CAMPUS

Downloading Music the Legal Way

Last spring, a dozen William and Mary students received letters threatening lawsuits from the Recording Industry Association of America. All were accused of illegally downloading music.

In light of these events, the Student Assembly (SA) began work on ensuring that students at the College have affordable legal options for downloading music and other types of entertainment.

In December 2007, SA President Zach Pilchen sent out an e-mail notifying students that the College had finalized a partnership with Ruckus, an ad-supported digital entertainment service that offers free music and video downloads to college students.

William and Mary students can register with their William and Mary e-mail addresses at www.ruckus.com to begin using the service.

According to Chris Utah, director of subscriber acquisitions for Ruckus, the company is “the only online music discovery service that provides free downloads to college students.”

Unlike other online music providers that only offer free previews of songs and charge up to $150 per year for subscription services, Ruckus allows students to download over three million different songs from both popular and indie music artists at no cost after registering at the site.

The Ruckus Web site states that all downloads are “100% legal, virus-free and spyware-free.” Ruckus also recently added a free video download service for subscribers with music videos, TV shows and films.

SA Senator Walter McClean, chair of the Senate finance committee, has played a key role in bringing a Ruckus server to the campus and in promoting the service to students.

At first, Mr. McClean talked with SA members and many other students about their experiences with downloading music. After determining that Ruckus would be a valuable and useful service for students at the College, he contacted representatives from both Ruckus and the College’s Information Technology department. Mr. McClean then facilitated communication between both sides in order for a contract to be worked out.

For the past few months, Mr. McClean has been actively working with Ruckus to publicize the service through Facebook, school-wide e-mails and campus mailbox flyers. Mr. Utah says that before promotional activities began in December 2007, there was not a single Ruckus user at the College. Now there are over 3,500 William and Mary subscribers on Ruckus, or about 47% of the College’s total population. As of January 21, 2008, students at the College have downloaded a total of 894,357 songs from Ruckus.

Although Ruckus is actually open to any US college student with a valid .edu e-mail address, Mr. McClean says that William and Mary’s partnership with Ruckus is beneficial because it includes a special server on campus that “increases download speed and reliability for William and Mary students.” This new internal server moves the substantial downloading by the College’s students on Ruckus to the campus’s internal network, thus improving Internet speed for both Ruckus users and non-users on campus.

Mr. Utah believes that Ruckus is a good service for college students because “students don’t generally have the money to pay for a new album or song just to see if they will like it, and with all of the legal action that the recording industry has been taking against college students, they are moving away from P2P and other illegal means of downloading.” Students can play the music they download through Ruckus on their computer, and for an optional fee of .79 to .99 cents per track, they can transfer the music to some MP3 players or burn their tracks to CDs. At the moment, Ruckus downloads are incompatible with Apple’s iPods.

In the upcoming year, Ruckus plans to fix incompatibility issues with Macs.

More TV shows and full length movies will be added to the video download service. A new feature called “Match and Snatch” will be beta-tested at the College and four other schools affiliated with Ruckus. This feature will let Ruckus users view music recommendations and find members with similar musical preferences based on the music they have downloaded. Ruckus also continues to heavily promote its networking features through its “My Ruckus Music” application for Facebook. Ruckus users can post their top-ten lists, recently played tracks, and most played tracks on their profile, and check out their friends’ favorite tracks as well.

Mr. McClean remains committed to promoting Ruckus at the College. “If we can push a service that means unlimited free music, and reduces the likelihood of William and Mary students being sued for thousands of dollars, I think it is someone’s responsibility to encourage it,” he said.

Megan Locke is Arts & Culture Editor for The Virginia Informer, a Collegiate Network publication at The College of William and Mary. This article was originally featured in the January 30, 2008 issue of The Informer.

The Subjection of Smoking: A Discussion of UNC’s New Public Area Smoking Ban Policy

UNC’s Policy Is Impractical, But Smoking Ban is Necessary to Reconcile Individual Rights

Smoking, once a common habit in American society, has become a lightning rod for controversy in recent years. Smoking sections in restaurants were rare 50 years ago, but now places like New York City have implemented blanket bans for indoor public places. Some places have even extended bans to outdoor space—and UNC’s campus might be next.

UNC already has a ban on smoking in administrative buildings and classrooms, and it extended the ban to residence halls and their breezeways in 2004. UNC Hospitals went tobacco-free and the School of Medicine and Campus Health Services went smoke-free in July. Now, there is talk of extending the ban on campus to areas within 100 feet of buildings. This would leave very few areas where smoking would be allowed, which include a narrow strip in the middle of Polk Place near the flagpole, the Davie Poplar, and the middle of the field in Kenan Stadium.

The crux of this issue is rights. Is it an infringement on smokers’ rights to ban them from smoking outdoors, or is it an imposition on nonsmokers to give them no protection against secondhand smoke? I believe it is the latter. I am a strong advocate of protecting the rights guaranteed to all Americans, but the key component of any right is that it is only preserved when it does not infringe upon the rights of anyone else.

