If you care about the environment, if you want to even give us a fighting chance at mitigating climate change, I implore you to vote for Joe Biden this November.
Only a lucky few look back at their time at Princeton and do not wish that they had spent just a little bit more time savoring the experience. Even at Princeton, fortune favors “fools.”
It is important to heed what happens in the world — but prioritize your mental health above it all.
Instead of focusing on and spotlighting students, the University chose a reality television star.
This is a time for us to recognize just how hard all of us are working to stay afloat, and to reward that hard work with positive reinforcement and compassion. It would do us well to accept “the state of the world” as a valid reason for lethargy and shorthand for the multifaceted but difficult-to-explain circumstances that make it challenging for us to be our best selves right now—emotionally, socially, and academically.
In the United States, empathy has become a partisan value, when in fact it should be a human one. This is a national emergency, a national time of grief, and a national time of mobilization in and outside of government regardless of political leanings. Unfortunately, we have seen shaky measures at best because the question has become not, “What can the government do?” but rather, “Should the government do anything at all?”
When forums for entertainment become outlets of information — the kind of information necessary for political discourse and democratic society — original intent ceases to be relevant, or at least cedes being priority number one.
Biden’s performance, and the debate as a whole, offers a valuable lesson. The debate demonstrates not only why discourse cannot survive without restraint, but also why restraint can be a powerful tool to display moral character. As students forming Princeton University’s discourse, and as young adults shaping our own personal characters, we cannot minimize this lesson in restraint. Without it, the future we create is more likely to repeat the mistakes of the present.
When Wilson alleges that Princeton “bends over” backwards for the sake of anti-racist activists and leftist revisionists, he is fictionalizing a widely covered event for which he cares to neither learn of nor represent fairly.
Nevertheless, the expectations of a Princeton semester remain, intensified by the new shortened calendar.
We have suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths at the hands of this virus, and the way to respond to this suffering is not through irrational fear of those who may have been exposed, but rather compassion and understanding of their vulnerability.
Like puppetry, the government is the one pulling on the general public, whose own choice over the entertainment that they enjoy are now not theirs to make.
The lack of discourse around anti-Native racism at the University is paralleled by minimal representation and resources for people of Indigenous heritage at the University. Princeton has the fewest resources for Indigenous students of any Ivy League institution, with fewer than 0.2 percent of students identifying as American Indian or Alaska Native, no affinity spaces, and very few Indigenous faculty and staff.
2020 has obviously forced us all out of our comfort zone. It is time we take the courage to jump willingly and abandon the ships that are past the point of repair.
In the absence of peripheral community, how do we make Princeton meaningful? This issue, I hope, both poses that question and provides an answer.
Princeton can make a bold statement among universities that it does not only rely on awards or similarly narrow external metrics in making decisions about hiring and promotion. Instead, broader criteria could draw more professors from all different backgrounds, who can bring in new ideas, instruct and inspire the next generation of scholars, and help the University live up to its ideals.
As Princeton students, we must fulfill our University’s unofficial motto, “in the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity,” and know that it is not only our civic responsibility but our duty to vote this year. We are fortunate enough to attend school with the future leaders of this country; we must act like it.
So unless club leaders can find a meeting time that’s not just workable, but also comfortable for the whole group, they need to vary the meeting time by week to work with everyone’s schedule. And yes, sometimes that will include Americans waking up when they don’t want to be awake.
As an institution that is committed to admitting students from diverse backgrounds, Princeton has to be equally as committed to ensuring their success. Many parents of queer students are often painfully aware of the leverage they possess, in that their student’s ability to complete their education is based on their willingness to provide their financial information.
What should now be clear for conservative voters heading to the polls is this: Mitch McConnell is not supporting the President—he’s selling him out.
