October 20, 2016

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Thursday October 20, 2016 vol. cxlno. 91

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U. graduate students vote in favor of AFT

By Rose Gilbert contributor

On Oct. 18, University graduate students gathered in McCosh 62 and voted to affiliate the emergent Princeton Graduate Student Union with the American Federation of Teachers, a national union specializing in education. AFT received 77.1 percent of the vote, winning by a significant margin over the PGSU’s other option, the Service Employees International Union, a more generalized national union that emphasizes political solidarity and currently represents service workers at the University.

162 graduate students voted, which accounts for about six percent of the graduate student body population.

According to AFT’s proposal to the PGSU, the American Federation of Teachers has the advantage of focusing on education and having a significant presence in New Jersey: they have successfully organized a union at Rutgers University, consisted of full-time faculty,

part-time faculty, and graduate students.

AFT also generally grants local affiliated chapters more autonomy than SEIU does and it is less inclined to have official political stances, which many students at the town hall meeting on Oct. 11 worried would alienate students with differing political beliefs from participating in PGSU. David Walsh, a leading member in the unionization effort and a third-year student in the history department, said that ultimately the vote wasn’t strictly necessary, but was about making the unionization movement as democratic as possible.

“This is an internal decision made by the Princeton Graduate Student Union; it’s not the same thing as a union election. Nevertheless, we wanted to be as inclusive as possible when it came to making this necessary decision,” he said. “Actually having six percent of the student body is actually a very encouraging sign.

See PGSU page 3

ACADEMICS

Men outnumber women 2 to 1 in this year’s Shapiro Prize

By Marcia Brown Associate News Editor

Recipients of the Shapiro Prize for Academic Excellence from 2015-16 were composed of a group of sophomores and juniors who were overwhelmingly male — in a two to one ratio.

According to Senior Associate Dean of the College Claire Fowler, due to the selection process for the prize, this is an outlier year. The gender breakdown often fluctuates for the prize because it is chosen based on academic excellence. Approximately 45 freshmen and 45 sophomores are chosen each year, Fowler said.

“It really varies when you have 45 people,” Fowler said.

“This year it was a two to one

ratio but actually that’s not always the case.”

“Sometimes there’s a gender disparity in who’s in the top 10 percent of the class, sometimes there’s not,” she said.

She said that, for example, some years there might be a lot of winners in one particular residential college.

The University announced 87 total Shapiro Prize winners this year, hosting a dinner for the winners, faculty members, and administrators in Chancellor Green on Sept. 27. 30 were women and 57 were men. Last year, there were 58 women and 36 men selected for the Shapiro Prize.

“Traditionally, we have a dinner and speaker and all the winSee PRIZE page 5

ORANGE AND BLACK

LILLIAN CHEN :: STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

In Opinion

Senior columnist Nicholas Wu discusses the need for a racial awakening among Asian Americans, and Elly Brown, president of the Princeton Pro-Life, responds to the Editorial Board’s position on the Women*s Center.

PAGE 6

IN THE SERVICE OF HUMANITY

VINCENT PO :: STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

A new plaque containingthe revised unofficial motto was installed in front of the Nassau Hall.

BEYOND THE BUBBLE

U. research scholar pen open letter against Trump

By Jessica Li staff writer

Joined by nine other former nuclear launch officers, University Research Scholar Bruce Blair penned an open letter Friday questioning the ability of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to serve as commander-in-chief.

“The pressures the system places on that one person are staggering and require enormous composure, judgment, restraint and diplomatic skill. Donald Trump does not have these leadership qualities,” the letter reads.

Other signatories of the letter include former officers from all three of the missile

launch stations still active in the United States.

Blair, who served in the underground launch center at Montana’s Malmstrom Air Force Base before accepting his position at The Wilson School’s Program in Science and Global Security, explained that the authority to deploy a nuclear weapon is a power granted only to the President and cannot be checked by any other decision-making body. He further noted that there is no room for flexibility once the decision is made at the highest end of the chain of command.

