— STAFF EDITORIALS —
Help us help them
Broken.
That’s the only term to accurately describe Xavier University’s relationship with the surrounding communities.
How did this happen? Assuming that Xavier isn’t actively trying to have a poor relationship with Norwood and Evanston, there are two main possibilities:
One: Fostering positive relationships with local communities is simply not a major priority at Xavier.
Two: Those administrators at Xavier who are in charge of dealing with Norwood and Evanston are working to build better relationships with these communities, but are simply not that in touch with local community leaders.
We’re starting to think that both of these are true.
In our article detailing Xavier’s efforts this week, we focused on the work (or lack thereof) of SGA’s Community Affairs committee. It’d be really easy to blame SGA for not doing anything to help build ties with the local communities, but we don’t think that it’s fair to blame SGA even a little bit for Xavier’s fractured relationship with local communities.
Imagine that SGA’s Student Life committee didn’t do anything for an entire year. Wouldn’t their advisors be all over them, encouraging them to plan programs and services for students?
So is there any greater indictment of how little Xavier officials care about building ties with the local community than the fact that SGA’s advisors have seemingly not encouraged or facilitated any actions whatsoever by SGA’s Community Affairs committee?
It seems like a total shame to us at the Newswire that a group of “kids” willing to help improve Xavier’s relationship with the surrounding communities is not receiving any direction or encouragement from “adult” officials at Xavier.
Stripping dignity
We at the Newswire are pretty supportive of student groups pushing the envelope, because frankly we enjoy it when people get their feathers ruffled. That’s why we like the idea that the Xavier Players are performing Paula Vogel’s “Hot n’ Throbbing,” a controversial work (at least for a Catholic school) that deals with the connection between pornography and domestic violence.
With its catchy title and touchy subject matter, people are bound to get agitated by “Hot n’ Throbbing.” And we’re totally cool with that.
Of course, when we saw the Player’s latest promotional flyer for the show, we got a little ruffled ourselves.
“Just in time for Valentine’s Day,” the flyer reads, “Learn to Pole Dance!” The left side of the page is filled with a picture of a young star from Xavier’s production of the play, sensually sliding down a pole. The day the show opens, students can pay $3 for a one hour lesson on pole dancing, which then gets them free admission to the show.
Though I guess it would be safe to say that the vast majority of the male population would not be annoyed by this flyer, we really do have to question its intentions.
If you’re putting on a production that’s trying to highlight the links between pornography and domestic violence, is teaching girls how to be strippers the best approach? Male obsession with pole dancing probably links to pornography in some way…
Of course the event will probably be a lot of fun, and it will hopefully close with a message about the dangers of pornography and domestic violence.
But still, it feels as if the Players are sending a mixed message.
Kind of like the Newswire will be when we send Matt Finger to show everyone how to really pole dance.
Protecting the students’ bodies
Matthew Finger
Managing Editor
There are a lot of student benefits at Xavier. We have a sweet student center, free basketball tickets and 24-hour access to Jesus in the form of numerous priests walking around campus. But do you know what we don’t get? Birth control.
Condoms promote safer sex and help to fend off things that have the potential to ruin, or at least hamper, your happy ever after. They serve a purpose for the sexual health of the campus.
At the same time, they probably promote sex in general. But that’s not to say that much of the student campus isn’t already engaged in taboo extracurricular activities. A 2003 survey by Dr. Lawrence Finer, director of Domestic Research of the Guttmacher Institute, found that by age 20, 75 percent of survey respondents had had premarital sex.
The issue, though, isn’t whether people need condoms. You can probably answer that question for yourself. The issue is, should we, as a Catholic university, provide condoms for students?
There are 184 colleges and universities in the United States with Catholic affiliations. As of 2002, 16 made contraception available to students. Xavier is not one of those.
The Health Center does provide information for those seeking access to contraception based on inquiry or need. McGrath also will prescribe birth control to female students, but only for medical reasons and not contraceptive ones.
So, if you need contraception you can get it. But what if you just want it? Free condoms would be great, right? And it wouldn’t cost the university much. A condom distribution program for a campus of 3,000 students costs roughly $5,000. Condoms are cheap. Babies are not.
