Category: Opinion

Growing up, I loved airplanes and the history of flight, and my heroes were the early pioneers – including groundbreaker Amelia Earhart, who challenged both flight records and gender norms but is now known for her disappearance.

I was reminded of this watching “The Daily Show” last week, which featured an extra-long interview with New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand on her new book “Off the Sidelines.”

Gillibrand’s book, which was released on Sept. 9, focuses on her own experiences as a woman, a lawyer and a politician, as well as the struggles of other women. I haven’t had time to read it, but from seeing her interview and knowing about her past legislative work I’d highly recommend it.

In a largely progressive college atmosphere like Ohio Wesleyan, where women are the majority and have a strong hold in leadership positions among the students, it can be easy to forget how revolutionary Gillibrand’s success is and just how recently it would have been impossible.

This is especially important to remember as signs point to a coming golden age of women’s political leadership in the United States.

Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State and senator (not just wife of Bill Clinton), is the expected 2016 Democratic candidate for president, and if she doesn’t run several other women have been discussed as possible candidates.

As with the black community, though, the fact that women may soon have a representative in the highest office doesn’t mean there’s equality in general society, or politics as a whole. Just look at some of Gillibrand’s experiences with sexism in the halls of power, which she details in “Off the Sidelines.”

Gillibrand, without naming her colleagues who she still has to work with, described being judged for her body, not her political work. She details comments like “You’re even pretty when you’re fat,” and “Don’t lose too much weight now, I like my girls chubby,” after post-pregnancy weight loss.

While she responds to these experiences with understandable outrage in her autobiography, she said in an interview with People Magazine that she won’t let it stop her. She wants women to gather together on issues and improving their representation, especially as the midterms approach.

“If we do, women will sit at every table of power making decisions,” she said in her book. And there’s no reason why we as men should fear this. Because really, what would we lose?

Men – specifically straight white men – have had every seat at the table for centuries, and while opening the table will mean we lose some privileges they’re not things we should have had in the first place.

Take the casual sexism Gillibrand’s experienced, or the more egregious example of Ray Rice – sure, there was a time when all this was accepted before women had strong political and social power, but should it have ever been?

Ultimately, though, change is coming no matter what – to use a fitting metaphor, women don’t need us to move a seat at the table out for them, they’re going to take it themselves.

In political terms, it may be in the midterms; it may be in 2016, but with women gathering their power and equal pay, reproductive rights and sexual violence in the military and colleges all on the national conversation, it’s happening. Unlike other marginalized groups, women have an equal to higher percentage of the population, giving them the voting power on their own.

But while they can have the power to do it alone, they shouldn’t have to. We can all play a role, not by leading but by supporting with our votes, donations and our talents, whatever they are.

If you’ve ever picked up a Transcript and looked at page six, you probably think that we editors have a lot of opinions. Well, we do.

We’re journalists by trade, and that comes with a whole lot of reading, writing and, most of all, listening. We’re trained to listen for every side of the story, and as we consciously do that, we sometimes take sides.

That might sound kind of bad coming from the editor of a paper, right? I mean, aren’t journalists supposed to be completely unbiased messengers? Isn’t that one of the fundamental pillars of everything we’ve been taught all these years?

Yes, it is.

But we’re also human and we have human thoughts and human feelings. We know how to check them at the door when it comes to reporting, but we can’t help but to have them. And when we have an entire opinion page to fill on top of our feelings, we use them to fill it. Feeding the beast that is The Transcript’s sixth page is an unfortunate reality of our weeks. We get editorials from non-staffers once in a blue moon, but usually we end up pulling together last-minute copy ourselves. Columns should not be last minute decisions.

The opinion page is representative of our commitment to serve students with a safe place to advocate for wants and needs and to bring awareness to various issues. To me, a paper without an opinion page isn’t doing it’s job, but us keeping it afloat internally isn’t making the cut, either.

This page of the paper is not for us. We have seven other pages we are responsible for filling. This page is for you.

