F R I D A Y MARCH 11, 2005
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD Volume CXL, No. 31
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An independent newspaper serving the Brown community since 1891
ABAYUDAYA VIA HILLEL Presentation provides a look at Ugandan Jews and their devotion to their culture A R T S & C U LT U R E 3
ALL-IVY TOWERS Cagers Robertson ’05 and Forte ’05, Hayes ’06 and Huffman ’08 bring home Ivy League honors
PEOPLE YOU MEET AT BROWN Andrew K. Stein ’06: Your personal opinions on ethnicity and politics are pre-scripted and dull
Grad Center suites to be coed optional next year
OPINIONS
7
SPORTS
8
TODAY
TOMORROW
snow 37 / 32
wintry mix 39 / 23
Swearer Center director to leave
COMPLEAT TREAT
BY BEN LEUBSDORF SENIOR STAFF WRITER
balance between liberty and security, Cole compared former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s Justice Department to the government in Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report.” In the movie, the Justice Department uses prophetic psychics to make arrests based on a suspect’s future crimes. Though Cole joked that “the only visionary psychic in D.C. is (White House political adviser) Karl Rove,” he said that the Bush administration has adopted a similarly abusive “preventive paradigm” to deal with terrorism. Such a doctrine differs from a precautionary stance by using “the coercive arm of (law) that puts tremendous pressure on … the values this country is supposed to be founded on.” By targeting foreign nationals, who are not citizens and therefore not voters, the Bush administration has been able to
Associate Dean of the College Peter Hocking, director of the Swearer Center for Public Service, will leave his current position at Brown this summer to focus more on his passions for painting and teaching. He notified the University of his resignation several weeks ago, and a search committee is being formed to look for his replacement. Hocking, a 1988 graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, has worked at the Swearer Center for 17 years. He Swearer Center said his decision came out of reflecting on the advice he was giving last semester to students interested in working for nonprofit organizations. “I increasingly found myself encouraging students to follow their dreams in their life decisions, and I realized that I needed to do the same,” Hocking said. Hocking wants to spend more time in the classroom — he is currently an instructor at RISD and at Goddard College in Vermont, from which he received a Master’s in Fine Arts in 2003 — and work on his artwork. “I feel like I’ve deferred that part of my career and that part of my life,” he said. “Working at the Center’s been a wonderful opportunity and challenge, and I’m extraordinarily fortunate to have had the opportunity to start with the Center as it was a very young program and to have been present as it’s grown,” Hocking said. “It’s been an absolute pleasure to be part of this community for as long as I have,” he added. Administrators and colleagues had only praise for Hocking as he prepares to leave. “He’s been a wonderful director of the Swearer Center and I’m sorry to see him go,” said Paul Armstrong, dean of the college. “He built the Swearer Center into a real, nationally important model for how service in the community can be intricately part of a stu-
see COLE, page 5
see HOCKING, page 4
Also, rising seniors will be allowed to squat singles BY STU WOO S ENIOR S TAFF WRITER
All four- and five-person suites in Grad Center towers A, B, C and D will be coed optional next year, the Office of Residential Life announced in a campus-wide e-mail Thursday. The decision will open up 285 beds to coed housing, increasing coed suites on campus by 34 percent overall. The Residential Council proposed making Grad Center coed in both 2003 and 2004. The Undergraduate Council of Students supported the proposal last week. “We as a council are very excited that Grad Center is now going to be coed,” said Adam Deitch ’05, president of ResCouncil. “I think it’s a great opportunity for students, especially rising sophomores, to have a greater flexibility in choosing housing.” The proposal received near-unanimous support from students, said David Greene, vice president of campus life and student services. In addition to the ResCouncil and UCS endorsements, see COED, page 4
Physicist: Inability to see other dimensions evolutionary BY JONATHAN SIDHU STAFF WRITER
The scientific community may be on the cusp of discovering methods for sending particles into previously unperceived dimensions, said world-renowned physicist Brian Greene at the Rhode Island School of Design Thursday. Greene, a Columbia professor of physics and math as well as a best-selling author, spoke as part of RISD’s “Perception of Space” lecture series. “The one lesson I hope you will take away is that in the last 150 years or so, physics has basically taught us that there is so much to the universe that isn’t apparent to our human senses,” he said. Greene traced a changing understanding of time and space throughout history, which began with Newton’s laws and culminates in string theory. However, string theory is radically different from its predecessors, he said. “Superstring theory begins by trying to address a question that seems to be somewhat separate from the one we have been studying thus far,” he said. “What is stuff made of? There is at least one more layer to this story. Inside an electron or a quark, there is something else, something finer,” he said. Greene called strings the fundamental building block of the universe, describing see STRING, page 4 Editorial: 401.351.3372 Business: 401.351.3269
Kori Schulman / Herald
Brian Faas ’05 romances a veddy Elizabethan Lucy DeVito ’05 in “Compleat Female Stage Beauty.”
