— STAFF EDITORIAL —
The right response
In light of the events that took place on Monday, April 16, the Newswire has decided to devote this column to the memories of the students who were massacred at Virginia Tech.
The tragedy raises several distressing questions that are being asked repeatedly by people around the country.
Why were the students not warned properly? Why was the gunman able to stage two separate attacks two hours apart? Why did it take so long for the authorities to respond? What caused Cho Seung-Hui to take the lives of 32 innocent people?
Would Xavier be able to respond properly to a similar situation?
The answers to these questions remain elusive as the facts come to light, and in the vein of true American crisis handling, people continue to shuffle the blame.
As a nation, we must refuse the urge to pin this crisis on some scapegoat who must pay for all the pain that has already been suffered. Certainly, mistakes were made: the university failed to warn the students of the first shooting, law enforcement should have responded more quickly and the campus and local police forces were not prepared to handle such a horrific crisis.
Already this event is causing polarization as the gun-control activists take to their respective sides, blaming one another, while others demand for Virginia Tech President Charles Steger to resign immediately due to his inaction.
When will our society learn that we should work towards a greater unity instead of dividing ourselves to find someone to blame?
There is no doubt that we will need to increase security around campuses and improve communications and responses to terrible acts of violence. But we must also recognize that while those measures may treat the symptoms, they fail to cure the true problem.
There are holes in people’s hearts – holes that drive them to commit such horrendous acts as these. As a society, we must recognize this reality, and accept our role in fixing it.
The shootings at Virginia Tech demand a response, and beg for a reaction of anger, fear, hate, blame, violence and division. We cannot respond this way.
We must respond with love.
We must continue to reach out to the loners and the disturbed, like classmates attempted to reach out to Cho.
We must forgive those who may have made mistakes, as many will claim the Virginia Tech Administration did, and we must forgive even those who harm us and our loved ones.
We must never forget the victims of such crimes, and fight to prevent events like these from happening again by establishing better security and clearer response policies.
We must continue to have compassion for those whose loved ones were lost, weeping with them, holding them, praying for them and healing with them.
We must live each day reflecting the hope that there is something greater than suffering in this world.
Our world is one saturated with violence and division, foolishly convinced that these are the surest and most effective ways to reach a solution.
In honor of those students who were senselessly murdered at Virginia Tech, let us go forth, Xavier students, and prove the world wrong.
The global warming hoax?
Imagine: you’ve been smoking cigarettes for decades. One day, you see a doctor for a painful and persistent cough. He examines you with highly sophisticated techniques and diagnoses you with lung cancer. You are not a scientist yourself and you will most likely never understand the complex reasons that lead to this conclusion. The doctor says that if you promptly quit smoking and take an expensive but vital treatment, you might survive and have healthy children. What do you do?
You tell your physician that tobacco-driven lung cancer is a “hoax”; that cell degeneration has always existed; that it’s a natural process for the sake of the human species.
You tell him that his diagnosis reflects the “corruption of science” by the pharmaceutical lobby against the tobacco industry.
You tell him that physicians, tied up with pharmaceutical and anti-smoking lobbying, are “overestimating the threat and scope of lung cancer to create a problem that they will need research grants to solve.”
You argue that by blaming lung cancer on the tobacco industry and consumption, he and his colleagues are trying to “enact legislation to restrict business, the free market and the individual’s right to chose their own stylelife.”
Would you, really? I bet you wouldn’t, even if you’re a member of the Xavier University College Republicans. However, this is a literal transposition of the absurd argumentation used by this group in a flyer for the projection of the documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle” that screened on April 12 in Kelley Auditorium, to (mis)inform students about “the Truth Behind Global Warming.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (www.ipcc.ch), consisting of several hundreds of scientists and reviewers and administered by the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization, released its fourth report “Climate Change 2007” last February, providing new evidence that:
- There is now near certainty – more than 90% confidence– that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from human activities have been the main causes of global warming in the past half century.