We are a student newspaper in both the worst and best ways. We make a lot of rookie mistakes, but we make them because we are on our own. We are so independent that we aren’t even allowed to have a booth at the club fair. The student newspaper at any institution is intended to promote discussion on the ideas and the trends you want to hear about in the paper. We are produced by students for students, and we strive every day to represent you in an open forum.

But we can’t exactly do that if we aren’t hearing from you.

Whether it’s a piece on an adviser that did your organization wonders or a demand to see more transparency from the administration, I know you have opinions just like me and our editorial king, Noah Manskar. I don’t care if it’s a rant about how inconvenient this construction on campus is or a rave about the food court’s salad bar makeover. I just want you to write about it.

We can’t give you what you want if you don’t tell us, so tell us. Tell us in a letter to the editor, in a guest column or even by responding to us on Twitter or Facebook. Tell us what you want us to improve on or what you want the school to improve on. I know you have it in you.

As mentioned above in Noah’s editorial, OWU clearly has no problem with opinions. If you using an anonymous forum to hide behind your opinions, you’re a coward. You aren’t contributing to making OWU a better place. You’re making it worse.

Take the time to write an opinion that matters. Be brave. Be brave enough to start controversy for the greater good.

I look forward

I am angry this week. I am angry because an app called Yik Yak is causing a lot of people pain they don’t need.

For those unfamiliar with it, Yik Yak is like a fusion of Twitter and the short-lived OWU Confessions. Users can post anonymous messages that others can see based on their location. Because OWU is such a concentrated area, if you get onto Yik Yak on campus the posts are most likely from students.

I’ve heard many say it’s good cure for boredom. It’s also a cesspool, a place where people can voice their most odious thoughts without consequence.

Yik Yak posts have referred to the House of Black Culture, one of few designated safe spaces for students of color, as a “crack house”; equated favoriting a tweet to an invitation for sex; and scrutinized international students for doing things domestic students do regularly simply because they’re “foreign.” Not to mention the post that said, “Let’s be real we all hate black people don’t we?”

I could go into every reason why these — and probably a good 75 percent of OWU’s Yik Yak posts — are socially harmful and have tangible deleterious effects on the people they’re about. I’m not going to because the message is out there. People who have directly experienced the oppression these posts perpetuate have told us about the power words have do harm and condone violence in myriad settings. But apparently it hasn’t sunk in.

How many times do we have to have these conversations?

How many times do people have to publicly recall their experiences with racism on campus and in Delaware, or with sexual violence at the hands of other students, for us to understand that these problems are not amorphous or external to our community?

For how many events about race or gender or multiculturalism must faculty offer extra credit for everyone here to understand that saying these things is not okay, and that removing your name from them doesn’t absolve you of your complicity in oppression?

Tell me, how many times? Because I am tired of seeing and hearing and reading these things, and I don’t even have to directly deal with their social, physical and psychological effects on a daily basis.

Until it sinks in, for every post about how women who have a lot of sex are undesirable, a woman who’s been raped is told she had it coming. For every time the House of Black Culture is called a “crack house,” a black student is called the n-word while walking down the street. For every time an international student is scrutinized for going about their life, one is isolated by a friend group.

There is no excuse for this sort of behavior within our community. It is not funny. It does psychological harm and creates an avenue for other kinds of violence.

There are some concessions to be made. Yik Yak users consoled someone who posted that they were having suicidal thoughts. Some posts combat the vitriol. And some students may not have had the opportunity to learn about these things for one reason or another. I was there once, too.

But I learned, and the fact is that there are so many ways to learn within and without the classroom. There is no reason not to take advantage of them.

If you didn’t know the kinds of things that go on Yik Yak hurt people, now you know. Delete the app. Don’t jump into the cesspool. Don’t give any merit or attention to marginalizing speech.

This won’t make the verbal and physical violence disappear. But we can no longer go without condemning it. Enough is enough.

New technology, live coverage, radio station to bring in a new era of journalism at OWU

Have you noticed anything different about The Transcript you’re holding?

I certainly hope so.