Once the President issues a command, even the highest ranking officers in the Pentagon war room will have to

create the launch order and must transmit the signal down to the very operators who are responsible for firing the weapons.

“All of us in our careers were trained and persuaded to not question the decisions made at the top — that being the White House or generals above us. Our job is to carry orders,” he said.

“I, as a very young man, [could] receive this message and it would take us one minute to turn the keys to send a signal to the missiles through underground cables,” Blair added. He said that he and his colleague could have fired up to 50 missiles carrying high yield nuclear weapons in a See LETTER page 2

LECTURE

BEYOND THE BUBBLE

U. professors discuss Kerner Report findings

Clinton, Trump face off in final debate

By Allie Spensley Contributor

University professors Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Imani Perry, and Julian Zelizer gathered on Wednesday to discuss the 1968 Kerner Report — a Johnsonera federal document analyzing race riots occurring across the country — and the ways in which its findings and recommendations are still relevant today.

Glaude, chair of the University’s department for African American Studies and professor of Religion and African American Studies, said that of all the Kerner Commission recommendations, the ones focused on policing — more so than those pertaining to education and housing—are the ones that persist in today’s political climate.

The underlying causes of the 1960s riots, such as institutional racism and police brutality, are still prevalent in America today, Glaude added.

“We are constantly limiting the expression of our values, and the scope of our politics, because we are afraid of triggering racism — which is in fact an explicit acknowledgement that it exists and that we want to leave it alone, that we want to

navigate it rather than uproot it,” he said.

Imani Perry, University professor of African American Studies, focused on four central points of the Kerner Report: how we historicize riot rebellion, how we situate the document in the midst of a complicated history, the way we talk about the historical pivot to the Black Power movement, and the issues identified by the report that we are still facing.

She discussed her transition from focusing on the intent of historical documents such as the Kerner Report to focusing on their real-world function regardless of their often idealistic purposes.

“I find myself called to think about the function of these reports in American life,” Perry said. “What’s their mechanism?

And that doesn’t hinge on the question of intent.”

Julian Zelizer, professor of History and Public Affairs, focused on the historical implications of the document in his comments.

The report demonstrated the limits of liberalism during the time period, but still served the important role of sparking a dialogue on race and riots, Zelizer said.

See REPORT page 3

Today on Campus 4:30 p.m.: Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and screenwriter Robert Schenkkan will discuss the making of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Dodds Auditorium, Robertson Hall.

By Samuel Garfinkle staff writer

The third presidential debate of the 2016 election season took place on Oct. 19 at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Moderated by Chris Wallace of Fox News, this debate returned to the format of the first general election debate of the season, with a 90-minute program divided into sections that represented a wide spread of political issues.

Much of the debate saw the two candidates standing by positions they have previously taken during the campaign, as well as attacking their opponents for previous scandals.

Some questions, however, provoked newly worded responses.

For example, when asked about his purported support for the repeal of Roe v. Wade, Trump said that he thought his promised appointment of pro-life Supreme Court justices would cause this to “happen automatically.” Clinton was then forced to defend her vote against See DEBATE page 4

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Thursday October 20, 2016

Blair: If you don’t want Trump to have control of codes, don’t vote for him LETTER

Continued from page 1

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very short time.

Blair further noted that he has not seriously doubted any President’s or presidential candidate’s ability to control the nuclear arsenal as he does for Trump’s.

In their open letter, Blair and the signatories stated that Trump “has shown himself time and again to be easily baited and quick to lash out, dismissive of expert consultation and ill-informed of even basic military and international affairs — including, most

especially, nuclear weapons.”

According to a directive from the Department of Defense, everyone with access to nuclear weapons except for the President must meet certain criteria that include being “dependable, mentally alert, and technically proficient commensurate with their respective U.S. nuclear weapons, NC2 systems, PCM and equipment, or SNM duty requirements.” Among other requirements, the individuals should “have good social adjustment, emotional stability, personal integrity, sound judgment, and allegiance to the United States.”