But you have to ask yourself if it’s the university’s responsibility to keep you clean and childless. Probably not. Especially since you chose to come to a value-driven university. That means you knew what you were getting yourself into.
But for Protestants like myself, the issue of free condoms comes as a no-brainer, and to not provide them is a little baffling. The idea of not providing a college campus with protection against AIDS, babies and the Clap seems counterproductive.
But our university is strongly committed to Catholic, Jesuit values. And I’m kind of OK with that. It’s not like condoms are really expensive. You can buy 40 for $16 online. And they aren’t hard to get, if you don’t mind the occasional curious look from a Kroger employee.
I do think that Xavier should have condoms provided for the studentry. They serve a world of purpose in health and quality of life. But I can see why Xavier doesn’t, even if I know nothing about rhythm-based birth control and I don’t understand Catholicism sometimes.
"Affirmative action is good; just don’t ask why"
Andrew Chestnut
Editorial Columnist
Although it means I have to spend about 5,000 hours in science classes, I generally appreciate Xavier’s eclectic, relatively-liberal, gigantic core curriculum. There is, however, one glaring exception in the college of business: Human Resources in a Diverse Society.
You may know that the class in question teaches valuable business information, such as that sexual harassment is bad and hiring skilled employees is good. Businesses should definitely worry more about setting up an expensive inner bureaucracy to manage employees than do what they are set up to do.
But what disturbs me is that it’s pretty clear that the university has made a deliberate decision to teach us that diversity in the workplace is not only good, but essential for business success. After taking the class and speaking with others, I’m certain that Xavier advocates affirmative action, and wants us all to do the same.
I suppose that’s fine, except they don’t give us the dignity to tell us why.
The class is all about how to increase the diversity of your selection pool of job candidates, how to have a diverse customer base, how you have to make entrance tests that don’t discriminate against a certain group... But nothing about why.
Someday, I might ask you to believe that dark beer is better than light beer. Or I might ask you to believe that France is the best country in the world. And whether you agreed or not, or whether those things are actually true, I would at the very least respect you enough to provide you with reasons why.
Children are expected to simply take things on faith. Asking an adult to blindly accept something is not only a stupid, irrational way of making an argument, but it’s also patronizing. (And it also means you are probably wrong.)
In the class, it’s a given that we must diversify. But here’s the thing: when a company focuses on hiring enough women and minorities to meet quotas and whatnot, it loses sight of hiring the best people it can. There’s no doing both at once.
It may not sound good, but it’s a fact. It’s inherently true, and it’s impossible to refute.
It’s also impossible to contest that Affirmative Action is inherently racist and sexist. I know this sounds bad, but it makes it easier for minorities to get jobs and get into schools, which means it makes it more difficult for people who aren’t. Affirmative Action discriminates against people based on sex and race (which I thought were outlawed by various Civil Rights acts, but I guess I’m wrong). It engenders the very same problems it so crudely attempts attempts to fix.
In the class, the HR department makes no effort to provide a response to these complications in the affirmative action argument; it pretends as if it puts everyone on a level playing field, although (as I’ve shown) it doesn’t. Worse, they fail to give any real reasons why diversity goals should be a business’ first or second priority.
We are excepted to basically accept that it’s good that these diversity quota laws exist and that we should be ever-so-excited to meet them.
I specifically remember one moment in this section where our professor explained that companies should make sure they have diverse boards of directors, at which point another person called him out and asked how that was even possible, since stockholders (not managers) elect the board.
Naturally, our professor had no response, and everyone in the class (who was still paying attention) could see he was just reciting all of this from the book, and that it had no meaning, which is emblematic of most of the HR curriculum.
There is a lot of bureaucratic, meaningless, non-sensical BS in the business world that we have to get acquainted with one way or another.
I guess Xavier is giving us a head start.
Ask the Experts
Mike Couch, Chief of Police
Question: Why are students not allowed to park in the C-5 lot after 2 a.m.?
Approximately two years ago when the C-5 lot was opened, the parking committee (consisting of faculty, staff and students) decided that commuter students could not park in the C-5 lot after 2 a.m.
