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Friday november 22, 2013 vol. cxxxvii no. 109
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THE RACE FOR PRESIDENT STUDENT LIFE
STUDENT LIFE
Shawon Jackson ’15: “Moving forward”
Zach Ogle ’15: “Increased outreach”
In Opinion Benjamin Dinovelli critiques the media response to meningitis, and Marni Morse encourages students to be more politically active. PAGE 4
Today on Campus 8 p.m.: The Princeton Student Events Committee is hosting games of laser tag. Frist Campus Center Multipurpose Room.
The Archives
Nov. 22, 1897 Yale defeated Princeton at New Haven on Saturday, Nov. 20, with a score of 6-0. The game was played before 20,000 people.
By the Numbers
By Anna Mazarakis
By Anna Mazarakis
staff writer
staff writer
For incumbent USG president Shawon Jackson ’15, reelection would mean “moving forward” and building on his current term. “Essentially, the message that I want to get across is that now that I’ve been on USG for about a year as president,” Jackson said, “I don’t just want to stay stagnant, but I want to learn from the mistakes that I made this past year and learn from the successes and then carry that forward into the next year.” He added that he is running for president because he has enjoyed this past year and would like to continue working on projects in the future now that he has an understanding of what the USG can do. Originally unopposed, Jackson faces a challenge from Class of 2015 See JACKSON page 2
Despite a late start to campaigning, Zach Ogle ’15 said he will rely on his perspectives as a student in USG and in other campus groups to win the campus vote, emphasizing the importance of increased outreach to student groups. “I’m running for USG president because I feel like USG can do a much better job of reaching out to non-USG students,” Ogle said. “I think currently the USG does a great job of doing projects, but a lot of the projects are representing the interests of the people who are currently on the USG, and we don’t necessarily focus on projects that would have a high impact for non-USG students.” Ogle has a lot to overcome See OGLE page 3
SHANNON MCGUE :: SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER
7X9
ALEKA GUREL :: SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER
STUDENT LIFE
3 of 4 USG committee chair positions to be contested
12 The number of candidates for two positions as Class of 2017 senator.
By Anna Mazarakis staff writer
On the Blog Lea Trusty discusses responsible representation and media coverage of meningitis.
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News & Notes Case of meningitis reported at nearby Monmouth U., strain unclear
a case of meningitis was reported at nearby Monmouth University on Thursday, The Star-Ledger reported. The diagnosis comes on the heels of the University’s decision to provide two rounds of meningitis vaccines to the campus community. A Monmouth employee has been hospitalized and is “gravely ill,” according to a letter sent to the school by President Paul Brown, though a university spokeswoman said the strain of the bacteria is unknown. The bacteria responsible for all seven cases reported at Princeton has been identified as N. meningitidis serogroup B. Brown added that Monmouth has been in communication with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Monmouth County Regional Health Commission and the New Jersey State Department of Health. Meanwhile, classes and activities will proceed as planned.
KATIE WOO :: CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
Students for Prison Education and Reform staged a demonstration in which students sat in a 7-foot-by-9-foot space to evoke the experience of solitary confinement.
In a break from recent trends, three of the four USG committee chair positions — Campus and Community Affairs Committee, Social Committee and Academics Committee — have contested elections. The final chair position, University Student Life Committee chair, is the sole uncontested election. Class of 2016 senator Eduardo Lima and Social Committee member Logan Roth ’15 are running to chair the Social Committee. Roth, a music concentrator who has organized music festivals in high school and a Battle of the Bands in India, said he knows the music industry and the entertainment industry at large. In addition to the Social Committee’s annual events, Roth said he also wants to include smaller events on campus that involve student groups. “I don’t think the social events involve student groups enough,” Roth said. “I think we sort of do events and we either look outside the school or we just do things that don’t involve other student groups. I think
our school is really talented and we’re just looking over them for other things.” Lima is a dancer in diSiac Dance Company and said he knows about entertainment and how to get a “party-like” atmosphere. Lima would like to involve more student groups in Social Committee events, namely by creating what he called a “Tiger Night 2.0,” similar to the freshman week show, but open to all students. “Social chair is more about creating a vision, and my vision is throwing the sickest party that Princeton has ever seen,” Lima said. “I’m also just very open to listening to ideas and working with the committee to think about what would be good for the campus.” Jimmy Baase ’15 and Richard Peay ’17 are running to chair the Academics Committee. Baase said he is interested in looking at grade deflation and academic advising if he were to be elected, since he says he thinks both have faults that can be improved. “As a whole, it’s kind of hard for the student government to force the administration See ELECTION page 2
BEYOND THE BUBBLE
Kreuger speaks about differences between policymaking and academia By Paul Phillips staff writer
Alan Krueger, the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at the Wilson School and former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, reflected on the differences between policymaking and academia in a lecture this past Thursday. Krueger served as chairman of the CEA from November 2011 to August 2013 and came back to teach at the University this fall. Krueger explained that although some skills, including persistence and the ability to write and communicate, are necessary for both academia and policy work, policy makers need quite different skills from academics. Policy makers, Krueger explained, spend much more time in meetings than people involved in academia. Teamwork and listening skills are, therefore, much more important for policy makers. He added that unlike professors, who quite frequently simply return to their offices after a meeting, policy builders tend to
linger because productivity, such as a lot of agenda-pushing and compromise, continues to occur after meetings. Furthermore, Krueger noted the importance of discretion in policymaking. “If you’re an academic and discover something new,” he said, “you spread it to the world. In government, that could be fatal. It could be illegal.” For example, he explained, a policy maker might want to stall on announcing a policy to allow the President to receive credit for that policy. With regard to the policy development, Krueger explained that while the policy process in general grinds slowly, development of specific policies occurs quite quickly. The rapidity with which policies are developed, he added, makes outside research input difficult to obtain and as a result, led him into policy realms with which he was not familiar. As an example, he noted that while he considers himself an expert on unemployment insurance, he had no idea of the tiers in benefit programs, which was a key component of the policy he was trying to develop.
Krueger also explained that “policies introduce constraints that we ignore in economics.” Economists, he added, quite frequently think in terms of marginal costs and marginal benefits without reflecting on how the two concepts might be related. As an example, he noted that the government quite frequently cannot get certain groups to agree to tax increases without also providing some sort of benefits to those groups. During the presentation, Krueger also listed some of the policies he supervised during his time in the CEA, noting investment in infrastructure, housing policy and the Affordable Care Act as key examples. However, he added that the defining issue that confronted him as chairman of the CEA was that of inequality and opportunity. Krueger noted that since the 1980s, a divergence between productivity and compensation has caused middle-class income to stagnate and lower-class income to decrease, while the top one percent has done extremely well. This inequality, he said, is an even See POLICY page 3
RACHEL CHOI :: CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER
Alan Krueger, former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, gave a lecture on Thursday afternoon.