Tuesday, March 20, 2007

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD T UESDAY,

Volume CXLII, No. 38

ARCH

20, 2007 2 007

Since 1866, Daily Since 1891

Ford Jr. speaks on senatorial defeat, race in U.S. politics

BY ZACHARY CHAPMAN SENIOR STAFF WRITER

Former Tennessee congressman and current chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council Harold Ford Jr. reflected on his failed 2006 U.S. Senate campaign and urged young people to become more engaged in politics during the annual Noah Krieger Memorial Lecture Monday.

In a dynamic and wide-ranging address to a half-full Salomon 101, Ford stressed the need for students to “think outside of every box, think outside of every convention and challenge every orthodoxy.”

Because of the opportunities afforded Ivy League students, Ford told the crowd “a taller burden rests on you than on other folks.”

“It is incumbent on this generation to be the new ambassadors for our country, the new agents of change in America,” Ford said.

“So many are counting on you to not only do better for yourself, but to do better for your community and for your country.”

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan Law School, Ford was elected in 1996 — at the age of 26 — to represent Tennessee’s 9th congressional district in the House of Representatives. He served in the House for ten years, where he was a member of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of moderate House Democrats

Alex Roehrkasse / Herald

Members of SDS staged a “die-in” downtown Monday to protest Textron, a U.S. military contractor.

Student arrested at SDS ‘die-in’ downtown

BY ALEX ROEHRKASSE STAFF WRITER

A student was arrested Monday at a rally and street theater held by the Brown chapter of Students for a Democratic Society in front of the downtown offices of Textron Inc., a corporation contracted by the U.S military for helicopters, armored vehicles and munitions.

Vale Cofer-Shabica ’09, a member of SDS, was taken into custody

by Providence Police officers after several protesters charged Textron

Study abroad, language instruction focus of int’l forum

BY MICHAEL SKOCPOL SENIOR STAFF WRITER

A small but impassioned group of undergraduates described diffuse information and institutional inflexibility as major challenges to international education at Brown at a forum Monday with members of the University’s internationalization committee.

The open forum — billed as an opportunity for undergraduate input on the University’s course offerings, language instruction, study abroad and international student life — drew nine students, most of whom stayed for the entire two-hour discussion.

Appointed in November and chaired by Provost David Kertzer ’69 P’95 P’98, the internationalization committee is charged with recommending ways Brown can improve the internacontinued on page 8

INSIDE:

3 METRO

Tower and placed their hands — covered in raspberry jam to simulate blood — on its facade.

METRO Cofer-Shabica had initially been taken into custody on charges of disorderly conduct and malicious destruction of property, said Capt.

David Lapatin of the PPD. He was released several hours later after charges of property damage were dropped and will face a hearing April 3, Cofer-Shabica told The

continued on page 6

continued on page 8

A Appointments process to U. committees plagued with problems

BY MICHAEL BECHEK SENIOR STAFF WRITER

The Undergraduate Council of Students has been hampered by disorganization this semester in appointing students to fill vacancies on University committees, frustrating some student applicants and causing concern among former UCS members.

The appointments process for spots on the Public Safety Oversight Committee and the University Resources Committee were marked by short application peri-

ods, limited or no advertising of the open positions and different standards for evaluating candidates — processes not in line with the UCS code or past practices. Many of those interviewed said their e-mails to the UCS appointments chair, Drew Madden ’10, were frequently not returned and their inquiries or concerns were ignored.

This semester, UCS oversaw the appointment processes for vacancies on the PSOC, University Resources Committee, Computing

Chris Bennett / Herald Former Congressman Harold Ford, Jr., delivered the 11th annual Krieger Lecture on Monday afternoon.

continued on page 4

Investigative reporter Williams ’72 speaks tonight

BY PETER CIPPARONE SPORTS EDITOR

Investigative journalist Lance Williams ’72, who played an integral role in unearthing the BALCO steroids scandal and currently writes for the San Francisco Chronicle, will speak tonight on his career as a journalist. The event, which will be held at 7 p.m. in List 120,

THE SPEAKER’S BLOGGER A year after leaving College Hill, Erica Sagrans ‘05 has landed on Capitol Hill, where she blogs for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

www.browndailyherald.com

Herald. He said he is speaking with a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union.

Cofer-Shabica said he was thrown to the ground by an officer, as was another SDS member.

Cofer-Shabica was arrested after the other protesters had marched back up College Hill, while he remained downtown to speak with reporters.

“You can protest all you want.

We’re glad to come with you,” Lap-

known for fiscal conservatism.

In 2005, Ford launched an unsuccessful bid to become the first black U.S. senator from a southern state since Reconstruction.

Republican Bob Corker defeated Ford last November by fewer than three percentage points in a testy and often intensely personal race.

Ford’s race — arguably the subject of a controversial Republican National Committee ad — and his family’s legal problems became central issues in the campaign.

Since the defeat, Ford has joined investment bank Merrill Lynch as an adviser and Vanderbilt University as a public policy professor. On March 14, Fox News announced Ford will provide political commentary for the network.

Ford began his speech by noting that it was a great start for “a Penn boy to get a standing ovation at Brown,” and he thanked Mayor David Cicilline ’83, who was in the audience, for “having me here and for not having me pulled over in this town.”

Speaking about America’s need to provide everyone with better educational opportunities, Ford cited Brown’s recent initiative to improve public schools in Providence as a step in the right direction. “It is my belief that U.S. dynamism and U.S. strength are a result of education,” he said.

But Ford lamented the United States’ stature as one of the world’s least popular nations in

5 CAMPUS NEWS

is sponsored by Alumni Relations, Campus Life and Student Services and The Herald.

Williams is best known for the steroids expose “Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports” and a series of Chronicle articles that focused on professional athletes’ use of performance-enhancing drugs, COURSES GET CAPPED With Banner set to launch, administrators have set enrollment limits for several courses in history and political science, in particular

which he co-authored with Mark Fainaru-Wada.

Williams’ reports were groundbreaking because they included private grand jury testimonies on steroid use from baseball sluggers Barry Bonds, Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield, as well as from sprinter Tim Montgomery.

Williams’ book led to the stricter steroid regulations imposed by

11 OPINIONS

195 Angell Street, Providence, Rhode Island

THE G-WORD Benjamin Bright ‘07 argues genocide has become a lazy term in political disourse that can oversimplify the reality of civil conflict

Major League Baseball in 2005 and increased speculation about alleged steroid use by San Francisco Giants outfielder Bonds.

The federal government subpoenaed Williams and FainaruWada in an effort to make the writers disclose their source for the private documents. But the writcontinued on page 4

12 SPORTS

WATER POLO TAKES ROCK The women’s water polo team defeated No. 17 Michigan this weekend in a string of victories, including its first win over a top 20 team

News tips: herald@browndailyherald.com

TODAY THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

PAGE 2

WE A

T H E R

Chocolate Covered Cotton | Mark Brinker

TODAY

TOMORROW

partly cloudy 40 / 17

sunny 41 / 31

MEN

SHARPE REFECTORY

TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2007

U VERNEY-WOOLLEY DINING HALL

LUNCH — Grilled Chicken Sandwich, Popcorn Chicken with Dipping Sauces, Tempeh Fajitas, Red Rice, Corn and Sweet Pepper Saute, Keilbasa, Magic Bars, Hot Fudge Pudding Cake

LUNCH — Jamie’s Spiced Chicken Wings, Baked Manicotti with Sauce, Corn and Broccoli Casserole, Bean and Bacon Soup, Vegetarian Corn and Tomato Soup, Magic Bars

DINNER — Orange Turkey, Au Gratin Potatoes with Fresh Herbs, Acorn Squash with Curried Rice and Chickpeas, Fresh Vegetable Melange, Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

DINNER — Pot Roast Jardiniere, Red Potatoes with Fresh Dill, Stuffed Spinach Squash, Oregon Blend Vegetables, Asparagus with Lemon, French Bread, Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese

SU

WBF | Matt Vascellaro

D O K U

Fill in the grid so that every row, every column and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 through 9.

Hi, How Are You | Alison Naturale

Deo | Daniel Perez �������������������

CR ACROSS 1 Naval cruiser letters 4 At right angles to the keel 9 Stable sound 14 Racer’s stopping place 15 Jelly fruit 16 Cuban export 17 Each 19 North of Irangate 20 Freudian mediators 21 Singapore sling liquor 22 At will 23 Cobra, e.g.

25 One who more than just talks 26 Auto dealer suppliers 31 Strongbox 35 Batter’s success 36 Perennial #1 resort in Ski Magazine 37 Advanced degree tests 38 Dads 39 Skin care prefix 40 Inoculation fluids 41 “Exodus” hero 42 Trumpet family instrument 43 “This Modern World” cartoonist 46 Road bulge 47 Actress Bening 52 “Thank you __ much!”

55 24-hr. reporting station 56 Long-snouted fish 57 Archie Bunker, notably 58 Pokémon protective eyewear 60 “Tyger! Tyger!” poet 61 Integra automaker 62 Bambi’s aunt 63 Feast where the Haggadah is read 64 Stowe slave 65 Place for porkers to roll

O S S W O R D

DOWN 1 Like some bunks 2 Extensive attack 3 Sharpen, as a blade 4 __ of Reason 5 Thief 6 Not so challenging 7 The Bard’s river 8 Chess piece 9 Official at a ball game 10 It flows past Khartoum 11 Gape at suggestively 12 Banister 13 Low card 18 Only two U.S. states, Wash. and Cal., are entirely within this zone 22 __ Sumter 24 Chills, as bubbly 25 Speaker’s platform 27 Run the meeting 28 Bring home the bacon 29 Hoarfrost 30 Bed support 31 What you pay 32 Lunchtime snack

33 Place with oinking and cackling 34 Bankruptcy bound, perhaps 38 Plane mover, briefly 39 Not across 41 Arsenal supply 42 Frequent McEnroe foe 44 Forcible removal from office

45 Recorded on the cash register 48 Nest occupant 49 Stories 50 Lott of Mississippi 51 Bacon product 52 Flows out 53 Contemptible 54 Mild expletive 55 Designer Chanel 58 Hood’s gun 59 Happy

Deep Fried Kittens | Cara FitzGibbon

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Cloudy Side Up | Mike Lauritano

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3/20/07

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METRO TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2007

PAGE 3

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Alum blogs for Pelosi Some R.I. legislators oppose troop surge

BY SUSANA AHO STAFF WRITER

Erica Sagrans ’05 — who left Providence a few weeks ago to join the staff of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

— is now an online writer and member of a small team working in Washington, D.C. on Pelosi’s Web site.

The site, which has its own political blog — called the Gavel — and is updated throughout the day, is “a really good example of how government could be getting more information out there,” Sagrans told The Herald.

In addition to writing for the site, Sagrans works on electronic newsletters that are sent to various groups and compiles updates for Pelosi on recent news in political blogs.

Sagrans said she “wanted to do something that combined writing and politics” — a combination shown in the work Sagrans did while on College Hill.

When she attended Brown, Sagrans was an editor of the College Hill Independent and took time off to be a Web intern at the Utne Reader magazine in Minneapolis. After graduating she continued to write, contributing to both the Providence Phoenix and local politics blog Rhode Island’s Future.

