Daily Herald the Brown
vol. cxlv, no. 28 | Tuesday, March 9, 2010 | Serving the community daily since 1891
Transfer applications up 5 percent from last year
O pen seatin g
By Ana Alvarez S enior S taf f Writer
Max Monn / Herald
Students flocked to the newly reopened steps at Faunce House to enjoy the nice weather.
Bereaved students search for meaning By Sophia Li Deputy Managing Editor
Just over two weeks ago, two young alums were struck by a car while walking in Brooklyn — a hit-and-run that joined two recent fatalities that crystallized the fragility of human life for the Brown community. “Suddenly everything is explicit,”
FEATURE said Rabbi Mordechai Rackover, associate University chaplain for the Jewish community. “We suddenly have to name the gifts of a person.” In the wake of tragedies as distant as Beijing and as close to home as the intersection of Thayer and Hope streets, students are trying to cope with losing someone their own age — for many, for the first time. “What do you do with it?” said Indy Shome ’11, a childhood friend of Arun Stewart ’11, who died last semester while studying abroad in Beijing. “How much are you supposed to grieve? How much are you supposed to go on with your life?” A rude awakening On Feb. 12, a knock on his door woke Jack deTar ’13 in the middle of the night.
inside
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News.....1-4 Metro.....5 Editorial.....6 Opinion......7 Today.........8
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The Of fice of Admission has received 1,461 transfer applications so far for the 2010 fall term, about a 5 percent increase from last year’s total, said Dean of Admission Jim Miller ’73. This reflects the 20 percent increase in first-year applications for the class of 2014. Complementing the rise in applications, 50 more transfer applicants will be accepted, bringing next year’s total transfer class to 170, according to a Feb. 11 Herald article. The increase is intended to grow the University’s revenue. Financial aid available for transfer applicants will also double from $400,000 to $800,000, a
change recommended by the University Resources Committee and approved by the Corporation at its Februar y meeting, said Director of Financial Aid Jim Tilton. The increase in qualified transfer applicants caused the push for a larger transfer class and more available aid, Tilton said. “We have a really deep, enriched pool of applicants,” he said. “There are some really talented students that we need to consider.” The increase in available aid will give the Office of Admission “more flexibility” to consider qualified students who would have previously been denied for financontinued on page 2
Tuition jump to be met with fin. aid increase By Alex Bell Senior Staf f Writer
Next year’s tuition increases will be offset in large part by increases in financial aid, especially in the Alpert Medical School, according to a University press release following the Corporation meeting in Februar y. Undergraduates will see a 4.5 percent increase in total charge, which includes tuition, room and board and other fees, from $49,128 to $51,360 per student, according to the press release. The increase will be par tially of fset
by a 6.5 percent increase in the financial aid budget, from $76.5 to $81.5 million. The release also states that graduate tuition will rise by a similar 4.9 percent, of fset by a 14.4 percent increase in budgeted support to graduate students, to a total of $45.5 million. But medical students will see the most dramatic difference next year, when a 5 percent increase in medical tuition will be met with a 16-percent increase in financial aid, bringing the Med School’s new financial aid budget to $6.7 million.
The reason for the increase in the Med School’s financial aid was two-fold, according to Associate Dean for Medical Education Philip Gruppuso, who oversees the Med School’s Of fice of Financial Aid. He said that while the Med School used to rely on its endowment and alums’ contributions to finance their aid budget, the school is now finding that these sources are no longer sufficient for its larger student body. Additionally, the introduction of need-blind admissions to the College in 2002 has caused
a gradual “fallof f in the quality of the financial aid package” for medical students that the new budget aims to rectify, Gruppuso said. “But we had to move resources from other places to increase that financial aid,” Gruppuso said. He declined to comment on where the funds had come from, but noted that the increase in Med School financial aid comes directly from the Med School budget, and does not affect the allocation of funds elsewhere in the University. continued on page 4
Chafee ahead in R.I. governor race By Claire Peracchio Senior Staff Writer
Former Senator Lincoln Chafee ’75 has emerged as the leader in the race for Rhode Island governor, according to a Rasmussen poll conducted Feb. 25. The Rasmussen poll comes on the heels of a Brown survey and a poll from the television station WPRI-12 conducted by Fleming and Associates, both of which also showed Chafee with an early lead before November’s election. “Obviously, we’re very encouraged by the poll,” said John Pagliarini, Chafee’s campaign manager. The Rasmussen poll, which surveyed 500 likely voters, found Chafee — a former senior fellow at the Watson Institute for Interna-
tional Studies — favored in hypothetical matchups against Republican challenger John Robitaille, as well as against Democratic primary contenders State Treasurer Frank Caprio and State Attorney General Patrick Lynch ’87. But in a matchup against Cha-
FEATURE fee and Robitaille, Caprio was the Democrat who earned the highest percentage of the vote, 27 percent compared to Lynch’s 24 percent. The third-place finisher against Chafee and either Democrat was Robitaille, who fared slightly better with Lynch in the race. Chafee also garnered the highest favorability rating, with 55 percent of likely voters holding a very favor-
able or somewhat favorable view of the former senator. Caprio came in second, with 52 percent indicating a positive view. The Rasmussen poll also highlighted economic uncertainty, with a plurality of 42 percent of voters characterizing the state of their personal finances as “fair” and 45 percent believing that their financial situation is getting worse. The challenge of dealing with economic woes in a debt-ridden state is not lost on the candidates for governor. Chafee has advocated for a plan to take advantage of key investments in Rhode Island, including Providence’s “Knowledge District,” transportation infrastructure improvements around continued on page 3
Herald File Photo
Lincoln Chafee ’75 leads in a new Rasmussen poll, putting him ahead of Republican challenger John Robitalle for November’s elections.
