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www.dailycampus.com
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
The Daily Campus Editorial Board
Melanie Deziel, Editor-in-Chief Ryan Gilbert, Commentary Editor Tyler McCarthy, Associate Commentary Editor Michelle Anjirbag, Weekly Columnist Chris Kempf, Weekly Columnist Jesse Rifkin, Weekly Columnist
» EDITORIAL
NCAA should grant UConn waiver for postseason ban
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nder current league policies, UConn is barred from the 2013 men’s basketball tournament, due to NCAA penalties for past players failing to meet newly enacted academic standards. A waiver request was rejected last Friday by the NCAA. The university is appealing to the NCAA Committee on Academic Performance’s subcommittee on appeals. This subcommittee should grant UConn the waiver. First, some background. Under the revised standards, teams will be ineligible to compete in the postseason upon failing to meet one of two academic progress rates. One rate is a fouryear average rate of 900, and UConn’s four-year average was 893, slightly below the required threshold. That leaves the alternative benchmark, a two-year average rate of 930. This is where things get tricky. UConn’s 2010-11 rate was 978, well above the requirement. However, their 2009-10 score was 826, enough below the requirement to drag the two-year average below the 930 necessary for tournament play. It is unfair for the NCAA to apply such rules retroactively. This holds true not only for UConn, but for any institution. One past player’s “senior-itis” could mean a future freshman’s postseason ineligibility. More specifically for UConn, only one current player (junior Alex Oriakhi) was even on the 2009-10 team that decreased the average rate. Besides, the team was already punished for the low APR score by the loss of two scholarships – is that not enough? Make no mistake: this postseason ban would hurt UConn not for one season, but many. The Hartford Courant wrote, “The ultimate decision figures to affect UConn’s roster, with players such as Andre Drummond and Jeremy Lamb weighing the possibility of leaving school for the pros. Other players could transfer, and recruits could cross UConn off their lists. And [Coach Jim] Calhoun, who has won three national titles, could decide it’s time to walk away.” In the waiver, UConn self-proposed alternative sanctions to allow for the possibility of postseason play. “Collectively, the university’s proposal will clearly send the message that the institution fully accepts the responsibility for past failings,” the school wrote. “It will result in the economic equivalent of a postseason ban without harming the very students the NCAA is trying to protect.” Yet the NCAA still rejected the waiver request, a reasonable and fair attempt on the university’s part. We agree that academic standards are necessary, but retroactive punishments are not an appropriate means of enforcement. The appropriate means are through methods UConn and the athletic department have already enacted. University President Susan Herbst said, “What is not being considered is the fact that our team’s academic performance improved tremendously in 2010-11, and in the fall 2011 semester. We have also developed a new long-term academic plan for our team, and it has already shown positive results.” The NCAA should grant UConn the requested waiver right away. The Daily Campus editorial is the official opinion of the newspaper and its editorial board. Commentary columns express opinions held solely by the author and do not in any way reflect the official opinion of The Daily Campus.
To the people who made “Robert Pattinson is Our Ray of Sunshine” a trending twitter topic: LOL! Thanks for the laugh. Today is not a day that you wear the clothes you spent the most money on, because the best moments of this day are all spent without clothes! Fear not, InstantDaily. The fall of the UConn Memes page was as swift as its rise. Your throne is secured, my liege. So was there anyone that actually bought a Wiz Khalifa ticket because they plan to go, or are you all just greedy little scalpers? Dear Sherry, You’re cool. From, Dan. You. Plus sign. Me. Equal sign. Us. Some day I’ll be living in a big ol’ city, and all I’m ever going to be is egotistical for thinking all criticism is meant to destroy me or is even directed at me in the first place. My name is not InstantDaily. I’m so glad it’s blister-on-feet season. I was having trouble staring at my computer for so long in the library, but then I put a bird on it!