Sagrans said she considered taking a job with the Boston Phoenix when she graduated, but she decided she wanted to do community organizing in Providence. She worked for a year at the Rhode Island Family Life Center, which helps people who are being released from prison.

At the Family Life Center, she became involved in the Right to Vote campaign against felon disenfranchisement, a Rhode Island ballot question in the 2006 election. She also helped with the campaigns of Rep. David Segal, D-Dist. 2, and Providence City Councilman Seth Yurdin, DWard 1.

She said she particularly

liked working for the Right to Vote campaign. There were “a lot of challenges to overcome about how to get funding,” but in the end it was a “really great collaboration” that involved residents of south Providence and other communities affected by the law as well as “a lot of Brown students, alums, people at nonprofits.”

After engaging in so much local activism in Providence, Sagrans said, she was excited about her new job at Pelosi’s office but also “wary of the culture” of Capitol Hill politics. However, she has had good experiences so far. “I really like the people I work with. They’re really smart and dedicated,” she said.

She now has a new appreciation “for how amazingly challenging it is to lead Congress” and to “try to solve that mess of Iraq.”

Sagrans said she is also excited to be working for the first female Speaker of the House and says the media team has been trying to find ways to “use the Internet to reach out to women and to let them know what Pelosi’s doing.”

Sagrans said she has not yet met Pelosi — she’s only been on the job for about two weeks — but said “from the people I work with, I feel connected to her.”

Still, Sagrans said she misses Providence and the communities she became a part of at Brown through groups like the Indy and the Finlandia co-op.

“The co-ops were great — we take a lot of pride in the fact that we own them ourselves.”

She also said activism at Brown could sometimes get intense and it was easy to burn out, but that she really values local organizing in Providence and the Brown alums involved with it.

“It’s the coolest people who stay — just because it’s the people who kind of fell in love with Providence … and stay to work in the community.”

BY TARYN MARTINEZ STAFF WRITER

Though there is no sign from the White House as to when the war in Iraq might end, some Rhode Island state legislators are calling for a halt to the escalation of the fighting as President Bush’s plan to send more U.S. troops to Baghdad and the restless Anbar province moves forward.

In February, Rep. Elizabeth Dennigan, D-Dist. 62, introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives calling for the federal government to end plans to escalate troop levels and to pass legislation prohibiting the use of federal funds for the war’s escalation.

Resolutions similar to Dennigan’s have been introduced in at least 20 other states, including Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont and Illinois, according to a General Assembly press release.

Inspired by what he said was “the voters and the voters’ concern” about the war, Sen. Joshua Miller, D-Dist. 28, put forward a similar resolution in the Senate in January — his first bill submitted as a freshman senator.

“As a newly elected senator, one of the biggest concerns about getting people active was, both locally and nationally, the war and the effects of the war on their community, and that people wanted to have

a voice in their opposition to the war,” Miller said. “This is just another way out of many that people can make that clear, not only to the rest of the public but also to elected officials.”

Miller said state finances also inspired him to sponsor the bill.

“The war is very expensive,” he said, “$1.5 billion that could be spent in Rhode Island has been spent in Iraq.”

Peter Asen ’04, administrative and development coordinator for Ocean State Action, praised the bills, noting that building pubic awareness is an important mission of the legislation.

“I think the state legislators can play a valuable role in just educating the public about the costs of the war towards the state and the challenges we face on the state level,” Asen said.

“The state legislators are speaking out as citizens, basically, and using their platform as people that represent folks at the state level to really reinforce the issue to the Rhode Island congressional delegation,” he added.

Will Lambek ’09, an organizer of the anti-war student group Operation Iraqi Freedom, said the resolution is a good step.

“This bill is specifically opposing the escalation,” he said. “We would like any bill in the Rhode Island General Assembly to go fur-

ther than that and cover more than just the escalation — but that being said, a rebuke from the General Assembly about the escalation would carry a similar weight to a call for withdrawal.”

Lambek said he was hopeful the legislation would pass, but said complications are coming from an unlikely source — the Democrats.

“The Democratic leadership in the General Assembly, especially in the Senate, is blocking this bill,” Lambek said. “They are not moving on a bill that should get nearunanimous consent. They aren’t representing their constituents, they aren’t representing the state and they’re failing in their role as an opposition party to the White House.”

But what is encouraging, Lambek and Asen agreed, is the strength of the state’s anti-war movement.

“It’s vibrant and it’s growing stronger, and it will continue to grow stronger as long as there’s a war on,” Lambek said. “This is something that people in Rhode Island and across the country are increasingly fed up with.”

Miller echoed these sentiments. “It’s going on across the country, and I think the louder the voice of opposition can be, it might help change things,” he said. “This resolution is one way to make it louder.”

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

PAGE 4

TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2007

Journalist Williams ’72 to deliver lecture tonight continued from page 1 ers refused to name their source and were consequently sentenced by a federal judge to 18 months in jail last September.

On Feb. 14 of this year, Colorado attorney Troy Ellerman admitted to leaking the steroid transcripts, leading the government to withdraw the writers’ subpoenas so they could avoid jail time.

“It’s definitely an up not to figure the calendar was narrowing,” Williams said. “I figured I’d spend some time (in jail). I was making sure I could do it and getting ready for it as best as I could.”

Since the subpoena was dropped, Williams has returned to

writing for the Chronicle, though not necessarily sports articles.

Williams, who says he is “not originally a sports writer,” has recently written about a San Francisco development firm being sued for toxic waste and a handwriting expert investigating the letters of the 1960s serial killer the Zodiac.

Williams said he last visited Brown in 2001 but still remains in touch with his days on College Hill.

He graduated from Brown the year after the University merged with Pembroke College. Williams said in his freshman year he “lived in West Quad (now Keeney Quadrangle), which was an all-male mosh pit.”

“I had wonderful classes,” Williams said, remembering in particular his freshman adviser, Professor of American Civilization Barton St. Armand. “I was remembering my Brown years and I was thinking wow, what great teaching I had.”

“I feel like Brown totally infuses my life because I still have so many friends from Brown,” he said. “It’ll just be fun to be back again.”

During his time on College Hill today, Williams will also visit a journalism class and meet with Brown athletic coaches.

After his speech this evening, Williams will sign copies of his book.

UCS appointments process disorganized, some say continued from page 1

www.browndailyherald.com

Advisory Board and, most recently, the Task Force on Undergraduate Education. The upcoming spring appointments process will fill vacancies on several other important University committees, including the Brown University Community Council and the College Curriculum Council.

Mike Williams ’08, who has served on the URC for one year, said he was surprised to see the campus-wide e-mail sent the afternoon of Jan. 29 announcing the vacancy on the committee and asking for applications due just two days later. The same e-mail also announced vacancies on the PSOC and the Computing Advisory Board. He said he contacted Madden by e-mail and urged him to prolong the application period. His emails to Madden, he said, were not returned.

“This is a two-year appointment,” Williams told The Herald.

“You have to give people more time to think about something like this.”

Williams added that he wasn’t contacted by Madden or any other UCS member before applications were solicited, even though, as one of the two students currently serving on the URC, he was required to sit on UCS’s interviewing panel.

Madden told The Herald that extending the application period was considered by UCS’s executive board, but that “we were attempting — it didn’t work perfectly — to get the appointments in sooner rather than later.”

Perhaps because of the short application period, Williams said, there were seven applications to the URC in total, down from what he said was more than 20 when he applied to the committee a year ago. Former UCS Vice President Zachary Townsend ’09, a former Herald Opinions columnist, was selected from among three finalists interviewed.

Like the URC, the PSOC positions had an application period of just two days.

Sriram Subramanian ’10, who applied unsuccessfully to the PSOC, said while he was not upset with the decision, he was annoyed that he was not told the result. He said he waited two to three weeks after turning in his application before inquiring as to the status of his application. He confronted Madden in person three separate times, he said, and was told — the third time — that he hadn’t gotten the position.

“I didn’t even get a reply from (UCS),” Subramanian said. “I had to force a reply out of them, and

that took me almost a month and a half.”

Another applicant to the PSOC, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he said he may apply to a committee through UCS in the future, said he sent several e-mails to Madden that were unreturned and was frustrated by Madden’s “complete unresponsiveness.”

Madden told The Herald he thought he had “fairly good communication” with applicants — though there were e-mails he “missed” because they were mixed in with his personal e-mails, so when notifying PSOC applicants he “could have skipped over an e-mail address by accident.”

“It’s highly possible I made a mistake somewhere,” he said.

The same applicant added that, given the sensitive nature of the PSOC’s work, he found the lack of an interview process “unnerving.”

Madden said he chose not to conduct interviews because two of the six applicants “came to the forefront as the most qualified,” and interviews did not seem necessary.

According to the Web site of the Department of Public Safety, the PSOC deals with information concerning DPS practices and policies, including policies governing the use of force. The PSOC also prepares an annual report on complaint activity for the preceding year and makes policy recommendations “where necessary and appropriate.” Last semester the committee reviewed an investigation into an alleged incident of police brutality.

Vice President for Administration Walter Hunter, who serves as an ex-officio member of the PSOC, said he urged UCS to select applicants who “reflect the diversity of Brown undergraduate students.”

While the UCS code does not require that UCS’s appointments committee conduct interviews for “ad hoc committees,” a definition which still includes the PSOC, former UCS Appointments Chair Benjamin Boas ’06.5 told The Herald that he found interviews useful for choosing the right candidate.

“The majority of someone’s work on a committee is to sit and talk,” said Boas, who served on several University committees including Residential Council and the PSOC and now works at the University as an assistant to the chief of police. “You have to speak up. You have to interrupt if you feel you’re not getting your say. And an interview tests that. The application doesn’t.”

Madden said he supports conducting interviews for ad hoc committees in principle and that “it’s been a matter of time restraints and

personnel.”

An applicant to the URC, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he still deals with UCS, complained that there was a delay of five weeks between when the applications were due and when interviews were conducted.

Madden said the delay was due to “a lot of things we had to do getting ready administratively” for the semester, including plans for the appointment process for the Task Force on Undergraduate Education.

But the URC applicant said he was asked by e-mail of his availability the next day to interview, even though the UCS code says signup sheets must be posted at least a week before the scheduled interviews.

In addition to short application periods, the process has been affected by limited advertising, as campus-wide e-mails constitute most or all of the publicity campaign.

UCS Vice President Tristan Freeman ’07 said the UCS executive board had agreed that campuswide e-mails were an effective form of communication and that they would form the “basis of communications.”

“Obviously there are things that we can do differently,” he said, “but I think that as a whole we’ve done a pretty good job at getting the word out there.”

The exception to this semester’s problematic processes was the Task Force on Undergraduate Education, which was heavily advertised on promotional TV screens, Facebook and the Daily Jolt through a campaign coordinated by UCS Academic and Administrative Affairs Chair Sara Damiano ’08, who assisted Madden with the appointment process. The task force received 30 student applicants, half of whom were interviewed.

At last week’s UCS general body meeting, Madden introduced a code change that would change his position from an internally elected position to a position voted on by the student body.

