I was dismayed at the arrogance displayed in the editorial “Punishment for pie-thrower should be tempered (SN 9/01).” Not only did The State News editorial board members demonstrate their ignorance towards the specifics of (anthropology senior Ahlam) Mohsen’s case, but additionally demonstrated their ignorance toward social justice movements and activism more broadly.
In high school, I remember health class teaching sex education with a specific set of phrases such as, “Say no,” “You could die before the age of 25” and “Children are forever.” Safe sex was promoted to cover all the bases, but abstinence was the main push in a classroom full of hormonal teenagers who recently discovered themselves.
The traditional five-day Welcome Week is gone and has been replaced by a three-day Fall Welcome. In short, it’s now meetings, events, a college colloquium, programs, an open house and a convocation one after the other.
For as long as I can remember, the MSU spirit has been ingrained in my system. Both of my parents graduated from MSU, and I’ve spent most of my life living very close to campus. I’ve always cheered for the Spartans during college football games. However, now that I’m starting classes as a freshman, I’m realizing MSU has so much more to offer.
ASMSU has started the 2010 fall semester on a serious note. MSU’s undergraduate student government has put together health care packages for MSU students based on the individual health care needs and budgets of students.
Lambda Chi Alpha posted a party on Facebook called the “Freshman ‘Fifth’teen.” As members of the greek community have suffered grievous injury and death due to binge drinking, they do lip service to the idea of responsible drinking with no change.
The first days of classes are a blur for everyone. One of the major reasons for this is the disastrous combination of speeds ranging from “Fast and Furious” to “Driving Miss Daisy” on campus and Grand River Avenue.
In a recent college ranking study published by U.S. News & World Report, MSU was ranked last out of all the colleges currently in the Big Ten Conference. When it’s phrased that way, it sounds pretty awful, and kind of demeaning. But in most cases, the MSU experience is not one that can be captured by a number.
It’s the beginning of the semester, so that must mean I’m writing a column about becoming a guest columnist for The State News. The gist is simple — so simple, in fact, I am going to paraphrase it from the column I wrote in the summer.
As part of a protest, anthropology senior Ahlam Moshen alledgedly hit U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., in the face with a pie. There are the traditional sit-in’s, marches and other peaceful ways to make a point, but a pie in the face? Not so much.
While listening to a program about the overturning of California’s Proposition 8 on National Public Radio the other day, a caller brought up a point that has been on my mind for some time, and perhaps is the most important part of the whole debate over gay marriage.
For more than 15 years, MSU Trustee Donald Nugent has driven three and a half hours almost every month to attend MSU Board of Trustees meetings. Nugent’s term comes to an end in January 2011, and although he has served two consecutive terms and submitted his bid for re-election, Nugent no longer will serve MSU as a trustee starting next year.
This is the imperceptive radicalism fueling our nation right now. Gingrich and Sarah Palin with her ever-so subtle and yet so inane pleads of Islam adherents compassion toward American jingoism only are a few of the people to be named in the campaign to mystify the distinction between terrorism and community cultural centers.
At the end of spring semester, I told myself I was going to take a step back and learn to relax for a little while. During the summer I had planned to do yoga, read lots of books, enroll myself in an anger management course, look at graduate schools and just breathe.
These past summer sessions at MSU have been somewhat eventful compared to the slow pace of those in years past. With changes happening across campus, ranging from road construction and residence hall renovations to the elimination of undergraduate programs at MSU Dubai and the assault on student savings to pay for increased tuition and possible parking tickets, MSU is not the same campus it was in early May.
What has been dubbed quite incorrectly by conservatives across the U.S. as the “Ground Zero Mosque,” finally has, amid protests, been approved. As soon as those three words are combined, they create an immediate inflammatory reaction in the average American.
Two recent reports released by Washington, D.C.-based organization The Education Trust place MSU in the top 25 of public universities with the greatest differences between the graduation rates of white and Hispanic or black students.
Oh man, Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker ruled California’s Proposition 8 unconstitutional a few weeks ago. I wasn’t surprised. A few months ago, I read that conservative lawyer Theodore Olson would take up the banner for gay marriage and immediately thought, “So, this is a done deal, right?”
Sharing and working together are elementary behaviors taught during our early years in an effort to get us used to the ideas of life’s great compromise: We can’t always get what we want. MSU has taken an opportunity to teach legislators something they can’t learn in a classroom or on the pages of a book, a basic how-to guide on balancing politics with various personalities.
Wow! The summer of 2010 is just about in the history books as a done deal. What have we accomplished? I always ask this question as a new school year approaches. I seem to forget that for some of us, the previous school year never ended. If one came back to campus to take summer classes, much of what others considered “summer break” was little more than business as usual.