An extreme example is in the case of murder. If murder did not infringe upon others, it would be a protected right. However, the very definition of murder involves infringing rather heavily on the victim’s right to live, so it cannot be protected.

Smoking is the same type of issue. It is difficult to understand why smoking bans are so controversial when there are similar laws in place that are universally accepted. Americans over the age of 21 have the right to consume alcohol if they choose, but the moment they get behind the wheel of a car, their choice ceases to be individual and can infringe on others.

It is for this reason that laws prohibiting driving under the influence of alcohol or other mind-altering substances are in place. No one is claiming “drinkers’ rights” in protest of these laws.
I fully support the right to smoke if one chooses to do so, but I equally support the right to breathe fresh air in a public place. The very characteristics of smoking are what make it so difficult to reconcile the rights of nonsmokers and smokers.

The smoke emitted into the air from smokers exhaling and from the tip of cigarettes is undeniably unhealthy for anyone who inhales it. According to the National Cancer Institute’s website, secondhand smoke contains at least 250 harmful chemicals, 50 of which are known carcinogens. These toxins include arsenic, a heavy metal toxin; benzene, a chemical found in gasoline; polonium-210, a chemical element that gives off radiation; and cadmium, a chemical used in batteries. The U.S. Surgeon General has classified secondhand smoke as a known cancer-causing substance; it is responsible for approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths in nonsmoking American adults each year.

Other substances such as smokeless tobacco and even many illegal drugs do not share this problem. I would go as far as to support the right to do heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine or any other drug on campus, if it were legal. Someone under the influence of heroin is not emitting anything into the atmosphere that is endangering my health—so I would fully back his or her right to consume any substance they choose.

UNC is a public institution, and therefore has the obligation to protect the rights of all of its students, staff and faculty members—nonsmokers as well as smokers. Something must be done to reconcile the rights of the two. The 100-foot radius rule is ludicrous. Smokers would be clustered together in the middle of Polk Place, but most of UNC’s population walks through the middle of the quad at some point, nullifying the entire idea.

The only fair solution is a blanket ban with designated smoking areas. The smoking zones should be away from building doors and highly-populated campus areas, but not so far away as to alienate smokers and force them to trek long distances to comply. The area behind Davis Library is a possible location—it is centrally located, but not in a place where most of the campus population regularly ventures.

Liz Gregg, a graduate student and a smoker, supports the idea of a ban with designated smoking areas. “I would support a ban if there was a place to smoke that wasn’t a mile and a half away,” she said. “I don’t want to bother people (when I smoke) and feel like a jerk.”

Cigarette smoke is harmful to everyone who comes in contact with it. The problem with smoking outside on UNC’s campus is that smokers choose to breathe in the fumes, but nonsmokers are never given a choice.

A blanket ban with designated smoking areas would protect everyone’s rights; smokers could have a place to indulge their habit as is their right, but bystanders would not have to suffer as a result of it.

Kelly Esposito is a Staff Writer for The Carolina Review.

Smoking Bans Unjustly Grant Precedent to Some Rights Over Others

If one were to poll the administration here at UNC regarding their opinion of which were the most maligned minorities on campus, or in society, it is likely reasonable to assume that ‘smokers’ would not even cross their mind. Long past the racial minorities, and the sexual orientation minorities, and women, when the campus official was still searching for groups on which to bestow pity for their struggles, for which he could blame society, the notion of that particular group joining that class is still exceptionally foreign.

This is not to directly compare smokers to a race; the two are distinctly different in that smoking is purely choice. But when looking for evidence of a mass societal subjection of a race or a gender that is largely due to the fact that we either consciously pass or have been conditioned to pass judgment on that group as inferior, it might be useful to consider that that is precisely what we have done to smokers.

UNC, already a campus laden with a considerable number of smoking bans in public places, has as its most recently proposed plan a prohibition on smoking within one hundred feet of a building. As the column directly to my left observed, that leaves small sections in the middle of Polk Place, McCorkle Place, and Kenan Stadium. There are maybe a couple of parking lots on campus the middles of which are more than a hundred feet from a building.

The counterpoint sufficiently criticized the practicality of the plan; clustering all the smokers together in hoards where people walk anyway is insanity. I am going to focus on the principle of the plan and demonstrate that smoking bans in public outdoor areas are unjust in any circumstance.

It is true that the question is one of the reconciliation of rights; the rights of the nonsmoker are pitted against the rights of the smoker because the nonsmoker wishes not to inhale the hazardous smoke emitted by the cigarette of the smoker. To what degree second hand smoke actually affects the health of a nonsmoker is a separate debate, and it is one that is irrelevant to this argument; therefore it will not be addressed.

Smokers inherently have a right to smoke; it is a positive action on the part of the smoker that requires a negation by the institution, either public or private. In its most basic form, when smoking is taking place in the privacy of one’s home, smoking in no way affects the rights of any other being; therefore it is a right.

In this manner in is fundamentally different from other actions of the sort that require negation by the institution, such as murder. In the simple act of performing a murder one’s own existence, the locus of one’s inviolable property and rights, is taken.

