Friday, September 20, 2024

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Commentary

COMMENTARY

The Rock is what we make it

Following the summer-time exodus of students from East Lansing, pentagrams, meaningless statements and depictions of penises and weed leaves summarize the overlapping confusion that now is the Rock.Within a month, the communal billboard has degenerated.

COMMENTARY

Body image issues come from media, industry

Short. Tall. Fat. Skinny. Young. Old. White. Black.These are just eight words of thousands that are supposed to define who we are.Across the world, young girls look at photoshopped images of models all with the same long, thin figures and ask themselves why their bodies don’t look like that.

COMMENTARY

Forgetting about the friend zone

The friend zone: An apparently inescapable place where lovelorn attractions go to slowly wither until their eventual and unavoidable death.To those unfamiliar with the term, the ‘friend zone' is a hypothetical situation in which a person wants to remain friends with someone who would much rather have a romantic relationship with them.Being “friend zoned” is, in today’s youth, seen as a terrible fate.

COMMENTARY

We are ready to move on

For some reason I always thought my last day of class would hold some kind of celestial significance. I’d even imagined it how it might go a few times this semester — as cheesy as it sounds, I pictured it as a sentimental affair, one where I would show up on time, pay extra special attention and maybe retain a few snippets when I look back on it decades from now.

COMMENTARY

Freedom vs. Paradise

The paradise might not be perfect after all, but a paradise it remains. For me this was the perfect identification of my country.Honduras might not seem to stand out in the map for most of my peers at MSU.

COMMENTARY

Be open to new cultural experiences on campus

Back home, I drive by the largest mosque in America on my way to the mall.For every Jack or Sarah in my class, there were three Alis and a Malak.I got a few extra days off every year for Ramadan, a Muslim holiday.Where I wore scarves around my neck for fashion, many of my female classmates wore them around their heads year-round for religious reasons.Street signs, business names and even letters sent home from the schools come in English and Arabic.I grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, one of the largest Arab communities outside of the Middle East with 40,000 Arab-American residents out of 98,000 overall, second only to Paris.

COMMENTARY

EDITORIAL: Laughing at student activism makes Ferguson undeserving of trustee title

MSU Board of Trustees Chairman Joel Ferguson has served on the board since 1986 and has been its chairperson since 1992 — longer than some college students have been alive.One might think that with such a history of service to the school, he would come to respect the students he represents. His comments about student activism at the Board of Trustees meeting suggest otherwise, however.

COMMENTARY

Letter: Graduate Employees Union thanks MSU Board of Trustees

Fellow members of the MSU community:I write today to thank several people. First, in January of this year, a systematic underpayment of approximately $100,000 to graduate teaching assistants from last summer was resolved through a mutually pleasing agreement between the Graduate Employees Union and MSU.