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I N D I A N A D A I LY S T U D E N T | W E D N E S D AY, J A N . 2 7, 2 0 1 6 | I D S N E W S . C O M
Jordan River Forum
LETTER TO THE EDITOR The financial scare of 2008 created an echo that has been resonating in the minds of college students ever since. The idealism that marked the prior decades has been replaced with a pragmatic approach to education. Students are looking for jobs that hire a large number of recent graduates and offer career advancement opportunities. If you speak with an Indiana University journalism professor, you will find that about 75 percent of current students are seeking a public relations specialization. That leaves just 25 percent of current students
who are trying to become full-fledged journalists. I should know, because I was also one of those students who thought public relations would offer a fulfilling career. Journalism educators must come to grips with the ethics of what a dwindling pool of journalism graduates will mean for the future of journalism. Pragmatism is causing many students to isolate themselves from the ethical concerns that come with choosing a career in public relations instead of journalism. Journalists must question the reality that they see before them, but public relations professionals seek to
make the most of tailoring the truth to influence public opinion. Journalism students are too preoccupied with learning how to make content instead of what ethics means for multimedia. Student debt weighs heavily on students’ minds. According to the Wall Street Journal, students who graduated in 2015 are the most indebted graduates ever, and the problem continues to grow. Public relations is now seen as the only way to make a living in the world of multimedia. It has infected the minds of students who see journalism as an archaic industry that doesn’t have a
place in modern society. This is why I’m calling for an end to this pragmatic approach to education. Instead of group projects that mimic office meetings students should be gaining the confidence to question and confront the world views of their peers and their professors. Pragmatism is killing the spirit of journalism education. It should be more than just pre-employment training. It should free students from the folly of putting profitability ahead of duty and the truth. Tyler Lipa talipa2012@gmail.com
LETTER TO THE EDITOR Many IDS readers obviously care about the food they eat, including where it comes from and how it’s grown or raised. The Bloomington Human Rights Commission hopes you also care about how your food is locally prepared and served, and especially whether the cooks, waiters and clean-up staff have safe working conditions, are treated in accordance with fair labor standards and practices and receive the full compensation to which they are legally entitled. That’s why we launched our Fair Labor Initiative, or FLI, last December, and why we hope you will make your dining choices on the basis of whether the local establishment affirms its compliance with fair labor practices.
By latest count, some 40 local eating establishments have signed on, so there are lots of choices from which to select. But there are scores of other eating establishments that have yet to make this affirmation. The BHRC hopes most of them will eventually sign on, but we need public support for our FLI to make a difference. Here’s what we’d like you to know: We have twice notified by mail almost all eating establishments in Bloomington and personally visited several dozen. We are not asking any establishment to affirm anything that is not already required by law. We believe law-abiding restauranteurs can only benefit from this initiative.
We are asking you, dear readers, to start voting with your feet and your wallets by patronizing those eating establishments that have joined in this effort. The list of all participating establishments is available on the City’s website at bloomington.in.gov/fli. You can contact the BHRC office for more information at 812-349-3429. All establishments that affirm their compliance are provided the decal shown here to display on the door or in the window. If your favorite eatery is not yet a participant in FLI, please speak to the owner or manager and let him or her know that you support this effort because it matters to you that the staff are treated fairly. Help us inspire as many
when bored is like the hiker trapped in a snowstorm who drinks whisky to keep warm. The warmth is transitory and the hiker, just as lost as before, now finds a strange new coldness filling her veins. The antidote to Neglecta is not distraction, but attention and care. Even a train schedule is a romance when one of the stops is where your lover lives. For the happy mathematician, a phrase like “fundamental theorem” might suggest the deep vaults beneath the city of reason; if it triggers boredom, you may still be looking at the manhole cover and waiting to lever it up. Not always, of course. Boredom Neglecta often appears when a student is in the wrong class, preparing to study the wrong list. It feeds on apathy, but registrar shuffles
and changes of major mean it usually resolves, for active students, by sophomore year. By contrast with drab Neglecta, Boredom Anxiosa is a riot of colors. It appears, paradoxically, when the student is in the right class, at the right time, and faced with a chance to fulfill an intellectual destiny. Before the cover to the vault, and in possession of a crowbar, however, the sufferer of Boredom Anxiosa hesitates. Will he be able to learn the theorem, argue the point, draft the plan, translate the sentence, understand the poem, write the code? The chance of failure is too much to bear. He spends, instead, an entire semester wandering the barren surface, while bolder classmates explore below. These surface-dwellers, stalked by Boredom Anxiosa,
In the 2016 election, marriage is a concern for both parties for different reasons. While Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders desire paid family leave, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio want more people to get married. Cruz and Rubio believe marriage is a solution to poverty. But using marriage to move up a tax bracket seems more like a problem. While the institution of marriage has always had economic consequences, marriage is no longer framed as a business transaction. Marriage is now something that requires a shared history with mutual love and respect. Finances cause marital stress among couples. A 2012 UCLA study showed poor people aspire to get married more often than higher-income people, but it also showed marriage between poor people often leads to divorce. From 2000-14, the federal government spent more than $800 million to promote marriage under the Healthy Marriage Initiative. It was meant to aid low-income families in building better marriages. Not surprisingly, the $800 million did nothing to convince Americans to stay together or get married. Marriage rates continued to fall from 2000-14, according to the Manhattan Institute. The thing that really gets me is that, in the light of Cruz and Rubio logic, marriage is supposed to make Americans less poor when reality totally contradicts their point. The Government
RACHEL MILLER is a senior in art history and political science.