In smoking, however, there is no direct violation of that locus; one is not coerced into standing next to a smoker, or even to walk by one. To grant one individual the right to breathe clean air while walking through a public outdoor area over the right of another to smoke in that same area is to presuppose that the nonsmoker has a greater right to the land than the smoker. The mindset that would lead someone to believe that someone smoking on the land on which they walk can only logically derive from a view that one owns that land; which is of course not the case.

This form of superiority complex, where nonsmokers have come to believe that their nonsmoking lifestyle is somehow better than that of a smoker, and therefore justifiably enforced by institutions of the state and federal governments in this country, can be seen manifested across the United States. In several states, such as New York, a private restaurant business owner cannot allow smoking in his private restaurant. In cases as these two assumptions are made: that private citizens are coerced into visiting restaurants where smoking is allowed and that smokers practice an inherently inferior behavior to nonsmokers. An American citizen ought to understand both that the first is certainly not true and that a behavior cannot be negated in this country simply because a majority of the citizens deem it inferior.

I do not smoke; I never will smoke. To me, smoking is idiocy. However, what smoking is to me is an irrelevant question in the United States’ political system. Our Constitution, generally in theme of limited government and specifically in the Ninth Amendment, protects a person’s right to be an idiot, and no one can presume that their rights take precedent over that right of another.

Smoking bans on public outdoor property of any kind, therefore, are counter to what used to be one of the most supreme American political ideals, and are arguably unconstitutional.

They should certainly not be tolerated at a university which prides itself on tolerance.

Bryan Weynand is Editor of The Carolina Review, a Collegiate Network member publication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. These articles were originally featured in the October 2007 issue of The Carolina Review.

The Coens Go West: No Country for Old Men

More than a decade after the breakout success of the Oscar-nominated “Fargo,” brothers Joel and Ethan Coen are poised for awards season glory. Prepare yourselves for another violent and idiosyncratic fable of Middle America, this time set in the desolate plains of West Texas. Adapting from the novel No Country for Old Men, by celebrated author Cormac McCarthy, the Coens deliver perhaps their densest work to date. This film offers a meditation on the body count that they have amassed through two decades of pictures about semi-bad people doing very bad things.

The dramatic arc of the film follows metalworker Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who stumbles upon a drug deal gone wrong during a weekend hunting excursion and finds himself up to his Wranglers in cash. Faster than you can say shallow grave, Moss finds himself pursued by hordes of pissed-off Mexican mafiosos seeking payment for their hijacked truckload of heroin, as well as rogue hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a character who is equal parts grim reaper and existentialist philosopher. Meanwhile, Texified Sherriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) does his best Marge Gunderson turn, staying doggedly a step behind the film’s criminal element.

The plot snakes through the Rio Grande valley, with a fresh load of corpses deposited at each seedy motel. For once, though, the Coen’s allow their trademark violence to mobilize weightier philosophical issues. The film is centered on concern over the conflict between providence and chance, symbolized with eloquent simplicity by Chigurh’s preference for making his decisions with the flip of a coin. For Chigurh, death becomes an occasion to meditate on the meaning of life itself and the arbitrary nature of existence, a notion that clashes with the homespun philosophy of Sheriff Bell whose very existence is predicated on faith in humanity.

Such heady material could have led to the film becoming something of a retreading of films like “Unforgiven,” or even of the Coens’ earlier works. However, Bell’s agonizing struggle over the decline of the way of life he believes in, rendered in a masterfully understated performance by Jones, make Marge Gunderson’s gentle platitudes (“There’s more to life than a little money, you know”) seem shamefully trite by comparison. The film’s Texasy dialogue, while at times overly glib, resounds with startling depth, capturing the spirit of Ingmar Bergman in a way that Woody Allen could only dream of. Indeed, the final scene ranks with the greatest passages in art cinema, like Antonioni in cowboy hats.

The weight of the dramatic situation masks some austere compositional choices at the visual and aural levels. Many viewers will not notice the total absence of a score or soundtrack, until the credits have begun to roll. Also, in an era where shot lengths are growing ever shorter even in the world of prestige pictures (i.e. “The Departed”), the Coens employ a style that focuses on long takes and static bodies, again channeling the art cinema of the 1960’s. The film’s sense of place becomes strained, and spatial relationships between characters at times breakdown completely, such as in Chigurh’s myriad and mysterious disappearances. Such curious occurrences make this a film that will certainly reward repeated viewings. Fortunately for intrepid viewers, a long theatrical run appears to be in the cards.

Luke Stadel is a writer for The Rice Standard, a Collegiate Network publication. This article was originally featured in the December 3, 2007 issue of the Standard.

Lehigh University to Purchase Island in SecondLife

When most people think of the Internet, they think of “traditional” websites such as Google, Yahoo, and Wikipedia. Amongst the gaming community, the Internet is the primary facilitator of Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOs), which allow hundreds of thousands of players across the world to play the same game, in the same world, either in tandem or in opposition with each other. Yet another cross-section of the Internet community views the Internet as a great way to meet other people and communicate with them through the use of Social Networking Sites (Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, etc.).

