working with students and younger people?

Oh, it’s lovely! They remind me of myself when I was their age and just starting to write, though they’re in a much more privileged position than I could ever imagine. It’s lovely to see young people, I love young people.

What are you working on now?

I can’t tell you that, because I don’t know! People always ask that. It’s really a question — I have to give you some advice — not to ask a writer. If they tell you, don’t believe it.

In your last book, “Among Flowers,” you wrote about traveling in Nepal. You have described the barrier between a tourist and the place he is visiting as a sort of inescapable hostility that someone feels when there is someone visiting their home. How did it feel being a tourist after you said you felt that way about traveling?

The position of a tourist, of someone like me, in my social situation and prosperity, visiting a place like that, is something most people growing up in a place like this, in a dominant society, wouldn’t think of. But I grew up in a place that was like Nepal, a place that invites the gaze of people with more money than the native people have.

I was very aware of my position as someone able to shape their reality, in the sense that I could describe them. I had the power to describe them, and to make that description translate just by writing about them and their situation, to make it translate into something that would possibly change their reality in a way that they had not determined.

Being aware of that kind of situation I did as much as I could not to describe them. I felt I was transgressing enough taking the seeds of plants that were native of them to bring back to my garden in Vermont. That was enough. There’s practically no anthropological or ethnographic description of the people. The people I met I tried to interact with in as human a way as possible.

Is that what Columbus was doing, describing?

Columbus? No, he was taking possession. I’m not in a position to take possession because I live in a country that will do it for me.

— Isabel Gottlieb

Students, administrators doubt efficacy of current writing requirement continued from page 1

happy super deadline day

are compiled by the registrar and sent to Rhoda Flaxman, director of College Writing Programs.

Flaxman then sends out letters to students who received “writing checks.” The first check is merely advisory, intended as a warning that the student’s writing needs to improve. If a student receives a second writing check, they are required to meet with Flaxman to work out a plan to improve their writing skills.

Associate Dean of the College Kathleen McSharry, who will assume responsibility for the writing requirement on July 1, said, “The writing requirement is amorphous — we have no real objective measure. We don’t have sufficient evidence that all students are meeting this requirement.”

Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron said there is concern about the writing requirement from “many quarters” and that student writing deserves attention.

“I think we could afford to expand the options available to students, beyond the many rich options we have in the English department and the literary arts department … and those classes that have Rose Writing Fellows,” Bergeron said. “There might be

another layer that we could add onto this.”

The current system of writing checks on grade logs will end when the registrar begins using the Banner software system, which cannot track writing checks. There is not yet a specific plan for a new system that will work with Banner to tracking students’ writing proficiency.

Developing a new system “is a necessity,” said Douglas Brown, director of the Writing Center.

“Nobody’s going to argue that (the current system) has been effective.”

Currently, the dean of the College’s office and the provost’s office are involved in two efforts to re-evaluate the writing requirement. Provost David Kertzer ’69 P’95 P’98 and Bergeron recently announced a Task Force on Undergraduate Education, which will review the college’s curriculum over the next year and prepare for reaccreditation by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. Part of the charge of this task force is reviewing the writing requirement, Bergeron said.

Bergeron also convened a committee composed of Brown, Flaxman and McSharry to explore writing at the College. Though the role of the committee is not strict-

ly defined, Flaxman said she sees its task as generating ideas for larger meetings in the dean of the College’s office and with the College task force.

The goals of the committee are “broader” than just finding a way to implement the old writing check system with Banner, Brown said. But each of the committee members rejected the idea of a specific curricular requirement.

“We’re looking for something we can do that will be compatible with Brown’s openness and open curriculum,” Flaxman said.

“We’re not interested in being police, but rather giving students many, many more opportunities to work on their writing, in courses and outside courses.”

McSharry said her immediate goals for the new writing requirement are to establish a baseline understanding of students’ writing when they arrive at Brown and to identify deficiencies before the end of a semester and earlier in students’ academic career. She said her office will begin tracking students’ scores on the writing portion of the SAT to determine if it can be used as an indicator of writing proficiency.

McSharry said a summer reading assignment with an essay to hand in to academic advisers has

www.browndailyherald.com

also been proposed so the dean’s office could start tracking students’ skills earlier. McSharry did not say whether this change is likely.

As for current Brown students’ proficiency in writing, administrators were generally positive.

“I’ve taught at a lot of places, and I would say that I’ve really enjoyed reading the papers of my Brown students more on the whole, collectively more, than at other places,” Bergeron said.

Flaxman’s comments were less enthusiastic. “I think that it’s very hard to judge (students’ writing) based on the response to the writing requirement because only a percentage of the faculty use the requirement,” she said. “I think that there are students at Brown who don’t really take enough classes that include enough writing in them, so these students can slip through the system and not be identified as needing work on their writing.”

Rafael Rincon ’08 agreed with Flaxman’s assessment and was unsurprised by the results of the Herald poll. “Of course I know people who don’t fulfill the writing requirement,” he said. “There are a lot of people who just take all science classes and actively avoid anything with writing.”

W ORLD & N ATION TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 2007

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Suicide bomber targets popular book mart BAGHDAD, Iraq (Los Angeles Times) — For ages, the Mutanabi book mart was a feeding ground for Iraq’s intellectuals, serving up a rich menu of history and philosophy texts, novels and biographies, and atlases and manuscripts to the Middle East’s most voracious readers.

On Monday, it proved yet another rich target for a suicide bomber, who left 30 dead and 60 wounded in a grisly attack that evaded Baghdad’s security crackdown.

The bomber detonated a sedan packed with explosives while sitting in a traffic jam, obliterating what had been a crystalline day.

Israeli official says Iran training Hamas TEL AVIV, Israel (Los Angeles Times) — The head of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency said Monday that Iran is giving advanced military training to members of Hamas, a move he called a “strategic danger” to the Jewish state.

Yuval Diskin, the director of Shin Bet, said the militant movement had dispatched “tens” of fighters from the Gaza Strip to Iran for “months, maybe years” of instruction and that Iran had promised to train hundreds more.

A Hamas spokesman denied the assertion. The training, if confirmed, would mean that Iran is expanding its alliance with Hamas, which Israel and the United States list as a terrorist organization and which has controlled the Palestinian Authority government for nearly a year.

Since Western nations cut off funding to the Palestinian government last spring after Hamas’ ascendance, Iran has given it at least $120 million in aid.

Reports of Iran’s training of Hamas militants, previously attributed to unnamed Israeli and Palestinian officials, have been circulating for weeks. Diskin’s remark at a rare briefing for foreign reporters was the first such official claim and echoed a drumbeat of charges by the Bush administration that Iran exports terrorism.

Sex doesn’t always sell (Washington Post) — Advertisers will sell more stuff if their commercials run during innocuous family-fare programs rather than sexually charged shows, suggests new research into the effects of erotic programming on viewers’ response to ads.

Programs with overtly sexual content appeared to interfere with viewers’ ability to remember the commercials, according to the study, published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology.

Researchers Ellie Parker and Adrian Furnham at University College London said provocative content may have left little “cognitive space” in viewers’ brains to process the commercials.