“I and some friends and acquaintances who formerly served as nuclear missile launch officers decided to issue a statement criticizing Trump as unfit to command our nuclear forces because we know that he would not pass these tests,” Blair said.

Blair also described the potency of a misguided decision, noting that the United States’ current arsenal can wipe out entire civilizations on the other side of the planet within tens of minutes.

According to Blair, there are currently 450 manned missiles in the United States controlled by 90 officers in three launch

bases. Collectively, these missiles can kill 100 million people if launched all at once. All designated targets would be struck within thirty minutes after the missiles are fired.

“Thirty minutes from now, this could be the beginning of the end of 100 million deaths,” Blair said.

Yet Blair noted a silver lining in this election: Trump has raised awareness of nuclear responsibility. According to Blair, various polls have shown that the single most important issue to undecided voters in key swing states is whether Trump would bring the country to a nuclear war.

Since the publication of the letter, more former and current nuclear launch officers have voiced similar concerns, according to Blair. There are now more than twenty launch officers who have signed on to the letter, Blair noted.

“If you do not want Trump’s finger on the ‘red button’, then you had better not elect him President,” Blair said.

Though the letter is not an endorsement of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, Blair stated that he personally believes that Clinton is more prepared to take charge of the nuclear arsenal than Trump.

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Thursday October 20, 2016

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PGSU to prioritize Glaude: Discussions must insist on member goals with AFT decriminalizing poverty for progress PGSU

Continued from page 1

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That means we’re already almost a fifth of a way to the thirty-eight percent marker, which, under federal labor law, is the number of cardcarrying union members necessary to call a union election for the entire bargaining unit.”

Walsh called the affiliation votes a “very significant step forward,” and said that affiliating with AFT will give PGSU access to resources like paid fulland part-time staff, office space, and legal representation. Specifically, AFT has pledged to provide a paid campaign director, three to five full-time paid staff, an office in Princeton, and legal support.

“This outcome means that we now have a framework in place to bring in AFT to back our organizing efforts,” Walsh added, “That means that the national union will have our backs as union organizers.”

Multiple graduates within PGSU deferred their comments to Walsh.

Moving forward, AFT will work with and support PGSU to develop a campaign to negotiate a contract with the University, the terms of of which would determine what kind of presence and inf luence a graduate student union would have on campus.

This campaign will allow PGSU to assess and prioritize their members’ concerns and goals including stipend size, child care, and teaching and research assistant duties. They will also have to decide whether or not to be a closed-shop union. The contract will formally define PGSU’s role on campus, including if and where their members can strike.

Many graduate students not involved with the PGSU declined to comment.

The Graduate Student Government is currently conducting research on questions graduate students might have about the possibility of unionizing through their Unionization Fact Finding Committee.

REPORT Continued from page 1

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“Even with all the limits and all the flaws, [the report] stimulates a conversation about race that I can’t imagine happening today,” he said.

All three speakers discussed the ways that findings brought up in the Kerner Report apply to modern issues of race.

“Ferguson. Milwaukee. Baltimore. Charlotte. These things happen right here, right now.

They are extraordinary moments that in a condensed way account for all the things that are laid out in the Kerner Report,” Glaude said.

The problem with current policies designed to solve issues of racism is that many do not directly address the persistence of employment discrimination and housing discrimination,

Perry added.

“All these forms of exclusion exist and yet the interventionist imagination is still focused on how to make black people better,” she said.

Glaude also commented on how the Kerner Report’s discussion of policing issues as a root cause of racial unrest still applies today.

“The current frame of speaking to and addressing police brutality is, in some circles, entirely too narrow,” he said.

“Unless we begin to talk about decriminalization in a number of ways, unless we begin to insist on decriminalizing poverty, we will find ourselves in this place.”