News, 3
Metro, 5
Opinions, 7
white history Nell Painter asks: “What makes light-skinned people white people?”
no confidence New survey shows R.I. voters lack trust in their elected officials
b.a. is not b.s. Ethan Tobias ’12 objects to the supposed uselessness of a college education
195 Angell Street, Providence, Rhode Island
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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD
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Tuesday, March 9, 2010
“The sheer abruptness and uncertainty of life slap you in the face.” — Danya Chudacoff ’11.5
Students struggle to heal after classmates’ deaths continued from page 1
When he answered, the friend standing there told him the news — that Avi Schaefer ’13 was dead. “He said Avi had been hit by a car and he was dead,” said deTar, one of Schaefer’s closest friends. “It just seemed impossible.” The next few hours were a whirlwind for deTar. “I was having strange thoughts,” deTar said. He recalled thinking that it was “crowded” in the car’s backseat on his second trip to the hospital. “Perhaps I was just defending myself by not letting myself focus on what was happening,” he speculated. Walking into the emergency room of Rhode Island Hospital, where Schaefer was taken after the accident, “solidified” the reality of the situation for him, deTar said. “I just started calling people,” he said. The news of Schaefer’s death spread quickly among students. Danya Chudacof f ’11.5 received the news around 7 a.m. through a phone call from Sarah Levy ’12, who at first hesitated to explain why she wanted to come over to Chudacoff’s house. Chudacoff recalled asking Levy repeatedly what was wrong. “ ‘Where is he?’ ” Chudacof f remembered asking. “ ‘He’s in the hospital,’ ” she said Levy told her. “ ‘Is he alive?’ ” she asked. “ ‘No.’ ” “That was the last lucid memor y that I had for, like, the next three days,” she said. “We went to Hillel,” she said.
“We went straight to Hillel.” A community grieves After retur ning to campus, deTar stayed awake despite his attempts to sleep, he said. Like Chudacoff, he gravitated toward Brown/RISD Hillel. Hillel opened at 8:30 a.m. to offer coffee and breakfast, according to Rabbi Rackover. “There were tons and tons of students,” some of whom were cr ying loudly, Chudacof f said. The mourners coming in and out also included professors, deans and President Ruth Simmons, she said. “There was such pain in the air,” deTar said. “But there was so much love, too.” “I couldn’t cry,” Chudacoff said. “I broke down when I was alone,” she said. In the afternoon, Schaefer’s body was transferred from the hospital to Sugarman Sinai Memorial Chapel on Hope Street, according to Rackover. Chudacoff, other students and even a faculty member took turns sitting by Schaefer’s body. “You have to take care of a body as if it were a baby,” Rackover said. “The person that sits with the deceased is called a ‘shomer’ ” — literally translated as “watcher,” said Ira Fleisher, the funeral home’s managing director. In Orthodox Judaism, that person “is with you from the time you die until the time of the funeral,” Fleisher said. “Someone accompanies you and stays with you so that you’re not alone.” The body was kept in a freez-
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er in the funeral home’s garage. There are couches in the garage, Chudacof f said, “arranged for mourners to sit and grieve.” Chudacof f and her companions sat for hours, talking about Schaefer and cr ying. “We sat, we talked, we sang zemirot,” Chudacof f said, referring to a type of Jewish religious song. Chudacof f and the others guarding his body sang Schaefer’s favorite zemirot, she said. For the first few days, Chudacoff said, people flocked to Hillel “when they didn’t know what to do.” “Hillel is a center for Jewish life,” she said, “and so many of us were Jewish.” Over the weekend, Chudacoff and her friends questioned repeatedly what it meant for Hillel to be a focal point for so many. “How does the way that we’re focusing on Hillel reflect on Avi?” she recalled wondering. Without Hillel, “this would have been, if possible, 10 times harder,” she said. “You really need to be able to set up a physical space for people to get together,” she said. “It’s absolutely necessar y.” ‘Unfinished conversations’ At first, Chudacoff was unable to believe that her friend was dead. Later, she felt “unquantifiable amounts of sadness and pain,” she remembered. “You’re so angr y,” she said. “You just feel angr y at the unpredictability and the uncertainty of it. What’s the reason? What’s the bigger picture here?” “What was the fatal cosmic equation that made this person be at this place at this time?” she said. Chudacoff dreams about “what if” situations, alternate realities in which Schaefer goes to the bathroom before leaving the bar he was at the night he died, or runs into a friend and stops to talk. As a consequence, “ever ything seems so banal,” Chudacoff said. “At first, you just, you feel guilty,” she said, a “combination of guilt and resistance” in reaction to thinking about something else. “What I feel changes daily, hourly,” said deTar, who also said he was still “tr ying to metabolize” the experience. He has difficulty focusing and channels his thoughts and emotions into his writing — especially