Court OKs bonds for state religious schools SAN FRANCISCO (Los Angeles Times) — The state can help religious schools obtain bonds to pay for improvements, even if the school’s mission is overwhelmingly religious, the California Supreme Court ruled 4-3 on Monday.

Rejecting arguments by civil libertarians, the court majority said the state can issue tax-exempt government bonds — which would save private schools millions on new construction — if the bonds will be used for facilities where secular subjects are taught with an academic content similar to that provided in nonreligious schools.

To determine whether state bonds could be issued, a court should consider the “substance of the education provided” and not merely the schools’“religious character,” the majority said.

Blacks in harder-rated classes, study says WASHINGTON (\Washington Post) — On Feb. 23, the Washington Post reported on a government study that showed high school students’ achievement flat on some key standardized tests even though their grades and the apparent rigor of their course loads were rising.

Here is another angle: By one academic measure, a little-noticed finding from that U.S. Education Department report showed that black high school students have caught up to their white classmates.

The study of the transcripts of 2005 high school graduates found that 52 percent of the black graduates had completed a four-year curriculum of at least “mid-level” difficulty. For their white counterparts that year, the rate was 51 percent — a one percentage point difference that experts said was statistically insignificant.

Three surveys in the 1990s had found that black graduates trailed white graduates on that measure by a significant margin; the gap was 11 percentage points as recently as 1994.

33 activist women arrested in Tehran

BY NORA BOUSTANY WASHINGTON POST

WASHINGTON — Amnesty International on Monday demanded the swift and unconditional release of 33 prominent Iranian female activists arrested Sunday and jailed in Tehran’s notorious high-security Evin prison. The women were arrested after peacefully protesting the trial of five other activists and grass-roots organizers against discrimination in the legal system.

On the eve of the U.S. State Department’s release of its annual human rights report and only days ahead of celebrations marking International Women’s Day, Iran’s best-known female activists were arrested early Sunday after they gathered with placards outside Tehran’s Revolutionary Court.

The five women whose trial they were protesting had held a public rally June 12 to call for equal rights for women under Iran’s penal laws, family code and blood money practices. At the time, club-wielding security officers rounded up 70 people.

Under Iran’s penal code, girls as young as 9 can be executed by hanging or stoning for adultery or what are referred to as morality crimes, while for boys the age limit is 15. If an Iranian girl dies in an accident, her family receives only half the compensation paid to the fami-

lies of young male victims, according to traditional practices.

“Rather than arresting peaceful demonstrators, the Iranian authorities should be taking seriously women’s demands for equality before the law and addressing discrimination against women wherever it exists in the Iranian legal system,” said Irene Khan, Amnesty’s secretary general, in a statement distributed by the group’s Washington office.

“Practically the entire top layer of the women’s movement in Iran, except for Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, who happens to be in Italy, is in jail,” said Hadi Ghaemi of Human Rights Watch in New York.

Under Iran’s constitution, protesters have the right of assembly provided they are not carrying arms or defaming Islam. Yet Nusheen Ahmadi Khorasani, Shahla Entesari, Parvin Ardalan, Sussan Tammasebi and Fariba Davoodi Mohajer went on trial Sunday on charges of acting against national security by participating in an illegal gathering.

All but Davoodi Mohajer, who is visiting her daughter in Washington, appeared in court with their attorneys Sunday morning. When they emerged from the chambers to observe the commotion surrounding the arrests of the other women outside, the four defendants were rearrested, Ghaemi said in a telephone conversation from New

York.

In calling for gender equality, the protesters outside the court used a play on words similar to a slogan used by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to rally public support for nuclear energy. Rights activists have launched a campaign to collect a million Iranian signatures for a petition to end legalized discrimination against women.

“In Iran’s prison system, there are eight women sentenced to death by stoning, while only two men have that sentence applied against sexual crimes or extramarital relations,” Ghaemi said. If only one woman has witnessed a serious crime, the suspect goes free because her testimony is worth only half that of a man in court, he said.

Although Iran, a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, has promised not to execute anyone under 18, in August 2004 it publicly hanged 16year-old Atefeh Sahaleh Rajabi in a public square in the city of Neka for “crimes against chastity.’”

With 159 people executed by the state in 2004 , allegedly in accordance with Islamic law, Iran was second only to China in the number of death sentences it carried out that year. Amnesty has expressed concern that Ahmadinejad’s focus on a return to pure revolutionary values is making such executions more common.

U.N. suspends aid program in North Korea

BY MAGGIE FARLEY LOS ANGELES T IMES

UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. Development Program on Monday suspended operations in North Korea after Pyongyang rejected conditions ensuring that U.N. money was not being diverted to Kim Jong Il’s regime.

The move came as North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator met U.S. envoys about renewing diplomatic relations if Pyongyang scraps its nuclear weapons program in exchange for U.S. aid. The two countries have been foes since the 195053 Korean War. North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan met with Christopher Hill, the top U.S. negotiator at six-party talks on the North’s nuclear program. Those discussions will continue Tuesday.

U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack played down prospects of a breakthrough, despite expectations that the U.S. might lift restrictions on a Macau bank suspected of helping Pyongyang launder money. He said the

agenda would include U.S. trade sanctions as well as Washington’s designation of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism.

Washington wants Pyongyang to follow through on a Feb. 13 agreement to shut down its main nuclear facility within 60 days and give access to U.N. nuclear inspectors, who are scheduled to visit next week to discuss dismantling the country’s nuclear program.

While the nuclear negotiations continue at the U.S. ambassador’s suite at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in midtown New York, North Korean diplomats were reeling at the U.N. from the Development Program’s suspension of its programs in North Korea.

The suspension affects 20 projects with a budget of $4.4 million, including food production and helping the government improve systems to manage the economy.

Eight international staffers are being recalled from Pyongyang, and 15 North Koreans employed by the agency likely will lose their jobs.

After charges by the U.S. earlier this year that lax accounting meant

that U.N. money could be diverted for illicit uses, the development agency’s board, which includes North Korea, voted unanimously Feb. 25 to change the way it operated in the country. The reforms included stopping the payment of salaries in euros to the North Korean government and local staff, refusing to employ government officials as UNDP workers and narrowing its programs to those that help the people but not the government. It also agreed to an outside audit.

But North Korean Ambassador Pak Gil Yon refused to accept the new conditions during a meeting Thursday with the program’s deputy administrator. The next day, UNDP administrator Kemal Dervis informed Pak that the agency “had no choice” but to suspend the program.

“For us, these conditions were non-negotiable,” spokeswoman Christina LoNigro said. “They came from our board, and we would reconsider restarting our program if these conditions were met.

Buchwald remembered for — and with — humor

BY JENNIFER FREY WASHINGTON POST

WASHINGTON — They sent “Artie” off with laughter, as was only fitting, given that humor had been Art Buchwald’s great gift to this world. So when hundreds of family members and friends — many of them public luminaries —gathered at the Kennedy Center on Monday to commemorate his life, it was a ceremony filled as much with mirth as mourning.

“He provided so much material for everybody, and so much of

it was timeless,” said his son, Joel Buchwald, after the 90-minute service. With 10 eulogies and two video tributes, approximately 550 guests and a setting in the Eisenhower Theater, Buchwald’s memorial may not have matched the fantasy one he humorously described in his last book — Carnegie Hall, Harlem Boys Choir, “New York Symphony” — but it was certainly an event.