I would say that my first semester as the paper’s editor began as a whirlwind, but really it would be more appropriate to call it a hurricane.

There was a major change between the top editors on our staff, serious issues with the technology we depend on to produce the paper and, of course, stories that challenged me ethically.

From Elliott Hall’s pipes exploding, to the horrific attack against one of our own students last spring, I found myself in our office in Phillips until 4 a.m. on several occasions.

Because of internal staffing issues and external factors we couldn’t control, I used to have anxiety every time I checked my email.

I would be so convinced someone else would be angrily informing me about a mistake, a quote or some larger issue that I had let slip through my fingers.

But I think I’m starting to get my groove back.

Thanks to my team here and a summer to prepare myself properly, I’m feeling pretty optimistic about this semester (knock on wood). We got a little bit of a makeover, and a lot of help from our department head, Paul Kostyu, to finally bring our department into the 21st century.

We plan to provide our student body with more live coverage of events by live-tweeting and keeping consistent with our social media.

Our radio station is on its way, and we will be broadcasting news and public affairs programming during the day and music and talk shows into the evening.

We plan to increase the number of columns and we want to work towards reporting on more diverse coverage than we have in the past. Also on our radar are a lot of promising reporters who we are confident have a lot of potential.

I’ve worked on this paper for all seven of my semesters here; first as a reporter, then as A&E editor and now as the Editor-in-Chief. I don’t know what I am going to do without it, but I do know I want to leave it better than ever.

Cheers to a great semester, everyone.

We now have numbers to concretely describe Ohio Wesleyan’s often ephemeral over-involvement problem.

Sixty-six percent of OWU’s students are involved in at least five clubs or organizations, a Student Involvement Office survey found. This means it’s most likely that an OWU student — at least one of the 490 who responded — has more extracurricular than academic commitments.

They’re also tired. Seventy-seven percent said their involvement “detracts from academic work” by adding mental or emotional fatigue; 66 percent said it made them more physically fatigued; and 77 percent said it “overextended (their) responsibilities.

This doesn’t surprise me. It’s only the second week of the academic year, so few of us are yet traversing campus with glazed faces, exhausted bodies and overworked minds. But in a few weeks, the truth these numbers tell will start to manifest itself.

On one hand, it’s easy to view these numbers with frightened awe and pessimism. But they come at an advantageous time.

Now that we have a better sense of how many all-nighters students pull in a given week, we can work proactively to create a healthier, happier campus.

To do that, I first want to ask some questions the survey didn’t. Do the students in that 66 percent feel their involvement in five or more clubs is healthy? What does it give them? What does it take away?

Instead of asking what limited students’ participation in extracurricular activities, as the survey did, why not ask what obstacles it creates in other parts of our lives. The most common response was academic workload (86 percent). Is it really that school inhibits involvement, or is it the reverse?

Answering these important questions would, I think, help inform how OWU’s administrators and we students will work to assuage this problem. But I think there are things to do before those answers come.

One would be to use next Saturday’s GO!OWU workshop as an opportunity for highly involved students to talk meaningfully with university decision-makers and each other about over-involvement.

Whether in a formal breakout session or informal breakfast chats, this would at least publicly acknowledge that there is a cultural expectation that OWU students do everything all the time. Hopefully, it would lead to some idea-sharing about how to care for ourselves and each other in our extracurricular lives.

Second, as students, we can evaluate our lists of commitments and ask ourselves whether each one helps or hurts us.

I am one of the 66 percent, and it’s a goal of mine to only make commitments I know I can keep, and to say no without fear or shame. Regret that I can’t help someone or that I’ll miss out on a great opportunity, sure; but no fear or shame. Not for any of us.

Ultimately, though, this isn’t solely our responsibiity. I maintain what I wrote in March about over-involvement — that I want Student Affairs administrators to acknowledge the problem and that taking care of oneself is as important as the sum of one’s extracurricular activities, which they have yet to do.

