Thursday, October 18, 2007

The Brown Daily Herald T hursday, O ctober 18, 2007

Volume CXLII, No. 91

Energy efficiency, improved advocacy featured in UCS agenda

By Franklin Kanin Senior Staff Writer

Perennially criticized for infighting and obsessing over parliamentary procedure, the Undergraduate Council of Students looked to turn things around at last night’s meeting. At its general body meeting, the council passed an agenda of roughly 40 goals for the 2007-2008 academic year, many focused on internal operations, communicating student goals to administrators and faculty and, listed first, energy efficiency.

Dorm renovations, improvements to Banner, development of community work-based classes, environmental concerns and increased communication with Brown’s Corporation were all featured on the list.

The agenda stressed taking in “student opinion as much as possible,” UCS Vice President Lauren Kolodny ’08 said. “I’m excited about the agenda. I think we really stressed creating a realistic set of goals.”

UCS President Michael Glassman ’09 said the agenda keeps council members focused and is intended to demonstrate UCS’s work to the rest of the student body. “I think it will just be helpful in terms of keeping

Since 1866, Daily Since 1891

Grad School diversity improving, report says

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us focused,” he said.

University administrators will all receive a copy of the finalized agenda so they can see what UCS’s priorities are, he said. UCS will also distribute the agenda to the study body, though it does not yet know how this will be accomplished.

The agenda is a good way to show the student body what UCS plans to do and has done, said UCS at-large representative Clay Wertheimer ’10 who spearheaded the formatting and organization of the agenda.

“I got involved with it because I think it was important to get it out right away to show the student body that we have really concrete goals and that we thought through these goals,” Wertheimer said.

Glassman said UCS is supposed to present an agenda every year, but he does not remember it ever happening. “It’s something that UCS is really supposed to do, but I don’t remember it being done, at least not as formally in the past,” he said.

The agenda was introduced at last week’s general body meeting and UCS members gave feedback to Wertheimer throughout the week continued on page 8

By Jenna Stark Contributing Writer

Rahul Keerthi / Herald Images from the Annual Fall Shuckoff, held yesterday on Wriston Quadrangle.

Simmons and Brown’s Slavery and justice committee get local award

By Caitlin Browne Staf f Writer

Though the University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice spent three years researching and writing a 106-page assessment of Brown’s ties to slavery, which it released last October, what was once a heated issue has all but disappeared from campus conversation just one year later. But on Tuesday

Arts Brie

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night, at an award ceremony that honored the committee’s work for historical justice, President Ruth Simmons urged other institutions to follow Brown’s lead.

“We want to see the rest of the nation engage this issue in the same way we have as a university,” she said, accepting an award from Rhode Island for Community and Justice on behalf of the committee.

“We are confident we can do it as

a nation.”

The Providence-based nonprofit gives its Community and Justice awards annually to honor exemplary community leaders, this year honoring the committee’s report and Simmons’ commitment to public education in Rhode Island.

Formed by Simmons in 2003, the committee examined the University’s historic ties to slavery and the slave trade, ultimately recom-

— Robin Steele

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continued on page 8

Hope High reaches out to immigrant parents

By Nandini Jayakrishna Senior Staf f Writer

RJD2 concert tickets likely to sell out today Tickets for the BCA fall concert featuring RJD2, Mr. Lif and Doujah Raze will likely sell out this morning. There are under 100 tickets left for the Oct. 19 show, according to David Horn ’08, BCA booking chair. He added that tickets are “selling out at an unprecedented rate.”

Though some currently on reserve may open up and be sold at the door before the concert, Horn cautions ticket-less students not to count on reserve tickets. No further tickets will be issued due to fire code restrictions. Tickets will be on sale today from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m., or until they are sold out.

mending that Brown address its history with a center for the study of slavery, a memorial commemorating the slave trade, recruitment of students from the West Indies and Africa and an annual day of remembrance. While none of those suggestions has yet materialized, Simmons created a $10-million fund to support local public schools and

Herald File Photo

Teachers at Hope High School started a program this summer, called “Juntos,” to better involve non-English speaking parents in their children’s education.

post- on DARJEELING In a special extra-large edition, post- interviews Wes Anderson. That’s it. No, really. Wes Anderson.

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JAILING THE youth Rhode Islanders sound off on the state’s new policy of jailing 17-year-olds in maximum security prison.

Signs in both English and Spanish posted inside the main entrance of Hope High School welcomed students and parents as they walked into the school for a “family night” Tuesday evening. The event, the first of its kind at Hope, is part of a program called “Juntos,” started this summer by two Hope teachers to make non-English speaking parents and students feel more at home at Hope.

Sixty percent of Hope students are Hispanic, and their parents often don’t understand or speak English very well, said Judah Lakin ’04, a social studies teacher for non-native speakers at Hope and co-founder of the program.

Historically, students at the East Side high school have failed to meet federal academic standards. In 2005, the state’s Department of Education split the school, only three blocks north of Brown’s campus,

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195 Angell Street, Providence, Rhode Island

A year after introducing a Universitywide diversity action plan, the Office of Institutional Diversity released its first update this fall. Some of the notable accomplishments in the Diversity Initiative Status Report included improving the recruitment and retention of graduate students, medical students and staff from underrepresented backgrounds.

The action plan, though relatively new, is part of the University’s long-standing commitment to being invested in difference and diversity, said Sheila Bonde, dean of the Graduate School.

“You look at all the ways that you can infuse diversity into a context — diversity of curriculum, diversity of ideas, recruitment of a diverse group of people,” said Brenda Allen, associate provost and director of institutional diversity. “We looked at the numbers of graduate students and felt we could do better.”

Since the implementation of the plan, the University has worked to revamp the recruitment process for prospective grad students and build a sense of community amongst current students.

Approximately one-third of grad students are of international representation, meeting expectations, according to Associate Dean of the Graduate School Valerie Wilson. As of 2007, about 2.5 percent of grad students are black, 4 percent are Asian, 3 percent are Hispanic and 0.5 percent are Native American.

“In terms of minority representation ... there is always room for improvement, especially for recruiting students who wouldn’t normally think of Brown,” Bonde said.

In 2006 the statistics for minority grad students were similar, with about 3 percent black students, 4.5 percent Asian students, 3 percent Hispanic students and 0.4 percent Native American students. “The percentage of incoming students from different ethnic groups in the Graduate School has been up and down,” Allen said. “Dean Bonde and Dean Wilson are trying to find strategies to lend to a more steady progress.”

Wilson said the new recruiting methods involve seeking out grad students who would normally not consider Brown for continuing their education. “In terms of minority students, that means reaching out to schools and students that have not traditionally been reached out to,” she said.

The University has also requested that faculty members take active roles in recruiting students to their departments during campus visits, matriculation week and Super Monday, Allen said. Super Monday

continued on page 6

continued on page 8

Child’s play Zack Beauchamp ‘10 compares Islamofascism with childhood name-calling on the playground.

Polo blog Hank Weintraub ’09 of the men’s water polo team is blogging his way through the season.

12 SPORTS

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T oday Page 2

Thursday, October 18, 2007

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

But Seriously | Charlie Custer and Stephen Barlow

We a t h e r Today

TOMORROW

rain 75 / 58

rain 74 / 58

Menu

Sharpe Refectory

Verney-Woolley Dining Hall

Lunch — Baked Vegan Nuggets, Cheddar Potatoes, Grilled Vegetable Calzone, Chicken Fingers, Chocolate Flake Cookies, Pumpkin Bars

Lunch — BBQ Beef Sandwich, Pasta Primavera, Zucchini & Summer Squash, Chocolate Chip Cookies, Peanut Butter & Jelly Bar

Dinner — Vegetarian Tamale Pie, Red Potatoes with Chive Sauce, Creole Eggplant, Chicken in the Rough, Chocolate Vanilla Pudding Cake

Dinner — Spice Rubbed Pork Chops, Vegan Paella, Sweet Potatoes, Green Beans with Mushrooms, Apple Fritters, Chocolate Vanilla Pudding Cake

Sudoku

Aibohphobia | Roxanne Palmer

Vagina Dentata | Soojean Kim

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

Octopus on Hallucinogens | Toni Liu and Stephanie Le

RELEASE DATE– Thursday, October © Puzzles18, by2007 Pappocom

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

C

o s and s wo d Lewis Edited by RichrNorris Joyce r Nichols

ACROSS 1 Is sore 6 Slowpoke 11 Different from what’s expected 14 What push may come to 15 Blood carrier 16 Stutz contemporary 17 Worked on a roof 18 Central U.S. agricultural area 20 English cathedral city 21 Et __ 23 Two little words?

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43 City on the Rhone 44 Son of 4-Down 46 Le Sage novel “Gil __” 47 Mimosa glass 53 Light cigar 54 2004 Kinsey portrayer Neeson 55 Fund for the future, briefly 56 Highly charged, as an issue 59 Oldman or Newman 61 Application 62 Gullible 63 Strainer 64 Avg. size 65 Copier need 66 Helped through a difficult time, with “over” DOWN 1 Michaelmas daisy

2 Kind of dog 3 Much-sought ideal 4 Mother of Seth 5 Keeping quiet 6 Greeted at the door 7 Like four Sandy Koufax games 8 “__ you satisfied?”

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31 Pi follower

32 African title of respect 33 “Starry Night,” for one 34 Not appropriate 35 Lincoln center?

36 Slalom curve 38 Mail in a box 39 Flag position 40 Spoken 44 Load (up), as energy food 45 Come (to)

46 Maude portrayer 47 Neck and neck 48 Couldn’t abide 49 Bowler’s aid 50 West Coast gridder 51 Hidden treasure 52 Like cornstalks 53 Bud 57 Eastern principle 58 Bolivian export 60 DX ÷ V

Gratis | Nate Carlson

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Classic How To Get Down | Nate Saunders

xwordeditor@aol.com

10/18/07

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10/18/07

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M etro Thursday, October 18, 2007

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Rhode Islanders criticize new state prison policy at open meeting

By Simon Van Zuylen-Wood Contributing Writer

The Family Life Center of Providence sponsored a town hall-style meeting at Classical High School downtown Monday evening to allow citizens to discuss a new state law that sends 17-year-olds to maximum security prison instead of a juvenile detention facility. The law, which passed in June, was meant to save the state money, but instead, critics say, has put Rhode Island in further debt.

Sending a 17-year-old to the juvenile remedial center, the “Training School,” costs the Department of Children, Youth and Families $98,000 a year. The average cost of sending a convict to state prison is about $39,000, said Steven Brown, executive director of Rhode Island’s branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. But because the state wants to protect the 17-year-olds from adult prisoners while incarcerated, it puts them in protective custody at the state prison’s maximum security facility, which costs about $104,000.

The state, in other words, Brown said, approved a bill that ended up costing them more money.