fiction that blurs “the line between prose and poetr y,” he said. “It’s how I feel in my life right now,” in between the “ever yday” and the “metaphysical,” he said. Grieving is “not just the process of dealing with the loss,” said Sherri Nelson, associate director of Psychological Ser vices. “It’s multidimensional, and it takes place over time.” Grief and mourning include experiencing “sadness, guilt, loneliness,” Nelson said, but also force people to cope with “a sense of a loss of meaning in life.” “There isn’t a lesson to be learned,” Chudacoff said. “For me it’s just sort of a reminder of how to value the quotidian.” Schaefer’s death and the hitand-run that injured Erinn Phelan ’09 and Alma Guerrero ’09 MD’13 underline the “extraordinar y risk” that exists in ever yday activities, said University Chaplain Janet Cooper Nelson. Cooper Nelson said she finds herself keeping the people next to her from crossing the street and thinking, while driving, that ever y pedestrian she sees could be Schaefer. “The sheer abruptness and uncertainty of life,” Chudacoff said, “slap you in the face.” “Avi I had seen the day before. Avi was here,” she said. “We had unfinished conversations.” Death from a distance While Schaefer’s death unsettled the Brown community because of its proximity, it is much more common for students to pass away while they are away from campus, Cooper Nelson said. One such student was Arun Stewart ’11, who died while abroad in Beijing last semester. Stewart, who was studying at Tsinghua University, lost his footing while at a rooftop gathering, according to a campus-wide e-mail from President Simmons sent on Oct. 31. Emily Tursack ’11, who lived near Stewar t in Keeney Quadrangle their freshman year, said it feels like he is still away. “It doesn’t really seem real,” she said. “He was so alive that it’s hard to picture him other wise.” The distance has made the experience “even more surreal and confusing,” said Shome, Stewart’s childhood friend. Still, Shome said, the initial waves of grief have subsided. He
thinks about Stewart and his death when he wants to tell him something, such as a joke he would have wanted to share. While December’s memorial ser vice on campus marked the end of “one pocket of stress” for Shome — who said he spent the rest of the fall semester after Stewart’s death struggling to focus on his schoolwork — winter break was an impor tant turning point for him. “I spent time alone, and just let myself feel,” he said. “That feeling of grief is an important feeling in life.” DeTar said he began to find solace at Schaefer’s burial. On his flight to San Diego — deTar went home before Schaefer’s funeral in Los Angeles on Feb. 15 — he tried to write the eulogy he would deliver for his friend. “The only thing I could write was, ‘My best friend died yesterday,’ ” he said. After the funeral, those in attendance helped bur y him — deTar said he used his hands to cover his friend’s coffin. “It seemed more natural for him to be in the ground than above the ground in a coffin,” he said, calling the funeral “the period at the end of the sentence.” New conversations begin As “perennial” and “prevalent” as grief is, it is hardly discussed, said Cooper Nelson, who runs a weekly bereavement group that offers a space for conversation to any grieving student who wants to attend. “At first, we don’t even know how to bring it up,” Cooper Nelson said, pointing to a “need to develop some better, more routinized ways” of talking about loss. While Rackover encourages students to express themselves in any way, including writing for themselves, he emphasized the importance of talking to others. “You need to be able to bounce yourself off of others,” he said. DeTar said he has relied mostly on his friends since Schaefer’s death, and not on Psychological Ser vices or other University resources, such as Cooper Nelson’s bereavement group. “I’ve found a lot of love from people that I wouldn’t expect,” he said. “If anything, this has shown me that people are people,” he said, “how human ever yone is.”
More transfers to be accepted this year continued from page 1 cial reasons, Miller said. Transfer applications are considered on a need-aware basis that factors in a student’s ability to pay. The steady increase in transfer applicants over the last three years seems to indicate a trend, Miller said. He added that while the number of transfer acceptances and
amount of available financial aid is not set for next year, there will be increases if more is necessar y. The overall increase in applications is due to greater interest in Brown, Tilton said. “I think people are seeking quality,” Miller said, “and they perceive us as being that.” The Of fice of Admission, which is still reviewing first-year
applications, has not star ted to assess transfer applicants, according to Miller. Transfer admissions decisions will be announced in May. Tilton said he was pleased to see more qualified transfers joining the Brown community. “Transfer students really do add a lot to the campus experience,” he said.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
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“By and large, racialization exists to put people down.” — Nell Painter, professor emeritus of U.S. history at Princeton
Princeton prof asks: What is whiteness? New COE program to
By Max Godnick Senior Staff Writer
What makes white people white? This is the question that Nell Painter, professor emeritus of American history at Princeton, asked Monday night in Salomon 001 as she discussed her new book, “The History of White People.” Painter’s book explores the history of whiteness throughout the world, as did her lecture, though she focused on material not explicitly covered in the book. “We are obsessive about imagining blackness and talking about blackness, but we don’t know the history of whiteness,” Painter said to the audience. “Part of the mythology of whiteness is that it has always been.” Tricia Rose, professor of Africana studies and chair of the department, introduced Painter before her lecture — the first in what will likely be a series about the book, she said. “Professor Painter really is a titan in the field,” Rose said. “There is really no one of her caliber doing the kind of work that she does.” Painter started her presentation by asking the question, “What makes light-skinned people white people?” She then began to explain the complex history of the cultural definition of whiteness. “From roughly 1800 to the mid1920s, the idea was that there was more than one European race,” she said. “This was based on pigmentation and head shape,” she said. “Head shape was a very big deal.” After analyzing a number of images of different skull shapes and explaining the different types of whiteness considered in the 19th and early 20th centuries, she explained that “today we think more in terms
Max Monn / Herald
Nell Painter explored the history of whitness in America and asked why light-skinned people were considered white people.
