— STAFF EDITORIALS —
Exercise your franchise
We have been encouraging all of you to vote since the beginning of the school year. It’s been such a grand old time that we can’t resist our last chance to do it just once more.
So, vote!
Many of you have already voted, considering that a huge majority of us are from outside the Cincinnati area and already sent in our absentee ballots! Good for you! Pat yourself on the back! Some of us have just voted early in general, which is still a grand idea.
But all of you who are still able to vote, whether it be Tuesday or sooner, and just haven’t or won’t: we’re talking to you.
One thing’s for sure: If you don’t vote, you’re not allowed to complain about the next president. Like the old fable, if you didn’t help bake the bread, you can’t eat any of it. Sure, your guy may not get into office, but if you voted for him anyway, at least you raised your voice in the most important way possible. You made your effort to get your ideas into action. Therefore, complain all you want.
Besides, if you vote at the actual polls, you get a sticker. A STICKER. How amazing is that? You can wear it with pride all day long and people will know that you personally took the effort to get to the polls and profess your opinion in the way our forefathers intended.
Speaking of our forefathers, lest we forget, 25,000 American revolutionaries died in battle or of disease on the warfront just so we could (among other things) have that right to mark our ballot. Twenty-five thousand. The war came at an enormous cost, especially considering how few people there were in the nation at the time. At the very least, vote in rememberence of those who would rather die than go without the basic liberty of voting.
Now for one last time, Xavier: get out there and vote. If you do, we promise we’ll quit harrassing you about it.
This freeze chills our mission
For the Newswire, the hiring freeze that has been enacted at Xavier invokes a few metaphors:
The presidential campaign’s “hatchet and scalpel.”
The Chuckie Cheese “whack-a-mole.”
Dagwood trying to patch a leak in a hose.
This situation is not a good one. The university’s budget is short some $1.6 million, and instead of carefully analyzing Xavier’s spending and deciding where money could or could not be spared, an across-the-board-with-few-exceptions spending freeze was implemented.
While this strategy will stop the university from losing any more money, it prevents Xavier from spending money on things it needs, like professors.
Isn’t teaching and learning the focal point of a university? Shouldn’t teachers be the first thing that the university spends its money on?
That the professors who aren’t being hired are in Core departments like Math, Philosophy and English (and certainly in others, as well) makes the decision to freeze hiring—period—even more troubling.
This puts remarkable strain on Core-teaching professors who will now, in the absence of specialized faculty, be forced to wear even more hats than they already do.
Again, we find ourselves wondering, “If we can’t afford to staff our existing campus, how can we expect to staff a larger one?”
Enough small talk
Sarah Wieten
Editorial Board
It’s been a while since I last wrote this column. However, when I did, I wrote about seasonal happenings on campus and ways to deal with the stress of being a part of all these happenings. Fine subjects to be sure, but, to be honest, I caught a lot of crap from my friends and family for the generic and safe nature of the column. They said it was childish, unnecessary, and limp. They called it the equivalent of talking about the weather; safe and available, but all in all a pointless formality.
And you know what? They are right.
At a time like this, Xavier deserves more from its newspaper. Isn’t the function of the editorial page to take the factual information the rest of the paper printed in a dutifully unbiased manner and get people riled up about it?
There is currently no shortage of reasons to get riled up. The economy is
in the tank and people in Washington are using our tax money to “fix it.”
What’s worse is that the companies that get our emergency money are spending
it on ridiculously expensive pedicures and executive retreats.
In addition, Syria has just accused the United States of attacking the Iraq-Syrian border, which would expand this war on terror into yet another country. And gas is cheap?!?! How did that happen?
I’ll let you in on a little secret, in case you don’t watch TV, read newspapers or look up when walking across campus; this is an election year.
Actually revise that; this is a really important election year. So here’s my campus related rant for the week: leave the people who were/are on campus to register/encourage you to vote alone. Regardless of how annoying, creepy, and/or smelly they are, can we agree that their intentions are good?
That they are likely sick and tired of dealing with apathetic students who just mock them? They are attempting to convince you to participate in the most direct way they can in our American democracy in a historic election year in which your vote will matter. So regardless of their age, ugliness or awkwardness, can we be polite to these volunteers?