In the past few years, the complexity of MMOs has increased, as has that of Social Networking Sites. In 2003, Linden Research, Inc. released a hybrid of the two technologies, dubbed SecondLife, which enables users to create avatars and interact with other people (through their respective avatars) in a virtual world. Rather than having goals similar to those of other MMOs, in SecondLife the goal is essentially the same as that of one’s “first” life. SecondLife allows for the leasing of land, enumerated in a currency that Linden Research invented (Linden Dollars), and also allows for the creation, buying, and selling of goods. Essentially, Linden Research attempted to create an entirely virtual world that is an almost perfect clone of the real world.

Recently, Library and Technology Services (LTS), has begun making plans to purchase an “island” (a plot of land) in SecondLife. According to Greg Reihman, Faculty and Development Director for LTS, several professors are already using SecondLife and more have expressed interest in doing so.

Reihman cited the applications of a technology such as SecondLife to communications and collaboration, claiming that “the 3D environment allows for forms of communication and presentation that are very different from what occurs using other communication tools,” with email and video-conferencing as examples of technologies currently used to achieve these goals. He also suggested the possibility of SecondLife’s application to distance education, enabling students to interact with professors and (virtual) classmates from anywhere in the world. In addition, technologies such as SecondLife might open up possibilities for students to create structures, buildings, and art in design classes or similar situations.

Aside from the use of SecondLife as a technology to simply augment what goes on in the classroom, Reihman cited examples of using SecondLife as the subject of studies in several different fields. He has already used SecondLife as an example in a philosophy class dealing with ontology (“what is real and how we decide what is real”). Professor Robert Rosewein, in the Sociology Department, is studying SecondLife because of its social and cultural implications. Professor Roger Nagel, who teaches a course on cyberethics in the Computer Science and Engineering Department, is also studying social networking sites, including SecondLife. Said Reihman, “[SecondLife is] where many people develop new identities and new forms of interaction and these new phenomena are intrinsically interesting to scholars working in those areas.”

Above all, the primary reason that the University is investigating SecondLife is that “it seems very likely that some form of virtual environment will have an impact on how we communicate and interact in the future, so many educators want to ensure that students are ready to participate in such environments – perhaps even to contribute to the development of such environments.”

Lehigh University would not be the first campus to set foot in SecondLife, as many campuses have already begun building virtual campuses and classrooms, communicating, collaborating, holding classes, and even hosting visits for prospective students. Universities already using SecondLife include Harvard, Ball State, Central Missouri State, Pepperdine, Bradley, and the University of Tennessee.

Reihman suspects that, though SecondLife might better be able to support some of the facilities that current technologies attempt to provide (video-conferencing, for example), this new technology will most likely not fully replace any major technologies, but simply serve as an enhancement.

The University’s official plans are somewhat vague. At present, the total cost of the project is unknown, but will become clearer as the project progresses. LTS is preparing for a small pilot in the spring and will make the necessary budgetary decisions based on what they decide to do and the response across campus to a SecondLife island.

According to SecondLife’s website, an island costs $1,675 US, plus approximately $300 per month for maintenance. Reihman suspects that this will be the initial investment. Although other campuses have gone with higher-cost ventures including hiring third-party designers to replicate real campuses in virtual worlds, Lehigh plans to start small and build further based on interest and how the project is received.

Brian Parks was a Senior Staff Writer for The Lehigh Patriot, a Collegiate Network publication. This article was originally featured in the December 2007 issue of The Patriot.

Buckley v. The World: The Conservative Icon at his Impudent Best

Most of us cut our teeth at publications that are namesakes of his brainchild.

We admire his elegant writing as much as his A-list group of friends, his lifestyle of travel and hobbies. We marvel at how a man so busy finds the time, not to mention the drive, not to mention the ability, to pump out almost a book a year, for 50 years — and his son who is even more productive than the icon was at his age.

It’s easy to forget that things weren’t always this way. Not even for William F. Buckley, Jr. Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription, a collection of outtakes from National Review’s popular “Notes & Asides” column featuring non-traditional letters to the editor, reminds you of this.

It’s also easy to forget just how far conservatism has come since chilly November 1955. Just earlier that year, it had been declared dead. Wrote the influential Lionel Trilling in The Liberal Imagination, “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” Fifty-two years later, and not only are conservative (and libertarian) ideas “in general circulation,” but liberal is a four-letter word in the political lexicon. William F. Buckley Jr.’s fortnightly correctly receives a lot of credit for that.

It’s easy, then, as an admirer, to forget that Buckley is a man, too. A man who, 50 years before he retired from day-to-day work at National Review and was widely hailed as the “godfather” of the conservative movement, had plenty of critics and naysayers himself.

Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription reveals Buckley as his contemporaries knew him, not the saintly, agree-to-disagree type he’s portrayed as in the mainstream media.

Buckley himself has noticed this trend, and he doesn’t like it. As he said in a 2005 interview with the New York Times, “When generations go by and you get fresh players, people are prone to say, ‘Well, he isn’t as civilized as that other guy.’ And it’s opportunistic,” Buckley continued, “because one has the feeling — at least I do — that they’re trying to give an authenticity to their criticism, which is more easily done by making comparisons of that kind.”