Accountability Office published a statistic demonstrating that 28 million married American families lived at or below the poverty line in 2013. Either Cruz and Rubio have never heard of poor married people or they will just continue to ignore and sacrifice their standard of living in the name of the American Dream. Instead of urging poor people to get married in order to struggle only slightly less, we should at least acknowledge the contributing factors to poverty. We live in a world where income inequality is rampant, especially among minorities. Economic instability is an everyday threat. We could try and provide livable incomes not only for married Americans, but single Americans too. We could recognize day-to-day struggles of single-parent families. The truth is that we are not going to eradicate poverty by throwing money into government sponsored programs that prey on the desperation of poor people and convince them to legally shack up together. We’re also not going to eradicate poverty by requiring businesses to give workers paid family leave. We need to acknowledge the source of the problem before discussing possible solutions. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, folks. rcm2@indiana.edu @RachelCMiller1
The end of neuroscience? Fair Labor Initiative decal
eating establishments as possible to do the right thing, and let the public know they are doing the right thing, by joining in the Fair Labor Initiative. A lot of restaurant workers will be grateful! Byron C. Bangert, Chair, Bloomington Human Rights Commission
are usually intelligent enough to pass, and even — on the surface — thrive. Far better, though, to banish it. Anxiosa’s antidotes are varied. It stalks the lonely, and so intellectual companionship — the nerds who nerd like you — can draw you to descend below. For others, a dose of solitary courage sends them at last into an enchanted wood. As they see Neglecta resolve itself among their friends, those who suffer from Anxiosa should also take heart: it is the restlessness of the hero before the adventure begins. Simon DeDeo is an assistant professor of Complex Systems in the Department of Informatics, where he runs the Laboratory for Social Minds. He is (these days) very rarely bored.
EDITORIAL BOARD The IDS encourages and accepts letters to be printed daily from IU students, faculty and staff and the public. Letters should not exceed 500 words and may be edited for length and style. Submissions must include the person’s name, address and telephone number for verification.
A marriage of poverty and matrimony is not a perfect match
CRAZY IS MAJORITY RULES
LETTER TO THE EDITOR In the field guide to college emotions, boredom is the sparrow: opportunistic, resilient and found everywhere. It’s also difficult to observe since the boring lecture, its most common habitat, is quickly forgotten. But by trapping boredom for long periods in Ballantine Hall, scientists and scholars have isolated its two main lecture-hall manifestations, Boredom Neglecta and Boredom Anxiosa. Neglecta, the more common of the two, is the boredom of the slow introduction. “Does everyone have a syllabus?” Lists of terms and dates and definitions. “Importantly, you should note.” “Meanwhile, in Germany.” When Neglecta first appears, undergraduates try to it flush out through stimulation. Results are poor. The student who pulls out a cell phone
A SLICE OF SOMETHING REAL
Letters without those requirements will not be considered for publication. Letters can be mailed or dropped off at the IDS, 120 Ernie Pyle Hall, 940 E. Seventh St., Bloomington, Ind., 47405. Submissions can also be sent via e-mail to letters@idsnews. com. Questions can be directed to the IDS at 855-0760.
Indiana Daily Student, Est. 1867 Website: idsnews.com The opinions expressed by the editorial board do not necessarily represent the opinions of the IDS news staff, student body, faculty or staff members or the Board of Trustees. The editorial board comprises columnists contributing to the Opinion page and the Opinion editors.
It might seem ridiculous to suggest the budding field of neuroscience, the study of the nervous system, is no longer capable of progress. Indeed, no one will explicitly tell you this is true. However, when you take a closer look, there’s some truth to it. Neuroscience has excited us with the idea that studying the brain can tell us many things about ourselves. But the research in neuroscience hasn’t lived up to those expectations. We still don’t know much about the brain, and some have cast doubt on the fields’ research techniques. Some have grown impatient and even come to believe progress in neuroscience has halted. This excitement and confusion in neuroscience has affected two distinct groups of people. The first of these is people falling for the nonsensical, commercial mumbojumbo that rides the excitement of neuroscience. People bolster the intelligence by claiming we know far more than we actually do about the brain. They believe neuroscience is established enough now that we can develop churches devoted to it. They use it to create better products like NeuroGum, a supposedly smarter way to chew gum. They wield it as the basis of various self-help regimens and online articles with titles like “Change your Brain, Change your Life.” But neuroscience is far from being advanced enough to support this. These deceptive marketers use this hype to take advantage of the uninformed populace. And there’s still the second camp to affected by this neuro-nonsense. This group, primarily
JACOB WORELL is a freshman in neuroscience.
comprised of academics, includes people who have actually done reading on the brain and who appreciate how completely clueless we really are. This initially seems to be a much more practical, useful position than the one expressed above — and at a glance it is. However, a problem is that this crowd is beginning to get skeptical of the field’s progress, and their impatience shows up as the notion that we will never have a complete understanding of the brain. It’s becoming quite fashionable to doubt neuroscience, even in a day and age in which science is often held to be the gold standard for evaluating the world. These two groups, for opposite reasons, arrive at basically the same totally warped conclusion: further progress is not likely. And all of this has its root in the vogue neurononsense that confuses what we really know. Ultimately then, what must be done is clear — we have to keep nonsense from surfacing in order to render a clearer image of the brain. Luckily, a simple solution exists. If academic skepticism of neuroscience were to really take hold, people will begin to notice. Once they do this, public attention will shift away from neuroscience toward whatever the next fad topic will be and the ridiculous mess surrounding neuroscience will stop piling up. Then the academic community will resolve its cynicism, and the result will be greater integrity and productivity in the study of the brain. jacob.worrell@gmail.com