University should stop funding The Tory, ending biased 'Rant'
I met with President Tilghman over a week ago to discuss what could be done about the callously homophobic and neo-colonialist statements made in the November issue of The Princeton Tory. I am apparently an enemy of free speech.
To be blunt, The Tory is not a good magazine, because time and time again it runs articles that have shockingly little to do with facts that exist in the real world. Furthermore, the opening section called "The Rant" is cowardly in its anonymity and makes offensive statements every month under the guise of editorial opinion. The problem with "The Rant" is that it is simply ranting; it does not serve the glorious purpose for a free press, "challeng[ing] the beliefs of others and hav[ing] the opportunity to explain [one's] ethics," that Aileen Nielson championed in The 'Prince' on Nov. 25. It only serves to insult some people while allowing the writer to feel smug about having written something controversial to further her moral cause.
It comes down to this: If The Tory is receiving University monies, the University has every right to pull funding from a magazine publishing opinions it does not endorse. If the magazine is completely self-funded, then there's nothing the University can do about it. The editors and contributors to The Tory need to be told by random "abnormal and immoral" gay guys like me that I don't object to their publishing their opinions, but only ask that they do it with decorum. Opinions need to have a name attached to them, so we know who we're debating with. The goal should be constructing a logical argument and not simply venting frustration over the liberalization of America. The facts in the stories need to be checked rigorously, because the truth of the matter is that championing a cause, no matter how deeply one believes in it, does not excuse not getting all the facts before an article goes to print. So why exactly did Aileen Nielsen write an editorial defending The Tory, in which she apologizes three times for not actually having read The Tory? Arthur Dudney '05
Offering views without analysis does not promote healthy debate
I am writing in response to the two Op-Ed pieces that appeared in the Nov. 26 edition of the 'Prince': Eric Harkleroad's "Stats Exaggerate U.S. Gun Violence" and Aileen Neilsen's "Protecting freedom of the press." I found both of these pieces extremely troubling, especially in light of the current debate on campus intellectualism — a topic that has been often addressed in recent weeks on the very same page.
In both pieces, the authors comment on issues which they clearly have made virtually no effort to understand. In Mr. Harkleroad's assault on the firearm homicide statistics used by Michael Moore in his film "Bowling for Columbine," he refers not to the film itself, but to the film's trailer which is available on line.
If he had actually seen the film, he might find some answers as to where these "mysterious, unexplained figures" come from. You see, in a trailer it is permissible to use such numbers for "shock value." It is a way of getting people to see the film.
Mr. Harkle-road's own statistical analysis — which he bases on Interpol statistics available online — leads him to conclude that Mr. Moore "falsified" the numbers in order to further his liberal agenda, to "make the U.S. look bad," and to deprive me of the right to brandish a pistol outside of Mr. Harkleroad's dorm room window. I have no doubt that statistics like these are extremely subjective, and can be taken from a wide range of sources, whether credible or not. The point is that even after his own analysis, Mr. Harkleroad concludes that "gun violence is a problem in the U.S." That, I think, is all that Moore is trying to say.
Ms. Neilsen's piece is similarly troubling. She addresses the issue of whether campus publications like The Tory should be denied funding at the request of students who are offended by the material they print. However, she is quick to admit that "I didn't read the Tory and don't know what the article they objected to was about."
Furthermore, her basic point that people should be able to distinguish between what they disagree with and what they are truly offended by is undermined by the fact that she herself fails to do just that — she felt compelled to complain, publicly, about students who want The Tory's funding taken away (without ever having read The Tory or even the specific piece that prompted the ordeal) but doesn't adequately explain why she finds this behavior so upsetting. By her circular logic, which places freedom of expression above all else and yet insists that it be measured and reasonable in response to the opinions of others, the students who complained about the Tory were doing the right thing. If they weren't, then she has no right to criticize their criticism of others. And so on.
The point is this: if you want others to take your opinions seriously, it requires more than merely opening your mouth and seeing what emerges. In a healthy intellectual climate, people take the time to analyze ALL of the relevant viewpoints before offering their own. In fact, I would argue that this is what distinguishes "intellectualism" from its antithesis. These two authors boldly offer their own views on the issues they address, but without more than a nod towards the subject they are addressing. This is symptomatic of an extremely poor intellectual environment — one in which everyone has something to say, but no one actually takes the time to "do the reading." I happen to be disgusted by many of the things written in The Tory, but I never comment on them without actually doing the reading. It is something we all must do if we want to be taken seriously outside of our own immediate world. John McGill '04
SCORE's 'unambitious' start should not mar program's future
In response to Mimi Chubb's story "Seniors logging into SCORE face early-morning shutdown" (Nov. 26, online edition), I wish to shed some light on what happened.
SCORE's outage was due to a configuration problem with one of the servers, which resulted in seniors not being able to submit their course choices when course enrollment began at 10 a.m. The problem was noticed immediately by our technical team, who resolved the issue in short order. SCORE was down for a total of 30 minutes. This, however, does not excuse the inconvenience that some members of the senior class experienced. SCORE was back up at 10:30 a.m., and by 1 p.m., 441 seniors had enrolled in courses. The maximum number of students signed on to SCORE at any one time peaked at 550 with no apparent response time and/or system performance issues. At the end of the first day of online course selection, 705 seniors had enrolled in spring term courses, generating 2137 course enrollments.