of skin colors than head shape when talking about race,” Painter said. She discussed what caused groups to develop different skin tones after the earliest humans dispersed from Africa. “The ancient hominids were covered with hair and had light skin,” she said. “When people lost that hair, they darkened up to protect against the sun.” As people went to different parts of the Earth, they went to places with less sunlight than Africa, where there was not enough ultraviolet radiation for dark skin. This, she explained, is what caused human skin tones to lighten in certain areas of the world. “What is going to happen as the ozone layer gets thinner and thinner and thinner and people are subjected to more and more radiation?” she asked. “Will white people stay white?” Painter discussed four phases in history in which the term “whiteness” was enlarged. The first, she said, occurred in the Jacksonian era of American history in which “voting and citizenship moved from people with income,
Candidates for governor focus on R.I. economy continued from page 1 the deep water port at Quonset, R.I., and the Warwick Intermodal Station, which would provide a transportation hub connecting T.F. Green Airport to the rest of the state, in order “to create good, paying jobs,” Pagliarini said. Both Caprio and Robataille tout small businesses as the focus of their economic plans. Caprio believes “if every small business could add one job, we’d go from highest unemployment rates to one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country,” said his spokesperson, Nick Hemond, said. Lynch is expected to unveil his economic plan in stages beginning later this week, according to his campaign manager Joel Coon. The focus on the economy may be a boon to Democratic primary contender Caprio, who could cite his familiarity with budget matters and pension reform, Wendy Schiller, associate professor of political science and public policy, said.
Schiller attributed Chafee’s strong showing in the poll to a popular family name and his lack of association with the current unpopular state government. Chafee, who lost his re-election bid for the U.S. Senate in 2006 when he ran as a Republican, could benefit from his status as an independent, which allows him to “depict himself as a different kind of politician” unencumbered by party affiliation, Schiller said. A Chafee victory in November is by no means a foregone conclusion though, Schiller cautioned. For Republican challenger John Robitaille, who has been campaigning for four weeks, the race is still in its early stages. Robataille, who had the highest percentage of voters choose “not sure” as their opinion of him, said he hopes to convert the undecided with a focus on Republican values of smaller government and self-reliance. “What I always tell people is this isn’t a sprint — it’s a marathon,” Robitaille said.
property and taxes to just being a white male.” The second, in the 19th century, expanded the definition of whiteness to include “people who were children of impoverished Irish immigrants.” The third enlargement of the white race occurred during the New Deal at the hands of the Federal Housing Administration, she said. “The suburbs were about 99 point 99 point 99 point 99 percent white when they were created in the 1950s and 60s,” she said. This was due to racially biased lending policies established during this era, she said. The “apartheid suburbs” as Painter calls them, polarized whites and blacks to an even greater extent and allowed civil rights activists to broaden their definition of the white race. “Malcolm X talked about the ‘white man,’ ” she said, adding that “Malcolm X helped create the idea of one single white race.” The fourth enlargement of American whiteness, she said, is occurring right now. “There are simply more people allowed in,” she said. “Racial identity is less important than it was in, say, the 1930s.” Painter spoke about race more generally to wrap up her lecture. “By and large, racialization exists to put people down,” she said. “And the people it’s meant to put down are the people who do the work.”
send interns to Hong Kong By Zung Nguyen Vu Contributing Writer
This summer, Brown’s Commerce, Organizations and Entrepreneurship Program is launching a pilot internship program in Hong Kong. According to Maria Carcovick, the program’s administrative director, two to three students will be placed with two private Hong Kong-based financial companies that have operations and assets worldwide. These Hong Kong summer internships are intended to complement the existing internships the program has run in India for the past five years. In creating this program, the concentration program partnered with the Advancement Office to find companies in Hong Kong and India that were affiliated with alums and were willing to take interns, Carkovic said. The aim of the internship is to provide students with hands-on experience in business in a developing country, she said. “Even during the recession here, the economic climate in India or Hong Kong is as different as the culture,” Carkovic said. “The (Career Development Center) already has various internship programs in the U.S., but this
program is specifically suited for the students we educated — global entrepreneurs who can adapt to many cultures.” Students who have participated in the internship in India in the past have been placed into various jobs and positions. Last summer, Anastasia Verghis ’11 worked on a project to calculate and analyze the debt structure for Reliance Industries Limited, a large Mumbai oil and energy company. The company expected her to know technical financial procedures, she said. Though she was thrown into the internship, she said Brown had given her the tools to be resourceful. Elise Fishelson ’11 spent last summer at Blue Frog, a Mumbai recording company and concert venue. Fishelson did marketing research and organized a workshop on home-recording sound quality for emerging artists. According to Fishelson, the most challenging aspect of the internship was defining her own role and contribution. The company had never had interns before, she said. She spent time learning to use the equipment and asking questions, before deciding continued on page 4
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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD
C ampus N EWS
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
“We meet 100 percent of need.” — Jim Tilton, director of financial aid
higher ed news roundup heeyoung min senior staff writer
Dollars, in thousands
Virginia colleges told they lack authority to ban anti-gay discrimination
Tuition and other required fees
Average financial aid for first-year students
Year Julien Ouellet / Herald
Tuition and other required fees have risen steadily in the past eight fiscal years, with an accompanying increase in average institutional financial aid for first-year students. Average financial aid for first-year students is not available for fiscal year 2011 because those financial aid awards have not yet been determined.
Med School financial aid increases continued from page 1 “This is a separate pool of resources from anything that has to do with the undergraduate college,” he said. Director of Financial Aid Jim Tilton, who is responsible for undergraduate financial aid, said
that Brown is “keeping up with our peers” in regard to the $5 million increase in the financial aid budget. “We meet 100 percent of need, and if tuition goes up, we need to meet that need,” he said. About $400,000 of the increase in financial aid will be set aside
to accommodate the projected increase in transfer students for next year, Tilton said. He said the increase in financial aid should allow this year’s incoming freshman class to have a “ver y similar” level of financial responsibilities to those of students in previous years.