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Fighting fire with fire leaves world colder
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ate is a strong word. I was in elementary school the first time someone said this to me after I said I hated vanilla ice cream. I was told that I should instead say that I don’t like things, because a part of hating something means that we will never give it another chance ever again. But the lesson we all could use alongside being careful of what we hate is how to face hate and answer it without perpetuating it. I think the best example that we can use is one given by a young boy. By Michelle Anjirbag Huffington Post Weekly Columnist blogger, Columbia University faculty and founder of EqualShot Barbara Becker recently wrote about her eight-year-old son’s answer to a swastika sprayed on a billboard in his neighborhood. He understood what it meant not only as a symbol of anti-Semitism, but as a sign that the person who did it hates him, even though he doesn’t even know him. He covered it with a heart that reads, “Choose Peace.” Of course, not every travesty can be covered up with construction paper and tape, but what Becker’s son did is something that most people, including myself, often do not have the courage to do. He decided to put something good over it, even though at first he wanted to cover it up with black paint. The difference means
little aesthetically, but it is still the difference between continuing to destroy something, or choosing to create something that, though small, is still something good that adds to the larger world. We take in a lot of hate everyday, whether it is through discrimination, making value judgments of other people or feeling judged in turn. We swallow the bitterness, ignore it or react vocally in violence or through protest. When we do respond, we respond with a sense of righteous anger, but we never aim to heal. That is what we need to do if we want to actively change the many, often inbred, injustices we all face on a daily basis. We need to think of responding to hatred and acts of hatred and discrimination as a form of talk therapy. If we look to forgive first, then we can look at the real problem – which is often rooted in some form of education – and find a real way to solve it. But we need to engage in a communal, cultural conversation first. If we could find the right way to talk about discrimination, then we could possibly find a way to breach the seemingly imminent threat of war between Israel and Iran; a war that will destroy anyone even tangentially involved because at its heart, it is a war fueled by generations of misunderstanding and indoctrinated hate. We could find a better way to address terrorist threats within this country, because we would not take people at face value alone in our evaluation of who is safe and who is not. We could end the political discourse of class warfare and engage in practical, real welfare instead. We could address the problems at the heart
of gender and sexuality-based discrimination. But we need to find the rightsized paper heart to do so first. For the problems that are not scrawled in paint on a billboard, this means engaging in collective discourse on difficult, loaded topics while avoiding divisive rhetoric. Repeating rhetoric of any kind does not constitute education initiatives, and without education that changes the way we look at the world, together, we are facing a lot of bad news in the near future. Look at Greece, Syria, Egypt or even Israel and Iran. Look at the way the people of these countries are becoming little more than objects in a fight between out of touch politicians. Look at the amount of teen and child suicides in response to bullying in this country. We need to change something, because the usual methods are no longer helping anyone. Answering wrong or hateful acts with anger, however righteous that anger may be, is not a productive solution. This is not about emulating Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., and “turning the other cheek.” This is about recognizing the limits of anger to build a positive solution to the many horrible things we all face in life. It is not an easy path – it is much easier to break things apart or black things out than to build something new and positive. But we will all be in a much better place if we can face our problems with understanding, and not hatred.
Weekly Columnist Michelle Anjirbag is an 8th-semester English major with a creative writing concentration and an anthropology and indigenous studies double minor. She can be reached at Michelle.Anjirbag@UConn.edu.
Research should be easily accessible to all online
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Conn is a research university. To many students, that means nothing. The happenings of the hallowed halls of academia are often shrouded in mystery, occasionally summarized or sensationalized by media outlets and often referenced by politicians to support whatever agenda they may have. I had an informational interview at a UConn Health Center research institution early this month. “What I’m concerned about,” explained my interviewer, “is how much of the work we are By Devin O’Hara doing is actualStaff Columnist ly reaching the public.” Research and academic papers are published in peer-reviewed journals. The process is long and vigorous. Each paper is anonymously vetted by experts in the field, a process which culls out methodologically poor and intellectually stagnant work and allows innovative and important papers to rise to the top. The work is then published, typically after several revisions and put out for scholars to build upon or tear down. Interestingly, the information and research contained in these journals is not immediately available to the general public, unless of course people pay the subscription fee or are affiliated with a university library. The rea-
son for this is that journals can’t afford the lengthy publication and peer-review process unless people pay. More often than not, the research within each publication becomes public after a set length of time, or another issue is released.
“Privileging research and intellectual thought has become a necessary evil ...” This process has begun to break down with the advent of internet publications. The publishers are slowly shifting toward an open-access, digital format. The change is exciting, but poses a number of unique problems. Possibly the most important one is monetary. While a journal cuts costs by not having to print a physical edition, open-access forces it to rely strictly upon institutional support, advertisement and donations. These alone don’t seem to bear the overhead that the review and publication process need. I think there is a case for increased support for these academic publications because the benefits to the public having total, open access are overwhelming.
The move would begin to tear down the veil of mystery, which has become associated with academia by giving citizens a look at exactly where their money is going, how it is being spent and what good is coming from it. Michael B. Eisen’s January op-ed in the New York Times, “Research Bought, Then Paid For,” summarized this argument well, suggesting that institutional libraries put primary support toward journals, which share their information openly to the public. But I think that more must be done to make this information actually valuable to the public. What good is research to a public who can’t understand it without somebody to explain its significance? Do we risk the intellectual conclusions reached in economic, scientific and philosophical fields being misinterpreted? I think the risk is real and important to address— Sarah Palin’s 2008 comment on the perceived futility of fruit-fly research comes to mind. So how do we prevent this? An important first step is a stronger emphasis on fields like logic, statistics and general research methods, in addition to using primary research documents in the classroom more often. As one professor put it to me, students need to become “knowledgeable consumers… of research,” enabling them to measure the
importance of each study or paper by themselves. A public that is able to understand and interpret this wide array of information available for free will be better able to make informed choices about the most controversial topics of our time and of the future: global warming, stem-cell research, various economic policies and reproductive health, just to name a few. I don’t intend to suggest that there are black and white answers in these texts, but that the information laid out in them allows readers to get facts, which are a mutual common-ground which we can agree on build off of. Privileging research and intellectual thought has become a necessary evil within academic publications in order for them to stay afloat. But, when you realize that this is the work that has allowed us to progress as a society scientifically, morally, and artistically, giving only a few the ability to access it and the tools to use it seems ridiculous. While increasing public funding to these research publications is obviously more expensive, it will simultaneously make the money we are spending on research more efficient by giving more people access. Staff Columnist Devin O’Hara is an 8th-semester English major. He can be reached at Devin.O’Hara@UConn.edu.
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