Among the guests were John Glenn, Nancy Pelosi, Sam Donaldson, Andy Rooney, Eunice Shriver and a whole clan of Ken-

nedys, Robert Novak, Bob Woodward ... and that doesn’t even include those who spoke. In addition to three members of his family (Joel and his sister Jennifer Buchwald, as well as Joel’s wife, Tamara Buchwald), the longtime humorist was honored by Tom Brokaw, Mike Wallace, Ben Bradlee, Dave Barry, George Stevens Jr., Michael Newman (who was Buchwald’s friend as well as his physician) and Ethel Kennedy, who brought down the house continued on page 8

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Education can ward off stupidity continued from page 12 suspect. Jones, through his attorney, denies any involvement. So far we’ve only heard the account of the strip club owner. He says there’s video of Jones assaulting a dancer inside the club. No one I know has seen it.

Even a man with Jones’ checkered past is entitled to a presumption of innocence. Remember when a woman accused members of the Dallas Cowboys of sexual assault and everyone said, “Those crazy Cowboys are out of control again” — until it turned out she fabricated the whole story and wound up getting kicked out of the country? The NFL can’t be so image-conscious that it tramples on people’s legal rights.

Jones is unique in that he’s managed to sully the reputations of two leagues at once. Because the strip club shootings occurred at the end of All-Star weekend, it’s been lumped into the criticism of the crowd the NBA attracted to Las Vegas. As if the NBA has any control over who shows up in conjunction with its events, or is accountable for the actions of people who play in other leagues.

The reported mayhem even had NBA Players Association President Billy Hunter doubting New Orleans’ capability of handling the All-Star Game next year. NBA players didn’t cause

any problems in Vegas and they weren’t in jeopardy. You didn’t hear about incidents at league events or player-affiliated parties.

The players will be even safer in New Orleans, where the hotels don’t need to keep access open to the casinos and the players’ hotel will return to its usual fortress mode.

That said, if anything can bring Bourbon Street to a halt, it’s All-Star weekend. In the last four years, it’s managed to close down the Lenox Square mall in Atlanta, the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles and the Las Vegas Strip. That’s an unprecedented trifecta.

Nevertheless, I never felt unsafe in Las Vegas. I didn’t witness scary behavior, just a lot of ignorance. Unfortunately, there’s still a segment of the African American population that thinks the AllStar Game is an acceptable time and place to smoke weed wherever and whenever, walk around drinking Patron out of bottles with two-foot straws, pick up women by demeaning them and set a franchise record for use of the n-word.

That’s not an NBA problem.

It’s an issue that swerves into the area of education, not discipline.

Start with implementing a little knowledge and maybe the stupidity can be reduced — even if, Chaney would tell you, it can never be eradicated.

TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 2007

Panel’s solution for pricey text books: don’t use them

BY STUART SILVERSTEIN LOS ANGELES T IMES

A federal advisory panel studying the high cost of college texts was offered a simple suggestion Monday for keeping down expenses: Don’t use so many books.

Or, at least, not books in the conventional sense.

The idea is to prod professors to take advantage of articles, lecture notes, study guides and other materials available for free on the Internet.

That suggestion, and several others, were aired during a threeand-a-half-hour meeting in Santa Clarita, Calif., where the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance heard from college administrators, textbook publishers and other higher education leaders and advocates.

The meeting — the second of three field hearings the panel will hold around the country before it delivers a congressionally requested report in May — didn’t produce any consensus solutions.

And neither did it answer a question that seemed to be a subtext of the proceedings: Who is to blame for textbooks that often cost more than $100?

Those costs increasingly have drawn attention from state and federal lawmakers over the past three years, prompted in part by students activists.

The effort gained support in 2005 when the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that college textbook prices have climbed at twice the rate of inflation over the past two decades.

Students activists largely have blamed publishers for the phe-

nomenon. They have pointed to such practices as bundling texts with additional, often unwanted, instructional materials such as CD-ROMs, as well as issuing unnecessary new editions.

Many of the participants at Monday’s session, held at the College of the Canyons, agreed that those practices are part of the problem. Among the solutions proposed were measures already in place at some campuses, including providing students with rental books, as well as encouraging professors to change their required textbooks less frequently so students have more opportunity to buy cheaper used volumes.

In addition, some officials suggested stepped-up funding of scholarships and other financial aid designed to help pay for books.

But probably the most dramatic cost-cutting proposal came from leaders of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District, a two-campus system in the Silicon Valley. That district has adopted a policy to encourage the use of public-domain materials on the Internet.

It reflects a broader movement involving materials that can be used for nonprofit educational purposes for free. Academics commonly call them “open educational resources.” The movement has been backed by such universities as MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Yale, along with the Hewlett Foundation.

“We want to change the question from, ‘How do you help students buy textbooks?’ to ‘How do we enhance student learning and student success?’ ” said Hal Plotkin, board of trustees president of

Foothill-De Anza.

Plotkin brushed aside concerns that the spread of free learning materials eventually could undermine the ability of publishers and professors to bring out new needed texts.

“There’s a future for enlightened publishers, but it’s not a future of selling $150 algebra books,” he said. “That’s something we have to get away from.”

Executives of publishing companies agreed that there might be a place for free materials that replace basic texts.

Sean Wakely, president of Belmont-based Thomson Arts and Sciences, a unit of one of the nation’s largest college textbook publishers, said he could foresee “a hybrid situation” where students would rely on public-domain materials but also instructional videos, case studies and online resources that they would buy.

“We have to figure out a business model that would work,” he said.

As for settling on who bears the blame for high textbook costs, speakers pointed to publishers, professors who order and write the books and college bookstores that sell them.

Wakely said publishers bear heavy expenses for bringing out new books, as well as for developing sophisticated online instructional materials that do such things as illustrate concepts in physics.

“That has to be paid for somehow,” Wakely said.

Congressional leaders, while drawing attention to the issue through the advisory panel’s study, are not expected to call for legislation to remedy the problems.

Buchwald remembered for — and with — humor continued from page 7 with rich anecdotes about her old friend.

Kennedy recalled how Buchwald, who was Jewish, stood up as a godparent for one of her children. He blanched when the priest asked him if he renounced Satan.

“Artie lost it,” Kennedy said, who went on to describe how he collapsed on a folding chair in the back of the church. “When I asked him what was wrong, he said, ‘I’m not ready to renounce Satan!’”

Brokaw read from a humorous tale Buchwald had written in honor of Kennedy’s 50th birthday, a run-on account of coming to work for Kennedy as her nanny, only to be asked to throw a dinner party, clean the guest rooms, run errands, tend to the lawn and so on. Bradlee, who described Buchwald as someone who “saw humor where the rest of us saw nothing,” told stories from their days working in Paris, including one in which Buchwald wangled an invitation to Grace Kelly’s wedding — by using humor, of course.

Buchwald left Paris for Washington in 1962, and began writing

columns for the Washington Post that were eventually syndicated to hundreds of newspapers.

Barry, who idolized Buchwald while growing up, recalled the first time the man called him, out of the blue, and their random phone conversations over the years since. Buchwald, he said, sometimes sounded “as though he had a family of hamsters living in his mouth.”