Madden told The Herald the idea was brought up in a meeting of the executive board. “It was something that was in the back of my mind all year long,” he said, adding he still hadn’t decided himself if he supported the code change.

Freeman emphasized the collaborative nature of decision-making on UCS, saying “most of the decisions that the (executive board) makes are made by consensus.”

He added that the executive board members “usually try to keep every application period open as long as we can,” but that, with

CAMPUS N EWS PAGE 5

TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2007

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

CCC approves course caps in anticipation of Banner

Spring break hitch: O’Neill ’08 plans to hitchhike from UK to Morocco

BY EVAN BOGGS STAFF WRITER

With the Banner online registration system set to launch next month, the College Curriculum Council, which approves course caps, is rushing to set class sizes for limited-enrollment courses.

Though Banner’s restrictions will not affect courses that are not currently capped, all limited enrollment courses will have a specified numerical limit that cannot be exceeded during pre-registration.

In anticipation of this, the College Curriculum Council’s screening committee approved Thursday a number of enrollment limits using an abbreviated system for approval.

Many of the course caps they approved were for history and political science courses.

“It allows departments to plan for the following year’s teaching requirements with their available resources,” said Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron, who sits on the screening committee, of the course caps. Enrollment limits are typically first requested by professors and then approved by the CCC. Bergeron said a few departments have requested provisional enrollment limits based in part on available teaching assistant resources. The new Graduate School stipend program, which will guarantee funding for grad students for only five years, could force some TAs to limit their teaching responsibilities. Within some departments, graduate students can take longer than five years to complete their dissertations.

David Beckoff ’08, a member of the CCC and the only student at the screening committee’s meeting, said the rapid approval process differed from the committee’s standard procedure for approving course caps, which usually includes evaluation by students and faculty.

But Beckoff added, “There was no kind of crisis in an appearance that students and faculty were being excluded.”

“Because of Banner, there were so many of these (undefined course caps) which were not essentially new caps,” said Senior Research Engineer William Patterson, a CCC member, of the enrollment limits reviewed during Thursday’s meeting.

Course sizes are usually determined by a series of rough rules, such as that seminar classes should not exceed 20 students, Patterson said.

Though these sizes are only advisory, Patterson said the screening committee deals with requests for courses with strict enrollment numbers like the English department’s expository writing courses and VA 10: “Studio Foundation.”

The committee approved caps for courses using a list compiled

by Bergeron and Associate Provost Nancy Dunbar, who is the Banner project owner, that included the course name, the number of teaching assistants for those courses during the previous year and course size for the last five years.

“Because there were simply so many of them, it didn’t make sense to do it as a blizzard of small items,” Patterson said.

Beckoff said course caps were decided using the highest and lowest previous course sizes. HI 1: “Eu-

rope from Rome to the Eighteenth Century” was a class that ranged from 48 to 80 students. Beckoff said the cap was set at 80.

“The subcommittee reviewed these recommendations and then made our own judgment calls based on the number of requested (teaching assistants) and the past enrollment of the courses,” Beckoff said.

Enrollment may still be flexible if a course’s enrollment is unusually high, Bergeron said. She added that methods could include redistributing teaching assistants within a department and using waitlists during shopping period in case pre-registered students drop the class.

“Our main goal is to help departments to plan properly (and) give students the flexibility they need,” Bergeron said.

Patterson said courses that seek enrollment restrictions due to limited faculty available are initially referred to the dean of the faculty, “the obvious point being that the only answers to that question would be under the purview of the dean of the faculty.”

Beckoff said he expected the approval process will be much less hurried in the future, and Thursday’s meeting was an exceptional case because courses needed to be capped before Banner is used during pre-registration in April.

“I read it simply as we have this problem of subduing the monster, and this was simply an efficient way,” Patterson said of the unorthodox procedure.

Though he said Bergeron’s tendency during the meeting to cap courses at their maximum possible size was “very reassuring,” Beckoff said he believes “having course limits does put some restrictions on the freedom that we value in the Brown curriculum.”

“We’ll want to move back to having student and faculty involvement in making these decisions,” Beckoff said.

Though Banner has been described as making it easier for professors to cap courses, Patterson said he has not seen signs of departments taking advantage of the new system.

“I really think the rumor of massive course limitations is just that,” he said. “I have not seen any sign of an avalanche of cap requests.”

Bergeron said the CCC’s method for dealing with course caps could again be altered once the University has a better idea of how Banner is working.

To accommodate these possible changes, the CCC will meet in April to determine course caps for the 2008 spring semester.

“I see a lot of problems with Banner, but paranoia about caps isn’t one of them,” Patterson said.

BY ISABEL GOTTLIEB STAFF WRITER

Like many college students, Elizabeth O’Neill ’08 is heading to a warmer climate for spring break: Morocco. But she has not reser ved tickets aboard any plane, train or bus. O’Neill, who is spending the semester studying at Cambridge University in England, will set out on foot and plans to reach Africa using only her thumb.

O’Neill will hitchhike to raise money for Link Community Development, a British nonprofit that works to improve education in Africa. Last year 676 students, mostly British, took part in the sponsored journey. The event is in its 16th year and has raised nearly 1.2 million pounds, or roughly $2.3 million, according to the organization’s Web site. The organization works to improve the scope and quality of education in over 500 rural schools in Ghana, Uganda, Malawi and South Africa.

Along with her friend Matt Owens, a Cambridge first-year student, O’Neill will depart from southern England on March 26.

A ferr y will take them to France — from there, they will have to rely on their thumbs and other people’s generosity to carr y them south through Spain and into Africa. They have planned no specific route in advance.

The trip should take the pair about five days, O’Neill said, though they allowed themselves 10 days when booking the flight back to England.

O’Neill’s goal is to raise 600

BALCO tonight, 7 p.m. list 120

pounds for LCD. Through creative fundraising, she is a third of the way there.

At first, O’Neill stood out on the street asking passersby for money. But policemen soon forced her to stop because they considered her requests begging, which is illegal in Cambridge.

FEATURE The only way to ask for money on the street is to “provide music or some street performance,” O’Neill said, “but I can’t play (an instrument) so I have to resort to poetr y reading or rapping.” She plans to tr y reading children’s poetr y or nurser y rhymes while holding a sign that says “poetr y vs. poverty.”

On one occasion, she wrote a rap song to perform at a bar in Cambridge. The lyrics include “We’ll sleep in a ditch/ we’ll eat straight pitch/ cuz when you’re hitchin/ you don’t bring no kitchen,” and “We need 600 pounds/ For an organization/ That’s workin in Africa/ developin’ nations.”

“I appear just as ludicrous performing this thing as you imagine,” O’Neill said.

One of O’Neill’s objectives in getting involved with the hitch was “getting to know people I wouldn’t meet other wise.” She said the positive response to her fundraising efforts has surprised her.

“Begging in the street has been a wonderful experience.

My objective is to make people happy. They walk by and smile,

say howdy, and a surprising number donate money. People have been friendly and curious, and I’ve met a lot of random people who are interested,” she said.

LCD is not O’Neill’s first exposure to community ser vice.

She has been involved with many social justice projects in the past and has traveled to New Orleans and Haiti do relief work.

She heard about LCD when she saw a flyer for “the hitch” as she was looking for something to do over spring break.

“LCD has a good philosophy about social justice activities.

They’re committed to working with the government and communities in a long-term way.

Education is an investment,” O’Neill said.

Though many consider hitchhiking a dangerous activity, LCD’s Web site says the 3,100 hitchhikers who have participated over 15 years have experienced no major safety concerns. An average “hitcher” needs about 15 rides to reach Morocco.

Safety precautions include a 24-hour “hitch hotline” that tracks participants and a mandator y group minimum of two travelers, one of whom must be male.

O’Neill acknowledged that “hitchhiking does have its risks. … My main concern is the drivers we’ll deal with.” But, she said, “There are risks with any travel. I was going to travel Europe on my own as an alternative, so it’s safer to travel with somebody.”

www.browndailyherald.com

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TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2007

SDS stages protest, street theatre at Textron Tower continued from page 1 atin told the protesters outside the Van Wickle Gates, where they had marched after the protest. “We’ll make sure you’re safe. But you can’t start doing damage to other people’s buildings. That’s not the way you get your point across,” he said.

Lapatin added that there may be further investigation into the protest and more charges could be issued.

“It was not supposed to be an arrest action,” said State Rep. David Segal, D-Dist. 2, who attended the protest. “This is an unfortunate ending, but I think it was pretty effective otherwise,” he said.

During the protest — which about 20 students from Brown attended, in addition to 10 others — students pantomimed Textron executives throwing cluster bombs at civilians while other protesters pretended to die in the circle at the intersection of Westminster and Exchange streets.

Protesters staged the street theater in the intersection while others blocked the cross-streets. After police officers demanded that the intersection be cleared, the pantomime was repeated on the sidewalk.

After two SDS members were refused entry into Textron Tower, students decided to rush the building.

“We made decisions on the ground, like rushing the building and painting it red with handprints,” said Alex Ortiz ’09, an SDS

member. “That was decided spurof-the-moment.”

About 12 PPD officers were on hand at the protest, lining the entrance to Textron Tower and clearing the streets of traffic.

The protesters, using jam as fake blood, imitated injured or dead civilians and held signs with slogans condemning Textron’s military contracts, including, “Dear Textron, our democracy is not for sale” and “Are you in the business of killing?”

Textron Defense Systems, a subsidiary of Textron, manufactures various products for the military including helicopters and armored security vehicles.

Textron received Air Force contracts in 2003 for the production of sensor-fused weapons. Though the Air Force calls the munitions “cluster bomb units,” Karen Gordon Quintal, spokeswoman for Textron, said the weapons are not traditional cluster bombs — sensor-fused weapons, she said, are designed to target multiple military vehicles, not civilians.

Quintal said Textron recognized SDS’s right to protest. “With respect to today’s protest, freedom of speech is a cornerstone of our democracy,” she wrote in an e-mailed statement.

Brown SDS called on Textron to stop producing all war materials and redirect its resources to other products, Ortiz said.

“Overall our main demand is, ‘Textron, stop killing people,’ ” he said.

Protesters said they were

pleased with the action, citing positive responses from passers-by.

“I got more thumbs up and peace signs than people flipping us the bird or anything,” said Bucky Rogers ’07, an SDS member who called the protest “an overwhelming success.”

Rogers said he thinks the demonstration reached Textron’s employees, whom he said he could see watching from inside the building.

Other protesters said though it was doubtful the protest would cause any change in Textron’s business dealings, it would at least force the spotlight on the defense contractor.

“Their P.R. people never love it when there are moderately uppermiddle-class Brown University students covering themselves in fake blood and rolling around in front of their office,” said Jared Paul, a Providence resident who attended the protest.

Ortiz said SDS’s next step will be to pressure the state legislature to revoke Textron’s corporate charter, Ortiz said. Segal said he plans to introduce legislation as early as next week to ban corporations chartered in Rhode Island from manufacturing cluster bombs.

Despite his arrest, Cofer-Shabica said the demonstration achieved its goals in spreading awareness of the military industrial complex.