Rep. David Segal, D-District 2, who attended the hearing, told The Herald that the state’s first concern was maintaining the appearance of saving money. “People were desperate to prove that there were going to be savings,” he said. “The budget needs to be balanced, so you can claim that (the bill) will save $3.6 million. And if nobody calls you on

it, that $3.6 million, you can spend it somewhere else.”

As of Wednesday, there were nine offenders incarcerated under the new law in maximum security, said Tracey Poole ’85, chief of information and public relations for Rhode Island’s Department of Corrections.

Thirty-six minors have been placed in the state prison’s maximum security facility under the law since July 1, Poole said.

At the Monday hearing, audience members — roughly 200 attended — spoke about the opportunities juveniles would never have once incarcerated. A panel, including a retired Rhode Island Superior Court judge, a city councilwoman, a psychologist and a youth group leader, moderated the event and responded to comments from audience members, some of whom were pre-selected by the Family Life Center.

One of the speakers, 17-year-old Dennys George, said the law was not helping young Hispanics like himself who are profiled by police.

George was arrested this summer for drug possession, according to an October Associated Press article.

George said at the hearing that he spent three days in the maximum security facility of the state’s Adult Correctional Institute, time that will appear on his permanent record.

Another 17-year-old at the hearing said, “I’m treated like a child, yet when I make a mistake I’m treated like an adult.” continued on page 4 A man whose son was incarcer-

Kori Schulman / Herald File Photo

Renovations to Thayer Street, including new crosswalks, began last fall under the auspices of a District Management Authority.

Fancy crosswalks, trash cans don’t excite many Thayer Street business owners

By Noura Choudhury Contributing Writer

Four years after the creation of the Thayer Street District Management Authority, shop owners and managers say they are still dissatisfied with improvements meant to make Thayer Street a cleaner and more welcoming place to shop and eat.

The authority is a coalition of the University, the city of Providence and the ten largest property owners, who together own more than 60 percent of the square footage of Thayer Street. Their charge is to make the area a more enjoyable shopping and entertainment venue through a series of improve-

Alex DePaoli / Herald

The pedestrian bridge connecting India Point Park to Wickenden Street will open later than had been planned.

Tree stalls India Point Park bridge opening

By Christian Martell Staf f Writer

The opening of the new pedestrian bridge connecting India Point Park to the Wickenden business district has been postponed until later this fall. The bridge was slated to open Sept. 12 — two years after the original bridge was demolished to make room for the relocation of I-195.

Construction was delayed because workers originally planned to cut down a large, old red-oak tree on a pathway leading to the bridge, but local park enthusiasts saved it

from being removed.

“The opening was delayed 45 days because of the saving of the tree,” said David Riley, co-chair for Friends of India Point Park, a citizen group dedicated to the preservation and expansion of the park.

Due to the setback, Friends of India Point Park will not hol d their planned celebration for the opening of the bridge until next spring, when the entire project is completed.

“We’ve been told (by the Rhode Island Department of Transportation) that the ramp won’t be done until then,” Riley said, adding that once

completed next year, the bridge will feature plants and trees. The walking ramp will be accessible later this fall, he said.

India Point Park, an 18-acre waterfront park between the Providence and Seekonk rivers, is ranked the third most-used park in the city following the downtown skating rink and Roger Williams Park, which is 24 times larger. India Point Park is home to the Mexican Soccer League, the Cape Verdean Independence Festival and the Fox Point Boys and continued on page 4

ments that have been implemented since 2006.

In January 2006, the City Council approved the district’s authority to tax. The voluntary tax that the commercial property owners imposed upon themselves can go up to five percent and cover maintenance of the improvements, an annual cost of approximately $80,000.

The city and the University split the initial $800,000 costs of the project, said Darrell Brown, director of state and community relations.

“Thayer Street is part of our campus, like it or not,” Brown told The Herald. “We have an interest in having it be successful.”

This past summer, the DMA,

also known as the Thayer Street Improvement District, planted 30 new trees along the street, and the authority has already replaced sidewalks and built new patterned crosswalks along the street.

“Those improvements may not seem like a lot, but they’re very expensive and the street needed a lot of work,” Brown said. “Although we’re not realizing just yet the benefits of what we’ve done ... we’re in the process of thinking with the board of other improvements that we can make on the street. It’s sort of an ongoing developmental process.” continued on page 4

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Thursday, October 18, 2007

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Thayer St. improvements questioned continued from page 3 The authority is also working on improving the sanitation of the area, said Michael McCormick, assistant vice president on planning, design and construction. A special sanitation task force cleans the streets and sidewalks, takes care of graffiti and cleans hanging flower pots.

McCormick added that although there will not be any more physical improvements this year, a task force is also working on creating a proposal to increase parking on Thayer Street.

Despite the improvements, business owners and managers say they are not impressed with the additions.

The business owner of Yang’s, Chooky DeBeaulieu, sees the additions as “not improvements, but a lot of changes.” DeBeaulieu, who said she has been in business on the East Side for 32 years, said she disapproves of the changing environment of the area in general.

“I’ve been here a long time,” DeBeaulieu said. “I’ve seen Thayer Street evolve into a non-collegiate area. There used to be a lot of multicultural spots, and not just businesses ... it’s lost its Ivy League environment, absolutely lost it.”

Anne Dusseault, business owner of Pie in the Sky, feels the sidewalks and plantation are “superficial improvements” that do not address the real needs of Thayer Street.

Dusseault, who has been in business for 15 years, said the DMA should work on adding lighting to the street, which she said would

improve the safety of the area, and expand parking.

Dusseault was also skeptical that the developments would attract more customers and students to the area.

“I don’t think a crosswalk or a tree is going to improve business,” she said.

Judging the success of the project is a difficult process, Brown and McCormick said. Other cities with district authorities can judge the benefits of their projects if there is an increase in rents or sales. However, because the value of Thayer Street property is already so high, according to McCormick, it is improbable that it would get much higher.

“One way of judging the success is the overall health and condition of the street, like people’s attitudes on the street, how they feel about the liveliness of the street and whether they feel safe ... and enjoy the various activities on Thayer Street,” Brown said.

The DMA includes property not directly on Thayer Street — a condition that Eric Chaika, business and property owner of the Red Carpet Smoke Shop on Waterman Street across from the Sciences Library, said he opposed.

“I have no problems with people banding together in their common interest on a voluntary basis,” Chaika said. “I did not want to be part of this organization. I did not feel that they served my best interests in any manner whatsoever.”

Chaika brought his petition to the City Council when it was con-

sidering granting the DMA the power to levy the tax. The DMA was granted approval, but only if Chaika was exempted.

Chaika said he still believes the improvements are minimal at best and will do nothing to recover the former vitality of Thayer Street, when it was once owned almost entirely by sole proprietors, he said. “Rents are at a level where the independent owner-operator, by and large, can’t afford it and has been squeezed out and will at best be working for the landlord,” Chaika said.

Not all the vendors on Thayer Street are as skeptical about the DMA’s project. Lisa Harrison, manager of Only in Rhode Island, said she feels it is too soon to tell whether the project will enhance the environment of the street. But she disapproves of the tax on property owners, which translates to the business owners in forms of increased rent.

“Store owners work hard enough to contribute to the vitality of the atmosphere,” Harrison said. “An additional tax is just an additional burden.”

The tax also applies to the University, Brown and McCormick said, since the University is a property owner on Thayer Street. The tax forms the University’s continuing contribution to the project’s funding.

“We all pay for the improvements,” McCormick said. “Again, that means that we all want the same thing. We all want (Thayer Street) to be successful.”

New youth jailing policy criticized continued from page 3 ated at 17 said, “When you send a child to prison at 17 — that ruins their entire life. That means lowend jobs, bad credit. For a 17-yearold five years is forever, 10 years is never going to come. We need help.”

Brown, of the ACLU, said he was more concerned with the psychological effects prison has on 17-yearolds. “Most states don’t automatically send minors for a very good reason,” he said. “Sending juveniles to prison increases the recidivism rate. It becomes a training school for juveniles to learn more crime.”

The meeting became an open forum on Rhode Island race issues as well as a discussion of the new state prison policy. Six of the eight

panel members were racial or ethnic minorities, and the audience was largely black, Hispanic or South Asian. According to Segal, 63 percent of those incarcerated in the state are black or Hispanic, while Rhode Island was 88.9 percent white in 2005, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Several speakers accused the police of stopping teens for “driving while black.” Stephen Fortunato, a former Superior Court associate justice and one of the forum moderators, said Rhode Island’s criminal justice program promotes “systematic racism.”

One audience member, who introduced himself only as Osiris and sported an aqua-blue shirt and a gold chain, said that the state’s lawmakers had no scruples about

passing the bill because they knew many of those affected would be minorities. “It looks like we voted for some wicked people,” he said.

“We need to get mad as hell. (The Rev.) Martin (Luther King Jr.) did it. Malcolm (X) did it. I can do it too,” he said.

A petition opposing the law was signed by most members of the audience, and many spoke of picketing outside of the state house on Oct. 30, the day the House of Representatives may vote on the issue at a special session.

“I think people are pretty embarrassed now,” Segal said. “I don’t think anybody is going to stand in the way of reversing it.”

A representative of Gov. Donald Carcieri ’65 did not return a request for comment for this article.

Bridge’s opening delayed by tree continued from page 3 Girls Club, among other groups. It has also been the location for past WBRU concerts and is next to Marston Boathouse, which is used by the University’s rowing teams.

Before the construction city officials told the Friends of India Point Park that the number of people using the park will double after the highway project’s completion, Riley said.

The entire Route 195 project — the construction of the pedestrian bridge, the relocation of I-195 and the replacement of a sewer pipe under Gano and India streets — will cost Rhode Island $26.1 million, according to the state’s Department of Transportation Web site.

Lambri Zer va, design project manager for the state’s Department

of Transportation, told The Herald in March that the removal of the old bridge was necessary because its piers would have obstructed the new road links for I-195.

“The new bridge took up space where the old one was, so we couldn’t keep the old one and build the new one at the same time. Unfortunately, (taking down the old bridge) was a necessary evil,” he said.

“We’re looking forward to the completion of the construction,” women’s crew members Vanessa Rathbone ’08 and Molly Getz ’08 wrote in an e-mail to The Herald.

“For the past two years, people on our team have been walking down busy roads and a lot of construction, which is not very safe.”

“I used the bridge freshman year to get down to the boathouse.

It always seemed kind of rickety be-

cause it would shake slightly if a big semi-truck passed underneath it,” said women’s crew member Emma Olson ’08.

Despite the old bridge’s small size and instability, Olson preferred it to an alternative route, which is used to get to the park and boathouse now. “(The bridge) seemed safer than the current way to get to India Point Park or the boathouse, which is straight down Gano Street and under the bridge,” Olson said.

Students must currently cross a freeway ramp to get to the boathouse. “The off ramp was recently rerouted and cars never seem to come to a full stop at the stop sign, which is dangerous for the number of rowers who walk and run by and any other pedestrians heading to the park,” she added.