In short: it’s disingenuous to compare the present day disfavorably to the time of men who are leaving the debate, whose voices no longer influence the debate. Said more bluntly, as Buckley’s nephew, Brent Bozell III, did when I asked him about how the mainstream media has changed its tone regarding his uncle, and “[to liberals,] the only good conservative is a dead one or a retired one.”

How things have changed. Wittingly or not, Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription plays the role of counter-history to the narratives portraying Buckley as the sterling example of Conservatism Done Right. We see this best in a conversely humorous and heated exchange between WFB and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., when the latter declined an appearance on “Firing Line,” unwilling as he was to do anything to “help” Buckley or further his worldview.

When Buckley published his rejoinder, Schlesinger responds, gruffly. “I do not see National Enquirer or National Review or whatever it is called, but I understand you ran your silly letter to me…in a better world I might have hoped you had the elementary fairness, or guts, to provide equal time; but, alas, wrong again.”

Buckley responds in kind: “Now, suppose I had begun this letter “Dear Arthur, or Dear Barfer, or whatever you call yourself.” Would I do that? No; and not merely because it’s childish, but because it isn’t funny.”

When Schlesinger sheepishly counters that “the reason one confused National Enquirerand National Review is because they have comparable standards of wit, taste, intelligence, and reliability,” Buckley goes in for the kill: “it is obvious to me that only someone who had difficulty in distinguishing between National Enquirer and National Review could have written such works of history as you have.”

When Newsweek prints a story claiming that National Review and the head of the hateful and racist Liberty Lobby “agree on about 90 per cent of their positions,” Buckley doesn’t miss a beat.

“This is about as illuminating as if National Review were to report that Newsweek and the Soviet Union agree ‘on about 90 per cent of their positions’ (health care, Social Security, educational opportunity for all…),” he begins. “What is distinctive about Liberty Lobby isn’t its love of the American flag or its belief in the free market. The outstanding contribution of Liberty Lobby to the public discourse is its concern…for the “niggerfication” of America, and its discovery that the Holocaust was a Jewish hoax.”

And when the New York Times makes the same mistake and hails National Review and the Liberty Lobby as “two organs of the conservative movement,” Buckley’s acid tongue re-emerges: “Think what you will of American conservatism, but pray do not confuse it with that pestilential sheet.”

By the time of the last Notes & Asides column, on December 31, 2005, the feature had begun to receive too few fitting correspondences to continue regularly, and disbanded after a 40 year run, retiring from regular appearance at the same time as its creator and prime contributor.

Casual readers will enjoy seeing WFB “let his hair down,” so to speak, not to mention the famous names that grace its pages. Buckley’s command of the language itself makes his every contribution a worthwhile endeavor, but Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription has something else to offer young writers, artists, and journalists, and that’s that one must trust his own voice. Anyone who tries to do anything worthwhile in life will come up against his fair share of detractors; it’s those who keep pushing forward anyway who have the most success. If Buckley had taken his intellectual ball and gone home after any of the insults contained in Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription, not only would we have lost a unique voice among the chorus, but conservatism itself may well have been the worse off.

The Buckley who gives as good as he gets is the Buckley that America has come to know and begrudgingly respect — and a different man from the Buckley that mainstream America has come to mythologize. Conservatives who know the difference, and prefer the former, won’t be disappointed by Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription — even if they decline taking its editor up on his advice.

James David Dickson is the Collegiate Network Fellow at The Detroit News.

Hindered Hiring: Bucknell Puts Fairness Above Quality

“What’s more important than quality? Equality,” at least according to Michael Scott of “The Office.” Apparently, Bucknell also adheres to this philosophy.

For the sake of “fairness” and “equality,” the Bucknell administration recently deprived students of an excellent and experienced professor.

In the Chemistry Department’s search for a new tenure-track biochemistry professor, the administration only consented to interviews with two of the three candidates who had been short-listed by the Department’s search committee. The third candidate was not allowed to interview because he has more experience than the other candidates; the administration felt it was “unfair” to compare him to the two other short-listed applicants.

Ranked second on the Chemistry Department’s short list of candidates, the potential biochemistry professor had five years of full-time teaching experience. Neither of the other two short-listed candidates had any such experience. When reviewing the applicants for the position, the Department search committee easily chose this candidate as one of their two preferred choices. The remaining candidates were less qualified, and the committee had difficulty choosing a third candidate for the original short list from the applicant pool.

If hired, the candidate would have left a position at a largely graduate institution for Bucknell. His interest in the position indicated a strong desire to teach in the less illustrious undergraduate environment. Although the position was advertised as “entry-level,” this particular candidate applied anyway, despite already having a tenure-track position at another university.

Not only that, but the candidate would have brought a $250,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue his research here at Bucknell, largely with undergraduate students.

With such a willing faculty member and large grant, many students could have pursued meaningful research. Yet, the administration chose to dismiss this opportunity for its students and denied the applicant an interview.