Kenneth Cuccinelli, Virginia’s attorney general, warned the boards of the state’s public colleges that they lack the authority — without authorization from the state’s General Assembly — to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, Inside Higher Ed reported on March 8. “I am aware that several Virginia colleges and universities have included ‘sexual orientation’ in their respective (nondiscrimination) policies,” Cuccinelli wrote in a letter to the leaders of the state’s colleges on March 4. “Such invalid policies create, at minimum, confusion about the law and, at worst, a litany of instances in which the school’s operation would need to change in order to come into conformance.” Rebecca Glenberg, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, advised university presidents that they are still “bound by the United States Constitution” to bar discrimination based on sexual orientation, according to a March 5 letter. “We express no opinion of Mr. Cuccinelli’s analysis of state law, though we have serious doubts about it,” Glenberg wrote. Grades on the rise across the country Grades are rising nationwide, especially at elite private institutions, wrote Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired Duke professor, and Christopher Healy, a Furman University professor, in Teachers College Record on March 4. An institution’s mean grade point average is “highly dependent” on the academic caliber of its student body and whether the school is public or private, Rojstaczer and Healy wrote, adding that “public-commuter and engineering schools” grade the toughest. Since the 1960s, G.P.A.’s have increased by approximately 0.1 to 0.2 points per decade, with a greater average increase for private schools, according to Rojstaczer’s Web site. At Brown, 50.6 percent of grades given in the 2007-08 academic year were A’s, a 15.8 percent increase from 199495, The Herald reported on Nov. 18, 2008. Rojstazer told Inside Higher Ed that addressing grade inflation was necessary because “the alternative is a student body that frequently misses classes, never prepares in advance, studies about 11 hours a week if they are ‘full time’ students, and drinks itself into a constant stupor out of boredom.” With anticipated repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, ROTC may return to Stanford campus Stanford University’s Faculty Senate voted last week to create a committee that will evaluate the possibility of bringing the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program back to Stanford’s campus, Inside Higher Ed reported on March 8. Stanford phased out its ROTC chapter in the early 1970s amid university opposition to the Vietnam War, but more recent resistance to the program concerned Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, Inside Higher Ed reported. “It is our assumption that the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, which has been a serious impediment to reopening the discussion at all, will probably go away within the next year or two, and the field will be open to have a reasonable discussion on this,” said David Kennedy, professor emeritus of history at Stanford, in a statement. Presently there are about a dozen Stanford students who travel to ROTC programs at the University of California at Berkeley, Santa Clara or San Jose, Kennedy said in the statement, which “imposes a pretty unreasonable burden on them.”
New Hong Kong internship continued from page 3 to create the workshop, she said. Overall, both Fishelson and Verghis found the internship to be a valuable experience in working and living independently.
Students can apply to these internships through the COE program. The India internships have chosen seven students for the upcoming year, though students are still being interviewed for the Hong Kong internship.
Metro The Brown Daily Herald
“You don’t have to convince me of the concept. I think it’s great.” — Providence Mayor David Cicilline ’83 on the proposal for a public marina Tuesday, March 9, 2010 | Page 5
Mayor talks future of Shooters site R.I. voters lack trust By Caitlin Trujillo Senior Staf f Writer
Providence Mayor David Cicilline ’83 appeared Monday at a Fox Point Neighborhood Association meeting and expressed his approval of the group’s plan to make the former site of Shooters nightclub part of a public waterfront space. His appearance comes on the heels of last week’s vote by the City Plan Commission to remove residential zoning recommendations from the site, eliminating the possibility of a large-scale residential development blocking public use of the site. Cicilline said he thought the agenda to make the former nightclub into a public marina was “ver y exciting from the beginning.” The challenge now, he said, is to ensure development occurs in an economically sustainable manner. “You don’t have to convince me of the concept. I think it’s great,” Cicilline said. “The only question is, how is it likely to unfold?” Cicilline said he wanted an economic analysis done on the site to achieve this goal. But Daisy Schnepel, president of the association, said they had only managed to raise half of the $30,000 needed for the feasibility study. Cicilline confirmed with the group that the city would contribute financially to the study as well. The mayor proposed looking into funds available from the fed-
eral stimulus bill, particularly Recovery and Build America Bonds, for financing any development. Cicilline also said he would be willing to meet with association members and the state Department of Transportation, which currently owns the Shooters site, to discuss the issue further. Rhode Island bought the site from its previous owner, Michael Kent. Cicilline said he doubted the state would create a publicprivate partnership to develop the site and will therefore likely sell it. But the city of Providence cannot afford to buy the site, he said. He added that Kent can exercise first refusal if the state seeks to sell the site but did not know if that was probable. Board member Arria Bilodeau said Kent had expressed no interest in getting the site back the last time the two of them spoke. Harrison Bilodeau, vice-chair of the Providence City Plan Commission, proposed asking the Department of Transportation to hold the site until development was ready to proceed. In the meantime, he said, the derelict former club needed maintenance and cleaning up. “You’re right, Mr. Mayor, the vision of the place is something worth waiting for,” Harrison Bilodeau said. But he added that currently the site is “an eyesore.” Cicilline said it was the Department of Transportation’s responsibility to maintain the site but
agreed that beautifying it would be optimal. “If we make it secure and clean it up,” then there would be a better chance of a publicprivate partnership for the land’s development, he said. Bryan Principe of the City Plan Commission said he wanted to see the land cleaned up so that, in the event that Newport becomes the location for the America’s Cup, Providence could ser ve as a destination for both sailors and tourists. If the cities of Providence and Newport come together and pitch a “dual plan,” he said, the Cup would bring in tourists who might not other wise visit Providence and would create an “economic boon” for the city. “The developers aren’t sniffing around right now,” Principe said. “Let’s take advantage of that.” Cicilline said he has reached out to Newport Mayor JeanneMarie Napolitano and is in talks with her to explore Providence’s role if the America’s Cup comes to Rhode Island. Making the possible waterfront a part of the pitch is a good idea, he said, though he warned against tying the fate of one project too closely to that of the other. In addition to Cicilline’s discussion of the Shooters property, the association also addressed their petition on their new Web site — www.makeshooterspublic.com — and their upcoming cleanup of the Seekonk, Mass., shoreline, scheduled for April 17.