C ampus n ews Thursday, October 18, 2007

Since 2005, science tours lure prospective science students

By Sophia Lambertsen Contributing Writer

Seeking to increase Brown’s reputation as a leader in math and sciences, the Office of Admission now hosts math and science-oriented tours for prospective first-years that highlight undergraduate research opportunities and the University’s resources in those fields.

Subjects highlighted on the tours are applied mathematics, chemistry, computer science, engineering, environmental science, geology, physics and mathematics — or pure math, as the tour guides refer to it. Life sciences, such as biology, are not included.

Associate Director of College Admission Elisha Anderson said these tours are not in response to any previous lack of math or science talent on campus, but instead part of a larger push by Brown to gain recognition across fields rather than simply as a humanities powerhouse.

“It seems that when I travel, Brown is thought of as a school that’s really good at the humanities,” said Anderson.

Since they began in the fall of 2005, Anderson said, the tours have been a success. Anderson said the tours have led to an increase in math and science-oriented applicants at all skill levels, so the number of talented applicants has increased.

Prospective students considering concentrating in these subjects generally attend the science tours in addition to the general campus tours, which, as science tour guide Deborah Vacs Renwick ’09 said, don’t provide a full picture of the resources Brown has to offer.

“Regular tours just point to the science buildings,” Vacs Renwick said. “With these (science) tours you get to go inside buildings, peek inside a lab. It’s very interactive. And they’re led by people who know the departments.”

Individual students’ accounts of their experience, especially with research and lab work, are especially effective, Anderson said. Still, the tours are constantly under revision.

“We’re trying to think of ways to include examples of undergraduate research and integrate student speakers who talk about what they’re doing on campus,” Anderson said.

“I have this sort of idea in my mind

Emmy Liss / Herald

Bryant Mairs ‘08, a guide for campus science tours, talks to prospective applicants.

where in each individual building on the science tour, they would talk to a student doing lab or research projects in that area.”

Current students’ individual stories and tales of research experience elicit better visitor responses than scripted information, he added.

In her tours, Vacs Renwick emphasizes how easily her science concentrator friends have found research opportunities with enthusiastic faculty.

Vacs Renwick told The Herald the tours are increasingly popular. Like the regular campus tours, she said, they spike around Columbus Day weekend and high schools’ spring breaks.

Prospective science students and parents’ questions focus on the workload in these concentrations, adviser-student relations, class size and undergraduate research.

“We try to stay away from pointing out architecture on the tours,” Vacs Renwick said. “Instead we focus on the curriculum and resources available, especially for research.”

Thanks to their small size, the tours are tailored to prospective students’ individual interests. On a tour last week, Vacs Renwick asked visitors about their prospective concentrations and dedicated extra attention to those fields represented.

Tour stops include lecture halls,

classrooms and labs, but the tour augmented this overview of Brown’s resources with amusing, quirky facts.

One Barus and Holley lecture hall, Vacs Renwick notes, was featured on an episode of “Family Guy.” And a group of engineers made a car for last weekend’s Red Bull Soapbox Race, which touring students on Friday got to see just a day before the race.

On Friday’s tour, prospective first-years seemed impressed.

“It seemed really similar to pure engineering schools like Cal Tech in resources,” said high school senior Theodore Frelinghuysen, who was on Friday’s tour. “But the sciences still seem really close to the rest of the college.”

High school senior Julia Massey, another prospective applicant on Friday’s tour, noted that Brown’s resources in engineering are so impressive that if she comes here, she’ll be more likely to concentrate in engineering.

The one concern expressed by prospective students was that the tour doesn’t touch on the life sciences.

Anderson is optimistic about the tours’ ability to attract science applicants. “People mention them in their applications,” he said. “I think they’ll definitely stay as part of our admissions repertoire in the future.”

Simmons to deliver King memorial lecture at Rice U.

By Nick Werle Senior Staf f Writer

President Ruth Simmons will travel to Houston on Friday to speak on civil rights issues at Rice University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Lecture. Simmons is giving her talk, “Sand and Ivy: The Unquantifiable in Academic Life,” as part of the university’s President’s Lecture Series of Diverse Scholars.

Rice originally extended an invitation for Simmons to speak last year, but she wasn’t able to attend because of scheduling difficulties, said Marisa Quinn, assistant to the president. Originally the speech was to be just part of the diverse scholars series, but Rice President David Leebron decided to combine the occasion with the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture.

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THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Simmons was chosen for the lecture because of her personal background and professional achievements, Rice spokesman B.J. Almond wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. He cited Simmons’ graduation from Houston’s predominantly black Wheatley High School, her status as the first black president of an Ivy League university and her commission of the University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice as reasons for her selection.

Similar to Simmons’ Plan for Academic Enrichment at Brown, Leebron is currently leading Rice in a major multi-year initiative to improve many aspects of the university. His “Vision for the Second Century” agenda focuses on building new facilities, enhancing research, improving the university’s graduate schools and “internationalization”

— many of the same goals in the Plan for Academic Enrichment.

Leebron is holding a dinner in Simmons’ honor prior to Friday’s lecture.

After speaking at Rice, Simmons is slated to travel to Newport Beach, Calif., to attend the annual fall meeting of the Association of American Universities.

The AAU is an organization of 62 American and Canadian research universities which assists member institutions in developing policy positions on issues relevant to a major research institution, according to its Web site. All the Ivy League schools except Dartmouth are members.

Simmons will also be doing some development work for Brown in California after the AAU meeting, Quinn said.

Psych prof follows her nose

By Max Mankin Contributing Writer

In her book “The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell,” Rachel Herz, visiting assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Alpert Medical School, explains the surprisingly significant findings of her 17 years of research on the olfactory sense.

One of the world leaders on the psychology of smell, Herz will be featured tonight at 6 p.m. at the Brown Bookstore for a reading and signing of her book.

Herz studies the links between smell and emotion, memory, language, interpersonal interactions and taste. Her book was published Oct. 9.

She became convinced of the importance of smell when she acted as an expert witness for a case in which a car accident victim lost her ability to smell. The woman, who was in her 20s with a healthy home life and career, reported a feeling of disconnectedness from herself and others, doubts about her competence as a homemaker and caretaker, a decreased appetite and a lack of interest in sexual intimacy, according to Herz’ book.

After some investigating, it became clear that the accident victim’s depression and lifestyle changes were directly linked to her anosmia, or inability to smell. The woman’s “loss of sense of smell impacted everything in her life,” Herz said.

“When she had her sense of smell, she totally ignored it. People take the sense of smell for granted.”

Herz told The Herald that her book “brings home the fact that the sense of smell enters into every facet of our life.” Her book has been hailed as “the first and definitive book on the psychology of smell,” and strives to exhibit the immense importance of smell in our daily lives, according to a bookstore press release.

“A primar y point here is to shake people into alertness that (smell) is the major sensory experience that people are having,”

Herz said.

Herz discovered that sleeping people cannot smell, underlying the need for loud smoke alarms.

Her research also indicates that no responses to smells are genetic.

For instance, Herz interviewed a woman who hated the smell of roses because the first time she smelled roses was at her mother’s funeral. Herz herself adored the smell of skunk in elementar y school because she never had a negative response to the odor, she wrote in her book.

Smells work by evoking direct personal experience with them, she said. “I smell Coppertone sunscreen, and I am immediately brought back to being on the beach in Florida,” Herz said.

In Asian culture, cheese is generally considered revolting, Herz said. On the other hand, Westerners consider cheese indulgent “comfort food.” However, in Japan, a fermented soybean dish called Natto is a common breakfast food, but no Westerners would think about eating it, she explained.

“To me, it smells like burning rubber, and burning rubber and food don’t go together in my lexicon of what I consider food to be,” Herz joked. “It has to do with the context in which I’ve learned it.”

For women, the way that men smell outranks all other physical characteristics. From the male perspective, the way women look is more important, but scent ranks a close second, according to Herz.

That doesn’t mean, however, that men should load up on cologne and body wash.

“What the artificial smell is that’s going to be the best scent — I can’t predict that,” Herz said.

She added that from a biological perspective, it’s best if “the man were just bathed in ivor y soap and didn’t put on any cologne, body spray, just got into his fresh washed clothes with no scented detergents and fabric softeners and went out with a woman and she continued on page 6

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Herz spends 17 years Hope High parents get a helping hand probing the world of smell continued from page 1

continued from page 5 could smell him for who he truly is biologically.”

According to her book, “the external manifestation of the genes for your immune system is your body odor.” It is important that couples have dissimilar immune systems and are therefore attracted to each other’s respective, and different, smells. That way, their children inherit the most diverse immune system possible, according to “The Scent of Desire.” Herz said, therefore, that there is “no such thing as the ‘Brad Pitt’ of body odor” because there are advantages to varying immune systems.

“For every woman there is a set of men with whom it would be good to pair one’s genes and another set with whom it wouldn’t be good to mix and match,” she said.

Herz argued that smell is an important tool used to reflect on the past so that we know who we are in the present. “It’s not semantic memory where I can say the capital of France is Paris. It’s not just where you were when you were learning this — it’s all the feeling and association that you had at the time when you were learning.

And without the sense of smell, that (feeling and association) is removed. It becomes robotic.”

Herz has changed her relationship with the University so that she no longer has an active research lab. She said she teaches one course , but works primarily as a consultant in the private sector, having worked with International Flavors and Fragrances, Frito Lay,

PepsiCo and the Coca-Cola Company. Her work for food product distributors focuses on the fact that all foods have aromas. Among other things, she helps companies such as Coca Cola represent their products with appropriate language.

Words on the label of “the product can have an impact on what the consumer thinks they’re involved with,” she said. “Smells are invisible but we are visually oriented so we look for meaning in the visual or verbal context that we’re experiencing. When a word comes along, it has the power to supersede the olfactory experience. It’s not (called) shoe polish for a reason.”

In addition to industry collaboration, Herz founded a company called Scentology which, according to its Web site, distributes “smart scents for positive change.” One of the company’s three fragrances is Bliss Booster, an orange oil fragrance that decreases feelings of depression. “People should not throw away Zoloft and take Bliss Booster instead,” Herz joked, because “smells only have reactions within them as a function of the associations we have to them,” but they don’t have pharmacological capabilities.

Herz concluded by saying, “My bottom line is that from the point of view of quality of life, the sense of smell is really key. People who have a functioning smell tend not to realize the impact that their smell actually has with respect to that quality. My hope is that this book will help people to realize this without going through the misery of losing it.”

Sox have backs against the wall continued from page 12 But we will also never forget how Trot always seemed to come up with that big hit when we needed it. How he used to grind for an extra base or go crashing into the wall in right field to save a run.

When Cleveland needed Trot, he came up big. Fighting off a tough pitch from lefty sidewinder Lopez, Nixon pushed across the go-ahead run, giving Cleveland the lead in the game and the momen-

tum in the series. It felt like my buddy just stole my girl, or like my Grandma just sent my roommate cookies and I was sitting alone on a Saturday night, disappointed, lonely and sad.

