Letters to the Editor

Response to an evaluation of campus intellectualism debate

This Monday marks the beginning of a dialogue about intellectualism on campus. After some fun debating, the U-Council is going to get serious and "assess the problem." I'll be interested to hear what they come up with, because I just don't understand how they are defining as "intellectualism."

The U-Council has a detailed list of complaints: 1. There are too few "vigorous" debates in seminars and precepts. 2. Students fail to invest in and critically evaluate course materials. 3. Office hours are underutilized. 4. There is no relaxed, unstructured intellectual life on campus. 5. There are too few intellectual topics in dinner conversations. 6. There is poor undergraduate attendance at public lectures 7. There is an undergraduate ethic that prizes resume-building rather than learning.

This list mentions two very different things: required work (1-2) and personal pursuits (3-7). Many people probably think that they are deeply intertwined issues, thinking something along the lines that a student who is not interested in coursework is probably not academically interested outside of class, either. Therefore academic interest inside and outside of the classroom go hand-in-hand.

Now, I realize that people might want better discussions in precept and at the dinner table. However, I fail to see why they are the same problem. They seem to be fairly distinct problems to me: There are some activities that students must do, and there are some activities in which students choose to participate. Yes, it might be that we are not as good as we should be at both of these activities, but I don't see why that is symptomatic of a single larger problem.

Given recent editorials by John Lurz '03 and others, I suspect that the intellectualism debate does not have anything to do with fixing problems (1-2). Rather, the real issue that Lurz and others are trying to address must have something to do with students not motivating themselves to pursue academic interests in their free time (4-7).

Lurz criticizes our universities for being "under the yoke of bourgeois society," which hampers intellectual passion and makes the university experience an essentially vocational one. According to him, there is a lack of intellectualism because people do not pursue academics for the sake of academics, or at least not as much as they should. I think I can see where he is coming from: Academics started out as a completely voluntary activity. People pursued academic questions because it was a good thing to be educated, or for fun (or something like that). Back then, education itself didn't get you much at all: Wealth was gained through inheritances, so education wasn't a gateway to a better life. Back then, all academics were "intellectual" in the sense that they were self-motivated.

But then something happened: Education became a commodity. And once education became something that was worth money in the business world, it was all downhill for Lurz's academic utopia. Fast-forward a few years and you get Princeton students running to Wall Street faster than you can say "Hervé Chapelier."

Most students have seen "Office Space." Recall Jennifer Aniston's issues with wearing "flair" buttons with twitty phrases as a waitress at TGI Friday's. For those of you who have not seen it, I will summarize: The manager notes that Jennifer is only wearing 15 buttons (pieces of "flair"), which is the minimum that an employee must wear. The manager asks her why she is doing just the minimum. Jennifer responds that she doesn't care for the buttons but if she must wear more, she will. The manager reiterates that the choice belongs to her and encourages her to "express herself" through the buttons. Jennifer asks, "If you want me to wear more flair, why don't you just make it a rule?"

Any attempt to reinstate Lurz's academic utopia would be playing the same role as the TGI Friday's manager: We don't require that you be academic outside of the classroom; we just want you to express yourself. You want to express yourself, right?

Why should students dole out their free time according to a rubric of academic importance that might not be important to them? What I choose to do, having satisfied all academic requirements, is a passion of mine that lies beyond rational censure. I've done — by stipulation — everything that I have been asked to do. So what more can be asked of me? Surely I cannot be censured for doing "nonintellectual" activities in my free time any more than I can censured for preferring vanilla ice cream over chocolate.

If Lurz accepts the fact that some do not care about academics for the sake of academics, and I assume that he must, then I just don't understand what he is asking us to do. Is he trying to motivate those "nonintellectuals," those who are not interested in academics for the sake of academics? Then he is asking, in essence, that a person be interested in something that is not interesting to him or her. That's absurd.

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The U-Council is going to try to fix the dearth of intellectualism on campus, and I really don't know what they mean by that. However, I have a sinking suspicion that they are defining intellectualism along Lurz's lines. I hope this is not so. Tom Pastorius '03

Re-evaluating the meaning of statistics on U.S. homicides

Eric Harkleroad's opinion piece "Stats exaggerate U.S. gun violence" is hardly a rigorous scholarly study of gun violence. Mr. Harkleroad's attack on Michael Moore, who is, granted, no Princeton physics student, is misplaced. Whereas Mr. Moore failed to cite his sources and to indicate his units (showing blatant disregard for not only the Honor Code, but the staple of academic research!), Mr. Harkleroad in his statistical account compared apples with oranges, failing to distinguish between firearm homicides and overall homicides. It seems ironic that Mr. Harkleroad would equate the two as equal, an indication, perhaps, that as Americans we tend to equate homicides with guns. Why is this so? Perhaps it is because most homicides in the United States ARE caused by guns, the very point Mr. Moore was trying to make in the documentary "Bowling for Columbine."

I call your attention to the statistics compiled by the "International Journal of Epidemiology" as displayed at http://www.guncite-.com/gun_control_gcgvintl.html. Five percent of homicides in the US are firearm homicides. The Journal of Epidemiology statistics, though slightly older, nevertheless demonstrate the difference between homicide and firearm homicide rates. In France, 36 percent of homicides are firearm homicides; Germany, 19 percent; UK, 8 percent; Australia, 24 percent; Canada, 35 percent; and Japan, 3 percent. Countries such as Switzerland with very lax gun control laws see a much higher percentage of homicides resulting from firearms (44 percent) than countries with a stringent gun control law, like the UK (8 percent). Clearly, Mr. Harkleroad is "profoundly biased in favor" of gun use. Mr. Harkleroad raises petty concerns about Mr. Moore's units: "Do they represent homicides per year? Per week?" As a student of the sciences, Mr. Harkleroad should realize these questions clearly don't matter: The ratio between two countries' firearm homicide rates per week, when each is multiplied by 52 to determine the rate per year, remains the same. As for the last question, "Are they normalized to control for differences in population among various countries?" Mr. Harkleroad makes an excellent point. If Germany were a small country of 8 million people, their firearm homicide rate would be equal to that of the United States. But it's not. It's a country 10 times that size, and thus with a firearm homicide rate one-tenth of the United States.

Surely, Mr. Harkleroad does not believe that because Japan has half the population of the United States, this accounts for having 1/285 of the firearm homicide rate! In 1992, the National Institute of Justice conducted the Kansas City Experiment, only 13 miles across the river from Mr. Harkleroad's hometown, where police removed 65 percent more illegal guns than usual, and the gun crime rate was cut in half. Nevertheless, despite Mr. Harkleroad's biased, sheltered view of violence in America, he is correct that the statistics were exaggerated: America's firearm homicide rate is only 109 times greater than that of Japan, not 285. It is important that 'Prince' readers "not take such numbers, and the conclusions drawn from them, at face value." Ian McHenry '05