Questions to the speakers dealt with the limits of liberalism today, how police brutality exacerbated riots, what direction the 2016 election will take, and what has improved in race

relations since the 1960s.

“I think the big takeaway is how far America has shifted to the right. All the conclusions arrived at [in the Kerner Report] are things no mainstream politician would say for fear of backlash,” Nicky Steidel ’18 said after the talk. Steidel is pursuing a concentration in African American Studies.

“It’s interesting to hear interdisciplinary discussion on a topic like that, especially given its relevance,” Sebi Devlin-Foltz GS said.

The lecture, titled “The 1968 Historic Study: ‘The Kerner Report: The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders’ — And Its Importance Today,” was held at 4:30 p.m. in Robertson Hall. It was co-sponsored by The Wilson School, the Princeton University Press, and the University’s African American Studies Department.

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Thursday October 20, 2016

Candidates spoke on immigration, abortion DEBATE

Continued from page 1

a ban on late-term partial-birth abortions, claiming that she did not believe these regulations had taken the health of mothers into account. Trump responded that this was “terrible,” insisting that this would allow doctors to “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month.”

Trump also once again refused to say that he would accept the results of the election, saying instead “I will look at it at the time.”

He then pivoted to criticize the media, insisting that they had “poisoned the minds of the voters.”

Clinton responded indignantly to this, calling this statement “horrifying,” and praising the United States for having “accepted the [election] outcomes when we may not have liked them.” She further leveled criticism against Trump for his statement, accusing him of “denigrating” and

“talking down our democracy.”

Speaking on immigration, Trump noted that “we have some bad hombres here,” in reference to undocumented immigrants.

Clinton reiterated her previous stance on immigration reform coupled with border security.

After exchanging fire over foreign policy, including issues surrounding Russia and Putin, the two candidates were offered an opportunity to make closing statements.

Clinton spoke first, emphasizing that she was “reaching out to all Americans” in order to “make our country what it should be.”

Trump used his closing statement to attack Clinton for donations from the wealthy and influential. He warned the audience, claiming “We cannot take four more years of Barack Obama. And that’s what you get when you get her.”

With the debates over, less than a month remains before the general election on Nov. 8.

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Fowler: Transcripts are considered without regard to race or gender PRIZE

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ners receive the same book written by the speaker,” Fowler said.

The prize was endowed by former University President Harold Shapiro GS ’64 and his wife Vivian Shapiro, according to History Professor Emeritus Nancy Malkiel. Malkiel served as dean of the College when the award was originally established.

“I think the impetus was simply to have a way of recognizing students for academic excellence,” Fowler said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to celebrate academic excellence?”

Fowler declined to release the gender breakdown of award winners for previous years, because the award is part of a student’s education record, although the names are printed in the commencement booklet.

A female award winner noted that recipients were seated by year and residential college at the dinner. Administrators and residential college faculty were seated with winners as well. According to this award winner, her table had 10 people and only two of them were women.

“I just thought ‘OK, this is fine,’” she said. “I noticed this as a function of the fact that I was the only humanities person at my table, because I’m always hyper aware of it.”

She said that when she looked around the room, “the whole room represented the disparity at my table.”

She also said that she didn’t know any other female winner this year, but knew several of the male winners prior to the award ceremony.

However, another award winner said that the gender disparity at the dinner wasn’t as pronounced.

“Now that I think about it, there were more males at my table than females, but it wasn’t a glaring thing to me,” he said.

A two-time award winner, he

said that he thought the prize winners last year in Butler were all female.

“It wasn’t something we really talked about it at the dinner,” he said. “For me, it wasn’t a big concern.”

Fowler said that to choose the award winners, she and the residential college deans review the top 10 percent of the class in terms of GPA. Because the students are recognized for their freshmen and sophomore years, their departments are not observed, Fowler said.

“We don’t do is strictly by GPA because it only tells you one thing about a student’s record,” Fowler said.