If the Sox do manage to come back from down three games to one and make it to the World Series, I will be ecstatic. However, if they don’t, I will cheer for Trot.

If I may steal one last line from the Sandlot … “Heroes get remembered, but Trot Nixon will never die.”

into three smaller, more specialized academies. The department’s commissioner called for increased parent and community involvement in the school, among other suggestions, in a plan drafted in 2003 for the school’s improvement.

Last Tuesday night, families and friends of about 250 students attended the event held to increase parent involvement, Lakin said.

Junior ROTC student volunteers in uniforms were at the door enthusiastically welcoming parents and escorting them to the cafeteria where the event was held. They also acted as translators and interpreters.

Students had decorated the cafeteria with colorful signs, balloons and national flags of various countries. There was food from different cultures, cooked either by teachers or donated by local restaurants. Attendees could tap their feet to Dominican merengue tunes or enjoy softer, slower Spanish music.

Parents also got a chance to interact with their students’ teachers in an informal setting.

Arthur Petrosinelli, one of the Hope principals, told The Herald that the effort was “absolutely outstanding.” Lakin first brought the idea for a program to increase parent engagement to Petrosinelli’s attention. “I was not in tune with what we were doing wrong,” Petrosinelli said of making Hope parents more involved with their children’s education.

Petrosinelli said teachers who could speak languages used by parents had taken the initiative to call them in their free time and invite them personally to the event. They also sent out written invitations to parents. Often parents don’t come to such events unless they’re personally invited, Lakin said.

“If you expect Latino parents to show up, you have to call them,” he said, adding that once parents meet the teachers who called them, they are more likely to respond to messages and invitations from them in the future.

Petrosinelli said the event was different from other parent-teacher events because it was not related directly to academics or disciplinary issues.

“It’s saying, ‘here’s our house, it’s open to you,’ ” he said. “It’s one major step toward creating a climate here at Hope that parents won’t be intimidated by. We’re not talking about discipline issues tonight.”

Parents seemed to enjoy the opportunity to attend a social event at their children’s school.

Maima David, whose nephew is a senior at Hope, said she took time off from work to attend the event.

“You have to take out time for the kids so they know you care for them,” she said. “It’s good for us and good for them too.”

Erin Leininger, an ESL teacher at Hope and co-founder of “Juntos,” said the event was “more like a party” for parents and teachers.

Yaquelin Nunez, another parent who was helping parents sign in when they entered the cafeteria, said she wants to “get parents more involved” in their children’s lives.

“I think (the family night) is a great way to get to know one another and other cultures. When you come to conferences (with teachers) you don’t get to do that.”

Mariah Franco, a freshman at Hope, said she was happy her aunt had attended the event.

“It’s good ’cause (family members) get to see what kind of school their kids go to,” Franco said.

After two hours of enjoying food and music and talking to teachers, parents met with their children’s advisers to get to know them better and to go over the teachers’ lesson plans.

Lakin said he decided to start “Juntos” when he noticed that many parents “were ignored (because they) didn’t understand a lot of what was going on” at Hope’s graduation in May. Graduation speakers delivered speeches in English, while many parents of Hope students are more comfortable in other languages.

Lakin and Leininger experienced first-hand the cultures some of their students come from when they visited the Dominican Republic over the summer. The teachers spent five weeks visiting and staying with aunts, uncles and even parents of their students at Hope.

“Most families were weirded out, or at least, it seemed that on the phone” about the teachers visiting the Dominican Republic, Lakin said, adding that some were “standoffish.” But once Lakin and Leininger met the relatives, they became more friendly.

“They were the most generous people we could’ve met,” Lakin said.

“They were like, ‘You teach our kids, we like you immediately.’”

Some of the parents Lakin met had sent their only children to Providence to receive a better education, he said.

“Eighty percent (of the parents

in the Dominican Republic) are expecting or hoping to be brought to the U.S. by their child once they turn eighteen,” he said.

Lakin called his experience “humbling” as it made him understand his students’ family backgrounds. “It wasn’t real to me until I saw it,” he said.

Based on what they learned in the Dominican Republic, Lakin and Leininger decided how to make Hope more accessible for immigrant parents. With the help of students, the teachers have placed Spanish signs welcoming and directing visitors to specific rooms throughout the school. There are also signs outside teachers’ rooms that list the languages they speak.

Recently, Lakin has also started a daytime and an after-school tutoring program at Hope with Brown students. The program currently has seven volunteers, three of whom have already started working with Hope students.

Mindy Phillips ’10, one of the volunteers in the program who was at the event Tuesday evening, said she and the other two tutors — Folashade Modupe ’10 and Keith Dellagrotta’10 — go into limited English proficiency history classes, for example, answering students’ questions and giving extra help in both English and Spanish.

Phillips said the classes can be a “nightmare” for teachers because they are not divided based on students’ level of English proficiency.

That means the same class can have students who are fairly fluent in English and students who don’t speak English at all.

“You can’t cater how you speak to every student,” said Phillips, who tutors at the school along with family night attendees. “It’s necessary (for students) to have special attention.”

Phillips said she was “amazed” a similar program didn’t exist before, especially since “Hope is a place in need of help ... and close to Brown.”

So far, Hope has funded the program’s activities, such as making signs and preparing for the family night, Lakin said, adding that teachers have also been very “generous” in donating money and food. Lakin and Leininger paid for their trip to the Dominican Republic.

In the future, Lakin and Leininger said they would like to start ESL classes for Hope parents. Lakin said he’d like to have “workshops educating parents about college, financial aid, and even health and nutrition workshops.”

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Keg on campus, larceny among last week’s crimes

By Kristina Kelleher Senior Staf f Writer

The following summary includes all major incidents reported to the Department of Public Safety between Oct. 4 and Oct. 10. It does not include general service and alarm calls. The Providence Police Department also responds to incidents occurring both on and off campus. DPS does not divulge information on open cases that are currently under investigation by the department, the PPD or the Office of Student Life. DPS maintains a daily log of all shift activity and general service calls which can be viewed during business hours at its headquarters, located at 75 Charlesfield St. David Pagliaccio / Herald

New bike racks such as this one have spouted on the Main Green.

New bike racks come to the Green New bike racks have been set up at several locations on the Main Green, providing Brown’s scores of cycling students an improved rack design and more rack space. The new bike racks are part of the campus improvements project, which seeks to place bike racks in less visually obtrusive locations. “Before, the first things you saw when you walked through Faunce were trash cans and bike racks,” Michael McCormick, assistant vice president for planning, design and construction, told The Herald.

Though the project sought to move bikes to more discreet locations, McCormick said new racks have been added as part of the improvement and more are likely on the way. McCormick said campus bike use has noticeably increased.

“We’ve not had the issues we are having on campus this year in the past,” he said. An avid biker himself, McCormick listed several probable causes for the increase, such as stretches of nice weather, heightened awareness of an individual’s carbon footprint, expensive gas prices and limited parking space. To inform students of the rack locations, the Transportation Office and Facilities Management will make a map of bike racks available through Morning Mail.

Julia Brooks ’08 appreciates the improvements. “I noticed before that there were not enough racks,” Brooks said.

Brooks added that abandoned bikes, which McCormick said are a public safety risk and decrease the usable space on racks, reduce the storage available to students.

“The bike storage room in my building is completely full of abandoned bikes,” she said. “I like to keep my bike inside when the weather is bad, but there is no room.”

Tyler Whitmire ’08 suggested abandoned bike sales that could raise money while freeing up more storage space for current students’ bikes.

Whitmire also offered a warning to students who keep their bikes locked on campus over vacations. Last summer Whitmire stored her bike on campus, but it mysteriously disappeared.

— Rebekah Bergman

Friday, Oct. 5: 7:55 p.m. While an officer was on patrol he observed a door leading to the basement of 125-127 Waterman St. forced open. The door was a piece of plywood which had been nailed to a loose board directly behind it against the bricks. The door had been intact earlier in the evening. Other officers arrived on scene and they conducted an interior check. No one was inside and it was noted that the interior of the building posed a hazard. Facilities Management responded and boarded up the entrance.

Saturday, Oct. 6: 6:05 p.m. Of ficers were dispatched to Lot 90B for a report of students with a keg of beer. Upon

arrival they observed a vehicle with a keg of beer in it. The owner of the vehicle was a Brown student who admitted that the keg was his. All parties involved were cooperative and the keg was confiscated. The Community Director was notified.

Sunday, Oct. 7: 4:06 a.m. An officer was dispatched to King House for a noise complaint. On arrival he observed approximately 100 or more people at the house, with crowds standing in the yard and in the street as well.

The talking from the crowd was loud and clearly a disturbance to the surrounding neighbors. He instructed everyone to leave or go in the house and close the doors so the noise did not spill out into the community.

The crowd complied. There were no further complaints.

Tuesday, Oct. 9: 10:11 p.m. A DPS officer and a

Providence Police officer were dispatched for a complaint of breaking and entering at an off-campus residence on Angell Street. Upon arrival they spoke with the complainant, a Brown student, who explained that on Oct. 9 between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. his laptop was stolen from his bedroom. The point of entry was a window at the top of the stairs on the third floor that had been left open. There are no suspects at this time.

Wednesday, Oct. 10: 3:18 p.m. An officer was dispatched in response to a larceny of a Brown ID on Stevenson Field.

The student complainant stated that at about 6 p.m. on Oct. 9 he placed his backpack on the sideline of the field while he played soccer with friends. The backpack contained his Brown ID. At 8 p.m. he discovered that the ID had been taken from the backpack.

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Grad School boosts efforts to increase diversity continued from page 1 — similar to the College’s A Day on College Hill — is an event that brings admitted grad students of color to campus for panels and a chance to meet future classmates.

“We’ve certainly tried to engage departments more explicitly in defining their goals for diversity,” Bonde said. “This past year Dean Wilson and I asked departments as part of the admissions process to identify their goals and what steps they will take to reach these goals.”

Later this year, Bonde and Wilson plan to meet with department to discuss their progress.

Many grad students said they were unaware of the new recruiting programs and the recent update on institutional diversity, but they said they believe the University is doing a good job incorporating diversity into the school and the community-building programs. “I think (the Grad School is) doing a considerable amount,” said Sohini Kar GS, a first-year student in the anthropology department.

“It’s hard with the Graduate School because there are people from all different age groups — it’s a mix of people that you are trying to get together.”

“I think maybe getting a little bit more of an international mix, that could probably be improved,” said Elizabeth Normand GS, a first-year grad student who is working toward her Ph.D. in neuroscience. “Maybe even more of a racial mix — again I’m thinking just about my program.

While there is a decent amount of mix racially, there probably could be more. That’s something that

could be improved upon.”

The Alpert Medical School is also looking to increase diversity among its students, especially in light of the expansion of the school.

