The Brown Daily Herald F riday, N ovember 2, 2007
Volume CXLII, No. 102
Documentary screening kicks off Asian history month
Simmons is a Glamour Woman of the Year — again By Michael Bechek Senior Staff Writer
President Ruth Simmons has been named one of Glamour’s Women of the Year for 2007, according to a press release Thursday from the popular women’s magazine. Simmons has received the honor once before, in 1996, when she was president of Smith College. Simmons will be featured in the magazine’s December issue, on newsstands Nov. 13, along with the three other female presidents of the Ivy League — Harvard University’s Drew Faust, Princeton University’s Shirley Tilghman and the University of Pennsylvania’s Amy Gutmann. The magazine notes that, with Faust’s election as Harvard’s president in Februar y, “Half of the Ivy schools are now helmed by women.” “There is a new order,” Simmons is quoted as saying in the magazine. Actress Jennifer Garner, author Toni Morrison and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., are among the 21 women the magazine chose to recognize this year. Simmons was not available for comment Thursday, said Marisa Quinn, assistant to the president. A crew from Glamour came in October for a photo shoot, Quinn said, to snap the shot that appears in the magazine along with a short video that will appear at a ceremony to be held on Monday in New York City. The crew tried out a number of locations but settled on 55 Power St., the president’s residence, Quinn said. Simmons plans to attend the awards ceremony, which will be
By Max Mankin Contributing Writer
Courtesy of Glamour
President Ruth Simmons has been named one of Glamour’s Women of the Year for 2007.
held in New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, Quinn said. She most recently attended the Glamour Women of the Year ceremony in 2005, when she introduced a tribute to civil rights activist Rosa Parks, who had recently passed away. The awards ceremony will feature a “star-studded list of presenters,” according to the press release, and a special performance by singer Mariah Carey with the
African Children’s Choir. Honorees are nominated by Glamour’s Women of the Year Advisory Board, which is made up of former winners, the magazine said. The annual special issue celebrates “inspirational women who have made unprecedented contributions to the worlds of entertainment, business, sports, fashion, philanthropy, science/medicine, education and politics.”
Med school admission gets increasingly competitive By Hannah Mintz Contributing Writer
As first-years finally recover from the trauma of applying to college, some college seniors around the country and at Brown are duking it out for coveted seats at medical school. The already demanding process of applying to med school has become even more difficult in recent years. Nationally, the number of people applying to med school this year has increased by 8.2 percent from the year before, according to an Oct. 16 press release from the Association of American Medical Colleges. Nearly all applicants begin by filling out a primar y application online, which is then sent to the applicant’s designated institutions. Upon receipt of the primary application, med schools send secondary applications for prospective students to submit — while many schools send secondaries to all applicants, others are more selective. Admission offices then decide whether to invite the applicant to on-campus interviews. At Brown’s Alper t Medical
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Panel questions impact of Teach For America
School, which enrolls 370 medical students, 2,599 secondary applications were completed last year, but only 93 offers of admission were made, in addition to places reserved for participants in the Program in Liberal Medical Education, according to the Med School’s Web site. In the past two years, the number of applications has increased by 63 percent, said Kathy Baer, director of admission and financial aid at the Med School. But Brown is a special case — the “standard” admission route was only implemented in 2004. Previously, admission had been limited to students from special programs, such as PLME students or participants in an early identification program for Rhode Island students. And as the Med School has expanded in size, more spaces have opened up. Not only are national applicant pools larger this year, but applicants have stronger qualifications than ever. “MCAT test scores and cumulative grade point average were the highest we’ve ever seen,” said AAMC President Darrell Kirch in
unpack this! Painting, sculpture and eyebrow plucking feature in a student group show curated by Ann Kidder ’08.
Following a screening of her documentary “My America ... or Honk if you Love Buddha,” producer and director Renee Tajima-Pena spoke Thursday night in List 120 about her experiences as a social activist, filmmaker and Japanese American to kickoff Asian/Asian-American History Month. Thirty-seven more film screenings, discussions, speakers, workshops, ceremonies and dances celebrating Asian and Asian-American history will occur almost daily throughout November. The events are also part of a month of themed programming sponsored by the Third World Center, “Community at Odds: Looking Inward, Reaching Outward.” Tajima-Pena spoke of the 1990s, when U.S. immigration laws loosened and Asian Americans started emigrating from not-as-traditional countries, which created a more diverse AsianAmerican population. “The 1990s was a period of confusion, of wondering, ‘Well, who are we and how do we define ourselves?’ So, I decided to travel across the country and answer that question,” TajimaPena said. Now, she makes “social change documentaries about whatever pisses me off,” Tajima-Pena said with a laugh. Tajima-Pena became involved in social activism while in elementary school, when she was assigned a report for which she had to use primary sources. Because it was a topic with which her family was familiar,
Tajima-Pena interviewed her mother and grandmother about the JapaneseAmerican internment camps during World War II. When Tajima-Pena presented her findings to the class, her teacher yelled, “That’s not true — things like that don’t happen in America.” “I got angry,” Tajima-Pena said, “because my mother had shown us where they were interred for two and a half to three years. The truth can be dangerous.” As she got older, Tajima-Pena continued as a social activist for Asian-American causes at Harvard University. She said she had trouble deciding whether to “wield the camera or the picket sign. Sometimes, I was wielding both.” Tajima-Pena was also actively involved in protesting the Vincent Chin case during the 1980s, when Chin — an Asian American — was killed by two white men who were only punished with probation and a fine. Tajima-Pena pointed out the changing face Asian-American identity. “I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s. There was no info on Asian Americans then,” she told The Herald. “Things started closed off to Asian Americans,” Tajima-Pena said, including jobs and education opportunities, but “awareness has changed 180 degrees.” Janine Kwoh ’09, a co-programmer for the month’s events, said the events are about gaining “a better idea of what it means to be Asian or Asian-American. We have to be self
CAMPUS NEWS
Students attending the panel discussion on “the Teach for America Controversy” packed into Petteruti Lounge Thursday night. The event, sponsored by the Roosevelt Institution, a non-partisan student think tank, addressed the effectiveness and long-term impact of the Teach for America program. The panel included Professor of Education Kenneth Wong, Associate Professor of History James Campbell, Visiting Lecturer in Education Maureen Sigler, University Chaplain Janet Cooper Nelson, Teach for America Recruitment Director Meredith Boak and Erin Brown ’08. Brown published a paper in the latest issue of the Brown Policy Review called “Why Temporary Is Not Enough: The Controversy Over Teach For America,” which ultimately led to the current panel discussion, said Camilla Hawthorne ’09, Brown Policy Review educational policy editor and co-organizer of the event. TFA’s mission is to ensure that “one day, all children in our nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education,” states Wendy
cut the candles Room inspectors found 22 hazardous situations created by excessive debris this semester.
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195 Angell Street, Providence, Rhode Island
Chris Bennett / Herald
Professor of Education Kenneth Wong participated in a panel discussion Thursday night on the effectiveness of Teach for America.
Kopp, founder and chief executive officer of TFA, on the organization’s Web site. TFA is a nonprofit organization that recruits college graduates to teach two years in urban and rural public schools. The program is highly competitive — last year 18,000 individuals
man on the street Student dish about the good and the bad in offcampus housing on College Hill.
applied nationwide and approximately 2,900 were accepted. Over the past five years, 106 Brown alums have joined TFA, Boak told The Herald. In 2006, TFA accepted 25 Brown students, the greatest continued on page 8
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football showdown The Bears head to New Haven, seeking a win against the Bulldogs to keep championship hopes alive.
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