“I think it its really important that that is something that attention is brought to, and a die-in is a really effective way to make people see. It puts it in your face and you can’t get away from it,” he said.

Alex Roehrkasse / Herald

SDS members put “bloody” handprints — actually raspberry jam — on the facade of Textron TTower downtown Monday (below). The action was part of a protest against the Providence-based company (above).

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Pakistani judges protest removal of chief justice ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Los Angeles Times) — At least seven judges resigned in protest Monday over the suspension of Pakistan’s chief justice, aggravating a political crisis that has become a serious challenge to President Pervez Musharraf.

At the same time, hundreds of lawyers in Sindh and Punjab provinces kept up the demonstrations that have roiled the country since Musharraf removed Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry from his post March 9 on unspecified charges of official misconduct.

Critics call the judge’s suspension a blatant interference with the judiciary for political purposes. Musharraf has denied the allegation, but the ensuing outcry has spiraled into one of the most serious political challenges to face the Pakistani leader since he took power in a coup in 1999.

Fewer calories might help increase longevity (Washington Post) — Scientists have found new clues to how restricting the number of calories someone consumes may help increase longevity.

A number of studies found that severely restricting the caloric intake of rodents, fruit flies, worms and other animals makes them live longer. That has prompted some people to try to live on severely restricted diets. Although no one has shown that will actually work in people, a growing body of evidence suggests it might.

In the newest study, researchers at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge studied 36 people who were overweight but not obese. A third ate a diet fully meeting their energy needs. One-third ate 25 percent fewer calories, while the last third ate 12.5 percent fewer calories and increased their exercise to burn 12.5 percent more calories.

After six months, the researchers found that those who reduced their calories by 25 percent, either by diet alone or through diet and exercise, had a marked increase in the function of structures inside muscle cells known as mitochondria. Mitochondria produce energy for cells. They also experienced less DNA damage in muscle cells. In addition, there was increased activity by a gene known as SIRT1. The equivalent gene in yeast, worms and flies play a role in extending life span.

Hamas gunmen break cease-fire JERUSALEM (Washington Post) — Hamas gunmen shot and wounded an Israeli electrical worker just outside the Gaza Strip on Monday in the first such attack by the Islamic movement since it agreed four months ago to stop rocket fire and other military strikes from the strip.

Hamas fighters later fired two mortar rounds at Israeli soldiers near Gaza’s main cargo crossing with Israel.

Israel condemned the attacks, which came as international donors are deciding whether to recognize the Hamas-led Palestinian unity government sworn in over the weekend.

The prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, told Palestinian lawmakers Saturday that the new government endorsed “resistance in all its forms” to end Israel’s occupation of territory captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

Poll shows Iraqis feel quality of life has plunged (Washington Post) — More than six in 10 Iraqis now say that their lives are going badly — double the percentage who said so in late 2005 — and about half say that increasing U.S. forces in the country will make the security situation worse, according to a poll of more than 2,200 Iraqis conducted by ABC News and other media organizations.

The survey, released Monday, shows that Iraqi assessments of the quality of their lives and the future of the country have plunged in comparison with similar polling done in November 2005 and February 2004.

The proportion of Iraqis who say their lives are better now than they were before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 has slipped below half for the first time. 42 percent say “things overall” in their lives have improved, down from 51 percent who said so in 2005 and 56 percent in 2004. 36 percent now say things in their lives are worse today; 22 percent say their lives are about the same.

Sunni insurgents step up attacks

BY KARIN BRULLIARD WASHINGTON POST

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Dozens of insurgents wielding machine guns surrounded the police station before dawn Monday in Duluiyah, a majority Sunni town about 45 miles north of Baghdad. The five officers on duty walked out, hands to the dark sky, and waited to be executed.

But instead of firing, the insurgents’ leader spoke: Repent, he commanded, or die.

“So we swore to quit the police and support the Islamic State of Iraq,” recalled Mohammad Hashmawi, one of the police officers, referring to a militant Sunni organization active in many parts of the country.

Apparently content, the insurgents stole the officers’ decrepit weapons and the station’s communications equipment, blew up the building and released the officers.

A similar scene played out simultaneously at another police station in the town, said police Capt. Hussein al-Jaburi. It was the fi fth police station in the town to be destroyed by Sunni extremists in two weeks, he said, leaving just three standing.

Later, Hashmawi said he would keep his vow. “I have seen death with my own eyes, and I don’t want to see it again. I will return to be-

ing a farmer. I tell you that the decisions and control of the city are in the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq.”

In Duluiyah and elsewhere Monday, Sunni insurgents continued their campaign of violence and intimidation on the eve here of the fourth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

In the northern city of Kirkuk, three back-to-back bombings — near a mosque, a police patrol and the home of a former army general — killed at least 16 people and wounded at least 38, a Kirkuk police official and a health department official said. Kirkuk police Col. Tala Salahaldeen attributed the bombings to the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaida in Iraq.

In Baghdad, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives while guards searched him as he tried to enter a mosque in Shorja, killing at least four people and wounding more than 30, police and the U.S. military said. A market in the predominantly Shiite neighborhood was the site of a bombing attack that killed 137 people last month.

As President Bush asked Americans to be patient with his plans for pacifying Iraq, the bloody developments underscored recent shifts in violence in the country.

Shiite militias have lain low during a nearly five-week-old security

crackdown in Baghdad, but Sunni insurgents have stepped up attacks, especially in the restive belt around the capital.

Execution-style killings persist. Police in Kut, south of Baghdad, discovered the bullet-pierced body of the mayor of Dijelah, a nearby Shiite village, on a main street. Khalaf al-Dilfi had been kidnapped earlier Monday by armed men, said Kut police Capt.

Hameed Jiati.

Also Monday, the Iraqi government asked U.S. authorities for custody of former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan in order to hang him Tuesday at dawn, news services reported, citing unnamed officials in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s office. Last week, an appeals court upheld the death sentence given to Ramadan, who, like Saddam Hussein, was convicted for his role in a 1982 massacre of Shiites from the town of Dujail.

The U.S. military confirmed Monday that a building in Anbar province being used as an observation post by the Iraqi military was bombed by insurgents Sunday morning. The explosion killed two soldiers and wounded 12 others.

Local authorities said Sunday that the building was a former hotel and that insurgents used disguises to plant bombs on the ground floor.

Justices tackle students’ free speech case

BY DAVID G. SAVAGE LOS ANGELES T IMES

WASHINGTON — High school students may have a right to free speech, but it does not go so far as to include the freedom to unfurl a banner promoting “bong hits” at a school event, former U.S. Solicitor General Kenneth Starr told the Supreme Court on Monday.

“This is disruptive of the educational mission and inconsistent with the school’s message” against using drugs, Starr said.

Starr, now dean of the Pepperdine University Law School, represents a school principal from Juneau, Alaska, who was sued for ripping down the banner and suspending the student who unfurled it.

The case forces the court to reconsider the line between a stu-

dent’s right to free expression and a principal’s authority to limit what is said and done at school.

During the hour-long argument, the justices struggled to draw such a line.

Most of them sounded as though they leaned in favor of the school principal. At the same time, they were wary of saying officials have broad power to punish students whenever they think a student’s message is offensive or inappropriate.

Several religious-rights groups filed briefs supporting the student’s free-speech right in this case. Their lawyers worry that school officials might, for example, say it was inappropriate for a student to wear a Tshirt that praised Jesus Christ.

Justice Samuel Alito Jr. said it would be “disturbing” if principals

had such broad authority to pass judgment on what students say at or near school.

But Starr said the court could rule narrowly and give principals the power to forbid signs and banners promoting drugs, alcohol or tobacco. “This case is ultimately about drugs,” he said.

The student’s lawyer insisted the opposite was true.

“This is a case about free speech.

This is not a case about drugs,” said Douglas Mertz, a lawyer from Juneau.

His client, Joseph Frederick, was an 18-year-old senior in 2002 when an Olympic torch parade was scheduled to pass in front of his high school. As the local TV cameras came by, he and a few fellow students unfurled a 14-foot banner that said: “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.”

Bush asks Congress, nation to be patient

BY MICHAEL A. FLETCHER WASHINGTON POST

WASHINGTON — President Bush asked skeptical Americans for additional patience as the Iraq war entered its fi fth year Monday, saying the United States can be victorious, but “only if we have the courage and resolve to see it through.”

In a brief address to the nation four years after he ordered U.S. forces to invade Iraq, Bush also warned the Democratic-led Congress not to pass a measure scheduled for a vote in the House this week that would require troops to withdraw from the conflict.

“It can be tempting to look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude our best option is to pack up and go home,” Bush said in an eight-minute speech from the Roosevelt Room in the White

House. “That may be satisfying in the short run, but I believe the consequences for American security would be devastating.”

Having cost the lives of 3,210 U.S. troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis and more than $300 billion, the war has exacted a larger toll than the White House ever predicted. The conflict has grown more unpopular as it has continued, dragging down Bush’s domestic approval rating, which now hovers below 40 percent, according to several polls. Meanwhile, more than six in 10 Iraqis now say their lives are going badly, and about half say that sending additional U.S. forces to Iraq would only worsen the security situation there, according to an ABC News poll released Monday.

A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll showed a narrow majority of Americans now favor set-

ting a deadline for troop withdrawals — a move the Bush administration has consistently opposed.

House Democrats are planning to vote this week on a war spending bill that would effectively require the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the fall of 2008. The White House has spoken out against the measure, with press secretary Tony Snow telling reporters that if the initiative prevails in Congress, it will “provide victory for the enemy.”

Peering sternly into the cameras during his remarks, Bush said Congress has a responsibility “to ensure that this bill provides the funds and the flexibility that our troops need to accomplish their mission.” Snow later underscored the president’s words. “What he’s saying is that if they attach strings, he will veto it,” Snow said.

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Int’l forum addresses study abroad, language instruction continued from page 1 tional component of its education and research efforts and raise its global profile. The committee has divided into a series of working groups that will report back to the parent committee in late April or early May. The working group on curriculum, language instruction and study abroad hosted the event, represented by its chairs — Susan Alcock, professor of classics, and Kerry Smith, associate professor of history — and its undergraduate representative, Daniel Fombonne ’07.

Most forum attendees were upperclassmen and included three leaders of the Development Studies Departmental Undergraduate Group and a leader of the International Relations DUG. Discussion ranged from shortcomings in Brown’s area studies and foreign language programs to challenges facing students seeking to study abroad.

Students present criticized the low number of professors with expertise in specific geographical regions and lack of courses available to area studies concentrators — specifically in Middle East studies and South Asian studies.

Tushar Khadloya ’10 said Brown’s South Asian studies concentration appealed to him as an applicant, but he found actually pursuing such a concentration nearly impossible.

“You have to take five or six classes and hope they somehow relate to South Asia so you can write a paper on it, rather than classes that just count,” he told the working group.

Like many area studies programs, development studies also must “fully rely on the grace of other departments,” said Ingrid O’Brien ’07, one of the Development Studies DUG leaders. After the forum, the Development Studies DUG leaders presented Alcock and Smith with a letter they said outlined “concrete steps” Brown could take to improve the concentration.