As upperclassmen looked at their schedules and saw trouble ahead, the Student Involvement Office put on a club fair, offering first-year students sign-up lists with no word of caution about taking on too much too fast. For every club fair, I want see a workshop or flyer about self-care rather than nothing.

Perhaps response bias plays a role — it’s possible that only the most overextended students took the survey. But experience tells me these are broader trends, and I want to see administrators take that into account.

I got more positive feedback and thanks from my fellow students on my March column than anything else I’ve written. It seemed to resonate with my peers’ experience. I heard nothing — not even a refutation — from any administrator.

Meanwhile, Dean of Students Kimberlie Goldsberry presented the 66 percent statistic as something exciting in my RA training last month. I want to see these key administrators take this problem head on, not ignore it or talk about it as if it is not a problem.

On a positive note, 86 percent of the engagement survey’s respondents said they think involvement has post-grad benefits. I want to see a concerted campus-wide effort to ensure those benefits don’t cost us our mental and emotional health.

By Philippe Chaveau
Guest Columnist

 This summer the world will stop for the FIFA World Cup, hosted in Brazil for the first time since 1950. As a Brazilian native, I can honestly say that I have dreamt of this moment. Yet, now that it is upon us, I can’t help but wish FIFA had selected another nation to host the most prestigious competition in soccer.

Brazil’s social balance is falling apart. The media has failed to show just how negative the World Cup has been for Brazil. Since the competition was awarded to Brazil in 2007, government corruption has gone through the roof.

Expenditures for every stadium have gone above original estimates, and billions of public funds allocated for stadium construction have gone into politicians’ pockets. As a result, all stadiums are behind schedule and will barely be ready for competition. The other changes promised by the government, such as new subway stations, new highways and better and bigger airports, are all so far behind that they won’t be ready until after the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

For those of you expecting to see the so-called country of soccer rejoicing as it hosts the World Cup, think again.

There will be protests, as evidenced during the Confederations Cup that occurred in Brazil last year. Millions of protestors took to the streets, revolting against the billions spent on stadiums that could have gone towards hospitals, schools or infrastructure, all of which are deficient. Brazil is not ready for the World Cup, but regardless, the competition will begin as scheduled on June 13.

With that being said, viewers should also not expect to see only protestors and anger. The World Cup is a celebration, and Brazil is a country that loves celebrations.

Look for a young Brazilian national team, striving to prove themselves at home, led by 21-year-old forward Neymar. Perhaps the biggest story of the competition is how the youthful Brazilian squad will react to playing in the greatest stage of world soccer.

Although playing at home could be a great advantage for the Brazilians, the pressure is on: anything short of a tournament victory will be seen as a failure. Brazilian fans get impatient extremely quickly, so in any game where the team is struggling, you may hear some boos from the crowd.

Brazil drew a spot in a very manageable competition group featuring Cameroon, Mexico, and Croatia. Yet, any slip up in the group stage could lead to a duel with current World Cup champions Spain in the first round of knockouts, something every Brazilian and Spaniard would prefer to avoid.

Other teams to watch for are the usual favorites. The all-powerful Germans, with arguably the best team on paper coming into the competition. The Italians, who always play defensively and rely on a great striker to get the wins, have Mario Balotelli up top for Italy this year, one of the world’s most polemic yet talented players. Other teams and players to watch for include Lionel Messi and the Argentinians, who are ready to win the cup on their biggest rival’s soil. Cristiano Ronaldo, the highest-paid — and best, as FIFA voted last January — player in the world, and the current best player in the world (as elected by FIFA last January), will try to bring his home country of Portugal into the fold.

The World Cup will be filled with excitement. Besides the great stories that unfold on the field, the lack of preparedness will certainly add a degree of tragic humor. We all saw how athletes and journalists alike reacted to Sochi’s installations, and it won’t be surprising if similar stories come out of Brazil this summer.

 Space Race of the 1960s, when astronauts and aviators were national heroes, and hearing about it was a big part of my childhood.

He was also loved to see the Air Force’s acrobatics squadron, and naturally father-son rivalry meant I sided with their rivals, the Navy’s Blue Angels.