“He talked funny, he wrote funny and damned if he didn’t figure out a way to die funny,” Barry said.

Buchwald famously chose to die, rather than undergo dialysis for his ailing kidneys, more than a year ago. Then he famously failed to do so, emerging from the hospice where he had gone for what he thought were his final weeks of life. He resumed his column, wrote another book and vacationed one last summer on his beloved Martha’s Vineyard. He died Jan. 17, at the age of 81.

While writing that final book — “Too Soon to Say Goodbye” — Buchwald e-mailed those he had chosen to eulogize him, requesting they write the eulogies ahead of time, so he could publish them

in his final chapters. And while many of the speakers Monday touched on what they had written, they also came up with new material. Wallace spoke of the very public battle with depression he and Buchwald shared, and closed his remarks with the simple, bittersweet “Until soon, buddy.” But he also slipped in some bawdy humor about Buchwald’s belief that he was a sex symbol.

Most of the biggest laughs, though, came from Buchwald.

The service opened with a clip of a monologue he gave at the 1981 Kennedy Center Honors that had Ronald Reagan in stitches. A second video, made by the CBS show “Sunday Morning’’ in 2006 — when Buchwald had temporarily cheated death — showed him telling stories, ripping out one-liners and enjoying the celebrity that had brought a parade of famousname visitors to his hospice room.

Watching it, audience members laughed, smiled and nodded. He was exactly the “Artie” they loved, remembered and can’t imagine any other way.

“Please, God,” Brokaw said, “make sure he has a good table, and lots of people to stop by.”

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 2007

W. water polo sweeps Wagner, loses to Princeton continued from page 12 third quarter, the Bears dominated the final minutes of the contest.

After the Bison scored with 5:03 remaining in the third to cut Brown’s lead to 8-7, the Bears found the goal four times in the remainder of the contest. Presant scored her fourth goal of the game with 2:53 remaining in the third, and Balassone, Lansing and Fahey converted scoring opportunities as well, allowing Bruno to open up a 12-7 lead with 58 seconds remaining in the game.

Though Bucknell scored twice in the final minute, it was too little too late, as Bruno rolled to a 12-9 victory. The Bears saw impressive play from goalie Stephanie Laing ’10, who recorded six blocks and two steals against the Bison.

“In the first two games, I think we were a better team than our opponents,” said Head Coach Jason Gall. “We were in better game shape, and we made plays when we needed to.”

The final against top-seeded Princeton was a different story, despite another outstanding performance from Glick. The Bears put themselves into a hole early, forcing them to attempt to make a comeback the entire game.

The Tigers scored the game’s first three goals, and Bruno did not get on the scoreboard until

1:48 left in the first period, when Glick converted a six-on-five opportunity. But before the end of the quarter, Princeton converted on yet another scoring opportunity and held a commanding 4-1 lead over Brown at the end of the first quarter.

The second period saw strong defense from each side, as Fahey scored the period’s first goal with 2:24 remaining to cut the Tigers’ lead to 4-2. With 30 seconds left, Princeton increased its lead to 5-2, but Glick managed to score with one second remaining to make the score 5-3 at halftime.

The only goal in the third quarter came with 3:42 remaining, when Glick scored her third goal of the day. In the fourth quarter, the Bears seemed poised to steal the victory, when Lansing scored 1:38 into the period to tie the game at 5-5. Brown’s defense then broke down, allowing two Princeton goals in the next 2:06.

Glick pulled the Bears to within one goal with her fourth goal of the game with 1:46 on the clock, but Bruno was unable to score again, and the game ended with Princeton on top, 7-6.

“Our games against Hartwick and Princeton were the first real opportunities we’ve had to play top-quality teams,” Balassone wrote in an e-mail to the Herald, “so we don’t have the experience to lean on under pressure.”

Despite the loss in the final, Glick’s eight goals in the tournament earned First Team All-Tournament honors.

“I feel that, if it wasn’t for my teammates, I would not be doing so well,” Glick wrote in an e-mail.

“We continually push each other in practice to swim as fast as we can and go as hard as possible in all aspects of the game. This is the first time in a few years that the team has been ranked in the top 20 nationwide, and I am excited to be able to compete at such a high level.”

The Bears will face Harvard on March 14 and then will travel to Ann Arbor, Mich., for the Wolverine Invitational, where they will face tough competition from some of the nation’s top teams.

“We need to improve on conditioning and fundamental ball skills,” Gall said. “We’re creating good opportunities, but we’re not converting, because we either don’t make the pass or don’t score the ball.”

Gall also mentioned the Eastern Championship as a goal for his team.

“We played even with Hartwick for two-and-a-half quarters, and after we gave Princeton a three-goal lead, and we beat them in the last three quarters,” Gall said. “We’ve shown that we’re in the same class as teams like Hartwick, Princeton and Michigan.”

Scientists speak out on their religious beliefs continued from page 1 has publicly defended the theory over creationism or intelligent design.

“Creationism, creation science, intelligent design, call it whatever you will, is scientifically unsupported — flat out wrong,” Miller said. “Evolutionary science is as good a theory as we have to explain the origin and species and the natural history of life on this planet, and it stands on overwhelming scientific evidence.”

Ho said he believes some principles of evolution, but natural selection remains a theory. Ho said he thinks intelligent design is as valid as evolution and should be taught alongside it.

“I think evolution as a scientific theory is a perfectly fine scientific theory, and as any scientific theory it should be willing to stand up to the scrutiny of evidence and the scrutiny of experimentation,” he said.

Renick said belief in evolution by natural selection still requires faith beyond reason.

“Let’s say evolution works to a certain extent. How did it start?

What is the origin of life? How did life come about?” Renick said.

“Whether you’re a Christian or an atheist it will take a leap of faith.”

Despite their different views of evolution, both Ho and Miller said people look to both religion and science to find different kinds of truth.

“The religious tradition in which I was raised, and in which I still find myself, encloses the idea that faith and reason are both gifts from God,” Miller said.

Ho compared the realms of science and religion to a Venn diagram — “two spheres that kind of intersect at one point.”

“There are still areas that science doesn’t share with religion and religion doesn’t share with

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

science,” he said.

Rumee Ahmed, the associate university chaplain for the Muslim community, said interpretation accounts for a lot of disagreement. Two people could observe the same phenomenon and interpret it either as a divine miracle or the result of natural laws depending on their personal background, he said. Just as understanding of the world is subjective, so is religion, Ahmed added.

“When you see words on the page, as soon as you construe them in your mind, you have conducted interpretation. Recognizing human subjectivity is the first step to understanding a text,” Ahmed said.

The Rev. Henry Bodah, associate university chaplain for the Roman Catholic community, said science and religion cannot truthfully contradict each other. Bodah cited St. Thomas Aquinas as saying “if science and the scriptures seem to contradict, it’s usually because we’ve misunderstood the scriptures.”

“So if science can demonstrate, for example, that the earth is fiveand-a-half, four-and-a-half billion years old, then it’s true,” Bodah said. “As far as I’m concerned,

there is no conflict between science and religion.”