Cole: U.S. losing legitimacy with post-Sept. 11 policies BY CHELSEA RUDMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
By adopting a “preventive paradigm” that includes legislation such as the USA Patriot Act, the Bush administration has severely curtailed American civil rights with results that have only worsened the nation’s security, according to Georgetown law professor and civil rights attorney David Cole. Cole’s invitation to speak yesterday in Salomon 101 coincided with the Brown chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union’s appeal to the Undergraduate Council of Students Wednesday to adopt a resolution condemning the Patriot Act. Co-sponsored by the Brown ACLU, Brown Lecture Board and Brown Pre-Law Society, the lecture was intended to “galvanize people” to sign a petition in support of the resolution, said Brown ACLU president Tristan Freeman ’07. The proposed resolution calls the Patriot Act of 2001 “a threat to the constitutional commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of association upon which student groups at Brown are predicated” and addresses specific threats to student rights, such as allowing federal agents to obtain students’ library records and perform “ ‘sneak and peek’ searches of dorm rooms.” Twenty-one other universities, including Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as 371 cities nationwide, including Dallas and Providence, have passed resolutions similar to the Brown ACLU’s. Cole, a Yale graduate and legal affairs correspondent for the Nation, sees the resolutions as testimony to the power of “ordinary people” and as a reason for optimism among civil rights advocates because “they’re significant — not legally, but politically.” In his speech, attended by about 30 people, Cole said that the resolutions are symbolic of an attitude that has probably helped dissuade legislators from enacting a second, proposed Patriot Act, and might affect the renewal of the Patriot Act’s “sunset provisions” that will come up for vote in December 2005. Addressing the government’s present
U.S. unaware of realities of Iraq war, vet says BY STU WOO SENIOR STAFF WRITER
Critical of the U.S. media and Bush administration, a veteran of the war in Iraq spoke Thursday night about the realities of the conflict, saying that U.S. soldiers there were ill-equipped, poorly trained and largely unsupportive of the war. Specialist E-4 Patrick Resta, who served as an Army medic in Iraq for eight months before returning to the United States in November, spoke before an audience of about 80 Brown students and local community members in Salomon 001. Resta criticized the poor coverage of the Iraqi war by the U.S. media and said the goal of his speech and accompanying slide show was to show what it was really like in Iraq. “One of the most important things veterans can do, like myself, is come out
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here and present a true picture of Iraq, because the American media isn’t letting people have that true picture,” he said. Resta pointed out how poorly equipped U.S. soldiers were in Iraq. He said that of the 1,000 vehicles his brigade brought into Iraq, only about 10 to 15 percent of them were armored. In addition, of the vehicles that were armored, many of them had only a half-inch sheet of plywood or sandbags as protection. “If you look at this fuel truck,” Resta said, referring to a vehicle in a photograph, “what you see are three sandbags. That’s the armor on that vehicle.” Resta said many troops, including him, took out loans to buy their own personal armor, which they either wore or used as protection in their vehicles. He said he was never trained to use the rifle he was issued and his gas mask did not see IRAQ, page 4 News tips: herald@browndailyherald.com