“The Medical School is growing, and as it grows and as avenues of recruiting grows, how do we build in that these applicant pools reflect diversity?” Allen said. “We looked at what we did and the ways we would be able to do things differently.”

The University is looking to develop its Early Identification Program, which provides a place at the Med School for selected Rhode Island residents and students of underrepresented racial and ethnic groups at Brown, Providence College, Rhode Island College, the University of Rhode Island and Tougaloo University. The University had identified additional schools it would like to involve in the program. “In the past we’ve had a very good relationship with Tougaloo,” Allen said. “But the idea of expanding it beyond Tougaloo means we will try to develop a more comprehensive relationship with other schools.” One possibility might be to expand on the relationships Brown had with the other Rhode Island schools in the program.

The University’s plans to increase diversity on campus reminds some students, however, of the conflicts of affirmative action.

Lulu Tsai GS, a doctoral candidate in the molecular biology and cell Ph.D. program said, “I don’t think we should recruit based on diversity. It’s good (the University is) trying to acknowledge it. … I’m against affirmative action, on principle.”

Another aspect of the action plan is increasing the diversity of University staff. As of October, the University employed 177 entry level employees in Dining Services, 57.1 percent of whom are minority workers. Similarly, among 173 entry level Facilities Management workers, 32.9 percent are minority workers, according to Henry Johnson, director of equal employment opportunity and affirmative action.

Of the 10 managers and assistant directors of Dining Services and the 26 managers, coordinators and directors in the University library system, none are minorities, Johnson said. “If we have underutilization of a minority of the particular position … if the best-qualified person is not a person of color, we are not going to hire (a person of color). We are always going to hire the best qualified person,” Johnson said. “We have a solid and active affirmative action plan. One of the very first things that is done (when hiring) is the University determines whether that particular job category is underutilized by minorities or women.”

Johnson has recently drafted a diversity recruitment plan for the library. In his proposal, he suggests the University should increase its advertising for available librar y positions and become more active reaching out to universities such as Rutgers University and the University of Rhode Island as well as historically black colleges in the South. Johnson also said he recommends that the University increase its interaction with middle and high school students by participating in career day and developing outreach programs. “Before middle and high school students can consider a career in library services, they need to be exposed to libraries,” he said.

The University has not yet

drafted any proposals for increasing diversity in Dining Services or Facilities Management, but Johnson said he hopes to do so in the future.

“We thought about the areas that had the largest underutilization (of minorities and women) and wanted to start there,” Johnson said.

The University has also developed a diversity workshop called “Valuing Differences” to discuss the barriers that often separate different social groups. “There had to be some kind of diversity training plan in place,” Allen said.

“From the staff’s point of view, the basic premise of the diversity development plan, is in order to really engage diversity. It’s an ongoing, continuous effort to engage ideas and subject matter that help you to broaden your repertoire.”

Most staff members seem unaware of the new workshops but are still satisfied with the diversity of their workplaces. “It seems to be balanced. We have a lot of different people from different ethnicities.

I’ve never seen any issues at all,” said Katherine Harrop, a supervisor at the Ratty.

The University is in the process of creating a diversity cabinet, which will allow the leaders of the different diversity efforts to meet, discuss and evaluate the progress of their changes. “We haven’t had the structure that allows us to talk on a consistent basis on the specific plans going forward and so on,” Allen said. “This diversity cabinet will allow us to have updates on what is going on in the different schools.”

With the action plan only a year old, it will take time to see the results of the revised recruiting programs, Wilson said. “Changes and programs like this do take a while to get rolling and get ahead on,” she said. “If we never come up with an approach we will never come up with the result that we want.”

UCS 2007-08 agenda passes continued from page 1 who then made a draft of the formatting and presented it to the executive board. “It was really a concerted effort,” Wertheimer said. “We were pushing for working in committees to make the general body (meeting) go smoother.”

Goals and projects will most likely be added to the agenda throughout the year, Glassman said. “I think that handful of projects is pretty set, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some other pretty big things gets thrown in that we haven’t talked about yet,” he said.

UCS has already made headway into completing some of the agenda items, including passing a resolution to push the University to adhere to the recommendations of the Energy and Environmental Advisory Council, increasing involvement with the Corporation and working with the Swearer Center for Public Service to encourage service learning classes.

In other UCS news, the council elected Ellen DaSilva ’10 to the executive board position of alumni liaison after class representative Michael Miller ’10 resigned from that position last week. DaSilva is on The Herald’s business staff.

The UCS Assessment Task Force, an ad hoc committee which will evaluate UCS over the year and deliver suggestions in the spring semester, was approved last night.

UCS also approved “A Resolution Calling for Brown University To Provide Aid Lost to Students Because of the Higher Education Act Elimination Policy,” which states UCS’s support for students who lost federal financial aid due to the HEA Elimination Policy.

UCS confirmed the appointment of Christopher Hardy ’10 to the EEAC.

Local group honors U. slavery report continued from page 1

www.browndailyherald.com

boosted funding for the University’s urban education fellow program in response to the report.

Filmmaker Katrina Browne, who directed and produced the documentary “Traces of the Trade,” introduced Simmons. Browne is a descendant of the DeWolf family of Bristol, the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. Her film follows descendants of the DeWolf family as they struggle with the legacy of their family’s slave-trading past.

Browne applauded the University’s willingness to openly confront its links to slavery.

“President Ruth Simmons took a bold step right into the thick of this painful and unresolved history,” she said. “Instead of circling from a safe distance, she invited the Brown community to squarely consider the role of the slave trade in the founding of the University.”

Simmons asked members of the committee to join her on stage and emphasized the time and effort the committee put into its report. “It’s hard to understand the import of this unless you see how much time it took,” she said, reminding the audience that producing the report took three times longer than expected.

“So often we wonder, ‘What can we do?’ We look around and see the problems and think there’s nothing we can do. It matters to tr y,” she

said. “It matters to try.”

Referencing the recent Jena 6 furor in Louisiana and an incident at Columbia University, Simmons said, “To know there are nooses in this country is to know we have serious work left to do.”

“Many people find talking about dark moments in histor y uncomfortable,” she said. “I believe these people are shortsighted. ... Many people now see it as useful and necessary.”

The committee successfully demonstrated a link between “yesterday’s inequities and today’s problems,” Simmons said.

She applauded the committee for engaging “every possible” constituency, including Rhode Island teachers and students who she said were reluctant to get involved. Simmons commended the committee for its perseverance and emphasized the national and international attention its work has received, commenting on “invitations from all over the world to come and discuss their research.”

“We learn, and because we learn we are able to begin a different life,” Simmons said.

Talking to The Herald after the presentation, Browne said she had attended many of the committee’s open sessions and that they facilitated open dialogue about a sensitive subject. “I think, like most people, we’re all holding our breath wait-

ing for the conflict and divisiveness.

It felt like there was a real spirit of seriousness and willingness to talk about it,” she said.

Browne was optimistic about the prospects of the committee’s work extending into a national dialogue.

“We all carr y a lot of fears about this, but if we confront it … a lot of Americans would be willing to have an honest and hard discussion about this.”

Though the committee’s work has largely faded from students’ minds, Browne said the report is timely in light of the upcoming 2008 bicentennial for the abolition of the slave trade. “It’s a really exciting time to be raising these issues because there’s more discussion right now in Congress about the legacy of slavery,” and what the nation can do to address it, she said.

National media attention stirred up by the committee’s work “has helped pave the way” for a national conversation about the legacy of slavery, Browne said. “Their leadership has really made a difference,” she said.

Associate Professor of History Michael Vorenberg, a member of the committee, told The Herald he was pleased with the local support for the committee’s efforts. “It’s very nice to be recognized by a state organization, because this is about local affairs as much as national and international issues,” he said.

thursday, october 18, 2007

Bush presents top civilian medal to Dalai Lama, challenges China on Tibet

By Elizabeth Williamson Washington Post

WASHINGTON — President Bush presented the Dalai Lama with Congress’s highest civilian honor Wednesday, pressing China to engage with Tibet’s exiled leader in his most significant embrace of a man whose cause and global following is a constant irritant to Beijing.

Tibet’s spiritual and temporal leader accepted the Congressional Gold Medal from Bush, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate President Pro Tempore Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., in a Capitol Rotunda ceremony that had even some lawmakers dabbing their eyes.

The event marked the first time a U.S. president has appeared in public with the Dalai Lama, who from his first White House visit two decades ago has agreed to private presidential meetings, in deference to China.

“An era that has seen an unprecedented number of nations embrace individual freedom has also witnessed the stubborn endurance of religious repression. Americans cannot look to the plight of the religiously oppressed and close our eyes or turn away,” Bush said before a shoulder-to-shoulder sea of dark-clad politicians punctuated by the bright saffron and maroon of Tibetan Buddhist monks. Seated behind him on the dais, the Dalai Lama smiled, nodding.

“And that is why I will continue to urge the leaders of China to welcome the Dalai Lama to China,” Bush said. “They will find this good man to be a man of peace and reconciliation.”

For more than 50 years, the man considered by believers to be the living embodiment of the Buddha has led the struggle for autonomy and religious freedom for his nation of 6 million people. Beijing has controlled the rugged Himalayan nation since 1951, when Communist troops forcibly replaced its quiet self-rule with Chinese authority. Eight years

later, the Dalai Lama fled across the mountainous border into exile in India. His encouragement of his homeland’s nonviolent rejection of Chinese rule has earned him international renown and humanitarian awards, including the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize.

China, in the midst of the Communist Party’s 17th National Congress, reacted with fury to news of the honor, and had “solemnly demanded” cancellation of the event.

Beijing considers the Dalai Lama to be a separatist, feudal leader whose onetime demand for independence has not changed, despite his efforts to compromise on limited self-rule.

The situation is particularly personal for Chinese President Hu Jintao, an avowed friend of the United States who earlier in his career was involved in the Tibet crackdown.

Bush told Hu, who will be acclaimed for a second five-year term at the Communist Party congress, of his plan to attend the medal ceremony this summer, while the two leaders attended an Asian summit in Australia.

“They didn’t like it, of course, but I don’t think it’s going to damage — severely damage — relations. ... I don’t think it ever damages relations when the American president talks about religious tolerance and religious freedom,” Bush told reporters before Wednesday’s ceremony.

Bush and congressional leaders of both parties showed uncommon unity in their request that China consider the Dalai Lama’s repeated requests for a meeting to discuss autonomy for Tibet.

Pelosi recalled first meeting the Dalai Lama in 1987. “It was then that His Holiness described a ‘Middle Way’ approach that seeks real autonomy for Tibetans within the framework of the People’s Republic of China,” she said. “This was a historic moment because His Holiness was relinquishing his goal of independence in favor of a compromise solution.”

A spokesman for the Dalai Lama

M. lax helping VIPS pull off half marathon continued from page 12 race, we immediately thought of Brown athletics, who have worked with us in past events,” Colaice said. “They care and just know about the importance of our program. So when I called (Head) Coach (Lars) Tiffany about the race, he was very supportive of it.”