By Roberto Ferdman Contributing Writer
Results of a recent public opinion survey by the Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions show that registered voters in Rhode Island have little or no confidence in their elected officials. The survey found that only 12 percent of registered Rhode Island voters have a “great deal” or “good amount” of confidence in public officials to make the right decisions for the state’s future, a number that the poll’s administrator found particularly alarming. “We expected some level of disconcertedness, but we were very surprised by the numbers,” said Marion Orr, the center’s director. The center’s analysis of the poll acknowledged the dire state of the national economy, and postulated that the repercussions of the nation’s economic recession could be devastating Rhode Island voters’ confidence in elected officials. Orr said he believes the reality of a struggling national economy has affected confidence nationwide. “Nationally,” he said, “I think there is this low level of confidence that people have in their government.” Rhode Island’s unemployment rate for January 2010 hit 12.7 percent, a full 3 points above the national average. The results — including the belief held by 74 percent of respondents that the economic stimulus package hasn’t helped their personal financial situation — seem to support Orr’s
claim. The survey found that discontent with public officials extends beyond state leaders. President Barack Obama’s approval rating dropped to 44 percent in the poll, 9 points below the center’s September 2009 poll. Frustrations with elected officials, however, extend further than the immediate problems presented by the struggling economy. Naoko Shibusawa, who lives in Cranston, cited the ongoing war in Iraq and the state’s underperforming public education system as other points of discontent. “I don’t know how many times I’ve called (government offices) to complain,” she said. But Shibusawa, an assistant professor of history, conceded that ultimately the responsibility lies with the voters who elect their representatives. And voters seem poised to seek new representation. The survey indicated that if the general election were held today, independent gubernatorial candidate Lincoln Chafee ’75, a former senior fellow at the Watson Institute, would defeat both his Democratic and Republican rivals. “It seems like this low level of confidence suggests an opportunity for someone like Chafee,” Orr said of the center’s findings. “I think that this is a fertile ground for challengers.” The results could signal the possibility of gains for unaffiliated candidates in a state deemed the nation’s most heavily Democratic by Gallup last year. “For anyone who has any ambition to run for public office,” Orr added, “I think now is the time.”
Editorial & Letters The Brown Daily Herald
Page 6 | Tuesday, March 9, 2010
l e t t e r to t h e e d i to r
Uganda bill opposition about human rights, not culture To the Editor: In his column (“Understanding the odd story of gay rights in Africa,” March 5), Dominic Mhiripiri ’12 accuses supporters of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill of being patronizing, closed-minded carpetbaggers. They just don’t understand Southern culture. Trying to end lynching in the South is forcing Northern values down the throats of the good people of Mississippi. Oh, wait. It’s 2010, not 1920, and Mhiripiri is writing about opposition to Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill. While Mhiripiri claims to oppose the part of the bill imposing the death sentence for people convicted of homosexuality, he never-
theless treats the position of those who support it as fundamentally valid. It is not. Advocacy of largescale state-sanctioned murder cannot and should not be treated as morally equivalent to opposition to large-scale state-sanctioned murder. To say that the two positions should be given equal weight is to demean the name of reasoned debate. This is not a culture issue. It is a human rights issue. (Historical note: The Dyer AntiLynching Bill never passed. The Senate apologized in 2005 for its failure to pass it and other anti-lynching measures.) Rebecca Maxfield ’13 March 5 erik stayton
correction Due to editing errors, an article in Monday’s Herald (“Brown partners with renowned Cape Cod lab,” March 8), the speaker of the quote, “Among the scientists at MBL, there are some who are ‘not involved, not interested,’ ” was incorrectly identified as Christopher Neill, the director of Brown’s partnership with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. In fact, Professor of Biology Mark Bertness was the speaker. The article also took out of context a statement by Hugh Ducklow, head of MBL’s Ecosystems Center, that there were “lots of other intellectual reasons” for the partnership, despite the two institutions’ different cultures. Bertness was making a distinction between intellectual and financial reasons for the partnership. The article also incorrectly attributed the information that the program’s students spend two years at Brown and the rest of their graduate studies at MBL to Charles Rosenthal P’88 P’95. In fact, Neill was the source of this information. The Herald regrets the errors.