Baseball season starts with errors continued from page 12 game against the Eagles. They led 5-1 in the third and 8-4 in the fi fth, thanks to catcher Devin Thomas’ ’07 two-run homer and leftfielder Brian Kelaher’s ‘08 RBI single. But GSU blew the game open with a four-run fi fth inning and seven-run sixth inning, taking advantage of four Brown errors in the process. Bears pitchers James Cramphin ’07 and Alex Silverman ’08, who took the loss, both pitched relatively well, combining to throw eight innings while giving up four earned runs.

The defense committed seven errors that led to 12 unearned runs in the 16-9 loss.

But in the nightcap, the Bears defense showed drastic improvement against the KSU Owls (66) to win their first game, 10-2.

Will Weidig ’10 threw six shutout innings for the win, with the defense helping him by playing error-free ball. The key inning was the top of the second, when Bruno scored seven runs behind RBIs from Tews, Thomas, Dietz, designated hitter J.J. Eno ’08 and centerfielder Steve Daniels ’09.

Drabinski said he was impressed with Weidig, who made his first collegiate appearance.

On Sunday morning, the Bears hoped to sweep the Owls to leave Georgia with a .500 record, but errors undid them again. This time, eight errors led to six unearned runs as the Owls won 116. Brown led 3-2 in the bottom of the first after a bases-loaded walk and a two-run throwing error, but the Owls took the lead by scoring four runs over the next five in-

nings. In the bottom of the fi fth, the Bears cut the lead to one after an error and a fielder’s choice led to two runs, but that would be the closest that Brown would get as KSU pulled away with five runs in the eighth and ninth innings.

In his first start of the year Dietz, who was named the Ivy League Preseason Pitcher of the Year by Collegiate Baseball, gave up two earned runs in five innings.

Drabinski said the players “were disappointed in the way they played” on Sunday, especially after playing so well on Saturday night.

Though he didn’t like the outcome of the weekend, Drabinski said he liked what he saw from his team’s offense, which had 45 hits, and pitchers, which he calls one of the “deepest pitching staffs” he’s worked with in his 11 years at Brown. Drabinski said he and his coaching staff have “high expectations” for the team, which Collegiate Baseball predicted would finish second in the Red Rolfe Division, behind Harvard.

Drabinski believes his team can win the Ivy League title, a sentiment his players share.

“This is the best team I’ve played on,” Dietz said. “We just have to fix a couple of things. If we just play defense, there’s nobody in the country we can’t take the field against.”

The team will focus on defense this week, Drabinski said, as team prepares to head south again, this time to face No. 4 University of South Carolina (10-1) over the weekend. The Bears will begin Ivy League play on March 31 at Princeton.

E DITORIAL & L ETTERS THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

PAGE 10

TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 2007

STAF F EDITORIAL

Failing our only requirement Writing well isn’t just important for those of us who hope to make a living stringing together sentences. In an age of information overload and email shorthand, knowing how to effectively communicate ideas through words is increasingly important. The University’s English requirement — which supposedly demands “competence in reading and writing” from each student in order to graduate — may be well-intentioned, but in its current form, it’s almost a farce.

The University has long stressed the importance of writing, but that focus should not be limited to the College’s literary arts and creative nonfiction programs. Though some students skillfully manage to avoid writing throughout their Brown career, strong writing skills are useful in any academic discipline, and almost all departments offer “writing-intensive” courses that require significant papers.

As the registrar’s description of the requirement explains, admitted students are expected to already have sufficient writing skills, demonstrated by the “superior performance in secondary school” that landed them on College Hill in the first place. But students arrive at Brown with varying academic backgrounds and are admitted for a wide range of strengths. When online services, bestselling books, high-priced tutors and even parents can help turn a shoddy personal essay into a work of poetic genius, an eloquent college application provides no guarantee of writing competency.

Once students arrive at Brown, they may find escaping writing harder than avoiding math or science, since writing touches virtually all serious academic study. But in an open curriculum, anything can happen.

Evaluating the writing competency of 5,800 students floating in an open curriculum is a challenge. Under the current system, students with poor writing skills are identified only if they happen to take a class in which written assignments indicate their shortcomings to a professor who then bothers to check a box when doling out grades at the semester’s end.

This system will soon end because Banner’s electronic grade submission system won’t allow for the current “check box” method of catching these students. Developing a new system to note concerns about a student’s writing proficiency would be a quick fix, but it wouldn’t do much to advance the writing requirement’s goal.

With the advent of Banner and the launch of the Task Force on Undergraduate Education’s thorough evaluation of the College curriculum, the writing requirement — and the College’s writing programs more generally — are ripe for review. We’re glad to see administrators seem to be on the right track. Bergeron, Associate Dean Kathleen McSharry, Director of College Writing Programs Rhoda Flaxman and Writing Center Director Douglas Brown all express clear concerns about the current system and what Brown describes as the “necessity” of developing a new approach.

Thankfully, instead of focusing all their efforts on reactively identifying bad writers, administrators seem eager to promote resources or creative methods that will help students improve their writing.

We support Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron’s general suggestion of adding another layer to existing support options. Though we don’t think requiring first-years to hand in an essay to their adviser during Orientation would be effective, most freshmen could benefit from writing support through the existing first-year seminar and Curricular Advising Programs.

Implementing the College’s only current general requirement is important. We’re glad students are entrusted with designing their own curriculum, but somewhere along the four-year self-directed path of intellectual growth, someone should make sure we know how to express our thoughts.

T HE B ROWN D AILY H ERALD Editors-in-Chief Eric Beck Mary-Catherine Lader

Executive Editors Allison Kwong Ben Leubsdorf

Senior Editors Stephen Colelli Sonia Saraiya BUSINESS

EDITORIAL Lydia Gidwitz Lindsey Meyers Stephanie Bernhard Stu Woo Simmi Aujla Sara Molinaro Ross Frazier Jacob Schuman Michal Zapendowski Peter Cipparone Justin Goldman Sarah Demers Erin Frauenhofer Madeleine Marecki

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PHOTO Eunice Hong Christopher Bennett Jacob Melrose

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General Manager Mandeep Gill General Manager Ally Ouh Executive Manager Darren Ball Executive Manager Dan DeNorch Laurie-Ann Paliotti Sr. Advertising Manager Office Manager Susan Dansereau PRODUCTION Design Editor Steve DeLucia Copy Desk Chief Chris Gang Graphics Editor Mark Brinker Graphics Editor Roxanne Palmer Web Editor Luke Harris POST- MAGAZINE Hillary Dixler Melanie Duch Taryn Martinez Rajiv Jayadevan Mindy Smith

ROXANNE PALMER

LETTERS New grad funding policy will hurt int’l students To the Editor: As international graduate students from departments across the humanities, social sciences and sciences, we would like to contribute to the current debate over the announced changes to University funding and support for doctoral students.

The new policy, which guarantees only five years of funding, will place enormous pressure on all doctoral students to complete degrees within the five-year period — a time frame that is well below the median time required in most humanities and social science programs. Dean of the Graduate School Sheila Bonde has openly implied that most students cannot expect funding to continue after their fi fth year, stating that “some sixth-year doctoral students will be funded, but only after we satisfy our obligation to students in their first five years” (“Grad school dean addresses funding policy,” Feb. 8). This policy is not competitive with funding at schools such as Yale, where the average time of funding is 7.2 and 7.1 years for students in humanities and social sciences, respectively.