Help with SCORE is available in a variety of forms, including FAQ's, online Help, and a Tutorial, all available on the SCORE home page. Students should also contact the OIT Help Desk at 8-HELP (8-4357) for technical assistance. Additionally, the Registrar's Office has staff available in the Armory Building (behind Jadwin Hall) for students who need individual help. The hours at the Armory are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on weekdays, Nov. 25 to Dec. 13.
These sources of help are publicized on the SCORE web site, and were emailed to students on Nov. 8.
Yes, online course selection got off to a less than graceful start. However, we remain committed to making SCORE a success for students. Robert Bromfield Deputy Registrar
Why a Moratorium for Student-Athletes?
Last June, the presidents of the eight Ivy League schools voted unanimously to require each of their intercollegiate teams to identify at least seven weeks during the academic year when there would be no required or coach-supervised activities. At that same meeting, the presidents agreed to reduce the number of students in each class recruited for football from 35 to 30.
The Prince recently published a column by the Varsity Student-Athlete Advisory Committee protesting the "moratorium." I thought it might be helpful to clarify what it is and explain why it was adopted.
First, contrary to what the students wrote, it does not amount to nearly one-third of the academic year. For the purposes of this requirement, the academic year begins with freshman orientation and ends with the spring semester exam period. The seven weeks do not need to be contiguous. The only weeks that cannot be counted are vacation weeks. Reading period and exam weeks can be counted. Most sports have had no difficulty identifying an appropriate seven weeks. In the case of crew, which faces special circumstances because of its year-round nature, the length of the moratorium has been reduced from 49 days to 33.
Second, the moratorium does not prohibit any student from working out individually. What is prohibited is required activity or activity in which the coaches are involved.
Why did the presidents adopt such a rule? As I wrote recently to the captains of the crew teams, the Ivy League was founded almost 50 years ago by schools that shared common educational values and a belief that, under proper conditions, athletics can add significant value to a student's overall educational experience. The moratorium grew out of concerns about the overall educational experience of our student-athletes—about whether the League's policies were allowing them to achieve a proper balance between their athletic and academic pursuits and to take proper advantage of the extracurricular and cultural opportunities that are available to them outside of athletics.
Why does the moratorium apply only to athletes? The answer is that studies, including a very thorough one at Princeton by Professor Deborah Prentice and then-Professor Nancy Cantor of the Department of Psychology in the mid 1990s, have shown that athletes at the Ivy schools (and Princeton is no exception) are distinguished from other students by two characteristics. First, they spend approximately twice as much time on a single extracurricular activity as any other student group (for example, students who play in the orchestra or write for the Prince) and consequently they engage in fewer extracurricular activities overall. Second, student-athletes as a whole underperform academically, based on what would be expected given their academic qualifications upon matriculation. This finding comes out of the Bowen-Shulman book, The Game of Life, as well as an independent study by our Faculty Committee on Athletics last year.
What concerned the presidents was not just that this underperformance by student-athletes exists, but that it has been growing steadily in recent decades. The data make it very clear that if we ignore the trends and allow our policies to be driven by the practices of other schools that have very different academic and extracurricular aspirations for their students, the Ivy League will eventually reach a place where our student-athletes have a substantively different educational experience than other students on our campuses. We all recognize that each individual experience is different, and that there certainly are athletes who perform exceedingly well academically and who find time to participate in other activities, but this doesn't alleviate the overall concern. The moratorium is an effort by the League to say that we have every intention of continuing to support strong and competitive athletic programs, but we are not prepared to accept a degree of "professionalism" among our student athletes that risks their becoming a different class of student.
Some have argued that because the Ivy League does not have athletic scholarships, students have the option to reduce their level of participation or to quit a sport if they find that the demands are too great. While this certainly is more likely to happen at a school without athletic scholarships, the evidence is that even at these schools it is difficult, in part because of commitments that students feel to their coaches and their teams. Reducing time or quitting is psychologically a difficult thing for a competitive athlete to do.
Does the moratorium reduce the freedom of student athletes to make choices about how they spend their time? It does, but this is not inconsistent with other University policies. Students cannot, for example, take courses exclusively in one subject they are passionate about, or elect not to meet the University's distribution requirements. We limit academic choices because we believe that broadly sampling the liberal arts curriculum is educationally important. Likewise we want student-athletes to have the opportunity to sample the university's extracurricular and intellectual menus more broadly than they can when they are devoting so much time to a single extracurricular activity. We seek to create conditions that will maximize the opportunities for our student-athletes—indeed, for all our students—to be full participants in all aspects of University life.
Some have suggested that while academic underperformance may be a problem elsewhere, it is not a problem at Princeton. Unfortunately, data collected last year by the Faculty Committee on Athletics at Princeton, as well as data from 1995 that have been analyzed by former President Bill Bowen for an update on The Game of Life, show clearly that this is not the case. Underperformance by student athletes is a concern at all of the Ivy schools.
We have high expectations for our athletic programs. We expect them reach for excellence, but in a way that enriches the overall educational mission of the University and allows student athletes to take full advantage of the academic and other opportunities that Princeton offers. The moratorium was intended to restore some degree of balance in the demands placed on student athletes, in a way that still allows our teams to be fully competitive within the League and beyond. The Ivy presidents will be carefully monitoring its impact to be sure that it is achieving its intended effect. President Shirley Tilghman
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