I urge you to read past these headlines and analyze the content for yourselves. Don’t let your conclusions be made for you.
It is time for a change to Princeton’s co-op policy.
With Princeton’s transition to digital classes, we lost the physicality of the studio, and all the experiences that come with it. We are still expected to make models and drawings, which may compensate for what we have lost academically, but that doesn't account for the Murray-Dodge runs and the scavenging through leftover catering from a special conference or guest lecture.
I realized that my friend’s silence wasn’t about me. And, more importantly, that everyone “hurts,” i.e. responds to trauma, differently. My response to this situation was to reach out to friends. I didn’t realize that my friend’s coping mechanism was to stop reaching out altogether.
Senior columnist Liam O’Connor discusses how disparities in high school education affect students’ academic performance — and recognition — in college.
The disruption of life-plans — short-term, long-term, and everything in between — can be painful and harmful in its own way. We should not minimize the pain that students are going through right now. Such reductions in well-being ought to be recognized for what they are.
Many academic awards select winners using predetermined criteria. Committees evaluate students’ accomplishments on the same abstract scale. This approach seems egalitarian: everyone plays on the same field. In practice, though, it ignores substantial cultural divides between fields of study that affect class arrangements, study habits, relationships with professors, the amount of free time they have, and how they spend it.
We must learn to see each other, all of us, as people whose lives could just as easily be our own, whose destinies are linked together. We must be willing to cease prejudice toward other cultures and countries. We must learn to see “communalism” as separate from Communism.
As I think of the thousands of black people mourning loved ones now, I doubt pointing to institutional disregard and devaluation provides them with any solace. But by addressing and changing those systemic patterns, we can help prevent others from enduring the same treatment.
It’s high time to stop using GPAs as a rigid measure of undergraduates’ talents.
This public health crisis has required us to ask all Princeton undergraduates to do a difficult thing: to complete their semesters online, and, in the case of our seniors, to forgo experiences that they had anticipated throughout their time here.
We hesitated to write you because we feel you've done an outstanding job leading the University, and with the gravity of the pandemic backdrop, because you obviously are facing many unforeseen and serious challenges every day. However, we feel compelled to reach out to you on this issue because we feel strongly that Princeton has made the wrong decision on not permitting its students to withdraw and come back next spring.
Teaching styles, grading disparities, high school backgrounds, and departmental politics all play roles in who’s crowned Old Nassau’s top students. I will explore each of these factors in depth for subsequent columns. But first, I’ll give a brief overview of who at Princeton is winning the nine prestigious academic awards to show why their results are so baffling.
Like it or not, grades are a way by which society evaluates us, but Princeton can alleviate the burden in this unusual semester by giving us the full ability, through an extended PDF deadline, to choose which grades we reveal while navigating the challenges of online learning.
As we eventually negotiate the aftermath of this crisis, this data should be a moment of reckoning that motivates reparative and preventative measures to support the health of people of color, pandemic or not.
This year, when we are all restricted from leaving our homes and passing through the threshold of our doorways into the world, let us stand up despite our isolation, anxiety and despair, and open our doors and our hearts with singing.
The responsibility is sole and simple, and that is to vote for Joe Biden. It is not only your duty as an American, but also your duty to the future.
In an effort to comprehend the exponential growth and the resulting large numbers associated with coronavirus, I have furnished some heuristic analogies that I hope will help display the full expanse of the disease more concretely. If we take the time to comprehend the intuition-defying numbers of confirmed and new cases of the coronavirus, these numbers, while terribly disheartening, should become more manageable.
We must remember that the crisis we face is societal, not biological. Its solution lies not in moral principles, but in political struggle.
The compromises we need to make aren’t always optimal. But ultimately, by living the way we are now and through the sacrifices that others are making, we can keep things bright for the future.