Students present also raised concerns about Brown’s language programs. The lack of options for higher-level study in languages was a particular concern for undergrad Jessica Robertson, who said most advanced language courses tended to focus only on literature and that opportunities for students with significant language experience to focus on practicing speaking represented “a big hole” in Brown’s curriculum.

Other students agreed, advocating for more informal or semiformal opportunities to practice languages and better information about non-language courses or extracurricular activities that involve foreign languages.

Alcock and Smith emphasized that the working group and the committee would not advocate a language requirement as a way to increase student participation in language instruction.

Attendees suggested the working group consider how to stimulate interest in study abroad and foreign languages among students whose interests lay outside humanities and social studies.

Many of the attendees had studied abroad and said the minimal outreach efforts and

the lack of information about options meant that only those highly motivated to do so studied abroad. Students also noted that Brown’s sometimes-inflexible study abroad requirements and deadlines can prevent students who do not plan far enough ahead from pursuing international study.

Many students are unaware of the opportunities for “nontraditional experiences abroad,” said Michael Boyce ’08, a leader of the IR DUG. He suggested the University provide more incentives, such as grants, to participate in international summer programs and better publicize such options to the student body.

Undergrad Cynthia Wise, one of the leaders of the Development Studies DUG, said information about study abroad is usually spread by word of mouth and that the University’s efforts to facilitate such networking are often “scattershot.”

Two students attended the forum thinking it was a study abroad information session, though they left before the discussion turned to study abroad.

Other students offered anecdotal evidence of the difficulties they had faced getting specific study abroad programs approved, and how arbitrary that process can seem. Several also said they thought the language requirements Brown attached to its study abroad programs were often too tall to meet.

Robertson said she found students with minimal background in a language often adapted quickly in a foreign country. As a Brown student, Robertson added, “I chafe at the idea of any sort of requirements for anything.”

Robertson also expressed concern that Brown was not making enough of an effort to persuade students to consider study abroad, a sentiment echoed by other students. “The people who end up going abroad are the people who seek it out,” she said.

“Brown doesn’t seek out students.”

“Publicity is the key,” Fombonne agreed. “Everybody here has some level of initiative.”

Several attendees also thought Brown could do more to promote and publicize extracurricular groups with an international focus, such as the South Asian Students Alliance and the Brown Journal of World Affairs. Khadloya, who works for the journal, gave Alcock and Smith a copy of the semi-annual publication and urged them to consider recommending that the University better publicize the journal as a unique extracurricular available to Brown students.

Overall, Alcock and Smith said they were happy with the results of the forum, though during the discussion Smith jokingly described the group as “self-selecting.”

“A real range of stuff came up,” said Alcock. “It’s interesting to hear about things from the point of view of people who have lived through them.”

Alcock and Smith will hold a similar forum for graduate students on Wednesday night and say they will continue to be interested in receiving feedback from students until the working group makes its report to the parent committee near the end of April.

TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2007

Ford Jr. speaks on Senate run, race in U.S. politics continued from page 1 global polls, along with countries like Iran and North Korea. “Our stature in the world has been diminished. We’re not thought of as a moral leader,” he said.

Though he agreed with the United States’ mission to “expand democracy, freedom, liberty and tolerance throughout the world,” Ford said he disagreed with the Bush administration’s approach and called on the United States to engage with Syria and Iran.

“America can’t be seen as enforcing a way of life on a group of people, who frankly don’t want what we’re giving them,” he said.

Ford also touched on the role faith has played in his major life decisions. A Baptist, he talked of growing up in a house where “if you ate on Sunday you went to church.”

In a question-and-answer session after the speech, Ford spoke candidly about his views on public campaign financing, the war in Iraq and his plans for the future. One student asked Ford if his opposition to gay marriage and other socially conservative views pandered to Tennessee voters, and to what extent politicians have to compromise their values to get elected.

“You have to be who you are,” Ford responded. “I have never compromised my values. I happen to believe that we should do all we can to reduce the number of abortions in this country. If that makes me weird to you, so be it.”

“All I can be is who I am. I accept the fact that I could be wrong and so could you,” he said.

Ford spoke, in response to stu-

dents’ questions, about his campaign defeat.

“I take full responsibility for the loss, for not running a better and smarter campaign,” he said. “We’ll get it right next time.”

Though he flatly denied planning to run against current U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., for his seat in 2008, Ford repeatedly referred to his “next campaign.” Of his future political plans, he said, “I hear there is a governor’s race in 2010.”

Ford also reflected on the role of race in American politics in response to a question from the audience.

“I don’t think that race has a role to play in politics anywhere in America. People should vote for whomever they feel best represents them,” he said. Ford acknowledged that he was disappointed by the racial tenor of the campaign.

“At the end of the day the people who did that have to live with themselves and answer to their God,” he said. “You can’t spend your energy agonizing about things over which you have no control.”

Ford relayed an oft-repeated anecdote about a campaign stop at the Little Rebel bar restaurant in Tennessee. With a prominently displayed Confederate flag, and a parking lot full of pickup trucks adorned with George W. Bush bumper stickers, Ford said his campaign assistant told him it might not be the best place to stop following a successful day on the campaign trail.

Ford said he had a premonition about stopping at the bar, which was immediately affirmed when a woman at the bar gave him a big

hug and said, “Baby, we’ve been waiting to see you!”

Ford said the lesson to draw from this experience is that “our country’s greatness has never, ever rested on the standard-bearers in society, on the people who just stood and watched things pass by.

The greatness of our country rests with those who dared to be big, to think big, with those who tried their hardest to execute big ideals. Our generation requires nothing less,” he said.

Natalia Nazarewicz ’10, a native of Oak Ridge, Tenn., said though she doesn’t agree with all of Ford’s views, she thinks he is an engaging and charismatic speaker.

“Voters in the South tend to vote for people whom they would most like to have a beer with,” she said.

“He is more conservative on a lot of issues than I would like, but I think that is reflection of political realities.”

Nashville native Arthur Kim ’08, who worked on Ford’s Senate campaign, said he thought Ford had an off night. “I have seen him give phenomenal speeches on the campaign, but I felt like his speech tonight lacked some direction,” he said.

The Noah Krieger Memorial Lecture is named in honor of Noah Krieger ’93, who died soon after graduating from Brown. His family established a program at the Taubman Center for Public Policy to honor his life and celebrate his memory. Past Kreiger lecturers have included former U.S. presidential candidate Howard Dean and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.

Woo: Williams has ‘done a service’ continued from page 12 of Shadows” in 2006 that baseball commissioner Bud Selig started taking the matter seriously and asked George Mitchell, the former Senate majority leader, to investigate doping in the sport. Though the drug policy is still lax when compared to National Football League or Olympic standards, and though the Mitchell investigation seems destined to fail because of lack of cooperation from ballplayers — Bonds, namely — baseball is at least taking steps to admit the problem and to correct it.

The U.S. government had also been reluctant to get into this mess.

Obviously, during the BALCO case, the government wanted to keep the names of the athletes quiet, even after some admitted to steroid use.

And last year’s Congressional hearings on steroids in baseball was all show, telling us nothing we didn’t know already while humiliating McGwire and, ultimately, Rafael Palmeiro in the process.

But the government is now taking a more active approach in trying to stop doping. Last month, authorities busted a steroid ring in Orlando and Mobile, Ala., to which baseball player Gary Matthews Jr. and former heavyweight boxing champion Evander Holyfield have been linked. Williams told me he thinks that doping agencies will continue to give way to law enforcement agencies, as has been the case in Europe. It may be lamentable that professional sports needs government intervention, but it’s probably in the best interest of both sports and our country.

A more important question might be, Why should we care?

In the current issue of ESPN The Magazine, Chuck Klosterman compares athletes taking steroids to Jack Kerouac being on a Benzedrine binge while writing “On the Road,” or the Beatles using psychedelic drugs while recording Rubber Soul and Revolver. “Absolutely no one holds it against them,” Klosterman, the respected Esquire columnist, wrote of the Beatles.

It’s a fantastic point. Rubber Soul and Revolver are no less “authentic,” and they would not and probably could not have been made without the use of drugs, Klosterman wrote. To take it back to the playing field, why should we care about steroids? They make linebackers hit harder, baseball players hit farther, Olympic sprinters run faster and, thus, spectator sports “funner”.

I posed this question to Williams, who basically bonked me on the head with this answer: It’s the kids, stupid.

If steroid abuse is unwatched in professional sports, “it could really pervade prep school sports and even middle school sports,” he said.

Steroid use in professional football and baseball, the country’s two most popular sports, is widespread.

Klosterman pointed out in his article that in 2004, the Carolina Panthers’ punter (!) was suspended for using steroids. “It’s kind of crazy to think punters would be taking steroids but defensive tackles would not.”

In baseball, Caminiti estimated in 2002 that at least 50 percent of baseball players use steroids, while Jose Canseco, who wrote a book on steroid use, put that figure at 85 percent. Williams believes it’s somewhere between. Regardless, with

such a high number of steroid-abusers in professional sports, it’s reasonable to think that it would trickle down into sports in college, high school and even middle schools.

Fortunately, the NCAA has a tough drug-testing program, but unfortunately, most high schools and middle schools don’t. It’s not inconceivable that if steroids become easier and cheaper to make and harder to detect, many teenagers might try using performance-enhancers, whether to get an athletic scholarship to their dream school or to simply make the varsity team.

The health implications of using steroids are becoming more and more clear. Caminiti died of a heart attack at age 41, with his history of drug abuse likely contributing to his death. Klosterman pointed out that Andre Waters, a former Philadelphia Eagle strong safety, committed suicide last year at age 44. An examination of Waters’s brain after his death showed that he had the neurological tissue of an 85-yearold with Alzheimer’s disease, which was probably brought on by using his skull as a weapon during his career. And Waters was not linked to steroids. Just imagine the extra pop a linebacker or safety could deliver to his opponent and himself with a little bit of steroids. It’s not something that kids need to start doing when they’re 12.

Fortunately, baseball is finally catching up with the rest of professional sports in trying to squelch these steroid buyers, and the government is cracking down on suppliers. It’s still early and it’s still unclear what work needs to be done, but at least we have a start now.

We should thank Williams and Fainaru-Wada for that.

TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2007

Despite valiant efforts, Kitchner and Mock stymied at Nationals continued from page 12 10 to 15 years.”

After the last match of his college career, Kitchner said he thought it was “going to take some time for it to sink in. However, looking back, I don’t think I would change anything.”

Though Kitchner’s competitive college wrestling career is over, he still plans on helping out the team next year — he has been accepted into Brown’s one year master’s program in innovation management and entrepreneurship engineering and is waiting to hear back from another graduate program at Brown.

“I am going to volunteer and help out the team as much as I can,” Kitchner said.

Brown’s other national qualifier had an even tougher draw in his first match — in the heavyweight class, Mock wrestled against second-seed Aaron Anspach from Pennsylvania State University, who eventually placed second in the tournament. Mock could not upset his strong opponent and lost to Anspach 13-4.