Applicants for entry-level faculty positions at Bucknell may not have more than three years of full-time teaching experience. Even though this applicant had more than three years of such experience, he was willing to accept an assistant professorship. As an assistant professor, he could receive two years of credit for his more than five years of full-time teaching experience.

His acceptance of the assistant professorship would have meant that he would receive a marginally higher salary – because of the two years credit – than those with no full-time teaching experience. Bucknell could have hired a more experienced professor for essentially the same salary.

Yet, the administration felt it would be unfair to the other candidates to compare them with this more experienced applicant. After the initial rejection of the candidate, the search committee immediately appealed the administration’s decision. The chair of the committee even requested to speak with President Mitchell if the decision to reject this candidate ultimately lay with him.

Nonetheless, the administration of the College of Arts and Sciences – in consultation with President Mitchell and other senior administrators – again refused the candidate an interview. The search committee was directed to find another interview candidate – one with less experience as a full-time professor.

Consequently, the search committee was forced to choose not one but two candidates from this largely mediocre pool when the administration rejected their second selection for the sake of “equality.”

Chris Zappe, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, maintains that the University is strictly enforcing its “efforts to promote fairness” in the hiring of new faculty members. This translates into passing over highly-qualified applicants simply because they do not satisfy the arbitrary “less than three years experience” requirement.

More experience is generally regarded as a positive aspect of someone’s résumé. And, as the search committee said in their appeal to the administration, “Teaching experience does not contribute to or correlate with the potential for long term excellence.”

While Bucknell prides itself on providing the “premier undergraduate experience in the nation,” University administrators apparently do not believe this experience is contingent on their hiring the best faculty. Although Zappe emphasized the University’s commitment to providing its students with the best education, these senior administrative officials have decided that fairness to inferior applicants is more important than providing a superior education.

The administration’s rejection of this initial candidate clearly demonstrates the lack of importance it places on Bucknell students’ education. Having professors with such prominent research grants would undoubtedly attract other highly qualified professors and students. Hiring outstanding professors should be one of the University’s primary goals – both for its students and its own reputation.

Even more troubling is the fact that the administration has reacted similarly earlier this year. Evidently, the administration – including President Mitchell and other senior administrative colleagues – has not permitted two other departments to interview certain applicants. Only until all of the less experienced candidates have been interviewed or deemed unacceptable will applicants with more than three years experience be granted interviews.

If Bucknell wants to hire the best faculty to provide the best education, then the University must hire the best applicants, regardless of their experience. Not hiring inexperienced candidates as faculty members only encourages those candidates to get more experience and improve their résumés.

However, the only objective Bucknell promotes is the employment of less experienced faculty in the place of more qualified candidates. The decision to approve or reject candidates should be based on their merits, or lack thereof, rather than on the equality of their résumés. Nothing should be more important than an applicant’s proven ability to do his job well. Candidates with more experience should receive even greater consideration because they have proven themselves as professors.

It is this system of meritocracy that directs societal achievement. Without being rewarded for accomplishments, people would not strive to improve.

Hiring is an inherently biased process. Without it, the best candidates would not be hired or adequately compensated for their efforts. Not hiring lesser qualified candidates encourages them to improve their qualifications and gain more experience. There will always be a disparity between job applicants. Bucknell should accept this fact and do its utmost to ensure that it provides its students with the best.

Thus, Bucknell’s hiring practices contradict everything we hold important as rational human beings. Simply for the sake of “equitable handling,” the University is willing to forsake its academic integrity. Bucknell’s actions effectively glorify mediocrity, condemn excellence, and negate the very principles which drive human industry and ingenuity.

For an institution supposedly dedicated to providing the best education for its students, it is difficult to imagine how we can be deprived of some of the best faculty merely because it is “unfair.”

Sarah Schubert is the former Editor in Chief of The Counterweight, a Collegiate Network member paper of Bucknell University. This article was originally featured in the December 2007 issue of The Counterweight.

Bach’s English Suites

J.S. Bach: English Suites

Carole Cerasi, harpsichord
Metronome 1078, 2 CDs, DDD

($38.98 on ArkivMusic.com: Click here to buy this CD)

Bach’s English Suites serve as an excellent example of the composer’s ability to take the genre of the baroque suite—a collection of stylized dance movements—and expand its bounds of compositional possibility to a level that, at that point in history, had never been seen. This recording offers a flawless reading by Carole Cerasi, who performs these pieces on a restored Francois-Etienne Blanchet II harpsichord, dated 1757. According to the CD notes, “sections of the soundboard including the rose, and parts of the case, are from an instrument by Jan Couchet, Antwerp 1671.”

Ms. Cerasi’s playing is sensitive, emotional, and extremely tasteful—much like Bach’s writing. Her decisions on tempi are perfect, never boring and never rushed. In regard to ornamentation, she chooses a sensible middle ground between the starkness of Englishman Trevor Pinnock’s and the indulgence of Dutch master Ton Koopman.