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The write way A long-planned effort to step up enforcement of the University’s writing competency requirement got off to a rocky start last semester. The Herald reported in September that the Office of the Dean of the College had been screening incoming students’ letters to advisers without informing students. At the time, we opined that this policy was unnecessarily misleading and constituted a serious violation of privacy. Fortunately, last week, an e-mail to students from Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron took a big step towards clarifying the nature of the writing requirement and making transparent the relevant enforcement mechanisms. Brown has expected students to show evidence of writing skill in order to graduate since the 1800s. Given the importance of clear writing to all disciplines, it is not surprising that this requirement was the only one that survived through the adoption of the New Curriculum in 1969. Dean Bergeron’s e-mail signals not so much a change to the substance of the writing requirement as such, but rather the introduction of several practical measures to ensure that the Brown degree continues to certify recipients as writers. Starting next fall, writing-intensive courses will receive a special designation on Banner and in the course catalogue. While students will not be required to take these courses, students who do enroll will be able to offer concrete evidence that they have worked on their writing while at Brown. Additionally, the class of 2013 and subsequent classes will benefit from the development of Advising SideKick, an online portfolio where students can compile written work and share it with their adviser. Finally, the Banner system will be updated so that professors can flag students whose writing is subpar. Professors have always had the option to point out students who seem
to need additional writing help, but now they will be able to do so electronically when they submit final grades for a course. In communicating these new steps to students, Dean Bergeron’s forthrightness is greatly appreciated. More importantly, we applaud her and the College Curriculum Council for devising creative ways to assess writing quality across the student body without threatening students’ freedom under the New Curriculum. Going forward, we hope these new practices will engender a small but noticeable shift in Brown’s academic culture. Students should now be completely convinced that writing is a critical skill to be refined and honed over the course of four years, and faculty advisers must make more of an effort to read some of their advisees’ written work. Towards this latter objective, the Advising SideKick can start to play an integral role. In describing ASK, Dean Bergeron’s letter notes that concentration advisers will evaluate students’ portfolios when they approve students for graduation. However, if the University wants to use ASK to its fullest potential, it should expect concentration advisers to be reviewing students’ writing well before the point of clearance for graduation. Indeed, the ASK system makes possible a more developed adviser-advisee dialogue on writing. It is troublesome that a students graduating before 2013 could do so without having their concentration adviser read a single piece of their writing. Nonetheless, we are hopeful that things are going in a positive direction. Editorials are written by The Herald’s editorial page board. Send comments to editorials@browndailyherald.com.
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Opinions The Brown Daily Herald
Tuesday, March 9, 2010 | Page 7
B.S. about B.A.s ETHAN TOBIAS Opinions Columnist Will Wray’s ’10 column (“B.A. — D.O.A.”, March 5) makes the case against higher education for those who cannot afford it and are not brilliant enough to deserve meritbased financial aid. He argues that a B.A. is essentially an overpriced tool for businesses to screen applicants, and dismisses the idea of government subsidies promoting college education. I object. A college education is an essential part of your intellectual growth. It teaches you how to think, analyze and be critical of what you read and hear in the media. It makes beginning a new job easy, not because you already know the requisite skill set, but because you already know how to learn. Furthermore, spending time at college provides an opportunity for academic growth. Many people, especially at Brown, end up pursuing studies they would never have imagined in high school. College opens students up to ways of thinking and a set of knowledge that they would never have thought to look into on their own. You cannot replace real live professors and peers with books. As much as books can teach us, they do not hold office hours and they cannot answer our questions when we are confused. Books do not provide hands-on knowledge. As anyone who has ever read a
laboratory procedure knows, it is always a lot easier to actually be doing the lab — motor learning is key. More importantly, even if it were possible to get an education on the cheap at the library, that sort of learning will inevitably have limits. How would someone go about picking which books to read? I imagine that most people would just tend to read books that they have heard of, restricting their potential to explore subjects and material that they do not even realize that they don’t know.
skimp on siblings’ educations in order to afford schools like Brown. For many of these families, any government assistance through loans or grants can make a big difference. There are surely many students with great potential who lack the opportunities and motivation to excel in high school. Even Wray’s example, Albert Einstein, earned poor marks in many subjects, and failed his initial college entrance exams. College provides late bloomers like him a chance to finally find themselves and accomplish amazing things. What a shame
What a shame it will be if the would-be-solver of global warming were to end up filing paper work or flipping hamburgers? Furthermore, if millions of students suddenly made a run on the libraries, the government — and ultimately the taxpayer — would have to increase library budgets to make up for the shortfall. Wray’s claim that financial aid will ensure that all the poor geniuses still get to college misses a rather large number of students who fall into a sort of donut hole. Their parents make enough money to support their education — but only just enough. They cannot qualify for financial aid, and yet they will need to take out loans, do work study, sacrifice on home improvement and vacations and even
it will be if the would-be solver of global warming were to end up filing paperwork or flipping hamburgers. One of Wray’s biggest issues with government subsidies for higher education seems to be the image of hard-earned taxpayer money being used to turn colleges into country clubs. The only basis Wray provides is the tale of a spa-like recreational center at the University of Missouri, where “students chill in the hot tub or splash in a lazy river surrounded by palm trees and a rocky waterfall while waiters serve poolside wraps, smoothies and protein shakes.” But as Wray even admits, “There is
no explicit connection between tax subsidies and (the) palatial sports complex.” Many universities receive contributions with strings attached; the funds for projects like this rec center often could never be used for any other purpose. Finally, Wray provides one of the greater indictments of his own proposed plan to slash funds for millions of students’ higher education: “It may smack of injustice.” You bet it does. The end result of cutting taxpayersupported education is the destruction of any semblance of equal opportunity. The rich will dominate society, while many highly qualified individuals will lose out because they happened to be born into circumstances beyond their control. A liberal education should not be the luxury of a select few. It has the potential to expand mindsets, encourage critical thinking skills and develop the natural talents of untold numbers of people. By cutting education funding for millions of Americans, the government effectively robs the country of its future, destroying the seeds of progress before they have a chance to grow. There really is no better investment in long term economic growth than ensuring access to higher education for all. Let the government funds flow.
