M O N D A Y OCTOBER 27, 2003
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD Volume CXXXVIII, No. 100
An independent newspaper serving the Brown community since 1891
www.browndailyherald.com
Interracial Dating forum draws crowd, plays host to debate BY SHEELA RAMAN
that threatens to spread to the entire industry and, in turn, the economy as a whole. He said that since heat encourages insect breeding, “all the relevant scientists agree that we’ll see a big explosion in disease-spreading, crop-destroying insects.” Gelbspan stressed that global warming was connected with many other challenges around the world. Even if Americans do pull off drastic
Diverse opinions fired intense debate on Friday evening as students shed the safety of political correctness at the Forum on Interracial Dating. The forum, run by the Organization of United African Peoples, entertained an overflow crowd in lower Salomon. Two panels of 10 students discussed controversial questions about the hardships and implications of interracial dating. OUAP member Carmelle Romain ’05 said the goal of the forum was to present different perspectives on interracial dating at Brown and to address why it is so stigmatized. “Personally, I don’t think any constructive conclusions were reached,” she said. “People jump around the answers. But it is valuable to hear other peoples’ thoughts and have dialogue.” One question raised was whether interracial dating is inherently wrong. Some panel members said no, while others brought up issues of exotification and societal power structures that make interracial dating questionable. The moderator, Dionne Boyd ’04, asked that no panelists be named without their specific consent. One panelist said he preferred women of darker complexion, and said he views ethnicity like any other physical characteristic such as height or weight. But panelist Adam King ’06 said physical characteristics are different from cultural characteristics because cultural characteristics are not individual. “I always question why men are attracted to women of my culture because issues of exotification are present and make me uncomfortable,” he said. Being interested in members of another culture doesn’t mean you are trying to exotify them, said Emily Pudalov ’06. “It’s like saying that I’m racist because I’m interested in Latin American studies at Brown.” “Self-evident” power dynamics like socioeconomic distinctions between
see WARMING, page 4
see DATING, page 4
Judy He / Herald
FALL SALE IN FAUNCE: Students could pick up a miniature gourd along with their packages.
Environmental journalist warns of pollution’s dire consequences at Saturday’s conference BY JUSTIN ELLIOTT
Politicians may hotly debate issues like terrorism and the economy, but global warming, if left unchecked, will eclipse all other political discussions, Ross Gelbspan, a retired Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, told an audience Saturday night in MacMillan. Gelbspan, who gave the keynote address at the Northeast Environmental Conference, said he was not a political organizer but stressed the importance of the press in informing the public and effecting change. He encouraged student environmentalists to picket local TV stations and demand that they report the truth about global warming. Gelbspan said that the Earth’s average temperature has heated by one degree in the last century, and that alone has altered the timing of the seasons and increased the occurrence of extreme weather events. The 1990s was the single hottest decade in the last millennium, he said. He gave examples of natural disasters related to worldwide climate change, like a heat wave in India last spring that killed 1,000 people and severe droughts in the western United States. Each disaster cannot be individually tied to climate change, he said, but there is an overwhelming pattern.
The warming of the ocean, he said, has led fish to move northward and, on land, tropical butterflies have been found in Vancouver, Canada. Scientists have begun to recognize a mass migration of all animals toward the poles searching for consistency of climate, Gelbspan said. Climate change has grave, unexpected costs for humans as well, he said. Economically, people could see rapidly rising national disaster-relief budgets. Gelbspan said that there is a looming crisis in the property insurance industry
Grad students at standstill over unionization BY DANA GOLDSTEIN
Within the next few months, the National Labor Relations Board could make its long-awaited decision on graduate student unionization, a decision with far-reaching implications for Brown. the GRADUATE Since 2001, when the University appealed the SCHOOL New England NLRB’s rulat 100 ing that Brown graduate students could be considered employees with the right to unionize, unionization has continued to be a thorny issue among Brown’s grad students.
The precedent set in 2001 by the NLRB’s ruling on New York University’s union was that teaching assistants, teaching fellows and graduate student proctors — but not research assistants in the physical and life sciences — could be considered employees. The national NLRB could choose to uphold grad students’ employee status, in which case the ballots cast in a 2001 referendum on grad student unionization at Brown will be counted. But the Board could also decide that research assistants must be included in that definition, which would mean a reorgani-
I N S I D E M O N D AY, O C T O B E R 2 7 , 2 0 0 3 Acoustic Night at Brown on its way to becoming an institution arts & culture, page 3
Virginia Coalition, the first BCA show of the semester, heated up Sayles Hall Friday arts & culture, page 3
Liberal bias as much a staple of Brown as Hazeltine, says Laura Martin ’06. column, page 9
zation of the pro-unionization movement. Most disastrous for pro-unionization groups would be a decision that grad students as a group are not employees of their universities, and thus do not have the right to unionize. The Brown Graduate Employee Organization is a group of grad students who have worked since 2001 to organize a Brown graduate student union under the United Auto Workers, believing grad students play an integral part in the teaching mission of the see GRAD SCHOOL, page 6
TO D AY ’ S F O R E C A S T David Horowitz’s disturbing popularity is actually explicable, says Terah DeJong ’05. column, page 11
Men’s soccer remains undefeated in Ivy League with a 2-0 win over Cornell sports, page 12
rain and wind high 66 low 47