Of the many metrics by which one can estimate the health of a society, one of the more interesting approaches is to compare the amount of public money spent on corrections versus how much is spent on higher education.
This is in response to the article Tickets in Mile High City scarce for MSU students (SN 3/20). Not only were tickets for MSU’s tournament games in Colorado available to the official team traveling party, players and coaches’ families and donors, but also to alumni and MSU students.
Here we are, five years later. It was on March 19, 2003, that President Bush ordered U.S. troops to invade Iraq under the pretense that former dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction. As the years went on, so did the reports of successes and failures, bombings and casualties.
Remember when college was about the free exchange of ideas and challenging pre-existing worldviews? Me neither.
If the Final Four were determined academically, things might be dramatically different, according to a new study from the University of Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport.
As many of you can probably tell by the tone of most of my columns, I do have a political bias. Yes, I’m a Democrat. In fact, I ran for office as a Democrat almost two years ago.
Well, well, well. Now the Democrats might need Michigan’s help. Our state and Florida — the only states punished by the Democratic National Committee for holding primaries before Feb. 5 — could be the tiebreaker for the now closely matched Democratic contenders, Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Barack Obama, D-Ill.
Fun stuff is happening in the nation’s highest court. On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard its first Second Amendment case in about 70 years. The nine justices will decide whether a Washington, D.C., handgun ban currently in effect is constitutional. Or, simply put, whether ordinary citizens have the right to keep a handgun in their home.
This in response to the music review by Matt Flint titled From the vault: ‘Sublime’ shouldn’t stand test of time (SN 3/17).
I wanted to take a minute to say thanks to Drew Neitzel for proving me wrong and playing absolutely great in the Big Ten Tournament. His passes were sharp and his shot was true, but most importantly he played with a relaxed confidence not seen all year.
Things are looking bleak once again for ASMSU, MSU’s undergraduate student government. Nigel Scarlett, ASMSU vice chairperson for external affairs, was arrested last week and charged with third-degree criminal sexual assault.
Imagine this. Geneva, Switzerland: Sabina and Jessica are running to catch a train. Once the girls reach the station they are bombarded by a group of eight to 10 adolescents. The boys start to harass both girls. A boy dressed in a leather coat pushes himself on top of Sabina and kisses her, but all she could do was try and push his face away. In the same instant, another kid creeps in from the side and snatches her purse. The boys start to separate the girls, making a circle around each of them, pushing and slapping them.
There is no cure for the common cold. This is universal knowledge. Yet when a “miracle cold buster” hit the shelves in 1999, Americans snatched it up. Throw in a cute story about a second-grade teacher who invented the product and an endorsement from Oprah Winfrey and you’ve got Airborne, the “effervescent dietary supplement” that made $151 million in 2006.
Throw around as many Michigan Open Meetings Act exemptions as you’d like. It doesn’t make the MSU Board of Trustees’ actions any less dastardly.
I recently learned from an MSU cafeterias employee that they often throw away perfectly good food at the end of the day. “They have to do it,” she said. But they don’t. It’s a waste of food.
We must make value judgments every day, and it’s easy to make decisions for the wrong reasons because they’re based on flawed logic. Unfortunately, even the basic principles underlying these daily decisions are not standard curriculum in pre-college education.
The Graduate Employees Union and MSU are in closed negotiations for a contract to replace the one that expires May 15. Although neither side has released its full bargaining platform to the media, it’s apparent that struggles in the bargaining process have kept both sides unsatisfied.
Some readers have urged me to consider a popular creationist assertion called the “fine-tuning argument.” It’s said that the laws of physics are precariously balanced. If the value of one fundamental physical constant were slightly different — such as the strength of electromagnetic and nuclear forces — life couldn’t exist.
Often, the phrase “with all due respect” is used by a speaker or writer to placate a person receiving a message that will soon become inflammatory. In a letter printed Wednesday, Waterboarding not wrong, needed for defense in Iraq (SN 3/12), the writer uses this phrase to smooth a transition into explaining why interrogation tactics involving waterboarding are appropriate and needed in select cases.
OK, here’s the deal. When someone asks for input, there’s an expectation that it will be used when making decisions. But when decisions seem to be made already, input has little impact.