Ethan Tobias ’12 wants you to pay for him to lounge on the lazy river. He can be reached at Ethan_Tobias@brown.edu.
Being truly collegial SEAN QUIGLEY Opinions Columnist Seeking a way to keep brick-and-mortar colleges and universities relevant, in an age when online institutions threaten to make the attainment of a bachelor’s degree substantially easier and more convenient, David Sheffield ’11 (“What could Brown do for you?”, Feb. 25) proposed several recommendations for bettering the Brown experience. In essence, he argued that Brown should create a more obviously personalized system, possibly through the use of tutorials, with recorded lectures to supplement the private meetings — and to maintain a reasonable schedule for professors. Incorporating the tutorial system is simply a phenomenal idea, which Sheffield was adroit in mentioning and defending. It not only provides that personal, collegial experience impossible in an online setting, but also would resurrect that archaic idea that a college is a place for controlled chaos. Outside of a few obligations, the college student should be free to float, as it were. I have a friend at Princeton who, currently studying abroad at Oxford, unreservedly praises its system of tutorials. More or less, he told me, his only requirement is a weekly paper addressing the week’s readings, which he must discuss with his tutor at an appointed time. He is also encouraged to attend the lectures of a visiting professor — which are public lectures, distinguishable from a Brown course’s stan-
dard lectures — to provide more discussion material. However, meeting with his one tutor is essentially the only class component. Unlike the Brown system, a tutorial system seems to premise that learning is chiefly acquired through reading texts and writing responses thereto. But, with the use of visiting lectures, one also develops a healthy respect for the more passive activity of listening to scholars in a given field. Structuring one’s time and education at university, then, falls under the purview of the individual student, in conjunction with any groups he might form with those in the same
As Cardinal John Henry Newman — an Oxford-educated, Anglican clergyman who eventually turned to Rome — contended in his book, “The Idea of a University,” the fundamental purpose of that medieval creation is to produce a learned, discerning person. At college, he wrote, “A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation and wisdom.” Newman further argued that, in its purest form, an education in the liberal arts is meant to inculcate that knowledge is worth having and pursuing merely for its own sake.
David Sheffield ’11 offered wonderful recommendations for those who prefer the physical college to the virtual, but his heart was not in it. discipline. In such a system, education, as in times past, becomes an activity of genuine self-ownership; obligations are minimal. Enforcing classroom obligations, many have rightly argued, is a rather pedestrian way to approach college learning. Preparatory schools — even most common secondary schools — are the proper place to have desks and teachers, not colleges. No, at a college one should train his mind, engage in a learned community and become so consumed with ideas that even sleeping in a bed becomes too practical a notion.
One does not, or at any rate should not, obtain an undergraduate degree merely to increase one’s credentials and opportunities, or even to acquire certain facts and details. One goes to college to engage, with others pursuing that same sort of liberal mind, in a moral community the indelible mark of which will never fade. In short, there really could not be anything more important for Brown, or any college that grants bachelor’s degrees, than to support the vitality of its undergraduate life. And that conception of a college, I think,
may be what Sheffield missed in his treatment of this issue. He offered wonderful recommendations for those — such as myself, and presumably anyone committed to the traditional liberal arts — who prefer the physical college to the virtual, but his heart was not in it. Certainly this may be a result of his focus on the sciences while at Brown, but I hold that it is more likely the result of the economical way in which most modern thinkers evaluate. Our culture is, as Nietzsche lamented when appraising the Anglo-Saxon peoples of his time, rather obsessed with shop-keeping and ledgers. In any transaction, one mark on the debit side necessarily requires an equal mark on the credit side, so many think. Yet is that truly how an education should proceed? Clearly it was not the guiding principle at the genesis of the modern university. Even in this day, the stalwarts such as myself uphold the idea that education is emphatically not concerned with utilitarian ends. One should not receive an education to earn a higher income; to compete with the Chinese; to get a job in Manhattan; or to devise destructive war machines for our federal leviathan. An education at a physical, traditional campus is its own end. While Sheffield may not entirely agree with that sentiment, his proposed solutions for maintaining the uniqueness of brick-and-mortar colleges and universities are laudable. Let us hope, however, that we have a reason to do so.
Sean Quigley ’10 adores the medieval period more than your average Protestant.
Today The Brown Daily Herald
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COE interns to work overseas
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5 comics
c a l e n da r tomorrow, March 10
5:30 p.m. — New Perspective in Arabic and Comparative Literature, Maddock Alumni Center, Brian Room
7:00 P.M. — Human Trafficking Awareness Week, Film & Discussion, List 2nd floor
7:00 p.m. — Thinking Critically About Death Row, Wilson 102
8:30 p.m. — MAPS Study Away Panel, J. Walter Wilson 411
Cabernet Voltaire | Abe Pressman
menu Sharpe Refectory
Verney-Woolley Dining Hall
Lunch — Linguini with Tomato and Basil, Chourico with Potatoes and Onions, Carrots in Parsley Sauce
Lunch — Beef Stew, Tomato Quiche, Nacho Bar
Dinner — Vegetable Frittata, Carne Gizado, Asian Noodle Bar
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Tuesday, March 9, 2010
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Today, March 9
to m o r r o w
R.I. voters lack confidence
t h e n e w s i n i m ag e s
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to day
Dot Comic | Eshan Mitra and Brendan Hainline
Dinner — Chicken Pot Pie, Vegan Stuffed Acorn Squash, Broccoli Cuts with Lemon Sauce
crossword Fruitopia | Andy Kim
Hippomaniac | Mat Becker
Island Republic | Kevin Grubb
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