The point is, my friends were right to say that my column was boring and pointless. With so many important issues, on campus and off, to discuss, what was I thinking discussing the weather? I solemnly swear that from this point on, there will be no mention of the changing of the seasons or the annoyances of the rain, wind, sleet or snow. Newswire readers deserve better from me.
X still marks the spot
Madeline LaFave
Editorial Board
With 63,000 in total and more than half of those living in the greater Cincinnati
area, Xavier alumni come by the packs to men’s basketball games.
We sport a 29 percent alumni giving rate, ranking us 3rd in that category out of Midwest colleges and universities in 2007.
Devout gatherings thrive all over, with Xavier chapters in over 50 cities, uniting Xavier around the globe. It is all this and more that proves Xavier is loved by its graduates.
To illustrate this point further, just last May, the day of Xavier graduation, I saw one of these graduates driving down Dana. With her car packed to the ceiling, loaded with four years’ worth of belongings, she was sobbing uncontrollably as she drove through the “Dana Death Trap” and on past Dana Gardens—possibly for the last time.
Let us consider the state of Xavier right now: a $1.6 million budget deficit has caused cuts in many areas, spurring a disastrous hiring freeze. The eligibility of our basketball stars is in question, and we just began what will be years of campus construction projects, most of which will not be completed in time to benefit even half of the current students.
So…why do we love Xavier so much?
While I can’t answer that question directly, there are so many pieces of Xavier that make the quality of life of a typical student hard to beat: How many Division I colleges or universities have a campus that can be covered on foot, end-to-end, in less than seven minutes?
What about those who live on-campus and can walk out the front door to see all three dorms, the student center, the mail center, the caf, the chapel and best of all, the Cintas Center?
How many colleges have a Jesuit president who is known for being “in-shape,” and whose students chant his name at halftime of every men’s basketball game?
Open pasta dinners at Father LaRocca’s, jam-packed 10 p.m. masses and FREE STUDENT TICKETS to games.
We even stood as the venue for John McCain’s Town Hall Meeting this summer, not to mention that we beat out 140 Midwest schools for the third year in a row, ranking number two in the 2009 “America’s Best Colleges” report.
I guess what I’m saying is that Xavier, even through disaster, growth and change, will always be the same Xavier we’ve all experienced.
The tradition will live on through budget cuts, hiring freezes, lack of bike racks, stolen projectors, an abundance of police notes and elections scandals; we will still go on to experience yet another winning basketball season, and all will be well.
I sort of even want to buy a campus brick.
— LETTERS TO THE EDITOR—
Missing debate
Last Thursday, Oct. 23, the Economics Society on campus prepared a debate between College Democrats and Republicans to discuss each party’s nominee for president. Curiously, the representatives from the College Republicans did not attend. I will neither demean the College Republicans to suggest that they were apprehensive to debate, nor give them so much credit to assume that they orchestrated the absence to serve their own purposes, but I do find the circumstances of last Thursday to symbolize the shortcomings in this election cycle.
Instead of debating the issues, the conservative crowd forced the panel (myself included) to defend Barack Obama against empty rhetoric labeling him as a “baby-killer,” a foreigner and a socialist.
When the moderators refocused the discussion, we could only defend Obama’s stance on the issues, hearing no support for Sen. John McCain’s. No one wanted to explain how tax-cuts to the rich would suddenly inspire the wealthy to pull the poorest of our nation into a reasonable standard of living. No one cared to describe a United States fifty years from now that will be suffocating from policies that allowed the market, not scientists, to determine when and how to cap pollution. (By 2050, McCain wants to reduce emissions to 60 percent of what they were in 1990; the world’s scientists implore a reduction of over 80 percent).
I already voted for Barack Obama, but I expected to have a constructive dialogue last Thursday about the differences between the two tickets. Instead, I heard the same response I normally get when I ask Republicans why they are voting for McCain this fall, “I am afraid of Barack Obama.”
Whether believing that Obama is Muslim, a foreigner, a socialist or a terrorist, most Republicans know more about the fabricated slander-smearing Obama than they do about McCain’s policies.
Know the facts. Don’t be cowed into a vote this election by the fear and smear tactics. Talk to people; listen to their opinions, and debate. If you skip debating and eliminate dialogue, you don’t know what you believe or why you believe it.
Will Durbin | '10
Katherine Monasterio
Op-Ed Editor
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