In his consolation match,

Mock came close to a win. At the beginning of the match, his opponent, Reece Hopkin of Northern Colorado, took a 5-0 lead. But Mock came back and the two went back and forth in a high scoring match. Close to the end, Mock was trailing two points, but he was unable to take down his opponent in the last few seconds to even the score, and lost 15-13.

Though he was disappointed with the results, Mock said that going to Nationals added a lot to his experience.

“It helped me out a lot. I know what I need to work on in the off season and in the summer to win at that level,” Mock said.

Mock, the only junior captain this year, led the team on the mat with 20 wins, including nine by fall and 11 bonus point victories.

He earned Second Team All-Ivy honors this year at heavyweight.

Mock will get right back on the mat in a freestyle wrestling tournament in Las Vegas in three weeks and, he said, maybe another tournament in Chicago.

“I’m ready to take the next step,” Mock said.

Maz’s Minute: No Cinderellas continued from page 12 clearly a weakness in tournament play where less physical, small-conference teams with more spread-out offenses can more than compensate with superior perimeter shooting.

Three — Florida, Vanderbilt and Tennessee — of the six Southeastern Conference teams that made the tournament, meanwhile, are still alive.

Upsets that should’ve been, but weren’t Two nail-biting finishes came from games that really should have been upsets but weren’t.

Both Illinois and Xavier had their tickets to next round essentially punched, but neither could put their opponent away. Illinois led Virginia Tech by 10 with just over four minutes left in its first round game but just couldn’t find the basket in the last 4:28. In an incredible comeback, the Hokies scored the last 12 points of the game to advance to the second round. Illinois’ failure to finish deprived us of a 12-over-5 upset for the first time since 2000.

In a game that had even more bracket-busting potential, Xavier led No. 1-seeded Ohio State 6152 with just 2:54 left to play. After the Buckeyes cut the lead to 61-59 with 9.3 seconds left, Xavier’s Justin Cage had a chance to ice the game from the free-throw line. Only one of his shots fell, giving Xavier a three-point lead and Ohio State a chance to complete its miraculous comeback.

For what is sure to remain one of the best shots of the tournament even once a champion is crowned on April 2, the Buckeyes’ Ron Lewis hit a long threepointer with just two seconds left to force overtime. Xavier barely put up a fight in the extra period, and Ohio State’s national championship hopes, along with tens of thousands of fans’ brackets, stayed alive.

Picks

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Not that these will do you much good at this late stage, but here are my picks for the rest of the tournament: Final Four: Florida, Kansas, Georgetown, Texas A&M Championship game: Kansas over Georgetown

Alex Mazerov ’10 still can’t believe that Texas lost to USC. His

W. water polo goes 3-2 at Wolverine Invitational continued from page 12 scoreboard themselves. Lansing finally put Bruno on the scoreboard with 1:08 remaining in the second period, and the Bears faced a 51 deficit heading into the second half.

Brown allowed five more goals to LMU in the second stanza, and despite two goals from Presant — as well as scores from Balassone, Blaxberg and Angyal — the Bears fell to the Lions, 11-6.

“The major problem we’ve had going against higher-ranked teams is confidence,” said Head Coach Jason Gall. “In the first half, we weren’t taking smart shots or confident shots. In the second half, we started just playing with more confidence. That gave us momentum going into the Indiana game.”

In its contest with Indiana, Brown rebounded beautifully from its loss earlier in the day, playing stellar defense and converting offensive opportunities en route to an 8-4 victory. Balassone started the scoring attack, converting an opportunity just one minute into the game.

The Hoosiers tied the score at 1-1 with 5:25 left in the first quarter, but in the second quarter the Bears began to take control. Fahey put the team ahead 2-1, and after a game-tying goal from the Hoosiers, Presant found the net twice to give her team a 4-2 advantage at halftime.

In the third quarter, Glick, who finished the game with 5 steals and 2 assists, began to heat up — scoring twice — and Presant added her third goal to the game. Despite two goals from Indiana, Bruno went into the final quarter with a 7-4 lead.

In the fourth quarter, Brown maintained the defensive pressure on Indiana, shutting the Hoosiers

out in the final period. A goal by Lansing, following an Indiana ejection at 6:55, made the score 8-4, where it remained for the rest of the game.

“Before the game we went over specific match-ups,” Gall said. “I gave my best defenders — like Caitlin Fahey, Ally Wyatt (’08) and Rory Stanton — individual assignments, and they did an incredible job. We were able to level up on certain players and leave weaker players open, taking away our opponent’s strength.”

After the impressive showing against Indiana, Brown faltered on Sunday morning against Cal Baptist. Balassone scored early to give the Bears a 1-0 lead at the end of the first quarter, but Cal Baptist scored two unanswered goals in the second and Bruno never regained the lead, as the offense struggled to convert opportunities, and the team suffered a disappointing 6-5 loss.

“Every player has an off game, and unfortunately ours all came in the same game,” Presant said. “We just had a lapse, but we got over it, which was great.”

In their second game on Sunday, the Bears once again rebounded strongly from a defeat, playing against host Michigan in front of the Wolverines’ home crowd.

Michigan took the early lead, scoring just 59 seconds in, but Lansing tied the game up on a 6-on-5 opportunity at 5:45. Glick then converted a five-meter penalty shot to give Brown the lead, but Michigan tied the game at 2 before the end of the first quarter.

The Bears started off strongly in the second quarter, when Balassone scored just 17 seconds in to give Brown a 3-2 lead. But the Bears’ offense was held scoreless for the rest of the period, and the Wolverines scored twice more to

bracket is finished.

7 p.m., list 120

take a 4-3 lead at halftime.

Brown’s struggles continued when Michigan took a 5-3 lead 16 seconds into the second half, but at 4:48 Fahey cut the lead to 54 with her first goal, and Presant also scored her first goal to tie the game with 3:25 to go in the third period. At 1:26, Michigan regained the lead, putting them up 6-5 at the end of the third quarter.

After Fahey drew an ejection with 7:17 left in the game, Angyal scored on the power play to tie the game. After a Michigan goal, Lansing and Fahey converted opportunities to give the Bears the lead, 8-7. The game looked to be in jeopardy when the Wolverines struck again with 1:15 remaining, but with 45 seconds left, Balassone scored what would prove to be the winning goal, and the Bears held off the No. 17 Wolverines 9-8.

“The biggest thing was that to every goal there was an assist, to every assist there was a drive, and the reason we converted so well was that everyone did their job,” Presant said. “Everyone was working together, and that was great to see.”

The wins against two top-level opponents give Brown momentum for the rest of the season.

“No one on this team has beaten Indiana or Michigan,” Gall said.

“Last year we came close, but we thought we could get over the hump and finally beat those teams.

The girls have learned to maintain leads and focus on fundamental aspects of the game.”

The team next travels to San Diego for the Aztec Invitational, where it will play eight games in six days.

“This trip to California will help build on our game shape,” Gall said. “We’re playing well, but we could be playing a lot better. By no means have we reached our peak.”

E DITORIAL & L ETTERS THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

PAGE 10

TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2007

STAF F EDITORIAL

In defense of paper Banner’s online course catalog is wrong on multiple levels — the first being that we can’t believe we’re nostalgic for BOCA and the Course Announcement Bulletin.

The Banner catalog’s organization seemed a great idea in theory — list all courses offered for the semester in one place, sorted by department. But navigating it is a user-interface nightmare. With all labs and sections on display, it’s hard to sift through just one class, much less a handful, and we can’t figure out whether or not a class is even offered.

Without course times on the page, we can’t skim over those 8:30 a.m. AB hour classes like we used to, and while we’re fans of independent studies, do we really need to see every single one offered by every professor?

Speaking of professors, where are they? The main display page for each department’s courses shows course numbers and descriptions, “schedule types” and, inexplicably, “Undergraduate College College” — but no professor names. Perhaps administrators don’t realize which professors are teaching EC 11 — or rather, ECON 0110 — in a given semester are of paramount importance. At an institution that prides itself on accessible professors, it’s unfortunate that students will have to wade through three pages to even find out their professor’s name.

Most irritating, there’s no efficient way to see everything offered. Selecting all departments and clicking “Get Courses” yields yards of Internet on one page — sadly, full of mostly irrelevant information and garbled course codes that, based on our unscientific research, don’t mix well with any Internet browser.

We find that in the messy new setup, students will most likely find classes they already know exist — which is hardly the point of a course catalog.

Going through the awkward system, we find ourselves wishing there were a consolidated place for all of this information — one that listed course numbers, descriptions, meeting times and professors in easily accessible chunks.

No, we’re not talking about Mocha, though we’re looking forward to the next version. We’re talking about the CAB. And we’d like it back.

Given the cost of a flimsy, cheap book that likely doesn’t cost much next to the $23 million Banner project, we can’t understand why the University dropped the intuitive CAB. A quick glance at a class’s blurb can give you more information than three pages on Banner.

As much as we miss CAB’s comparatively simple course listing, the book’s extra pages on various degree programs, liberal learning courses, how to file a concentration and the academic calendar are much more accessible than the Registrar’s Web site, a nightmare of italics Times New Roman with a design reminiscent of Geocities.

Of course, as we use Banner more, we’ll get used to it, and freshmen will soon be asking each other excitedly, “Hey, are you taking ECON 0110 too?”

But with Banner, filtering out entire departments is too easy. Maybe some of us did that anyway when reading the CAB, but as we flipped through the 200 pages of opportunity, a course in an unknown department could catch our eye. With these diversions now buried beneath a poorly designed interface, trying something completely new is that much harder. When finding classes we know are out there is this cumbersome, we worry students may never find the mysterious four-letter code — whether it be COLT, ANCT or SCSO — that could turn out to be their unexpected passion.

Bring the CAB back, Brown. As proud editors of a paper publication, we think having a hard copy is never a bad idea.

Executive Editors Allison Kwong Ben Leubsdorf

Senior Editors Stephen Colelli Sonia Saraiya BUSINESS

EDITORIAL Lydia Gidwitz Lindsey Meyers Stephanie Bernhard Stu Woo Simmi Aujla Sara Molinaro Ross Frazier Jacob Schuman Michal Zapendowski Peter Cipparone Justin Goldman Sarah Demers Erin Frauenhofer Madeleine Marecki

Arts & Culture Editor Arts & Culture Editor Features Editor Features Editor Metro Editor Metro Editor News Editor Opinions Editor Opinions Editor Sports Editor Sports Editor Asst. Sports Editor Asst. Sports Editor Asst. Sports Editor

PHOTO Eunice Hong Christopher Bennett Jacob Melrose

Photo Editor Photo Editor Sports Photo Editor

General Manager Mandeep Gill General Manager Ally Ouh Executive Manager Darren Ball Executive Manager Dan DeNorch Laurie-Ann Paliotti Sr. Advertising Manager Office Manager Susan Dansereau PRODUCTION Design Editor Steve DeLucia Copy Desk Chief Chris Gang Graphics Editor Mark Brinker Graphics Editor Roxanne Palmer Web Editor Luke Harris POST- MAGAZINE Hillary Dixler Melanie Duch Taryn Martinez Rajiv Jayadevan Mindy Smith

UCS criticizes new Banner course catalog To the Editor: For the past year and a half, the Undergraduate Council of Students has communicated student input to the administration and the Banner Project Team in an effort to ensure that online course registration be both userfriendly and consistent with Brown’s academic ethos. After reviewing the Banner Catalog and Class Schedule, we were disappointed by the system’s poor construction. We strongly disagree with Associate Provost Nancy Dunbar’s claim that these two systems “won’t be too much extra work.”