This decision was based on the premise that students parking in this lot after 2 a.m. may be spending the night on campus and the spaces would not be available to the commuter population arriving for morning classes. The same is true for the C-1 lot.
It is a fairness issue. Every commuter now has an equal opportunity to park in the closest commuter lots for morning classes.
Commuter students parking on campus after 2 a.m. are directed to the C-2 lot where there is adequate commuter parking, numerous “Emergency Telephones,” increased lighting and extra police patrols conducted throughout the night.
— LETTERS TO THE EDITOR —
Ready to be transformed? Read a book
Reports on our prototype Learning Commons in some quarters—including the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Chronicle of Higher Education—have created the impression, right or wrong, that Xavier is de-emphasizing books. It’s been discouraging to see that notion spread around, but for me, the most depressing moment so far came when I read the joke (is that what it was?) in the Newswire’s editorial of Jan. 23: “We’ve never been so excited to walk into a building filled with old books, though that’s probably because we can’t see any of the old books.”
Granted, the architecture of McDonald Library was never inspirational and the Learning Commons has a bright, contemporary atmosphere that’s attracting plenty of students; there’s nothing wrong with that. But the hostility to books suggested in the editorial—and in some student course evaluations I’ve seen—is nothing short of frightening.
Many students are saturated with audiovisual stimulation and expect Google-quick access to any kind of information. Your average old book has no pictures, no sound and no search engine better than an alphabetical index. How dull.
Or is it? When you pay attention to a good book and let its well-chosen words resonate in your mind, when you think about its arguments, when you imagine its scenes, then you are engaged, touched and provoked in a way that nothing on YouTube can match. What could be more exciting than encountering the Bible, Plato or Shakespeare? It’s not information, it’s transformation—transformation into mature human beings who can understand and reflect on themselves.
Book readers aren’t necessarily bookish. A recent New Yorker article by Caleb Crain, citing a November 2007 study by the National Endowment for the Arts, reports that “readers are more likely than non-readers to play sports, exercise, visit art museums, attend theatre, paint, go to music events, take photographs and volunteer. Proficient readers are also more likely to vote.” Crain speculates, “Perhaps readers venture so readily outside because what they experience in solitude gives them confidence. Perhaps reading is a prototype of independence.”
On a more prosaic note, according to the N.E.A., “Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages and fewer opportunities for advancement.”
Americans’ reading habits are eroding fast. In his article, “Twilight of the Books,” Crain says that according to the U.S. Department of Education, in 1992 54 percent of 12th graders reported that they talked about their reading with friends at least once a week; by 2005, only 37 percent did. And an alarmingly small proportion of American adults today are actually “proficient” readers: a pitiful 13 percent are able to compare the viewpoints of two editorials.
My advice to students who don’t want to become another statistic in the dumbing down of America: watch as little TV as possible, use the Internet in moderation, get your news from a good paper (the New York Times is free to you, right outside Gallagher) and read lots of novels. Sure, learn a few things from the latest gadgets, but learn more from old books.
And if you’re not excited by old books, and can’t grow to be excited by them? Then you’re wasting your youth and your parents’ money by attending a four-year Jesuit university with a substantial core curriculum. May I recommend DeVry?
Richard Polt | Chair
Department of Philosophy
I want to be one less
January is national cervical cancer awareness month. Each year there are over 11,000 reported cases of cervical cancer and about 33 percent of women diagnosed die from the disease.
An annual pap smear is one of the best ways to help detect and prevent cervical cancer. It is recommended that one should receive a pap smear within three years of having sex but no later than age 21.
An additional way to prevent cervical cancer is to protect against the human papilloma virus (HPV) with the FDA approved vaccine Gardasil. You may recall their catchy “I want to be one less” commercials that have flooded the television market. Gardasil is recommended for girls and women between the ages of nine and 26.
owever, the vaccine only works if it is given before you have had sex or the infection occurs.
Xavier’s Colleges Against Cancer wants you to be informed. For information about cervical cancer you can schedule a visit with the gynecologist at the McGrath Health and Counseling Center or visit www.cancer.org.
Jenna Schell | Class of '09
Katherine Monasterio
Op-Ed Editor
Submit a Letter to the Editor
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Editor-in-Chief Nathan Sergio
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