Let’s settle this. Did Rosen do something wrong, or did the students overreact?
When I look at myself on a good day, I don’t search for faults. I see an attractive, funny, smart young woman who enjoys life. But when I look at whatever goes wrong in my life, I see only faults. I see an ugly, stupid failure who ruins everything she touches — even when that’s just not true.
As an anthropologist teaching in the Princeton Writing Program whose courses regularly involve offensive material, I would like to weigh in on the recent controversy surrounding Lawrence Rosen’s use of the N-word in his class. In short, I write in support of the students who walked out on Rosen.
Letter to the Editor: I am hereby skipping my morning run to write a brief response to Professor Rouse's Feb. 8 letter.
In her February 8th letter to the editor, Professor Carolyn Rouse offered a pedagogy for Rosen’s class as contextual background for why certain students should not have walked out. Unfortunately, her letter entirely misses the point as to why the students walked out of class.
I write to provide important context to the events reported on Feb. 7 in the Daily Princetonian story “Students walk out of anthropology lecture after professor uses the word “n****r.” Like every semester, professor Lawrence Rosen started the class by breaking a number of taboos in order to get the students to recognize their emotional response to cultural symbols. Rosen was fighting battles for women, Native Americans, and African-Americans before these students were born.
Princeton Pro-Life (PPL) is a campus group. The President may be reached at acavasos@princeton.edu.
At Princeton, another year has come and gone, and with it the cycle of all our peculiar rituals. This week, a significant portion of the junior and senior classes gather in big mansions behind locked doors (they’re locked: I’ve checked) to cast judgment on a significant portion of the sophomore class. They will display the sophomore’s names and photos, hear the case for and against the social merits of each, and then, one by one, vote on whether or not to admit the sophomore in question into their mansion.
Rather than slotting “bad sex” as unavoidable, we need to take it as a symbol of how society has stigmatized female sexuality. Blanket advice, telling women to better use verbal cues and just say stop, is not the solution. It unfairly places all the blame on the victim. If we want to address sexual assault, we need to start by examining our society’s toxic sexual culture and the role we play in upholding it.
Anything can go viral at the click of a button. Posting pictures like these can have grave consequences in someone’s future professional and personal lives. Just four years ago, a lewd photo from a Tiger Inn party created a national scandal for two Princeton students. As the Street’s holiest weekend approaches, I urge all of my classmates to exercise caution when posting about their late-night escapades on social media.
We need more judges like Aquilina to stand up for silenced victims of sexual assault, when everyone else has left them behind.
A few weeks ago, Life Time Fitness, a Minnesota-based gym chain, made national news by announcing that it was going to eliminate all news channels from its TVs. Members still had the option of watching cable news networks on individual workout machines, but the large TVs in the gym showed lighter content from channels like HGTV or USA.
I propose the establishment of Mental Health Peers. Mental Health Peers will provide a concrete service in the University community by training students how to be friends in mental crisis. We will train our friends, classmates, and peers how to talk about mental health.
Poetry has been good to me in this: It is language, and perhaps one day I will speak. I do not know if time will reincarnate my voice into its own entity, or if one day my old age will legitimize my words and open up an unbridled spot for my voice.
The question is how to use the advantages of the scope and scale of the support for the referenda. The mass of the student body is critical. Utilizing the popular support of the referenda to start a collective bargaining process is our strongest position.
Three weeks is enough time to see the important people in one’s life, but not enough to fully slip into the routines of home again.
On-campus activism is highly needed and noble, but only a synthesis of on-campus and off-campus activism can destroy deep-seated inequality, exclusion, and hardship.
Instead, the administration has offered no timetable, writing only that the referenda “cannot take effect at this time.” Such oblique language makes me doubt that anything will be done.
Raising the standard of evidence plus lowering penalties seems to encourage cheating more than anything else. Honestly, the administration saved students from themselves.
Since it is almost certain that the University will not reverse its decision on the three referenda, students should move on and focus on how they can play a role in the formal process taking place to review the Honor System.