From its separate listings of course times and descriptions to its superfluous inclusion of independent studies to its generally unfriendly interface, the current system is more than “extra work.” It is borderline non-functional and, worse, it threatens to irreparably damage Brown academics. Shopping period’s success hinges on students’ ability to identify interesting classes, and the catalog and schedule seriously compromise that ability. In addition, with the discontinuation of the Course Announcement Bulletin, these resources will prove inadequate for Brown’s advising process.

Not only will students and faculty no longer be able to have advising conversations over an open book, but the online system will not provide an accessible alternative information source. Finally, the system’s problems extend to prospective students and first years, as they

often rely on the Course Announcement Bulletin and BOCA to learn about Brown’s academic offerings Brown students’ needs for course information can be met simply — Mocha’s example demonstrates this.

We urge the Banner team and relevant administrators to work quickly, seek student input and modify the existing system. Students have raised many substantive concerns about Banner’s effect on the Brown curriculum, and the Catalog and Schedule’s problems must be remedied so that the community can re-focus its attention on these more important issues.

The Executive Board of the Undergraduate Council of Students John Gillis ’07 Tristan Freeman ‘07 Sara Damiano ‘08 Sara Gentile ‘09 Brian Becker ‘09 Hugh Livengood ‘07 Vernissia Tam ‘09 Michael Glassman ‘09 Melissa Revotskie ‘09 Lauren Kolodny ‘08 Tara Gonsalves ‘08 Drew Madden ‘10

Meal plan solution: students sharing credits

T HE B ROWN D AILY H ERALD Editors-in-Chief Eric Beck Mary-Catherine Lader

LETTERS

ROXANNE PALMER

Managing Editor Managing Editor Managing Editor Features Editor Features Editor

Steve DeLucia, Ezra Miller, Designers Catherine Cullen, Erin Cummings, Madeleine Rosenberg, Copy Editors Senior Staff Writers Rachel Arndt, Michael Bechek, Oliver Bowers, Zachary Chapman, Chaz Firestone, Kristina Kelleher, Debbie Lehmann, Scott Lowenstein, James Shapiro, Michael Skocpol Staff Writers Susana Aho, Taylor Barnes, Brianna Barzola, Evan Boggs, Irene Chen, Nicole Dungca, Catherine Goldberg, Isabel Gottlieb, Thi Ho, Rebecca Jacobson, Tsvetina Kamenova, Franklin Kanin, Hannah Levintova, Abe Lubetkin, Christian Martell, Taryn Martinez, Zachary McCune, Nathalie Pierrepont, Alexander Roehrkasse, Jessica Rotondi, Marielle Segarra, Robin Steele, Allissa Wickham Sports Staff Writers Amy Ehrhart, Kaitlyn Laabs, Eliza Lane, Kathleen Loughlin, Megan McCahill, Marco Santini, Tom Trudeau, Steele West Business Staff Dana Feuchtbaum, Kent Holland, Alexander Hughes, Mariya Perelyubskaya, Viseth San, Kaustubh Shah, Jon Spector, Robert Stefani, Lily Tran, Lindsay Walls Design Staff Brianna Barzola, Jihan Chao, Aurora Durfee, Sophie Elsner, Christian Martell, Matthew McCabe, Ezra Miller Photo Staff Stuart Duncan-Smith, Austin Freeman, Tai Ho Shin Copy Editors Ayelet Brinn, Catherine Cullen, Erin Cummings, Karen Evans, Jacob Frank, Ted Lamm, Lauren Levitz, Cici Matheny, Alex Mazerov, Ezra Miller, Joy Neumeyer, Madeleine

To the Editor: As a cashier with Brown Dining Services, I have seen that people on meal plans use their dining options in different ways.

Towards the end of the day, one typically sees a segment of students (and quite a large one at that) rushing to Josiah’s or the Gate at 1:45 a.m. These are the students on the traditional 20 meals-per-week plan.

Towards the end of the spring semester, one sees another set of students doubling up in lines to swipe as many credits as they can before they lose them at the end of the academic year. These are the students on flex plans. There are also students scrounging around for meal credits at the end of a semester and long waits at the cashiers because someone does not have enough flex points to complete a transaction. These are the poor souls who “misunderestimated” their appetites or just got the munchies too often.

Why have one group of students eating too much since they have excess meal credits and another group eating less than they should due to a mismanagement

or miscalculation on their part?

One should also note that this semester a lot of students lost meal credits since Dining Services (voluntarily or involuntarily) reset their systems to void meal credits at midnight instead of 2 a.m.

Would it be too much of a hassle for the establishment to set up machines at dining halls to transfer meal credits/flex points between two consenting card-holders? Alternatively, the Card Value Center machines at the Rockefeller Library, the Sciences Library, Faunce House, et cetera could be reprogrammed to transfer excess meal credits between two cards just as they can transfer declining balance dollars between two cards.

And thus, Brown University would finally have solved a major problem concerning basic needs that plagues developing nations around the world, as well as our own students.

Sriram Subramanian ‘10 March 19

CORRECTIONS POLICY The Brown Daily Herald is committed to providing the Brown University community with the most accurate information possible. Corrections may be submitted up to seven calendar days after publication.

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O PINIONS TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2007

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Making your stretch mark on society ADAM CAMBIER OPINIONS COLUMNIST

This past Friday, amidst rampant rumors of bankruptcy, Wall Street saw one company suffer one of the worst stock falls to hit our fair nation since Black Tuesday. The company affected was Bally Total Fitness Holding Corp., whose stock fell 62 percent from $1.24 to 75 cents per share.

In terms readily understood by anyone who has ever adopted a child in Africa, that’s a big drop. Instead of paying the price of a cup of coffee to adopt a piece of Bally Total Fitness, it’s down to mere pennies a day.

This one-day dip in price is the crown jewel on an overall drop of 30 percent over the past year.

It’s all well and good to attribute Bally’s financial decline to their poor management or to their crushing debt. You could even say it stemmed from membership database errors that led the company to miscalculate its gross annual income. I have another theory for why Bally has gone straight down the pooper like millions upon millions of purged meals before it.

Bally’s failure is the signal for a seismic shift in our society. Like the fall of the Bastille, it heralds the end of an outdated and tottering regime.

That’s right, I’m talking about the end of the oppressive fitocracy.

The fitocracy. It’s the cultural institution that tells us that we have to be thin and muscular to be beautiful. It says we all have to look like Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, and its days are numbered. The people of America are waking up, and they’re realizing that not only is it okay to be tremendously fat and out of shape, but it’s also the better way to be.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine attended a showing of the movie “300.” The movie theater was filled with a healthy crosssampling of young men and women on the cutting edge of social change. Prior to the feature presentation, an advertisement was aired for Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty.”

If America is going to throw off the shackles of enslavement to an unrealistic body image, we need a new patron saint. We need someone fatter and uglier and just plain viler than the cookie-cutter stick figures that pepper the outdated fantasies of teenage boys around the world. I was perusing the Sun, a respected British paper that boasts the highest English-language circulation in the world, when I found her.

To me, Beth Ditto looks like the aftermath of an Avon lady exploding all over Roseanne.

The lead singer of punk group “The Gossip,” Ditto weighs in at a robust 210 pounds, no doubt accrued thanks to God-knows-how-

Flabby is the new sexy. Folks, it’s time to follow suit and fatten up.

The ad featured numerous older women, all wearing nothing but a natural smile. With the appearance of each new naked old lady, replete with sags and bags, the audience let loose with an explosion of whooping and hollering. I concluded that these outbursts were motivated by nothing short of sheer, unadulterated lust. Against this evidence of cultural transformation, the resplendent pectorals of “300” seemed nothing short of ridiculous.

It’s abundantly clear that fug is the new fit.

many fatty, rib-sticking meals she’s eaten in her home state of Arkansas. Her trademark is wearing skin-tight blue bodysuits with stripper heels on stage at her band’s shows.

She’s a lesbian who dates a transgender individual born as a woman but living as a man.

She told the Sun, “I read things where people call me a fat ugly bitch, and you know what? I am a fat ugly bitch, and it’s amazing!”

Fat, ugly and proudly holding her shining lantern, Beth Ditto is the perfect Statue of

Liberty for a new America.

However, like a Miss America contestant, Ditto’s looks alone don’t justify consecration.

She has achievements to her name, other than just being fugly and proud of it. She’s a fat activist. When asked to perform a few in-store concerts for British clothing retailer Topshop, she refused because the chain doesn’t carry clothing for girls of a heftier persuasion. In the way only our redneck lesbian figurehead could, Ditto offered to design a line of what she called “clothes for big girls and boys.”

Although Topshop declined Beth’s generous offer, they did make sure to point out that they do indeed think she is pretty great.

And apparently they aren’t the only ones — at Britain’s 2007 NME Awards (a less-stuffy British version of the Grammys), Ditto was nominated for Sexiest Woman of the Year.

Sure, she ended up losing the title to Kate Moss, but it’s still a big waddling step in the right direction.

If Bally’s fall, lust over naked old ladies, and Beth Ditto’s Sexiest Woman nomination are any indication, flabby is the new sexy.

Folks, it’s time to follow suit and fatten up.

So go ahead and supersize that McDonald’s 20-piece Chicken McNugget value meal.

Use your treadmill as a towel rack. Mow down a few big-headed beautiful pedestrians to cut them down to size. The buff are going down, and the big are set to run gasping and panting to the top of the heap.

Adam Cambier ’09 is good cholesterol, but he spreads like bad cholesterol.

The G-word BENJAMIN BRIGHT OPINIONS COLUMNIST Whether it’s “Save Darfur” posters in the New York City subway, front-page revelations of Saddam Hussein’s massacre of the Kurds or the never-ending controversy over the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians 90 years ago, escaping genocide-talk is an impossible task these days.

While it may seem that we are living in an age of unparalleled cruelty and slaughter, frequent accusations of genocide and the outlawing of genocide-denial in the international arena show that the term has been politicized, cheapened into the most cynical of weapons for attacking political opponents and mobilizing grassroots support.

For the most part, humanitarian intervention is only justified by the international community when the conflict is defined as genocide. Otherwise, it would just be imperialism. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when Western activists label virtually every conflict in Africa as genocide.

Everyone agrees that the massacres in Rwanda in 1994 qualified as genocide. Interestingly, the United Nations, European Union, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International tend to avoid the G-word in reference to the conflict in Darfur, although that hasn’t stopped anyone else.

Many talk about the ongoing genocide in Uganda. Similarly, the war in Liberia and the spreading of conflict from Darfur to Chad have produced talk of “potential” genocides, introducing a nifty hierarchical classification system for the G-word.

Genocide-mongering has had disastrous effects on civil conflicts around the

world. Johnathan Steele explains in the Guardian how the Save Darfur campaign has replaced a complex regional issue with a good versus evil scenario: “The complex grievances that set farmers against nomads was covered with a simplistic template of Arab vs. African, even though the region was crisscrossed with tribal and local rivalries that put some villages on the government’s side and others against it.”