- The global climate is likely to warm 3.5 to 8 degrees if carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere reaches twice the levels of 1750, which is likely to happen after 2050, unless there is a prompt and sustained shift away from the 20th century pattern of burning coal and oil and an aggressive expansion of nonpolluting sources of energy.
- Even if the level of warming falls in the middle range of these projections, it would cause significant stress to ecosystems and alter longstanding climate patterns that shape water supplies and agricultural production.
So yeah, why should we care about this apocalyptic prophecy of global warming, made up by a bunch of corrupted scientists? Because their diagnosis is accurate. Because awareness is urgently needed.
(Note: “Hoax” and “Corruption of Science” are the words used by Republican Senator James M. Inhofe to describe the idea of a human-driven global warming)
Alice Moulimois
Class of ‘07
The outrageous price of textbooks
As everyone associated with college education knows, many college textbooks cost well over one hundred dollars each, and the price keeps going up (exponentially, it seems) every year. To make matters worse, many college courses require multiple textbooks.
Further, publishers, with the collaboration of their authors, publish new editions of their existing textbooks every few years, denying the students the opportunity to purchase used editions at reduced (but definitely not low) prices.
As a result, typical college students must pay several hundred dollars every year just for textbooks. This is a substantial burden on tens of thousands of students and their families across the country. I know this because I was one such student.
Only the publishers can explain why textbooks cost so much, or why it is necessary to create new editions of existing textbooks so frequently. I have no doubt that greed plays a major role in both the high price of textbooks and in the frequent changing of editions.
Fortunately students have the option of buying a lot of their books online. Many online book companies offer brand new versions of textbooks at lower prices than college bookstores do. More importantly, many websites provide access to bookstores all over the country that usually carry minimally used versions of many textbooks at substantially reduced prices.
However, it is the faculty that can have the greatest impact on the high cost of textbooks. I would like to make a few simple suggestions that every faculty member can undertake that will help lower the financial burden of many students.
First, in many cases we can designate our textbooks as optional. For some courses it is necessary to have a required textbook, but for most courses, including science courses, which generally require the most expensive textbooks, this is more of a habit than necessity.
A copy of the textbook can be put on reserve in the library so that those students that cannot afford to purchase the textbook still have access to the course materials.
Second, there is one thing we all can do to counter the publisher’s greedy practice of printing a new edition of an existing textbook. All we have to do is simply to stick with last year’s edition and inform the bookstore accordingly.
Finally, we should ask whether it is necessary to have publisher-produced textbooks for our courses. If we are really willing to consider the alternatives, there are courses where publisher-produced textbooks can be avoided entirely.
One alternative would be to use handouts. Many faculty already give out handouts in addition to required textbooks. Perhaps those handouts could be expanded upon such that the textbook becomes unnecessary.
For example, in my class, we only use handouts, and half way through the semester not a single student, to my knowledge, has complained that lack of an official textbook has been a disadvantage.
Most importantly, there has been no detrimental effect on the students’ grades thus far, as compared to previous years.
The greatest advantage of an in-house textbook is that it costs far less than any textbook produced and marketed by a large publishing company. Equally important, in-house textbooks can be updated every single year, if necessary, because each year one can order only as many copies as one needs.
In conclusion, there are practical steps that faculty can undertake to help their financially struggling students in regards to the high price of textbooks. It is only a matter of will.
This is definitely a worthy cause for all of us to consider. Things can change only when individuals question the way things are being done and take the initiative to change them. This is exactly what we need to do if we really want to do something about the ever-increasing price of textbooks.
Neema Nourian
Biology Department
Mfreke's Funhouse
Mfreke Akpaninyie
Click to enlarge.
Darren LaCour
Op-Ed Editor
Submit a Letter to the Editor
The Xavier Newswire 3800 Victory Parkway Cincinnati, Ohio 45207-2129 On-campus location: The Publications House, 3739 Ledgewood Dr. Telephone: 513.745.3607 Advertising: 513.745.3561 Fax: 513.745.2898 Email: John LaFollette
Editor-in-Chief Ellie Jaqueth
Advertising Manager Full list of staff contacts www.xu.edu/newswire
