QUESTIONS ON CONSENT | YES AND NO IN SEXUAL ENCOUNTERS | SCENE, PAGE 8
STUDENT LIFE
THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER OF WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS SINCE 1878 VOLUME 128, NO. 75
WWW.STUDLIFE.COM
FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2007
Colleges protest US News rankings Questions for Paul BY BEN SALES SENIOR STAFF REPORTER In protest of the way in which the US News and World Report rankings portray the University community, several universities across the country have refused to fill out the peer review survey, an important component of the Report. Christopher Nelson, president of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, said that he would not fill out the surveys because he believes that rankings do a disservice to prospective students and their families. “It is about the students. We know that families need valuable information in order to exercise freedom of choice. You want to look at
[many factors] and we ought to be providing those, but they are missing from any of these rankings,” said Nelson, who has not filled out the survey in ten years. The peer review component of the survey is worth 25 percent of the overall ranking and asks college and university presidents to rank other schools on a 1-to5 scale. Robert Morse, US News director of data analysis, said that the rankings should not be taken as more than a collection of statistics and that the colleges protesting against the rankings falsely accuse them of measuring things that US News does not examine. “US News has never portrayed the rankings as having
the ability to measure everything about an institution, and they are not meant to be a tool to compare all aspects of the school, what is going on in the classroom, what students are actually learning,” he said. “The schools themselves are not measuring those things either.” The US News rankings system is one of the most comprehensive and is thought by supporters of the survey to represent an objective measure of the education provided by different schools. Another school that has issues with the US News rankings system is Sarah Lawrence College (SLC) in Bronxville, NY. SLC stopped including SAT scores in its admissions criteria and thus could not submit the scores
to US News. SLC’s president then claimed that US News devised a formula to estimate what the students’ scores would be; a formula that Sarah Lawrence officials say is not representative. “We do not feel that the way US News represents us is accurate,” said Judith Schwartzstein, SLC’s director of media and community relations. “They cannot come up with an accurate representation in the absence of real data.” The decisions of some schools to refrain from taking the US News survey comes as part of a larger movement among liberal arts colleges to personalize the admissions
Rusesabagina: A conversation with Student Life
See US NEWS, page 2
CANDLELIGHT VIGIL
EITAN HOCHSTER | STUDENT LIFE
Paul Rusesabagina, the subject for the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” visited campus on Wednesday to speak at the Assembly Series. During the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, Mr. Rusesabagina used the hotel he managed as a safe haven to save Tutsis from execution. BY SARA RAJARAM ASSIGNMENTS EDITOR Before a packed audience at Wednesday’s Assembly Series, Paul Rusesabagina described in vivid detail his experiences during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Following the lecture, the internationally recognized humanitarian sat down with Student Life to discuss today’s most urgent global confl icts, future reconciliation between Rwandans, protests against Rusesabagina and the movie “Hotel Rwanda.”
EITAN HOCHSTER | STUDENT LIFE
“We gather tonight as a community, mourning our colleagues at another great institution,” said Chancellor Mark Wrighton. “An event like this reminds us that each life is precious, that each life has bounded potential.” Students gathered in the quad for a vigil organized by the University. Chancellor Wrighton, campus ministers and other students spoke, expressing grief for the victims of the Virginia Tech tragedy. “It’s a horrible tragedy and it really is a crisis,” said Betsy Nichols, a senior at the vigil. “I’m impressed with how many people around the nation are coming together and holding vigils. We all understand the pain, even though we can’t feel it ourselves.”