The policy is further at odds with the University’s stated commitment to enhancing Brown’s prestige in international higher education. International students often require more time to complete a Ph.D. than their American counterparts, due to extra time needed to acclimatize ourselves to the new culture and to pass language requirements. With a rigid policy of guaranteeing only five years of funding, Brown will become a far less attractive option for potential international applicants.

Furthermore, international students are unprepared for these funding changes. Because of our ineligibility for many sources of external funding and due to visa restrictions that prohibit us from working off campus and stipulate that we must have sufficient funds to pay for tuition, fees and living costs for each entire year, many of us who have thus far been making good progress to completion of our degrees could

face the daunting scenario of having to return to our countries of origin after our fi fth year.

We are therefore calling upon the Graduate School, under Bonde’s leadership, to reconsider the new funding policy. If the University is truly seeking to bolster its international profile, then accommodating the realities of educating international graduate students is integral.

Elif Alpaslan GS of Turkey Fulya Apaydin MA’05 GS of Turkey Roberto Bacci GS of Italy Joseph Clark MA’04 GS of Canada Ruben Durante MA’05 GS of Italy Ana Margarida Esteves MA’06 GS Portugal Benedetta Gennaro GS of Italy Emilio Gutiirrez Fernandez GS of Mexico Gill Frank MA’03 GS of Canada Jeanette Lee MA’06 GS of Trinidad and Tobago Inna Leykin GS of Israel Shih-Cheh Lo GS of Taiwan Lisbeth Trille G. Loft GS of Denmark Erica Moretti GS of Italy Chung Nguyen GS of Vietnam Feryaz Ocakli MA’06 GS of Turkey Burak Onaran MA’03 GS of Turkey Omer Ozak MA’06 GS of Colombia Oded Rabinovitch MA’05 GS of Israel Pooja Rangan GS of India Sian Silyn Roberts GS of New Zealand Eoin Ryan GS of Ireland Marc Steinberg GS of Canada Aiko Takeuchi MA’04 GS of Japan Julia Timpe GS of Germany Phong Tran GS of Vietnam Aslihan Tokgoz MA’03 GS of Turkey Stephen Wicken GS of the United Kingdom March 3

Managing Editor Managing Editor Managing Editor Features Editor Features Editor

Steve DeLucia, Ezra Miller, Designers Catherine Cullen, Madeleine Rosenberg, Copy Editors Senior Staff Writers Rachel Arndt, Michael Bechek, Oliver Bowers, Zachary Chapman, Chaz Firestone, Kristina Kelleher, Debbie Lehmann, Scott Lowenstein, James Shapiro, Michael Skocpol Staff Writers Susana Aho, Taylor Barnes, Brianna Barzola, Evan Boggs, Irene Chen, Stewart Dearing, Nicole Dungca, Thi Ho, Rebecca Jacobson, Tsvetina Kamenova, Hannah Levintova, Abe Lubetkin, Christian Martell, Taryn Martinez, Zachary McCune, Nathalie Pierrepont, Robin Steele, Allissa Wickham Sports Staff Writers Amy Ehrhart, Kaitlyn Laabs, Eliza Lane, Kathleen Loughlin, Megan McCahill, Marco Santini, Tom Trudeau, Steele West Business Staff Dana Feuchtbaum, Kent Holland, Alexander Hughes, Mariya Perelyubskaya, Viseth San, Kaustubh Shah, Jon Spector, Robert Stefani, Lindsay Walls Design Staff Brianna Barzola, Aurora Durfee, Sophie Elsner, Christian Martell, Matthew McCabe, Ezra Miller, Sarah Raifman Photo Staff Stuart Duncan-Smith, Austin Freeman, Tai Ho Shin Copy Editors Ayelet Brinn, Catherine Cullen, Erin Cummings, Karen Evans, Jacob Frank, Ted Lamm, Lauren Levitz, Cici Matheny, Alex Mazerov, Ezra Miller, Joy Neumeyer, Madeleine Rosenberg, Lucy Stark, Meha Verghese

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O PINIONS TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 2007

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Consensus sapientum

BY MATT PREWITT COLUMNIST ABROAD

TEL AVIV, Israel — What is the goal of economic production? For a relevant and appropriately postmodern answer we can look to the novelist Don DeLillo, who offers up an elegant, Eastern-sounding formulation — we consume, produce and innovate to help us forget that we are going to die.

It turns out that this idea has occurred to many people — most of them 20th-century writers with a melancholic fixation on death.

However, it appears in the work of health-obsessed capitalist philosophers such as Ayn Rand and poetically minded Wall Street Journal subscribers such as Ben Stein. These people argue that institutional cycles of work, production and consumption are an affirmation of life and a safeguard against mental illness.

In quasi-religious fashion, they speak of careerism as the path of salvation from latent human weakness and fear. They paint the same picture as DeLillo from the opposite angle: Rather than describing productivity as a distraction from the inevitable, they describe its absence as passive surrender. Indeed, productive work’s antagonism towards death and existential angst appears to be something of an unspoken consensus between a broad set of apparently disparate thinkers.

Their apparent opposition comes from the school of thought heavily influenced by Freud — basically Sartre and other continental figures. These people find repression distaste-

ful. They find it corrosive and soul-destroying to spend your life numbly serving institutions, navigating markets and consuming pointless goods. But even these neurotic caf café-goers agree that economic activity staves off marginalization, mental illness and weakness — they just don’t think that outcome is desirable.

Today, in America, the zeitgeist belongs more to Don DeLillo than to Foucault and more to Ben Stein than to Ayn Rand. In other words, we’re moving away from extremes toward the center. We are closer than ever to accepting this consensus sapientum (“consensus of the wise”) that careers are — no more and no less — a practical means of keeping our minds occupied.

“Listening to Prozac,” is the poster boy for this approach: If medication works, take it. If your mental states are hindering your social integration, alter them.

In other words, people today put less credence in the mind-body dichotomy. It has become very difficult to argue that humans are anything other than naturally defined phenomena.

Consequently, it has become a lot harder to talk in ideological terms. Even in the political arena, pragmatism is becoming the lingua franca. George W. Bush was an anachronistically ideological president, and in the coming years America will react to his failures with a surge of pragmatism and status-quo conservatism. I believe (somewhat hopefully) that when he leaves office and antiAmericanism dies down a little, the West will collect itself and develop a serious strategy for containing radicalism — most notably fundamentalist Islam.

Radicalism is out of fashion in all its forms, and its definition is expanding.

Is this a good thing? Probably. The world is too big and crowded for extreme opinions.

Communication is too easy, individuals have too much power and the status quo is satisfactory for a vast majority. In the second half of the twentieth century, the world struggled to repress its warring instincts — the idea being “have ideologies, but don’t fight for them.” In the coming decades I think the project will be to eliminate them entirely.

Radicalism is out of fashion in all its forms, and its definition is expanding.