While it is true that the Sudanese gov-

less willing to resolve the conflict or make compromises, thinking Western support will result in a sweeter deal, while the “evildoers” become embittered against a torrent of Western criticism.

And that’s exactly what we see in Sudan, where “the rebels, much weaker than the government, would logically have sued for peace long ago. Because of the Save Darfur movement, however, the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal re-

The conflict in Darfur has been simplified into a black-and-white moral paradigm in order to drum up support for the Save Darfur campaign, with the victims becoming celebrated martyrs and perpetrators ruthless villains. ernment severely overreacted to rebel attacks by arming the Janjaweed militias, most Western activists have forgotten that rebel soldiers also committed grievous atrocities. And so the conflict in Darfur has been simplified into a black-and-white moral paradigm in order to drum up support for the Save Darfur campaign, with the victims becoming celebrated martyrs and the perpetrators ruthless villains.

Consequently, those victims are much

action, the more the West will pressure Sudan to hand them control of the region,” wrote Alan Kuperman in the New York Times.

Indeed, rebel factions in Darfur initially rejected a peace treaty last May in order to extract further concessions from the Sudanese government and increase their dominion over tribal lands, needlessly prolonging a brutal civil war. This gravely embarrassed both the international commu-

nity and the Save Darfur movement, who had romanticized the rebels as noble freedom fighters.

It’s all part of the strategic logic of victimhood, which is repeated over and over again when the West sticks its nose in civil conflicts where it doesn’t belong. As Brendan O’Neill convincingly explains in spiked, “By treating certain groups as worthy victims who deserve our protection, Western campaigners encourage them to advertise and even prostitute their victimhood in order to win that protection.”

Charges have been leveled that Bosnian Muslim rebel groups massacred their own people and blamed it on the Serbs in order to win more Western support and sympathy. Violence in Bosnia was extended for several months when the Clinton administration urged the rebels to hold out for a better deal. The Israelis and Palestinians are constantly one-upping each other over who is the “real” victim of genocide, hoping to win over the hearts and minds of naïïve Westerner activists.

Throwing around the G-word as a political tool has become increasingly popular in the international community, by states, activists and the supposed victims of genocide, all of whom seek to lend their cause some legitimacy in terms of hollow moral absolutes. Not only does this denigrate the very concept of genocide, but it also inflames civil conflicts around the world.

If the G-word is to serve any meaningful purpose in the modern world, then steps must be taken to ensure that it serves as a failsafe mechanism for alerting the world to the most egregious crimes against humanity — and more than just a weapon to manipulate the international arena by the most cynical of political actors.

Benjamin Bright ’07 holds office hours at Haven Bros.

S PORTS T UESDAY TUESDAY, MARCH 20, 2007

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

W. water polo goes 3-2 at Wolverine Invitational

BY BENJY ASHER CONTRIBUTING WRITER

The women’s water polo team had a breakthrough weekend at the University of Michigan’s Wolverine Invitational, where it went 3-2.

Its strong showing including an 84 win over Eastern Division rival University of Indiana, as well as a 9-8 victory against No. 17 Michigan for the Bears’ first win over a Top 20 opponent this season.

The weekend also included an 11-2 rout of Slippery Rock University, an 11-6 loss to No. 11 Loyola Marymount and a disappointing 6-5 loss to California Baptist University. This weekend’s results put the Bears at 9-4 on the season, with three of their losses coming against Top 20 opponents.

Brown’s schedule began with an easy match-up with Slippery Rock Friday. The Bears overpowered the Rock from the beginning,

building a 4-1 lead in the first quarter. In the second quarter, Bruno continued to dominate, shutting out Slippery Rock while adding five more goals to its own score, to go into the half up 9-1.

The third quarter was split 11, and neither team scored in the fourth quarter, allowing the Bears to cruise to an 11-2 win. The Bears’ offense was spread among eight players, with Elizabeth Balassone ’07, Caitlin Fahey ’07 and Lauren Presant ’10 scoring two goals each, while Claire Angyal ’07, Paige Lansing ’07, Alexis Blaxberg ’08, Rory Stanton ’09 and Sarah Glick ’10 each contributed one goal.

But it was Brown that looked overpowered Saturday morning when it faced No. 11 Loyola Marymount. The Bears dug themselves into an early hole, allowing five goals to LMU before getting on the continued on page 9

Jacob Melrose / Herald File Photo Caitlin Fahey ’07 had four goals, including the game-winner against host school University of Michigan, in the Wolverine Invitational over the weekend.

Williams ’72 has ‘done a service’ to sport Where the upsets at?

Have we thanked Lance Williams ’72 and Mark Fainaru-Wada yet?

President Bush has. At a small reception at the 2005 White House Correspondents Dinner, the two San Francisco Chronicle reporters, being honored for their work in revealing the BALCO steroids scandal, were introduced to the president.

The first thing he said to them, Williams recalled, was “You’ve done a Stu Woo service.” The Drunken Stu-por reporters then chatted with Bush, a former owner of the Texas Rangers, for a few minutes about baseball and the Congressional hearings on steroids in the sport. Then, before they parted, Bush told them again, “You’ve done a service.”

Of course, we know what happened after that. A year later, the federal government thanked them again, this time by sentencing them to 18 months in jail for not revealing how they obtained sealed grandjury testimonies in which Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi, among others, admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs. The two are likely to avoid jail time now, but only after a lawyer pleaded guilty to leaking the information.

It still surprises me how ungrateful both Major League Baseball and the government have been to Fainaru-Wada and Williams, who is speaking in List 120 tonight in a lecture sponsored by The Herald, and Fainaru-Wada. Through their investigative reporting, which won them a 2004 George Polk Award, the reporters are forcing baseball and the government to do something it wouldn’t have done other-

wise — clean sports of dangerous drug abuse.

Baseball wasn’t looking to clean up its act anytime soon. It had plenty of chances to investigate the prevalence of performance-enhancers among ballplayers — in 1998, when a reporter noticed a bottle of androstenedione sitting on Mark McGwire’s shelf during the homerun race, and in 2002, when Ken Caminiti confessed to Sports Illustrated that he had been abusing steroids for years, including in 1996, when he was named the National League’s Most Valuable Player.

It wasn’t until early 2005, just after Williams and Fainaru-Wada wrote the stories about Bonds and Giambi’s grand-jury testimonies, that the league instituted a tough drug policy. And it wasn’t until after the reporters published “Game continued on page 8

Despite valiant efforts, Kitchner and Mock stymied at Nationals

BY HAN CUI SPORTS STAFF WRITER

Jacob Melrose / Herald File Photo Levon Mock ’08 participated in the NCAA Wrestling Championship this weekend but could not get out of the first round of the tournament.

Shawn Kitchner ’07 and Levon Mock ’08 competed last weekend in the NCAA Wrestling Championship at the Palace of Auburn Hills in Michigan, where both wrestlers had tough draws in their first round. Despite their hard work, neither pulled the upset and could not advance further in the tournament.

As a result, Kitchner finished his college wrestling career with a record of 46-29, and Mock will head into his senior season with a career record of 38-32.

At 165 pounds, Kitchner first wrestled against fi fth seed Nick Balma from Northern Iowa University. Kitchner lost by a 5-0 decision. In his consolation match, Kitchner faced off against another seeded wrestler, Johnny Galloway from Northern Illinois University, the twelfth-seeded wrestler in the weight class. Despite his effort, Kitchner could not take down his opponent and lost the match 8-2.

Kitchner said he was somewhat disappointed with his performance in the two matches.

“Although both of my opponents were seeded, I don’t think I wrestled at my best. I was a little conservative on the mat — maybe it’s because it was my first time at Nationals,” he said.

Kitchner had not wrestled for seven weeks due to injury when he took fourth place at Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association and qualified for Nationals.

He earned Wrestling All-Ivy Honorable Mention this year for his extraordinary comeback.

Though he could not fulfill his dream of becoming an All-American, his achievements at Brown were praised by the coaching staff.

“Shawn had a very successful college career,” said Assistant Coach Mike Burch. “He is one of the most dedicated wrestlers, wasting no minutes in training.

He is one of the best wrestlers and leaders Brown has had in the last continued on page 9

Whew! That’s me still catching my breath from a ridiculously intense four days of college basketball (there was a Europeaninspired holiday in there too, I think). Saturday, day one of the second round of the NCAA tournament, was by far the wildest and most pulse-pounding day so far — especially considering that I have Texas A&M in the Final Alex Mazerov Four in my Maz’s Minute Facebook bracket.

But even for those of you who picked Ohio State to represent the South in the Final Four and didn’t really care who won the A&M-Louisville game in Lexington, Saturday offered up plenty of thrilling match-ups, including two overtime games going on at the same time.

But once all the end-of-game buzzers had sounded, the excitement didn’t really produce too many big surprises. That fact, ironically, is perhaps what’s most surprising thus far about the 2007 tournament. There were no significant upsets in the second round, and the lowest seed to advance to the Sweet 16 was the seventh-seeded University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Runnin’ Rebels. This represents the first time since 1995 that not a single double-digit seed has advanced to the round of 16.

There weren’t any upsets of the George Mason-over-North Carolina caliber — which happened in the second round last year — meaning we’re left with a Cinderella-less tournament and a relatively bland third round of action on Thursday and Friday.

Every tournament follower (and enlightened bracket filler-outer) knows to expect the unexpected, but this year, the expected is almost exactly what we got.

With no George Masonesque Cinderella tale for me to sound off on, here are a few less

intriguing but still-worthy-of-ourattention storylines.

Where art thou ACC? The Atlantic Coast Conference sent a conference-record and league-high seven teams to the Big Dance this year, and now just one squad is still alive — UNC. Failing to win a single game were Georgia Tech and Duke, whose mediocrity even I underestimated — and I’m one of the biggest Duke haters anywhere. At least Georgia Tech fell to a talented UNLV team that went on to knock off secondseeded Wisconsin in the next round. But the Blue Devils losing to VCU, a team that lost to such powerhouses as Toledo and Appalachian State in the regular season? Come on now. You’d really be hard-pressed to find a table at the Ratty with more than one or two people that could tell you what VCU stands for. (It’s Virginia Commonwealth University.)

But, seriously — don’t worry, Duke fans. I’m sure Greg Paulus’s career average of 9.1 points per game will get you to at least the second round next season.

Okay, enough Duke-hating for now, and back to the ACC’s struggles. Virginia Tech, Boston College, Virginia and Maryland were all eliminated in the second round. The Terps, Cavaliers and Hokies were all doomed by their opponent’s shooting prowess from beyond the arc. Butler and Southern Illinois — which, as one of my friends pointed out, shows up as “So Ill” on the CBS scoreboard — both nailed 12 shots from three-point land against Maryland and Virginia Tech, respectively, and Tennessee knocked down 11 against Virginia.

All three of those ACC teams, by the way, made just 17 threepointers combined. Focusing so much on points-in-the-paint play might work in the regular season and the ACC tournament, but it’s continued on page 9