She explained that having a 4.0 in eight classes and passing one of her classes through pass/D/fail is different from a student who took 12 classes but received a B+ in one class. The award takes into account complexity, breadth, and rigor of the student’s program. She said it was “not enough” to have a 4.0 in six classes and that they look at the whole program.

“Grades are important but they’re not the whole capacity of your education,” Fowler said.

“It’s nice when you get good grades but it shouldn’t be the driving force of your education.

It might make you make narrower choices than you might want to make. That’s what P/D/F is for.”

Fowler said that the GPA is largely considered in honoring this “purely academic award.”

“What they told us was we were selected for the award based on a combination of your academic performance and the breath of your academic pursuits,” one awardee said.

A female award winner however, wondered about a perceived skew towards the sciences in award recipients. She said that selection committee places an emphasis on A+ grades but the classes that largely give out A+s are in non-humanities disciplines. Because non-humani-

ties disciplines are often graded on the curve, if a student places outside of the curve, he or she receives an A+. However, if a student writes an excellent paper, they will still most likely receive just an A, she said.

Fowler said that they account for this in the way the University calculates GPA because an A and an A+ are weighted the same. She said that the selection committee is “mindful” of the difference in grading between the humanities and non-humanities.

“A lot of students take science classes,” Fowler said. “All the engineers are 25 percent of the population, [so] it’s not surprising that a lot of them would be represented.”

However, a female award winner said that this year’s gender disparity did make her have doubts, though it did not make her question the award.

“Did I get this award so they could at least have some females here or did I get it in spite of the fact that they have no regard to the gender breakdown?” she said.

“I don’t think having a quota fixes anything, but I think there is an impressive number from groups that identify as women and men that could have won the award,” she said. “Even if it’s the top kids are men but don’t have the highest GPA, the University could account for that by looking at men or women because it is holistic.”

Fowler said that they look at the transcript without regard to race or gender, but said that people might notice, “as we do,” imbalance in the selected group of winners.

“I felt like if I raised this concern with an administration it would come off as ungrateful and I shouldn’t feel that way I don’t think,” a female awardee said. “They’re never going to release the criteria.”

page 6

The Daily Princetonian

Thursday October 20, 2016

Opinion

Thursday October 20, 2016

page 7

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LETTER TO THE EDITOR

The Women*s Center: a pro-life perspective

vol. cxxxix

Elly Brown

guest contributor

Do-Hyeong Myeong ’17 editor-in-chief

Daniel Kim ’17

business manager

BOARD OF TRUSTEES president Richard W. Thaler, Jr. ’73 vice presidents John G. Horan ’74 Thomas E. Weber ’89 secretary Betsy L. Minkin ’77 treasurer Michael E. Seger ’71 Craig Bloom ’88 Gregory L. Diskant ’70 William R. Elfers ’71 Stephen Fuzesi ’00 Zachary A. Goldfarb ’05 Joshua Katz Kathleen Kiely ’77 Rick Klein ’98 James T. MacGregor ’66 Alexia Quadrani Jerry Raymond ’73 Randall Rothenberg ’78 Annalyn Swan ’73 Douglas Widmann ’90

140TH BUSINESS BOARD

B

y now, everyone has either read or knows about the most recent piece published by The Daily Princetonian Editorial Board, and most everyone probably has an opinion on it. Therefore, I do not wish to persuade anyone one way or the other about the editorial specifically.

Instead, my aim here is to comment on the responses to the editorial as they pertain to Princeton Pro-Life in my capacity as president of that organization. In addition, I hope to put forth a view of diversity and inclusion within the Women*s Center and elsewhere that might bridge the gaps between the seemingly opposing sides in the debate over the editorial.