We also seem to be okay with this mildly depressing appraisal. As a culture, we have all but discarded the quest for meaning in favor of a moderate, practical approach: Don’t fight yourself, but don’t go looking for latent desires. Join Greenpeace if you want, but if you think you might like being an investment banker, don’t try to convince yourself otherwise. In 2007, more people are agreeing with Don DeLillo that ignorance and repression are sweet bliss, and less people are digging through the wastebaskets of their minds in search of their authentic selves.

The contemporary approach to mental illness is similarly post-ideological. Brown’s Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior Peter Kramer, the author of

Matt Prewitt ’08 dressed up as a Moderate for Purim.

War: The surest path to war crimes NATALIE SMOLENSKI OPINIONS COLUMNIST In May 2004, Haleema Shihab spoke to tthe Guardian’s Rory McCarthy from her bed in Ramadi General Hospital. “We went out of the house and the American soldiers started to shoot us. They were shooting low on the ground and targeting us one by one,” she told him.

Mrs. Shihab’s account of civilian carnage is not unique. According to the Fallujah-based Study Center for Human Rights and Democracy, the U.S. military’s offensives in that city alone have left approximately 5,000 civilians dead. In the city of Ishaqi, a police report filed by Staff Colonel Fadhil Muhammed Khalaf, assistant chief of the Joint Coordination Center, stated, “The American forces gathered … family members in one room and executed 11 people, including five children, four women and two men, then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals.” The Iraqi government rejected the results of a U.S. military investigation which found no wrongdoing. In another incident reported in January by the New York Times, the U.S. military captured four people on a channel island northwest of Baghdad, “then turned them loose and killed them as part of a staged escape attempt.”

The Times also reported in February that one Marine has been sentenced for participating in the abduction and murder of an Iraqi civilian in Hamdania. After killing the man, Marines posed his body by the side of a road with an AK-47 and a shovel, then falsified a report stating that he had been killed while planting a roadside bomb. The U.S. military has also conducted hearings relating to the more famous Mahmoudiya incident, in which eyewitnesses and accused servicemen detailed how a group

of U.S. soldiers raped a 14-year-old girl, killed her family and set their home ablaze. Finally, international media have documented the results of two US military investigations which concluded that 24 Iraqi “non-combatant local residents,” some as young as two years old, were murdered by the U.S. military in Haditha.

Shihab was one of the casualties of an American raid on Mukaradeeb, an Iraqi town close to the Syrian border. According to tthe Guardian, the town’s residents had concluded a wedding feast and were sleeping in their homes when, at 3:00 a.m., American forces descended on the 25-house village and began to strafe terrified residents. Of the 42 resulting deaths, all reported by the nearest hospital, 11 were women and 14 children. The incident has not been investi-

The military’s reluctance to critically investigate its own conduct becomes apparent when we hear representatives characterize military operations in Iraq. Sidney Blumenthal described in Salon Magazine how Marine spokesman Jeffrey Pool ridiculed reporters for swallowing “alQaeda propaganda” in the Haditha case: “I cannot believe you’re buying any of this,” he wrote in an e-mail. Furthermore, the military did not even attempt to investigate what happened in Haditha until Time Magazine presented evidence of a massacre in a 2006 article. Similarly, the United States initially dismissed charges of wrongdoing in Ishaqi — the BBC had to obtain a tape from a “hardline Sunni group” corroborating Col. Khalaf’s report before the military reopened an investigation. Finally, Major General James Mattis, commander of the 1st st Marine Division that hit Mukareeb, employed a mixture of defiance and intimidation in his correspondence with tthe Guardian: “How many people go to the middle of the desert ... to hold a wedding 80 miles (130km) from the nearest civilization? These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let’s not be naive.” The story continues: When reporters asked him about footage on Arabic television of a child’s body being lowered into a grave, he replied: “I have not seen the pictures but bad things happen in wars. I don’t have to apologize for the conduct of my men.”

Indeed, as former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in reference to the chaos and looting after the American invasion, “Stuff happens.” The problem is that in war, an individual does not know if he will be watching that “stuff” happen or making it happen. Chances are, the group or coalition with which he is fighting will do both.

“I don’t have to apologize for the conduct of my men.” gated by the U.S. military.

In several of the cases mentioned above, the U.S. military acted under the assumption that the targeted civilians were harboring insurgents in safe houses or otherwise aiding and abetting a dangerous enemy. The nebulous nature of such suppositions, which have no recourse to a vetting process — for instance, a trial — in times of war, practically guarantees the perpetration of war crimes. In fact, no historical account of armed conflict is complete without at least one account of how paranoia combined with lethal force and little — if any — legal culpability resulted in the deaths of innocent people unlucky enough to be targeted or caught in the crossfire.

Unfortunately, the inevitability of war crimes does not factor into any mobilization calculus — the military itself does not evidence a sufficient anticipatory mechanism. In fact, it seems that “war crimes” can only be uncovered and then adequately investigated and prosecuted via the urging of a vigilant civil society, and then only after their perpetration.

Natalie Smolenski ’07 agrees with Donald Rumsfeld that “death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.”

Living vicariously

BY MOCTAR ABOUBACAR GUEST COLUMNIST I read the first lines of Courtney Jenkins’ ’07 article (“She’s not that innocent: the decline of our pop princess,” Feb. 28) with a little smile on my face: “Where were you when Britney shaved her head?” Although the comment was surely intended to be ironic, one of the effects of the article was to imply a profound connection between our generation and the musicians and celebrities of the late 1990s and turn of the century — up until now. I followed Jenkins’ reasoning. What generation, after all, is not inspired by its music and musicians?

However, enough is enough. Jenkins’ article highlights the problem of the preponderance of celebrity in our lives. Being influenced by the music is one thing, but we shouldn’t be so dominated by the musicians themselves and other icons of popular culture. I can’t turn on the television or open a newspaper — not even the grandiose New York Times — without having to see what is new with Britney’s relationship to that “K-Fed” fellow or having to suffer through even more coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death. The problem with paying too much attention to these musicians and celebrities is that we are letting very real events pass us by while we sit passively in front of a giant, inane spectacle.

How many people are adequately informed about the civil unrest in Guinea that has been going on since January? I had to go all the way to the diminutive “World Briefing” Section of the New York Times one day to find the latest on Guinea. But I did not have to venture past the first page to see that Anna Smith had died suddenly. Guy Debord, author of “The Society of the Spectacle,” would be rolling in his grave.

I think the problem is simply that people care too much about people who do too little. And this is very dangerous. In our youth, maybe, they were our icons, but someday we should grow up. What is Kevin Federline famous for? Certainly not his musical prowess, judging by his record sales. No, he is famous for marrying Britney Spears. Just what is Paris Hilton famous for again? For “being Paris Hilton.” The story of celebrities as represented in all the media is the chronicle of one long, meaningless party and one meaningless marriage after another. We are, it seems, stuck in the contemplation of these new gods, these celebrities whose private lives and endless escapades have somehow become our national priority.

Jenkins writes in her article, “Popular culture has long been another lens through which to study History.” I could not agree more — in horror. I imagine historians of the future studying Brangelina or Bennifer (hey, remember Bennifer?).

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with celebrity or pop culture.

But please, let’s not let them go as far as to define our era. Let’s not wake up to find that existential apathy has set in, that our generation would rather live the false lives of others than our own authentic ones.

