The underage drinking law isn't perfect. It could use some simple reforms, like the reduction of punishments in favor of treatment. But it has saved lives. A lower drinking age has deadly consequences for young Americans.
I hope that you, as a constitutional scholar, remember that you are placing confidence in the same constitutional framework that today legalizes slavery or involuntary servitude of people as punishment for a crime and that has led the United States to currently have the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world. These laws have been designed to protect you and me, as white people. I ask you to think of people before you think of laws.
Another Bicker season has come and gone, leaving some students overjoyed and some crushed. For some of those students, bickering was a way to increase their social status, to be part of a club that everyone wants to get into. During the year, the thought of Bicker nags constantly in the recesses of their minds. Students actively try to hang out with members of clubs, even at the expense of their old friend groups. Every social interaction with a member of a selective club is just that more important, that more consequential. But I’m willing to wager that most students who bickered, like me, were just looking to be able to eat with their friends.
On a campus like Princeton's, where we are all so concerned with grades, internships, and jobs, friendships are yet another source of stress. Who to talk to? How to talk to them? At what event? These questions ran through my mind all of last year. Every time I sat at a meal table with upperclassmen, I silently hoped that they would talk to me. They usually didn’t — they probably didn’t even think to do so — but had they asked me how I was or what I wanted to major in or even what my name was, I wouldn’t have felt that I was sitting at a table for one, full of other people.
As you call on the University to do, we condemn violence and hatred of all kinds. The three of us and the offices we represent work daily to protect the rights and safety of immigrants, transgender people, and people of color (and those whose identities intersect all of these categories and others).
Athletes on our campus should be encouraged to embrace their free speech rights to protest, rather than to separate their athletic career from their beliefs. While Trump encouraged NFL owners to fire protestors, the administration should commit to protect student-athlete protesters and make these commitments clear.
To sum things up: if you’ve ever wondered why Princeton drops $700 a piece on lawn chairs, while still mandating that certain students work campus jobs and not others, the U.S. News rankings may offer some explanation.
The key distinction to be made is that the term whiteness refers to a construct, not a color. When saying that whiteness is the root of racism, it is not a castigation of all Caucasian people. Rather, it is the recognition and repudiation of a negative ideology founded in the imbalance of powers between races. Whiteness is far more about superiority than it is about color.
At the beginning of each year, Outdoor Action encourages freshmen to, "choose to be challenged." It means that students should actively seek out difficult situations that push them outside of their comfort zone. Now, I'm asking that all students choose to challenge themselves in the upcoming academic year. A liberal arts education is meant to expose students to bold new ideas. Take advantage of it.
