Founded 1876 daily since 1892 online since 1998
Monday April 10, 2017 vol. CXLI no. 39
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Impact Journalism Day
I M PA CT J O U R N A L I S M D AY
Students are fighting for the future of Impact Journalism Day Universities (IJD-U), student newspapers from 20 renowned universities, united by Sparknews, are collectively sharing stories about 30 student initiatives that aim to address serious social and environmental problems. By writing about these innovative projects, the 20 participating student newspapers, show the collective force that the media has to catalyze change. From teaching each other how to use computer science for social good, to creating platforms that crowd-
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fund for university fees, to providing peer support for mental health, to sharing education with refugees, these stories show that students are actively challenging the notion that nothing can be done. Additionally, by each newspaper sharing their articles with each other, student journalists are given broad visibility and the individual actions of young people will be seen around the world, offering these initiatives the chance to grow and be replicated. One fortunate student will also be invited to attend the One BEYOND THE BUBBLE
Faculty, students react to confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch By Rebecca Ngu Contributor
IMAGE COURTESY OF PRINCETON CITIZEN SCIENTISTS
Princeton Citizen Scientists organized a campus-wide Day of Action.
Princeton Citizen Scientists aim to renew civic engagement By Katie Peterson Contributor
By 1:00 p.m. on Monday, March 6, over 500 University affiliates had packed Frist Campus Center. By the end of the day, 64 teach-ins had occurred, 13 University and community organizations had promoted their respective causes, and nearly 1500 people had participated in the campus-wide Day of Action, according to organizer Sébastien Philippe. A fifth year Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Philippe is also president and co-founder of Princeton Citizen Scientists, one of the two student groups to host the March 6 event. The group banded together shortly after the November elections, when “it was pretty clear that there was a need for a renewed civic engagement,” Philippe said. The organization was “organic,” Philippe explained, because he and fellow students were looking for ways to process and move forward. “People kind of came out of this election pretty shaken-up,”
he said. Princeton Citizen Scientists is a group of about 40 science, engineering, and social science graduate students who aim to address the current political discourse with their expertise. “We, as scientists, have important contributions to add to the public debate and the public discussion of scientific legislation,” Michael Hepler, a 4th year graduate student in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and another co-founder of Princeton Citizen Scientists, said. In fact, there’s a very long tradition of that kind of contribution at the University. In 1946 the University started an organization called the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists. The committee was founded by Albert Einstein and other scientists in the interest of warning the public about the dangers of nuclear weapons. Today, Princeton Citizen Scientists seeks to raise awareness of those same nuclear security See DAY OF ACTION page 7
Young World conference in Bogotá to meet with other pioneering young leaders. IJD-U is inspired by Impact Journalism Day and Solutions&Co, two events created by Sparknews which bring together more than 80 of the world’s leading newspapers including The Financial Times (UK), USA Today, The China Daily, Die Welt (Germany), Le Figaro (France), El País (Spain), and Asahi Shimbun (Japan), and many others, to bring awareness to social innovation. To read their stories visit
Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch was confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice by the Senate with a 54-45 vote yesterday over accusations of plagiarism in his book “The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia,” according to POLITICO. Gorsusch was accused of lifting sections almost verbatim from a 1984 article for the Indiana Law Journal for his 2006 book published by the Princeton University Press. Professor of jurisprudence and politics Robert P. George, who was the general editor of the series that included Gorsuch’s book, defended Gorsuch. Given the timely nature of the allegations, George labeled them as politically-motivated attempts to derail Gorsuch’s nomination. “I can only say that their timing and substance (or, more to the point, lack of substance) makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is a politically motivated effort to smear him in the hope of derailing his confirmation…” he wrote in an email in response to ‘Prince’ inquiry. George stated that the accusations are part of a long American political tradition since the late 1980s of “politics of personal destruction” wherein opponents have smeared Supreme Court nominees to derail their confirmation. Ryan Chavez ’19, who is in George’s class, affirmed the prevalence of political partisanship that Professor George highlighted. Chavez is a columnist for the ‘Prince.’ “I think the confirmation process, at the current moment, a lot of it comes down to politics,” he said. The politicizing comes from both parties, he
noted, citing how Merrick Garland, former President Obama’s Supreme Court nomination, did not get a hearing due to Republican obstructionism. “I wouldn’t necessarily endorse Professor George’s view, but I think his analysis of where things are is very accurate. [The confirmation process] is so connected to the partisan division in this country,” said Chavez. While Alis Yoo ’18 did not comment on Gorsuch’s alleged plagiarism, she noted the underlying resentment that has fueled the contention around Gorsuch’s nomination, namely the Republican refusal to consider Merrick Garland. Yoo is also in George’s class. “I think an opposition to Gorsuch should and can only be rooted in the GOP’s unprecedented move to ignore a sitting president’s candidate,” Yoo said. Regarding the substance of the plagiarism accusations, George noted that the infractions were technical, not conceptual. “To me, the key thing is, Gorsuch did not attempt to steal other people’s intellectual property or pass off ideas and arguments taken from other writers as his own, nor did he seek credit for insights or analyses that weren’t his own,” George wrote. George continued, “He was not trying to steal other people’s work or deceive readers by representing the insights and arguments of others as his own.” He explained that the similarities between the texts illustrate, at best, that “[Gorsuch] was in a small number of cases a bit sloppy about paraphrasing and citation” and, at worst, See GORSUCH page 5
In Opinion
Today on Campus
Guest contributor Daniel Krane scrutinizes Professor Robbie George’s defense of Neil Gorsuch’s plagiarism, and the Editorial Board encourages every student to participate in the We Speak survey. PAGE 6
12 p.m.: Improper Translations: Multilingual Reading practices in Fourteenth-Century English Literature. Emily Dalton reads Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess. Louis A. Simpson Building 35 Person Meeting Room 144.
impactjournalismday-universities.com/read-our-stories IJD-U will also be celebrated on April 24th in New York as part of a Sparknews sustainability event hosted by BNP Paribas, IJD-U’s sponsor. Louis Slade, Manager, Impact Journalism Day Universities
Christian de Boisredon, Founder, Sparknews
For more information, contact ijd-uni@sparknews.com I M PA CT J O U R N A L I S M D AY
App connects students to mental health resources By Pressly Pratt UC Berkeley
UC Berkeley students are developing a website and mobile app to connect campus students experiencing mental health issues with other students who face similar experiences. The startup, called SafeSpace, placed first in the Improving Student Life category of UCBerkeley’s 2016 Big Ideas contest, an annual competition aimed at providing students with startup ideas and resources to help turn ideas into realities. The team won $10,000 in the competition — money it has used to begin developing the app and website. Over the course of the competition, the team decided to create a mobile app and website to foster communication and connection among students suffering from mental health problems. The project now partners with the University Health Services program Cal Bears Say Hi. Like SafeSpace, the Cal Bears Say Hi program works to foster peer-to-peer relationships to make students feel more comfortable and less isolated on campus. Monica Casanova, a public health major who is minoring in public policy and political economy, came up with the idea for SafeSpace when she was working on a paper about mental health support systems on campus. She suffered from severe depression her freshman year and said she wanted her paper to reflect her personal experiences of trying to navigate the resources on campus — she felt they were lacking. After working on the projSee UC BERKELEY page 3
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or many university students and young people around the world, the 2016/2017 academic year has not been very hopeful. There is a sense that world leaders are shying away from addressing global problems such as climate change and forced migration, yet, as the generation with the greatest level of higher education, we are acutely aware of how seriously these problems threaten our future. For this reason, we have realized the need to take action. On April 10th, as part
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