So when I read last week that their former commander, Greg McWherter, is facing allegations that he allowed sexual misconduct and harassment while leading the Blue Angels, I was disappointed but not very surprised.

I should note that there are a number of Blue Angels, including the only female member, who defend him and that the investigation is ongoing. But at the same time the Navy viewed it as serious enough to relieve him of his current position, and given the ongoing epidemic of sexual misconduct in the American military, it’d be naïve to think any unit would be exonerated — even my favorite.

It’s a sad irony that McWherter was also president of the Tailhook Association until April 25, when he resigned to avoid being distracted from his duties by the inquiry.

At the Tailhook Association’s 1991 convention in Las Vegas, several dozen women were forced to run down a crowded hallway of male pilots, who groped them at will.

Without the scandal, which the Washington Post said may be the worst in the Navy’s history, it’s questionable that this incident or the fact that over 25,000 members of our armed services were targets of sexual assault and misconduct in 2012, according to the Pentagon, would have made national news.

At the Tailhook convention, the top brass said there was no tolerance for sexual assault in the military. It’s the same thing they’ve been saying over the past year, as renewed attention and Congressional inquiries bring the spotlight back onto sexual assault in the military.

Last June, I wrote a column on the two plans being introduced to combat military sexual assault. It’s May now, and Congress is still debating. Worse, the general consensus is in favor of the weaker plan, which leaves disciplinary authority to military personnel, a system that has failed time and time again.

It’s not all bad, though. A number of laws and government efforts are being introduced to reduce sexual assault in general. The most prominent is focused on us — college  students.

Throughout the past year, university after university has come under fire and even federal investigation for mishandling and misreporting sexual assaults that occur on and around their campus.

These include op academic schools like Yale and Dartmouth and athletic powerhouses like Florida State University, where Heisman Trophy winner Jameis Winston was accused of sexual assault.

Local police cleared Winston, but an April 16 New York Times report found many irregularities in their handling of the case, and noted that the investigating officer has also worked for a nonprofit booster organization that’s the lead donor for Florida State athletics.

Thankfully, I can say that from my professional experience, there are effective means to promote reporting of sexual assaults to authorities in Delaware. I’ve spent the better part of the semester researching statistics on sexual assault in Delaware from 2000 to 2012, and while numbers of reports were over three times the national average, interviews with academics, activists, advocates and police attributed this to the positive efforts of the Delaware Sexual Assault Response Team.

As professor and criminologist John Durst noted, though, from a survivor’s perspective any number is too high.

Having seen the reports, even in more aggregated forms, I have seen that there are truly haunting stories within them, but the stories are not mine to share.

Even with such great reporting structures, we may never be able to end sexual violence entirely, but we should never stop fighting.

By Nam Tran Hoang
Letter to the Editor

“All trash rooms will be LOCKED May 5,” said a recent email from a resident assistant.

The news was received with quite a grudging feeling. Life at Ohio Wesleyan has increasingly become harder. To paint a picture: imagine a place where fire alarm is set off at midnight, at 4 a.m. and at noon; a place where food stored in community fridges and clothes in laundry rooms are stolen; a place where being loud, getting drunk, smoking, selling weed and other activities can be observed.

Then there comes this rule — trash rooms will be locked on the Monday of finals week.

Up to now, the benefits, if any, of living on campus are overwhelmed by these disadvantages. Call them annoyances. Consider yourself a customer who is required to pay much more, and then receive these annoyances. Now a strong feeling of injustice creeps in.

Let us get back to the recently announced rule. The content itself is not much a problem; rather, the way it is implemented is quite unsettling. On what basis was it proposed? Would it be better for the whole community, or would it just cause more burdens? Would it be practical – consider when the trash rooms are closed, and trash starts accumulating in front of their doors, or in the hallways, or in other public places?

Unless there is a very clear basis for the rule, recommending it, instead of immediately implementing it, will make it much better received.

On the overall, many things need to change. Otherwise, years from now, OWU may expect little donation from some of its alumni.