Over the past couple days many have argued, whether on social media or in this publication, that in contrast to what the Editorial Board might suggest, the Women*s Center is in fact inclusive because it has helped host events with a wide array of campus groups. The paradigmatic example that has been used in such responses is Princeton Pro-Life’s “Pro-Woman, Pro-Life Open House,” which was held at the Women*s Center last Friday. As part of the organization in question, I, too, am thankful that the Women*s Center opened its doors for us to host an event about a controversial topic like abortion that people might otherwise hesitate to discuss. As Aparna Raghu ’18 rightly suggests: “If the Women*s Center cannot hold programs and host student groups that take stances on contentious issues, these important discussions will remain undiscussed.”

Additionally, in a separate response, Sarah Sakha ’18 points out that politicizing the issues that the Women*s Center seeks to address is harmful and only gets in the way of a more robust understanding of the issues themselves. She explains that the “harmful politicization of basic questions of human dignity and identity” doesn’t get us anywhere and actually undermines the project of the Women*s Center. Her argument appears to suggest that the Women*s Center’s hosting of the pro-life open house was praiseworthy because it addressed a contentious issue without the politicization that the issue often receives.

Business Manager Daniel Kim ‘17 Comptroller Denise Chan ’18

Head of Advertising Matthew McKinlay ‘18

I could not agree more. And I am thrilled that the campus generally seems to agree with me and these writers that open discussion and hosting events like the pro-life open house — and not politicizing these events — is only beneficial to the Women*s Center and campus in general.

Unfortunately, what hasn’t been mentioned is that Friday’s pro-life open house was only the first pro-life event that has been hosted at the Women*s Center (at least while I have attended Princeton) while events with different viewpoints on that topic have been held much more frequently, as the Editorial Board points out. Further, Princeton Pro-Life pitched the idea of the open house to the Women*s Center precisely because we sensed a need for a different perspective to be presented there. Since we can all agree that hosting the pro-life event was commendable, it is a bit disappointing that similar events do not happen much more often.

So, where do we go from here? Since hosting the pro-life open house was a positive and praiseworthy example of diversity and inclusion within the Women*s Center, and since there is harm in politicizing issues dealing with “dignity and identity,” it seems that the logical step moving forward is to host more events like the pro-life open house. As we all know, there exists a wide array of women’s issues that are often harmfully politicized or stigmatized, only a handful of which fall under the umbrella of Princeton Pro-Life. So far, the Women*s Center has been making great efforts to address such topics. It is my belief — and consistent with the student’s responses mentioned above — that the Women*s Center should continue to host events on such topics that present diverse (and potentially opposing) viewpoints in a depoliticized way — just as they did with the pro-life open house.

Perhaps it is this sense of diversity that the Editorial Board seeks to support. If so, it seems like we can all get behind it.

Elly Brown is a junior and president of Princeton Pro-Life. She can be reached at eabrown@princeton.edu.

the mid-terminator Nathan pHAN ’19

..................................................

Head of Operations Nicholas Yang ’18 Head of Subscriptions Vineeta Reddy ‘18

NIGHT STAFF 10.13 .16 staff copy editors Katie Petersen ’19 Daphne Mandell ’19 contributing copy editors Michael Li ’20 Emily Spalding ’20 Todd Gilman ’20 Luke Henter ’20 Douglas Corzine ’20

L

The need for an Asian-American racial awakening

ast week, Asian-American social media erupted with outrage over a story recounted by New York Times reporter Michael Luo. While walking from church to lunch with his family, he ran into a woman on the street who angrily yelled at him, “Go back to China!”

I really sympathize with Luo’s narrative. I grew up in a white-majority suburb of Detroit where that sentiment was not usually explicitly stated, but often implicit in discourse. That said, after discussing this incident with some friends, what really stood out to me was the tone with which Luo told the story and the ways in which it demonstrated the position on race that many Asian-Americans might prefer to hold.

In Luo’s telling, his brush with racism was wholly unexpected and didn’t exist in his family’s stratum of society. For example, Luo addresses the woman’s class and alludes to her “nice raincoat” and fancy iPhone 6 Plus. He writes that she could have been “a fellow parent” at one of his children’s schools. In his worldview and perhaps in the preferred worldview of many other Asian-Americans, past a certain class threshold, racial distinctions simply fall away. It’s true that socioeconomic status can have a mitigating effect on racial prejudice, but that part of his account reveals his attitudes on the intersection of class and race.