Like they did last year, the Bears will be manning water stations in front of the public schools along the race. They will also help out with road closure and crossings.

“In the survey we conducted from last year’s race, the lacrosse players were very popular, and we are very happy to have them back again,” Colaice said.

The team has a history of involvement in community service.

Last year, the team helped to raise money to build a school in Sri Lanka. Every year during the offseason, the team comes together to discuss future projects.

“It’s our team’s belief that nothing is more powerful than education,” Tiffany said. “Anything we can do to promote this cause, be it

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money or time, is all worth it.”

Following Tiffany’s example, the players are enthusiastic about volunteering at events like the race.

“We are all happy to commit to this program,” said Jordan Burke ’09. “Right now we are in off-season, and this is the time where we can make a difference. As a team, we can do a lot more.”

Assistant Coach Jon Thompson will be a runner in the 13.1 mile race, and the players are excited to cheer him on.

“To play spor ts at Brown, there is an inevitable schedule block,” said Mike Cummins ’08, who is the student leader for this event. “All the players are happy the coaches organized activities like these for the team. As soon as you get out there, you become attached to it.”

According to Tiffany, the team looks forward to continuing its tradition of community involvement.

“It’s enjoyable to lead a group of 40 guys and wrap our arms around events like this,” he said. “Once you start doing it, it becomes infectious. There is a real sense of reward.”

said his remarks were more carefully calibrated than usual, so as not to provoke a strong public response during the Communist meeting in Beijing.

In a sometimes-rambling speech punctuated by laughter and selfdeprecating asides about his faulty English, the Dalai Lama thanked “American friends ... that have stood with us in the most critical of times and under the most intense pressure.”

“The consistency of American support for Tibet has not gone unnoticed in China,” he said. “That this has caused some tension in the U.S.-Sino relations, I feel a sense of regret.”

He praised China for its powerhouse economy and technological advances. And he sought, as he has frequently in the past, to assure China that he has no designs on independence for Tibet.

“I am seeking a meaningful autonomy for the Tibetan people,” he said. “There is no hidden agenda.”

He sought to enlist U.S. elected officials in convincing suspicious Chinese leaders of his sincerity and asked them for help in moving the dialogue forward. “I have always encouraged world leaders to engage with China,” he said.

One of Wednesday’s most moving tributes came from novelist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, another Congressional Gold Medal recipient. He saluted his 72-year-old friend and spoke achingly of their shared exile. “Like Jerusalem ... Tibet is not far away,” he said. “One day when we die ... we will go to Tibet together.”

After the ceremony, the Dalai Lama and Pelosi greeted several thousand people — some wearing traditional Tibetan dress and others waving Tibetan flags — gathered on the West Lawn of the Capitol.

Actor Richard Gere, chairman of the International Campaign for Tibet, presided over a program of traditional singing and tributes under a hot sun that glared off the Capitol’s back steps.

Supreme Court orders halt to Va. execution

By Robert Barnes and Jerry Markon Washington Post

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court stopped the execution of Virginia death row inmate Christopher Scott Emmett Wednesday, a move that legal experts said might signal a nationwide halt on lethal injections until the justices decide next year whether the procedure amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.

The court granted the stay of execution just four hours before Emmett was to be put to death. It is the second time the justices have stopped an execution since agreeing to decide whether lethal injections carry the potential for pain that would violate constitutional standards.

“I think this is a de facto moratorium,” said Douglas Berman, a sentencing expert at Ohio State University’s law school. Since almost all executions are carried out by lethal injection, he said a halt “would mean the most profound hiatus in the operation of the death penalty in at least two decades.”

The justices review applications for stays on a case-by case basis and gave no indication what their decision means for other death row inmates. They gave no reason for halting Emmett’s execution, saying only that the stay would last until a federal appeals court in Richmond rules on the case “or further order of this court.”

Emmett’s attorneys have brought numerous appeals, and the Supreme Court turned down his latest Oct. 1. Emmett, 36, beat a co-worker to death with a brass lamp in a Danville, Va., motel room in 2001 and then stole his money to buy crack.

“The Supreme Court has spoken, and we will follow their decision,” said David Clementson, a spokesman for Virginia Republican Attorney General Robert McDonnell, who had urged that the execution be carried out.

Democratic Gov. Timothy Kaine, who previously had delayed Em-

mett’s execution so the justices could consider his latest appeal, said in a statement that he “had no reason to question the prosecutor’s decision to seek the death penalty or the jury’s decision that death was an appropriate punishment.”

The court’s action spared Kaine, who personally opposes the death penalty but has overseen four executions in his time as governor, from having to make the decision to either halt the execution or allow it to go forward before the justices decide whether lethal injection is constitutional.

Other governors and courts are facing the same question. Executions by lethal injection have been delayed in at least six states, including Texas, which leads the nation in executions, since the court announced Sept. 25 that it was taking up the issue. Other states had already suspended the use of lethal injections because of questions about it.

“I think you’ll see that very few states want to be the outliers when the court seems ready to step in and stop” the planned executions, Berman said.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center, agreed.

“I believe this stay in Virginia, combined with previous stays in a number of other states, confirms that a moratorium on all lethal injections is in place in this country until the Supreme Court rules on the issue,” he said.

Lethal injection is the primary method of execution in 37 of the 38 states that have the death penalty.

Nebraska uses electrocutions, but no executions are scheduled there.

Kent Scheidegger, legal director and general counsel for the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which favors capital punishment and opposes expansion of criminal rights, said he had hoped the court would explain its reasoning in its case-by-case review of the stay requests. Another appeal, from Georgia, is likely to reach the court this week.

Weintraub ’09 blog on NCAAsports continued from page 12 its unenviable position, the team boasts a 5-1 record in divisional play and a 12-7 mark overall.

Teammate Grant LeBeau ’09 said Weintraub not only sheds light on the life of a student athlete, but is an incredible writer as well.

In other entries, Weintraub discusses more lighthearted topics, such as moving into the dorms while also getting ready for school and wrapping up pre-season: “And like third grade chicken pox, school snuck up on me,” he wrote in his first entry.

In his second entry, Weintraub touched upon the unique individuals Brown is known for, citing ex-

ceptionally distinctive players from his team.

“Discovering new accomplishments and qualities of my friends is a regular occurrence for me. I just found out last week that Mike (Gartner ’09) is an incredible pianist. Here’s the catch: He was my roommate last year.”

Corey Schwartz ’11, another teammate, particularly liked this entr y as well. “It shows how our team is so diverse and that we have things going on other than water polo,” he said.

Weintraub paints this picture well, telling his audience of a neuroscience major gifted in Akkadian, a classicist who is going to be a veterinarian, a Commerce, Orga-

thanks for reading.

nizations and Entrepreneurship concentrator who is exceptional at ultimate frisbee and a personal trainer who won the Mellon-Mays grant for his work in Native American ethnography. One player is even a pre-med student with an aviator’s license.

Weintraub proves to be just as remarkable as his teammates. He spent last summer in Italy with the Brown in Bologna program and has spent the last six years studying Chinese. Additionally, he recently started a new discussion and suppor t group for lesbian, gay, bi, transgender, queer and questioning athletes.

Who says there isn’t enough time to do it all?

E ditorial & L etters Page 10

Thursday, October 18, 2007

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

S t a f f E d i to r i a l

Heady decision As athletes across the country get bigger, stronger, faster and more fiercely competitive at all levels of play in both men’s and women’s sports, concussions are alarmingly on the rise. In just the past year, more than one former professional athlete has revealed he is suffering from debilitating and long-lasting neural problems thanks to concussions sustained during a playing career.

For most of us, sports are fun and harmless. But too many football and hockey players have had their careers cut short and their personal lives forever altered because of the preventable problem of returning to the field while still healing from a concussion.

As this ever-increasing problem manifests itself on fields and in homes across America, it’s encouraging to see Brown’s football team participating in a study that may eventually help doctors identify when a player is at an elevated risk for a concussion. By recording data on the speed and direction the head is moving during a violent tackle, this study may also allow researchers to more accurately pinpoint the types of collisions that are likely to leave an athlete concussed. The Head Impact Telemetry software on the Bears’ sideline this year is another cutting edge tool that could help keep student-athletes on College Hill, and across the country, safer.

In many high schools across America, concussions are an unspoken danger. High school athletes are just as vulnerable to concussions as their college and professional counterparts. But high school athletes aren’t being paid to play, and they don’t have access to the training staffs and medical resources available to older athletes. Many high schoolers either do not realize when they have suffered a concussion, or more often than not, the 16- and 17-year old kids just want to get back out on the field to continue playing.

High school trainers are usually well-educated and competent, but diagnosing a concussion is a difficult process as evidenced by the confusion we hear about on NFL sidelines every Sunday over whether or not a player should be cleared to return to the game after sustaining a heavy hit. Fortunately, some high schools and colleges now administer baseline tests to their athletes before a season begins. Then, when a player has been injured and shows symptoms of post-concussion syndrome, he or she can be tested and that test can then be compared with the baseline to better diagnose a concussion.

Even with those precautions and medical personnel, concussions are a dangerous reality in athletics. That’s why the sensors in Brown’s helmets and the new monitoring technology are such crucial instruments in the fight to understand these head injuries. The study will give doctors and researchers valuable information that can be used to keep athletes in Brown Stadium and fields elsewhere healthy in the future.

It’s already paying dividends. It helped the Brown training staff reaffirm that one of their athletes needed extra attention because of the likelihood he had suffered a concussion. Hopefully, in the near future not only will Brown’s hockey and football teams be benefitting from the study, so will high school athletes across the country.