Cerasi’s treatment of the spritely opening to Suite No. 2 in A minor exhibits her deft command of the double-manual keyboard, with excellent treatment of the very vocal bass line. Her reading of the expressive allemande in Suite No. 3 in G minor gently exposes the simple but brilliant counterpoint and gorgeous harmonies so typical of Bach.

Other highlights include: the closing gigue of Suite No. 3, a fugal dance highlighted by tasteful phrasing; the prelude of Suite No. 4 in F major, marked by sublime ornamentation and a flair that is so often missing in harpsichord recordings; and the most fiery of the six suites, No. 5 in E minor. This suite’s opening and closing movements—prelude and gigue, respectively—are fugues whose mindboggling contrapuntal lines are treated by Cerasi with sublime perfection. She articulates each of them clearly, distinctly, and independently—a feat in and of itself—while also demonstrates perfect phrasing, choice of tempo, ornamentation. Cerasi shows a unique ability to pull the drama out of these emotionally-laden pieces.

Carole Cerasi’s reading of the English Suites is a must-have for any fan of harpsichord music in general, or the music of Bach in particular. Her abilities set her apart from the mostly male-dominated world of period keyboard performance and give the top performers in this arena a run for their money.
Grade:

Performance: A-

Sound: A

Beautiful Bella: The Politics of “Propaganda”

“True Love Goes Beyond Romance,” Bella’s poster reads, its protagonists gazing deeply into each others’ eyes.

The subcommunication is clear: This isn’t your typical Hollywood love story.

Typical, Bella certainly isn’t. A love story? There’s no question.

Critics, as is their habit, disagree. Wrote James Bowman in The American Spectator: “Bella, though a charming and even moving film at times, is propaganda — superior and well-made propaganda, to be sure, and with a message that I happen to agree with, but still propaganda….The Sunday-school lesson is right, true and much-needed, but it’s still, alas, a Sunday-school lesson.”

Which begs the question: If Bella is propaganda, what film — outside of the fun-but-meaningless shoot-’em-up genre — isn’t?

If successful, Bella could do for the pro-life cause what If These Walls Could Talk did for the pro-choice cause. If These Walls Could Talk exposed anti-abortionists as judgmental, Bible-thumping hate-mongers, there to condemn, harass, and even kill those who see abortion as a matter of choice, not of life-and-death.

Bella portrays the pro-life community’s better half. Jose, played masterfully by Eduardo Verastegui, is the perfect intercessor for the life of unborn Bella due to his own checkered past.

The Plot Thickens

Jose, an ersatz soccer coach, dance instructor, and local celebrity, was en route to a major contract signing when his life crosses paths with young Katie. Katie is playing hide-and-go-seek with her mother when she runs out onto the seemingly quiet street. Jose, daydreaming while driving, never sees the little girl until it’s too late.

Even then, Jose could’ve averted his ruin and avoided his fall from grace if he’d just driven away. “Let’s go, man,” his manager urged in the moments after the accident, with nary a witness in sight. “Let’s get out of here.”

But he couldn’t. When we meet Jose five years later, he has lost everything: his friends, his fame, the money, and seemingly even his good looks (though in real life the opposite is true: director Alejandro Monteverde asked Verastegui to grow out a long beard so that his good looks wouldn’t distract from the movie’s message). Having spent the last four years in prison for involuntary vehicular homicide, Jose is taken in from the cold and hired as a chef by his brother, Manny, an ambitious though callous restaurateur.

One of Jose’s earliest images makes him a most unlikely intercessor for the unborn Bella. Traumatized by the accident and his life’s strange path since, Jose holds his wrist over an open flame, as if he feels he deserves to feel that pain. Although Jose was still a young man by the time he got out of prison, he lacked the killer instinct necessary for competitive sport. “If you don’t have passion, you can’t play football” Jose’s mother explains to Nina during a tour of the family’s shrine to Jose’s sundry football accomplishments.

True Love Goes Beyond Romance

It’s only when he sees the trials of beautiful-but-confused Nina that Jose’s guilt is converted from self-hatred to love for and service of others. Jose’s relationship with frazzled Nina is, paradoxically as selfish as selfless: In Nina, Jose sees his own opportunity for redemption — one that wouldn’t have been possible without getting Nina to see beyond her own limitations.

Never is Jose the overbearing, loud-mouthed, self-righteous type that pickets outside of abortion clinics; indeed, Jose went with Nina to support her during the abortion. Never does Jose judge. Jose, most amazingly, never actually tells Nina what to do.

Rather than argue against the abortion by assuming his own perfection and trying to lead Nina down The Righteous Path, Jose reveals his own deep wounds and imperfections and gives Nina the opportunity to help atone for them. For Bella’s filmmakers to make their case through on pregnant pauses, subcommunication, and unconditional love, rather than unconvincing and stale argument, took equal parts vision and ego-suppression.

When Nina unloads a polished, seemingly pre-meditated arsenal of reasons she “can’t” bring a child into the world — men won’t look at her anymore; she doesn’t have any money; and she just lost a hostess job that barely supported her own lifestyle, let alone those of the child — Jose allows the silence to fill the room. Consciously avoiding passing judgment which would only push Nina closer to having an abortion, Jose personifies the adage that silence is golden. After several unanswered rebuttals, it’s clear that Nina is only trying to convince herself, and doing a poor job of it.