Luo writes that he and his family represent the “model minority,” which by his reasoning should be part of a post-racial world. Content to live as the model minority, it seems that many Asian-Americans would rather ignore the tough conversations about race that

Nicholas Wu

senior columnist

dominate the lives of so many other people of color.

But what about those Asian-Americans who don’t fit the “model minority” mold? Does that mean that they are to be consigned to the status of “other” simply because they do not have professional degrees?

The fact is, at a certain point, those conversations about race are unavoidable. For the time being, nothing will change the fact that Asian-Americans “look different” from the majority of the American population, are often perceived as “looking the same,” and will continue to be perceived as the perpetual foreigner. This attitude of complacency in the AsianAmerican community desperately needs to change.

In contemporary media discourse, especially at a relatively elite place like Princeton, it is often too easy to think about racism in abstract terms, as a relic of darker times that happens “somewhere else” or at Trump rallies. There seems to be a fascination among media and political elites about explaining the plight and bigotry of the poor white male, as if to suggest that the world above the poverty line is a cosmopolitan, race-free world.

Racism is not an artifact of the past. Even this past weekend, the Nassau Weekly published a particularly disgusting line from a fraternity email involving the objectification of Asian female genitalia and sweet and sour sauce. They have yet to publicly comment or apologize.

Perhaps even more relevant to the scores of stu-

dents currently looking for jobs, one could also look at the pending Department of Labor lawsuit against Palantir Technologies for its flagrant discrimination against Asian-American applicants. In one egregious example, according to the New York Times, “software engineering jobs drew a pool of more than 1,160 qualified applicants. Of that number, 85 percent were Asian. Yet Palantir ultimately hired 11 Asian applicants and 14 non-Asian applicants.”

These incidents show racism at some of its very worst, and the Asian-American community needs to wake up to the fact that racial identity actually matters. Is “Asian-American” a contrived racial category? Of course; it’s an incredibly diverse group of people from many different countries of origin, but it’s the category that the Asian-American community has to work with and around right now.

A good starting point for greater participation in civil society and political discourse could be as simple as the issue of voting. Asian-Americans are the fastest growing racial group in the country but have some of the lowest voter participation rates. How can the collective power and voice of the community be heard if people don’t even go to the ballot box? As a good friend of mine (who is far more eloquent than I) put it, Asian-Americans need to come to a new realization of race relations: “we are not the model minority, nor will we be the silent minority.”

Nicholas Wu is a Wilson School major from Grosse Pointe Shores, Mich. He can be reached at nmwu@princeton.edu.

Thursday October 20, 2016

Sports

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Women’s Volleyball leads all Ivy teams Stephen Craig:: Staff0 Photographer

This time last year, the women’s volleyball team had just stumbled through a 3-4 Ivy League start. Though the Tigers would eventually turn the tables and claim the conference championship, Princeton entered this season seeking a strong start. Seven games into the Ivy schedule, the Orange and Black have simply dominated across the board. Not only have the Tigers defeated every other Ivy team, Princeton maintains a 19-set win streak. The combination of senior leadership and freshmen talent has proven particularly fruitful for the Tigers. This past weekend, senior cocaptain Cara Mattaliano and freshman middle blocker Maggie O’Connell led the team’s offense in kills.

Looking ahead, the team intends to remain humble.

Tweet of the Day “Dear iPhone: I’m adding contact phone numbers and the default is “home fax.” Do people still have those??”

Courtney Banghart (@ CoachBanghart), Head Coach, Women’s Basketball

Stat of the Day

3.56 kills / set Senior co-captain Cara Mattaliano leads the league in kills/set.

Partner Brittany Ptak ranks third.

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