T he B rown D aily H erald Editors-in-Chief Eric Beck Mary-Catherine Lader

Executive Editors Stephen Colelli Allison Kwong Ben Leubsdorf

Senior Editors Jonathan Sidhu Anne Wootton

editorial Lydia Gidwitz Robin Steele Oliver Bowers Stephanie Bernhard Simmi Aujla Sara Molinaro Ross Frazier Karla Bertrand Jacob Schuman Peter Cipparone Erin Frauenhofer Stu Woo Benjy Asher Amy Ehrhart Jason Harris

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

photo Christopher Bennett Rahul Keerthi Ashley Hess

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Aditya Voleti, Steve DeLucia, Designers Erin Cummings, Alex Mazerov, Max Mankin, Katie Delaney, Copy Editors Senior Staff Writers Rachel Arndt, Michael Bechek, Irene Chen, Chaz Firestone, Isabel Gottlieb, Nandini Jayakrishna, Franklin Kanin, Kristina Kelleher, Debbie Lehmann, Scott Lowenstein, Michael Skocpol, Nick Werle Staff Writers Amanda Bauer, Brianna Barzola, Evan Boggs, Aubry Bracco, Caitlin Browne, Joy Chua, Patrick Corey, Catherine Goldberg, Olivia Hoffman, Jessica Kerry, Cameron Lee, Hannah Levintova, Abe Lubetkin, Christian Martell, Taryn Martinez, Anna Millman, Marielle Segarra, Matt Varley, Meha Verghese Sports Staff Writers Andrew Braca, Han Cui, Kaitlyn Laabs, Kathleen Loughlin, Alex Mazerov, Megan McCahill Business Staff Diogo Alves, Emilie Aries, Beth Berger, Steven Butschi, Timothy Carey, Jilyn Chao, Ellen DaSilva, Pete Drinan, Dana Feuchtbaum, Patrick Free, Sarah Glick, Alexander Hughes, Claire Kiely, Soobin Kim, Katelyn Koh, Darren Kong, Christie Liu, Philip Maynard, Ingrid Pangandoyon, Mariya Perelyubskaya, Viseth San, Paolo Servado, Kaustubh Shah, Saira Shervani, Yelena Shteynberg, Jon Spector, Robert Stefani, Lily Tran, Hari Tyagi, Lindsay Walls, Benjamin Xiong Design Staff Brianna Barzola, Chaz Kelsh,Ting Lawrence, Philip Maynard, Alex Unger, Aditya Voleti, Wudan Yan Photo Staff Stuart Duncan-Smith, Austin Freeman, Tai Ho Shin Copy Editors Ayelet Brinn, Rafael Chaiken, Erin Cummings, Katie Delaney, Jake Frank, Jennifer Grayson, Ted Lamm, Max Mankin, Alex Mazerov, Ben Mercer, Ezra Miller, Seth Motel, Alexander Rosenberg, Emily Sanford, Sara Slama, Jenna Stark, Laura Straub, Meha Verghese, Elena Weissman

J ee H yun C hoi

L e tt e r s Are table slips actually effective?

To the Editor, While I agree with Don Trella ’08 about the Critical Review (Oct. 16), one of the examples he uses to support his point deserves some critical thought. He claims that “at some level we want to have some information ‘pushed’ to us” and uses table slips as an example of this. He goes on to say that “objectively speaking (table slips are) effective” and that is why student groups table slip. I wonder, however, how effective table slips really are. I have been a part of many groups that table slip and have table slipped probably an average of one and a half times weekly throughout my Brown career for one cause or another, yet the more I slip, the more I feel as if we’re wasting time and resources in table slipping.

I would venture that most students, in fact, do not read table slips any more than they read morning mail.

Particularly for upper classmen, who have a higher tendency to be off meal plan (even if they are on campus) table slips seem to be a shockingly ineffective means of publicity. Even many first years, after a while, have

stopped reading. Wait, you might say. If table slipping is so ineffective, then why do so many groups table slip? If it’s actually ineffective, wouldn’t groups just stop doing it?

Well, in the business world, yes. But in the world of student group organization, when it is unlikely that any cost-benefit analysis will ever be done in regards to methods of advertising and publicity, no. It seems to me that one of the only reasons groups still table slip as much as they do is to give legitimacy to their event and their methods. Table slipping is recognized as a good means of publicity, and is believed to be widely effective, so groups continue to do it.

At the end of the day, there isn’t any empirical evidence to suggest whether or not table slips are, in fact, effective. I’m not suggesting a study of their effectiveness, but simply suggesting that we really have no means of knowing if they work. Perhaps they are effective. But perhaps we’re wasting our time.

Max Chaiken ’09 Oct. 16

Brower misrepresents the Indy’s circulation To the Editor: In his Oct. 16 letter, Nathan Brower cited as a “case example to expose Undergraduate Finance Board hypocrisy” the hundreds of issues of the College Hill Independent he found in the Faunce basement. The Indy isn’t meant to be picked up from Faunce — it’s distributed as needed by our staff throughout College Hill.

Without wading into the Critical Review-UFB debate, I would like to note that Brower’s estimate represents perhaps 15 percent of our press run. Since the Indy is published 10 times a semester, the unpopularity of a single one of those 10 issues is not germane for a

discussion of UFB “corruption.”

In my three years writing for the paper, I’ve encountered plenty of anecdotal evidence that the Indy is not “much less read” than the Critical Review (a periodical with a vastly different mission), as Brower claims, and the figures attest to my experience — not that I regard circulation as the sole or most important measure of a publication’s contribution to the Brown student body.

Matt Sledge ’08 Senior Editor, The College Hill Independent Oct. 16

For want of a jogging track To the Editor: The news that the Nelson Fitness Center may finally become a reality is heartening, but the fact that the current version does not include a dedicated jogging track is distressing (“With new plans, $50m Nelson Fitness Center to be completed in 2010,” Oct. 16).

Such a feature is standard fare in any modern fitness facility, and the lack of one is a loss for countless students and staff who walk and jog as their primary cardiovas-

cular activity. The competition track at OMAC simply does not compensate for this omission. With the huge sums of money lost on the SHOP architectural firm as well as from the long time delay (construction costs have increased seven and a half percent per year), we could have had this essential feature!

Peter Mackie ‘59 Oct. 16

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O pinions Thursday, October 18, 2007

Page 11

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

The U.S.-Israel relationship: Walt-Mearsheimer in reverse BORIS RYVKIN Opinions Columnist The recent publication of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” by the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer and Harvard’s Stephen Walt has led to intense controversy.

Although the book makes many points about the nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship, I would like to address two. The first is the claim that American and Israeli policies toward Iran should not be one and the same.

The second is that Israel and its lobby unduly manipulate American foreign policy to suit Israel’s ends. On the former, the authors are right on target. On the latter, however, they have the situation entirely backwards.

Walt and Mearsheimer are correct in their views on Iran and on how hysteria has distorted America’s position. The geopolitical and potentially existential threat of Tehran’s nuclear ambitions is true for Israel, but not for the United States. Given the Iranians’ low uranium deposits, dearth of technical experts, and heavy international attention, it is unlikely that the Iranians could produce viable weapons anytime soon and, even if they did, that the weapons could conceivably be passed on to individual terrorist groups.

Tehran’s recent diplomatic victories stem from using the threat of nuclear development as a trump card, which also helps divert public attention at home. If the regime could independently manufacture nuclear weapons, why would it commit suicide and destroy everything it has gained by opting for a first strike? The response of some — that the Iranian government is possessed by an apocalyptic vision and is irrational — leaves me

yawning. The sanctions approach to dealing with the problem is on its last legs and American military action would be disastrous. The United States, despite the hype, can live with a nuclear Iran. More importantly, America needs Iran to stabilize the situation in Iraq and create a regional balance of power with the Middle East’s other major player, Saudi Arabia. The fact that the Iranians nearly went to war with the Taliban in 1998 is something we should also keep in mind, considering the latter’s resurgence in Afghanistan.

While they may be correct on Iran, the authors have the direction of manipulation in

Lyndon Johnson’s demand that Jerusalem not carry out a preemptive strike during the Six Day War to the current administration’s obsession with creating a separate Palestinian state within Israel’s borders regardless of the cost, the United States has frequently treated Israel as little more than a poker chip.

The strategic considerations involved made such conduct understandable during the Cold War, when America sought to check Soviet influence in the Arab world, but the fall of the Berlin Wall should have ushered in a real relationship of equals.

While the collapse of Soviet power should

While they may be correct on Iran, the authors have the direction of manipulation in the U.S.-Israel relationship totally reversed. the U.S.-Israel relationship totally reversed.

Walt and Mearsheimer argue that the problem originates in Jerusalem and ends in Washington — that America is pressured by Israel and the American-Jewish Lobby is a dishonest broker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to ignore Israel’s obligations to the international community. In fact, as four decades of history have shown, it is the United States that is exercising undue influence on its ally. From

have led Washington to reduce its meddling in Jerusalem’s affairs, the opposite happened.

American pressure increased and played a decisive role in pushing Israel to embark on 17 years of ill-fated compromises, which yielded an intifada, a war in Lebanon, Gaza’s falling to Hamas and the emboldened Palestinians ‘demanding a full withdrawal to Israel’s indefensible pre-1967 borders. During the 1996 Israeli elections, for example, even

though a tripling of terror attacks made the Israeli public increasingly disillusioned with the Oslo Peace Process, President Clinton publicly supported the pro-Oslo candidate, Shimon Peres. As the Clinton administration was struggling with the Lewinksy scandal, it pushed Middle East peace more than ever, applying pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to force a final settlement no matter the cost for Israel. Even now, the Bush administration, hoping to contain Iran and salvage the Iraq debacle, has opted to play the Israeli poker chip to maximum effect. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have made it clear that huge territorial concessions will be expected of Israel at a conference with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas next month. How anyone can see this as evidence of Jerusalem’s pulling America’s strings to suit its agenda is beyond me. A better description would be as though it is 1938, Israel is Czechoslovakia and the United States has signed the Munich Agreement. Not only does this intimate engagement run against America’s national interests by weakening its diplomatic maneuverability in the Middle East, it is also one of the worst violations of another state’s sovereignty in modern history.

The U.S.-Israel relationship, as it stands, does not serve the interests of either state.

Israel is not an equal partner in the marriage, but something of a protectorate, whose territorial integrity could be violated at will based on Washington’s prerogatives. Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, despite making a well-argued position on Iran, have totally mischaracterized what is at fault with the actual U.S.-Israel alliance and have likely delayed attempts at its effective reform.

Boris Ryvkin ’09 needed to write something totally predictable.

The dangers of “Islamofascism” ZACK BEAUCHAMP Opinions Columnist

Poopyhead. Stupidface. These playground insults work by connecting a negative quality (“stupid” or “poopy”) to something possessed by the insult’s target (their head or face).

Perhaps the similarity between this style of insult and the term “Islamofascism” is why the latter has always seemed so outlandishly out of place in any serious discussion of terrorism policy.

The term has an oddly childish ring to it and offensively attaches the negative term “fascism” to the religion of Islam, an implication which perhaps was responsible for President Bush’s abandoning the term after his use of it in a 2005 speech provoked widespread outrage in the Muslim world (“‘Islamofascism’ Had Its Moment,” New York Times Sept. 24 2006).

Besides simply sounding silly and being offensive, resorting to this sort of immature name-calling makes critics of Islamic fundamentalism seem more like inarticulate kids and less like serious contributors to an important foreign policy debate. This move discredits their arguments, which in some cases are worth considering. The use of the term “Islamofascism” damages the credibility of its user much in the same way that an extreme anti-Israel protestor holding a sign about “Zionazis” marginalizes the protest that person is attending, even if the protest itself is calling for something reasonable (like withdrawal from Iraq or the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict).

It is important to note that the connection created by the term is not between Islamic fundamentalism and fascism (which would not nicely fit in one word), but between Islam and fascism. The term “Islamofascism,” then, does much more than cast the person using it in a negative light — it implies that Islam itself is a fascist religion, which in turn implies that a war on Islamofascism is really a war on Islam, a view with catastrophic consequences for American counterterrorism policy.

for minimizing the threat posed by Islamic fundamentalism.) Conflating all Muslims with a small minority of their co-religionists risks turning the war on terrorism into a war on Islam, a view of the conflict whose dangers are too grave and too obvious to need explaining.