Moctar Aboubacar ’10 wishes he were known as ““Aboubacargelina.”

S PORTS T UESDAY TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 2007

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

W. water polo sweeps Wagner, falls to Princeton in ECAC Championship

BY BENJY ASHER CONTRIBUTING WRITER

The women’s water polo team advanced to the title game of the ECAC Championship tournament this weekend with wins over Wagner College and Bucknell University but ultimately lost 7-6 to topseeded Princeton — ranked No. 18 nationally — in a disappointing final round.

The Bears’ record now stands at 5-2 — with both losses coming at the hands of top-20 opponents — after dropping games against Princeton on Sunday and No. 12 Hartwick College Feb. 24. The tournament saw excellent play from Sarah Glick ’10, whose eight goals over three games earned her First Team All-Tournament honors, and Caitlin Fahey ’07, who was named to the second team.

The Bears were seeded third in the tournament, an invitational sponsored by the ECAC, which combines teams from the Collegiate Water Polo Association and the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference.

In the first round they faced sixth-seeded Wagner and escaped with a close 12-11 victory. Lauren Presant ’10 put Bruno on the scoreboard first, taking advantage of a six-on-five opportunity to score less than a minute in. After another goal from Presant and a score from Alexis Blaxberg ’08, Brown led 3-2 at the end of the first quarter.

Jacob Melrose / Herald Lauren Presant ’10 led Brown with seven goals in two games versus Bucknell University and Wagner College.

In the second period, Glick put up three goals, and Paige Lansing ’07 scored once to give the Bears a 7-5 halftime lead. The Bears scored three consecutive goals on shots by co-captain Elizabeth Balassone ’07, Claire Angyal ’07 and a penalty shot by Glick to open up a 10-5 lead. The Seahawks came back, though, scoring three consecutive goals of their own, cut-

ting the lead to 10-8 at the end of the period.

Brown secured the victory in the final period despite a valiant effort from Wagner. The pesky Seahawks cut Bruno’s lead to 109 in the early going, but Presant struck once again, and Fahey — who finished with three assists and two ejections drawn — scored so that Bruno came out on

top, 12-11.

In the semifinal match-up against second-seeded Bucknell, Presant put in another strong performance, leading Brown with four goals — including two in the second quarter — after Bucknell tied the game at 4-4. Though it was a tight game well into the continued on page 9

Walls ’10 earns Ivy League Rookie of the Week award For the second straight week, Lindsay Walls ’10 earned Ivy League Rookie of the Week honors. The announcement comes on the heels of Walls tying her careerhigh of 19 points in the women’s basketball team’s season finale against the University of Pennsylvania on Saturday night.

The previous week, Walls, who is member of The Herald’s business staff, scored 19 points and grabbed seven rebounds against Columbia, which earned her the first Rookie of the Week honor.

Walls, a native of Santa Cruz, Calif., started the season getting limited minutes but showed steady improvement as the season wore on. She moved into Brown’s starting lineup with seven games remaining and proved to be very productive in that spot. She was the presence in the paint that Brown was seeking and ended the season averaging 16 minutes per game while scoring 5.9 points and grabbing 3.4 rebounds.

Brown now has earned three out of four Rookie of the Week honors.

With such a young team, Walls should be a fixture for the Bears next season — in which they should be much more competitive and in the hunt for the Ivy League title.

— Justin Goldman

Education is the way In the South, baseball’s season of “high to ward off stupidity expectations” kicks off with errors

BY J.A. ADANDE LOS ANGELES T IMES

Hearing the cries for the NFL to clean up player behavior and the NBA to straighten out AllStar weekend reminds one of the words of former Temple Coach John Chaney: “You can never end stupidity. Never.”

You sure can’t end it with rules and regulations. If the threat of punishment were enough of a deterrent, you’d never hear the phrase “prison overcrowding.”

The compilation of Tank Johnson’s arrest on weapons allegations, the biweekly Cincinnati Bengals arrests and the latest reports of misdoings by Adam “Pacman” Jones even had fed-up players requesting more stringent penalties for player misbehavior at a recent meeting with NFL and union officials. A union spokesman who was present said that, contrary to reports, there was not a proposed “three-strikes rule.”

The thing is, NFL teams already have all the power they need to ditch the bad character guys. The second paragraph of the standard NFL contract requires the player to “conduct himself on and off the field with appropriate recognition of the fact that the success of professional football depends largely on public respect for and approval of those associated with the game.” Later, the team is granted this authority: “If Player has engaged in personal conduct reasonably judged by Club to adversely affect or reflect

on Club, then Club may terminate this contract.”

The reason it rarely gets enforced is teams get stupid too.

Crazy-in-love stupid. They get smitten with talent and will find a way to rationalize any kind of behavior as long as a guy can run a 4.4-second 40. Players will continue to act up and teams will continue to tolerate it.

The Tennessee Titans knew what they were getting when they drafted Jones. He’d been arrested once for a bar fight while he went to school at West Virginia. That didn’t keep them from taking him with the No. 6 pick. Jones was questioned but not arrested after a fight at a strip club after the draft. He was arrested again the summer before his rookie season on suspicion of assault and felony vandalism after another nightclub altercation.

These things can happen to young men. But they don’t keep happening again and again to people of good character. You don’t see a single story such as this about Donovan McNabb or LaDainian Tomlinson, let alone multiple. Jones has been involved in 10 incidents that attracted police attention since joining the NFL in 2005.

The latest is his alleged connection to a shooting outside a Las Vegas strip club in the early hours of Feb. 19. Here’s the NFL’s quandary: Police have not arrested Jones or even named him as a continued on page 8

BY STU WOO FEATURES EDITOR

A little bit of sunshine and fresh air is usually a blessing, but it wasn’t for the Brown baseball team this weekend as they headed to the South.

Playing for the first time on a grass field this year and against Southern teams already in their midseason, the baseball team, whose record is 1-3, dropped three of four games at the Georgia Southern Eagle Invitational.

The Bears committed 21 errors that led to 19 unearned runs in the losses, though the defense did hold up in a victory over Kennesaw State University.

Though Head Coach Marek Drabinski said he was “not trying to make excuses” for his players, he attributed their fielding problems to the lack of outdoor practice due to the cold New England weather. The team has been practicing indoors thus far and has practiced outside only twice, both times on artificial turf.

“It’s just a different challenge because you’re not taking ground balls off the (Olney-Margolies Athletic Center) surface,” he said.

“The thing about Southern fields is that they’re really hard and quick.”

In the season opener on Friday night, the Bears lost 9-2 as the GSU Eagles, whose record is 116, battered starting pitcher Ethan Silverstein ’07 for six runs in the first three innings. Eagles pitcher Brian Wilkerson kept Brown off-

Ashley Hess / Herald File Photo Tri-captain Devin Thomas ’07 went 4-for-10 with a home run and four RBIs in two games against Georgia Southern University on Saturday.

balance all night on his way to a complete game, allowing only two runs on second baseman Bryan Tews’ ’07 bases-loaded single and first baseman Jeff Dietz’s ’08 solo homer.

“We were really never in that

game,” Drabinski said, referring to Brown’s poor offensive showing.

The Bears got off to a better start Saturday in their second continued on page 9