M O N D A Y MARCH 21, 2005
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD Volume CXL, No. 37
www.browndailyherald.com
An independent newspaper serving the Brown community since 1891
SASA WAY MORE THAN SO-SO Annual South Asian cultural show “Rangeela” packs Salomon and delights its audience A R T S & C U LT U R E 3
JUDGEMENT CALL Gavin Shulman ’05 takes on dictionary dumber-downers and comes out looking smrt OPINIONS
D’Souza sees a more politically diverse Brown
11
SCHELL OF A FIGHT Wrestler Jeff Schell ’08 represents Brown at NCAA Championships but drops first two matches S P O R T S 12
TODAY
TOMORROW
snow/rain 40/29
mostly sunny 46/30
Weekend conference examines slavery reparations
TWO YEARS,TOO LONG?
BY JONATHAN HERMAN S TAFF WRITER
BY CAMDEN AVERY SENIOR STAFF WRITER
Dinesh D’Souza said he found a more politically diverse Brown when he arrived to speak March 14 than when he last spoke on campus in 1997 as a part of a Gabriella Doob / Herald debate on affirmative action. The well-known author, fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and former senior domestic policy analyst in the Reagan administration spoke last Monday to a substantial crowd in Salomon 101. D’Souza said he noticed a definite political moderation on campus since his last visit to Brown eight years ago. “I don’t know if the crowd was typical — it was certainly less of a left-wing crowd (than) when I debated the affirmative action issue,” D’Souza said. “I think there was a good range of intellectual diversity. The kind of hard left that I usually encounter at Brown has declined, was absent or in a post-election funk.” D’Souza said that his speech was an “effort to reflect” the importance of intellectual diversity in a predominantly homogenous political atmosphere. President Ruth Simmons’ fund for intellectual diversity provided most of the capital to bring D’Souza for the lecture sponsored by the Brown College Republicans. “By itself, it’s a drop in the ocean, but I do think that if bright students hear something that makes sense, even if they are indoctrinated every day, they will look into it and want to learn more,” D’Souza said of his speech. “I see it as a
his work at DPS, said Capt. Emil Fioravanti, interim chief. Glen Hebert worked with the Woonsocket Police Department for 21 years and was detective sergeant in charge of the night division for the last six years. Hebert received his bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Roger Williams University. Hebert said he wanted to join DPS because Brown is “a nice community and a good place to start a second career.” John Heston, a graduate of the Community College of Rhode Island, has worked for the Rhode Island Park Police Department and the Rhode Island Capitol Police Department. For the past 12 years, he has worked as an officer for the Charlestown Police Department. Anthony LeDoux, also a graduate of CCRI, was previously an officer for the Rhode Island School of Design Public Safety Department. Prior to that
Swearer Center has been in the process of changing the nature of spring Breaks Projects to better align them with the mission of the center, Flam said. Past projects organized small groups of students to volunteer with a variety of organizations across the country, he said. Students had a range of community work and locations from which to choose. Some went to South Carolina to provide hurricane relief, and others went to Arizona to volunteer in hospitals, he said. There was little or no intellectual component to these trips, he said. Now, spring Breaks Projects only take place in Rhode Island to take advantage of local Swearer Center connections, Flam said. “Moving the projects to Providence and Rhode Island seemed more in line with the Swearer Center mission to establish a connection between the Brown community and the local community,” he said. The Swearer Center has also added an intellectual focus to make the projects more meaningful, Flam said. Students now volunteer work in a variety of local organizations and meet with local nonprofit organization leaders and community activists. The projects’ new goal is to investigate specific issues in the community based on a chosen theme, Flam said. Past projects constructed along these lines have investigated issues from immigration to affordable housing to food security. “We hope that these projects will have a better chance to impact lifelong learning if they have an intellectual component,” he said. This year the Brown Christian Fellowship has undertaken a project in the
“It’s easy and cheap to say, ‘Get over it,’” said Alfred Brophy, a law professor at the University of Alabama, at the first session of a weekend-long conference on slavery reparations Friday night. Even apologies, said panelist Melissa Nobles, associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “seem to be the way to go for two reasons: They’re easy, and they’re cheap.” The conference, titled “Historical Injustices: Restitution and Reconciliation in International Perspective,” lasted all weekend and included a film screening and six discussions with guests, each of which was hosted by a University professor. The University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice kicked off the conference Friday evening with a brief speech by President Ruth Simmons and a discussion about truth, apology and reconciliation. Like all the conference’s discussion panels, Friday’s event was held in Smith-Buonanno 106, with packed seats and people sitting on the floor. In his introduction Friday night, Associate Professor of History James Campbell, chair of the slavery and justice committee, laid the foundation for the weekend’s discussions, briefly sketching the University’s historic involvement with slavery. “Like nearly every American institution,” Campbell said, the University has “a long history with the slave trade,” with community members and presidents who have acted vocally as both abolitionists and slave owners. He drew attention to the fact that the president’s office was built, in part, with the labor of slaves. Vanessa Huang ’06 said Sunday that for her, this was the chief question concerning reparations — what, exactly, should the University’s role be, especially considering its history with the slave trade? Huang said she thought the question was raised over the weekend but not satisfactorily answered. The question came up several times in terms of what a university might to do change the United States’ approach to slave reparations. Still, Huang said, she was pleased with the conference overall and with the kinds of discussions raised. In her opening address, Simmons posited the weekend’s endeavor as an effort to begin to address the “catastrophic inhumanities” of slavery and to “repair the moral breach” made by the University in years past. Indirectly acknowledging the resistance the subject of reparations meets — on campus, as anywhere — Simmons said, “I welcome any discomfort this process may cause as entirely necessary and salutary.” Some of this discomfort became evident by the time Sunday’s conference
see DPS, page 7
see BREAKS, page 4
see SJC, page 4
Laura Leis / Herald
Protestors stop outside the Rhode Island National Guard Recruiting Office on Saturday’s anti-war march that marked the two-year anniversary of the war in Iraq.
Breaks Projects shift to local focus BY STEWART DEARING STAFF WRITER
Spring Breaks Projects — community service projects funded by the Swearer Center that used to consist solely of flying to an area and volunteering for a week — are becoming seminar-style workshops on community issues in the real world, said Rabbi Alan Flam P’05, a senior fellow at the Swearer Center and associate University chaplain. Over the past four and a half years, the
see D’SOUZA, page 6
DPS inducts five officers BY NICOLE SUMMERS CONTRIBUTING WRITER
The Department of Public Safety swore in five new officers at a Friday ceremony attended by the officers’ families and various members of the Brown community. The ceremony came on the heels of the University’s announcement Friday that Mark Porter, currently director of public safety at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, will become Brown’s chief of police and director of DPS in April. The officers come to Brown from a variety of backgrounds in policing and crime prevention. Leif Anderson rejoined DPS in November 2004. He has a degree in administrative justice and served in Operation Desert Storm. John Finegan previously served as a member of the Providence Police Department. Finegan is trained in detective and interrogation techniques, which are skills he can incorporate into
Editorial: 401.351.3372 Business: 401.351.3269
195 Angell Street, Providence, Rhode Island
News tips: herald@browndailyherald.com