Here, defenders of the word “Islamofascism” could plausibly object that this analysis ignores the actual contextual use of this term. Islamofascism, they might say, means

The term “Islamofascism,” then, does much more than cast the person using it in a negative light — it implies that Islam itself is a fascist religion, which in turn implies that a war on Islamofascism is really a war on Islam, a view with catastrophic consequences for American counterterrorism policy.

Roughly 10 or at most 15 percent of Muslims worldwide ascribe to a fundamentalist view of Islam, making them a comparatively small segment of the Muslim population. (It is important to note, however, that this still means there are between 100 million and 150 million fundamentalist Muslims, meaning that this statistic cannot be used as a justification

the same thing as Islamic fundamentalism, regardless of whatever a semantic analysis of the term might suggest. But does it? The writings of many of the leading proponents of the term leave significant room for doubt.

An official publication of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, when describing a documentary that it suggests be shown during

what it calls “Islamofascism Awareness Week,” states: “Virtually every major Western leader has over the past several years expressed the view that Islam is a peaceful religion and that those who commit violence in its name are fanatics who misinterpret its tenets. This claim, while widely circulated, rarely attracts serious public examination. ... ‘Islam: What the West Needs to Know’ reveals the violent, expansionary ideology of the so-called ‘religion of peace’ that seeks the destruction or subjugation of other faiths, cultures, and systems of government” — a description of Islam which leaves little room for doubt about what the center’s view of Islam really is. Norman Podhoretz’s new book, “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism,” never gives a definition of exactly what the word means, but he does claim that “almost to a man, Muslim clerics in their sermons” affirmed that Osama bin Laden was acting in accordance with God’s wishes by carrying out the September 11th attacks. Like the Freedom Center, Podhoretz is here implying that every Islamic religious authority, and by extension every Islamic believer, approves of terrorism against the United States.

Regardless of whether or not the proponents of the term “Islamofascism” actually believe that Islam itself is the problem, the use of the term and the ways it is being applied leave the unequivocal impression that Islam and Islamic fundamentalism are one and the same. Islamofascism is far more serious than a childish insult. It is a profoundly offensive term that promotes a disastrous foreign policy with real consequences in the real world.

Zack Beauchamp ‘10 is calling the kid hogging the swingset an Islamofascist.

S ports T hursday Page 12

Thursday, October 18, 2007

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Rams run past w. soccer on strength of early goals

By Christina Stubbe Contributing Writer

The women’s soccer team fell to 3-8-1 on the season after losing, 3-1, Tuesday night at Stevenson Field to in-state rival the University of Rhode Island (9-3-2). In what was an fairly even game, URI benefited from a couple of quick goals in transition, and the Bears failed to score until the 84th minute.

In the first half, neither team was able to maintain possession for long, as each struggled to control the midfield. Both teams had chances to score, but the Rams made better use of their opportunities. At one point midway through the half, goalkeeper and reigning Ivy League Player of the Week Steffi Yellin ’10 was forced to make a diving stop as the ball raced across the mouth of the goal. Yellin played aggressively all evening in response to the speedy Rams’ attack, finishing the night with three saves.

In the 30th minute, URI finally broke through the Brown defense.

Iceland National Team member Dora Larusdottir headed a crossed ball into the top left corner of the net from inside the 6-yard box, leaving Yellin with no opportunity to make a play.

Despite ending the half behind 1-0, the Bears had confidence going into the second half. “I thought we completely outplayed them the first half,” said co-captain Julia Shapira ’08.

But the Bears continued to

M. lax not relaxing in offseason

By Han Cui Sports Staff Writer

Don’t be surprised if you see people running down Benefit, Wickenden and Ives streets on Sunday — and don’t be surprised if you also see men’s lacrosse players at the checkpoints along the course. Though it is the offseason for the lacrosse team, the players are doing more than just practicing and relaxing.

This is a busy time for the Bears, not just in terms of competition on the field, but in terms of volunteering for educational causes in the local community.

The Bears will be volunteering at the second Volunteers in Providence Schools City Kids Half-Marathon Road Race and Relay this Sunday.

The race supports VIPS, a non-profit organization providing educational programs for students in all Providence public schools. Founded in 1963, VIPS is the largest and oldest organization in Rhode Island that deals directly with public schools.

“The purpose of the race is to raise awareness for the volunteers’ work in public schools, show people the pride of the public schools, and attract more people to be involved in the program, which will benefit more students,” said Rachel Colaiace, special events coordinator at VIPS. This is the second year VIP is holding the race. The lacrosse team also volunteered for the event last year.

“When we were organizing the continued on page 9

Ashley Hess / Herald

Julia Shapira ’08 and the women’s soccer team fell to Rhody on Tuesday.

struggle to find any consistency at the start of the second half. URI scored again 10 minutes into the second, on a transition play in which the Rams sped down the field past the Brown defenders.

The Bears will work on avoiding such defensive lapses when preparing for their future games.

“We need to organize the mid-

field and defense,” Shapira said.

“We can’t let breakdowns happen in an Ivy League game.”

After the second goal, the Bears played their best soccer of the night.

The Bears outshot the Rams, 6-5, in the second half and created several corner kick opportunities to put consistent pressure on URI goalkeeper Jackie Fede.

Finally, with less than six minutes left in the game, Brown scored.

From about 25 yards out, Meghan Robinson ’10 served the ball the across the box to Shapira. The Rams’ defense had stepped up on the play, hoping for an offside call, so Shapira was left alone with the keeper inside the 6-yard box. Taking her time, she set up and chipped the ball over Fede for the goal.

The late goal brought the crowd back as Brown employed a full-out attack to tie the game in the final minutes. Instead, with just four minutes left, the Rams scored again for a final score of 3-1.

Head Coach Phil Pincince said it was encouraging that the team continued to play hard and attack the goal even after the Rams’ second goal. “I was glad that down 2-0 we didn’t quit,” he said. “I like that we can take that away (from the loss).”

Still, the Bears faced a sobering moment when midfielder Mollie Mattuchio ’08 took a hard tackle inside the 18-yard box and injured her ankle in the 55th minute. Play was stopped, and Pincince carried her off the field, where trainers eventually took her to the emergency room. According to Pincince, the injury was particularly disappointing because Mattuchio already missed over a month of play earlier this year with a torn ligament in her knee.

The Bears resume Ivy League play on Sunday, when they take on Cornell at 12 p.m. New York.

adds at the end.

Even without Weintraub’s quips, the Bears’ unique situation this year of being without a home pool after the demise of the Smith Swim Center and adjusting to a new head coach has drawn some attention as well. Despite

Lost amidst the horror (for Red Sox Nation) of Cleveland’s sevenrun 11th inning Saturday night was the bloop single that broke my heart.

It all star ted with Tom Mastny.

An 11th-round draft pick with 74 innings of Major League experience and a career Shane Reil earned run averAre You For Reil? age of 4.86, Mastny took the mound in the bottom of the 10th, with the game tied at six, to face the heart of the Red Sox order.

The trio of Ortiz, Ramirez and Lowell came into the frame hotter than Shane Reil, going five-of-seven the night before and adding six RBIs. Now, do you remember those Sure commercials that always showed a bunch of happy people singing and dancing before cutting to that one poor guy who wasn’t wearing deodorant? This is exactly how I saw this situation. A country full of Red Sox fans were smelling fresh, waving their hands in the air, hugging each other and giving noogies, while Tom Mastny stood in fear on the mound, sweating and feeling “unsure” because he couldn’t remember if he’d sprayed on his Axe that morning.

So imagine my surprise, soon to become horror, when Mastny dropped Manny and Co. one, two, three and walked into the dugout like it was no big deal. The Sox had a chance to take a two-to-nothing series lead and completely squandered it. My spirits were crushed.

After the Mastny shenanigans I felt like some guy I didn’t even know had just punched me in the groin.

My stomach hurt, and my eyes were starting to tear. I was like, “Dude, I don’t know you, man. Let’s just be cool, let’s talk this out.” Then I got the haymaker.

Eric Gagne.

I groaned in disbelief, as did the rest of the Red Sox fans on earth, I am sure. Literally 15 minutes prior to this, I was all but certain the Sox were taking down this game, and just like that my head was in my hands and I was crossing my fingers for every pitch. I imagined Gagne like he was a character on MTV, running up to the camera like, “I’m Eric Gagne, and this is Jackass.” Then he would grab the World Series trophy from out of Mike Lowell’s hands, get on a skateboard, strap down his goggles and ollie into the Providence River.

These are my dreams.

Sure enough, Gagne delivered.

After striking out Sizemore he allowed the next two batters to reach base. Sox manager Terry Francona, having seen enough, walked slowly to the mound and appeared to mouth the words, “You’re killing me, Smalls,” before patting Gagne on the back and summoning Javier Lopez. As if the situation wasn’t bad enough already, as Javy peered into the batter’s box, he was staring face to face with a legend.

That man was Trot Nixon.

Yeah, as Red Sox fans, we all know Trot Nixon can’t hit left-handed pitching. That’s why he always platooned when he was in Boston.

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Nothing fishy about Weintraub ’09 blog

By Whitney Clark Spor ts Staf f Writer

With a double concentration in Asian studies and philosophy and the added work of founding a new club on campus, you’d think Hank Weintraub ’09 of the men’s water polo team wouldn’t have time for much else. But when approached

by Head Coach Felix Mercado and asked if he wanted to write a blog for NCAAsports.com, Weintraub found the time.

Somewhere in his busy schedule of “food, class, food, practice, food, homework, food, sleep” — a typical day, as he depicts online — the first-time blogger now represents his team, his school and his sport for a new audience.

Detailing the life of a student athlete and the “trilemma” all players face of trying to balance academics, sports, and social life, Weintraub weaves humor and reality into his weekly updates.

“I like it. It’s interesting to see my thoughts on paper,” Weintraub said.

When Mercado was contacted by the NCAA through Brown’s sports information department about having one of his players write for the blog, he thought it would be a good way to give outsiders an idea of what the team goes through.

“Hank does a good job of representing the team in the right way,” Mercado said. “It’s funny, entertaining and informative.”

In one entry titled, “To play, or not to play,” Weintraub discusses the decisions of players to either go to a top water polo school — such as the No. 4 University of California, Los Angeles, whom

dspics.com

When he’s not helping the men’s water polo team win games, Hank Weintraub ’09 is writing a weekly update for his blog on NCAAsports.com.

the Bears recently encountered in California — or to a school, well, anywhere else. The dilemma arises because on the top teams only the best players get significant playing time, while Weintraub argues that on the East Coast, water polo can be a part of an athlete’s life without taking over.

“Just don’t go to Harvard,” he

Trot will never die, as for Gagne...