Students prepare for summer with help of Career Center BY JACQUELINE BRIXEY CONTRIBUTING REPORTER As the end of the semester draws near, students are finalizing their plans for the summer. Many will intern at companies all across the nation including Double Feature Films, the FBI, MTV, General Mills and Goldman Sachs, among others. Career Center Director Mark Smith said that the importance of an internship is twofold: while internships allow students to try out a potential career, they also serve as an opportunity for skill development and social networking. “[Internships] give an inside look and an opportunity to start building contacts
and relationships within a company or firm,” said Sally Pinckard, associate director of Undergraduate Career Advising in the Weston Career Center. “This is important because internships are also an early look at the intern as potential for full-time hiring.” As she further explained, interning is also beneficial for a firm, since it will not have to re-teach the skills necessary for the job. According to Smith, the use of the Career Center has increased dramatically over the years as more students begin to recognize the importance of internships and the opportunities provided by the Career Cener. In 2003, there were approximately 1,400 appoint-
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ments for internships, compared to more than 6,000 this year. Jacqueline Cohn, a sophomore and a psychology major, will be interning with Double Feature Films and Reveille Productions in Los Angeles. She decided to use the Career Center because there are alumni in the production business that are “very willing” to help University students. The Weston Career Center, a part of the Business school, has also seen an increase in usage by students. Evan Sharp, a senior and Career Peer at the Career Center, said that he found his past three internships using the Weston Career Center. He has interned at Goldman Sachs in New York City and
will be working there in the coming summer as a fulltime employee. But, not all students used the Career Center to find internships. Sophomore Jay Werber found success instead in the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) and will be participating as a Research Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta for the summer. He found the REU program last year and conducted research at Professor Al-Dahhan’s lab. Neither the Career Center nor the Weston Career Center had statistics for the rate of acceptance for internship applicants who use their services because students usu-
See INTERNSHIPS, page 2
Swing batter, batter Wash. U. softball swings into action. The team swept Blackburn College and their victory will continue in their coming games. Check it out! Sports, Page 3
Student Life: How accurate is the movie “Hotel Rwanda” in its portrayal of your actual experiences? Paul Rusesabagina: “Hotel Rwanda” is a portrayal of what was going on in the Mille Collines Hotel during the genocide. Almost 100% of it is a true story. A few composite characters have been made here and there. Also, a few events have been portrayed less violently compared to real life. SL: Was there ever a moment when you wanted to evacuate? PR: I never had that moment. All the opportunities I had to leave the hotel, I never left. My own conscience was telling me that if I was to leave then those refugees will be killed. Up to that time, I was the only person who could speak for them. SL: You’ve recently received criticism from some survivors of the Rwandan genocide. Specifically, President Kagame has accused you of misrepresenting actual events to profit from people’s hardships. How do you respond to these claims? PR: President Kagame, like Habyarimana who was the president before him, is a dictator. Those people would always like to hear you speaking about others, but not them. They want me to speak only about those three months of the genocide, but the genocide did not come from nowhere. He, like many others, is afraid to face our history. If we want to reach a solution, we need to face the past. We need to see what happened, why it happened, who did it…we should not keep quiet
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because I call that silence complicity. Silence is agreement. SL: Many people say that while genocide was occurring in Rwanda, the world “stood by and did nothing.” Is history repeating itself today in Darfur and is the international community once again standing by to watch genocide occur? PR: Actually, history repeats itself because, for so long before the killing takes place, the world is always there to see how situations always start to escalate. This was the case in Cambodia, with the Jewish Holocaust, Rwanda and the Romanian Holocaust. The whole world was watching, seeing the situations escalating, and they never did anything. It is the same thing in Darfur. Since 2003, more than 250,000 people have been killed. And the world just closes its eyes and ears and doesn’t want even to talk about it. SL: Does the U.S. have responsibility to step in now in Darfur? PR: The U.S. can stop what is going on in Darfur. The U.S. administration recognized Darfur as a genocide in March 2005, when Colin Powell was still the secretary of state and foreign affairs. Declaring it as a genocide is good, but it is not enough. We need to join words with actions. SL: Was the punishment of the leaders of the Rwandan genocide adequate? PR: There was no punishment. Most of the genocidaires are free all over the world. War criminals are free. Justice has been a very big issue in Rwanda and it still remains an issue. Of course, reconciliation has not yet started, because you cannot reconcile a nation without doing justice, without speaking. Through dialogue only we fi nd solutions. SL: Is complete reconciliation between the Hutus and Tutsis possible? PR: Reconciliation is very possible. If you go back in history, each and every [Rwandan] has been involved in one way or another. The only solution for us is to sit around a table with young people who can ignore what has happened in the history.
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