It’s only after spending the afternoon with Jose’s family that Nina admits her real hang-up about having the child: her own family history. Young Nina was only twelve when her father passed away. Her mother never recovered, and spent the rest of her days watching television, alone, in the family room — never even took off the wedding ring. “I had to raise myself, and her,” Nina reflected, tearfully, as she and Jose lay on the Jersey Shore.

Eduardo Verastegui’s life parallels and then dovetails Jose’s nicely. Verastegui, today part owner of Metanoia Films, was once on the road to stardom, before discovering meaning in the Catholic faith. The upstart had starred in five highly-rated Spanish soap operas,was once considered one of the 50 Most Beautiful People by People En Espanol, and even started to make a splash in America, appearing on CSI: Miami prior his 2004 awakening.

Verastegui’s renaissance wasn’t induced by tragedy in quite the same way as Jose, but worked out to much the same effect. Today, Verastegui is just as active in creating entertainment with a socially-conscious message as he was in playing in what he now terms the “devil’s work.” Today he hopes to make films that “entertain, engage, and inspire.”

Coming Soon, to a Theatre Near You?

As I was told by a filmmaker on another project entirely, “the business model for film isn’t good if you can’t find a major distributor.” Bella is in that boat currently, but doesn’t plan to stay there for long. Rather than wait for approval from Hollywood’s gatekeepers, Bella’s producers have decided to go the free-market route by encouraging fans to rent theaters and distribute tickets themselves, while signing theatre-by-theatre deals. As with most independent films, Bella must prove to Hollywood that it can reach a wider audience before getting a big distribution deal. Thus far, the strategy seems to be working. During the week of October 22, Bella grossed the second highest per-screen average of all films. That fact is even more impressive considering Bella has depended largely on word-of-mouth publicity. The higher the profit per screening, the more legitimate Bella looks in Hollywood’s eyes.

And Tinseltown has been wrong about these types of things before. It wasn’t long ago that none of the big distribution houses thought that a movie set in the ancient Middle East, and shot in a dead language would fill theaters. $600 million later, and The Passion of the Christ was one of the highest-grossing films of all time.

Bella’s creators obviously can’t expect that type of payout — Jose’s mourning beard is the closest Bella ever gets to Jesus — but on the cusp of an election year in which morals — and the purple-faced pundits who espouse them — figure to factor in huge, Bella is refreshing in its compassion and its appreciation for the unique contributions that each and every life brings to the table.

James David Dickson is a graduate of The University of Michigan and is the former editor of the Collegiate Network member paper, The Michigan Review. He is currently the Collegiate Network fellow at The Detroit News.

Moore’s Unhealthy Proposal: A Review of Sicko

Almost three years to the day after filmmaker Michael Moore released Fahrenheit 9/11, a critical documentary concerning U.S. and specifically President George W. Bush’s foreign policy in Iraq, Moore decided to tackle the issue of health care in his latest movie, Sicko, released June 29. The film, through anecdotes, historical documents, and foreign comparison, seeks to prove the terse point, “America would benefit overall from universal, government-subsidized health care.”

The film, similar to his others, received rave reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film 3.5 out of 4 stars, Richard Roeper gave the film “two thumbs up,” and even Roger Friedman of Fox News described the film as “smartly let[ting] very articulate average Americans tell their personal horror stories at the hands of insurance companies. The film never talks down or baits the audience.”

Let’s face it. Michael Moore knows how to make a movie. Whatever one’s political affiliation or beliefs, the movie is cinematically very interesting, comedic, and a pleasure to watch. The stories of the various people interviewed are well told and every person is humanized to a very believable extent. In addition, Moore succeeded in his goal of bringing health care to the forefront of political debate. In the first week of Sicko’s release, it was difficult not to find some sort of press coverage either vehemently criticizing or enthusiastically praising the message of the film.

The exquisite filmmaking and debate that has ensued does not, however, excuse Moore from his naive, poorly argued message. For instance, Moore’s primary mode of argumentation involves anecdotal evidence — the horror stories of “everyday” American citizens and their bouts with the health care system along with interviews with foreigners describing the benefits of universal health care systems. In one horror story, we are told of Rick, who sawed off the ends of two of his fingers while at work but because he had no insurance and minimal income, he was forced to choose which finger end to reattach. When Moore speaks to doctors and patients in the hospitals of other countries (Canada, England, France, and Cuba), we are told doctors are paid very well, and patients receive efficient, thorough care with little if any loss.

The problem with such a mode of argumentation is that so few examples cannot prove a general point. We may feel for Rick, but he is one out of 300 million Americans and neither his case nor any other anecdote can be generalized over the entire population. Similarly, simply because Moore found one foreign hospital on a specific day to be devoid of inefficiency does not mean that universal health care typically is efficient. Moore addresses the claim that universal health care is very inefficient, for example because major surgery may have to be delayed because of the long waits. Yet all the proof he has that this claim is misinformed is the testimony of a select few French, English, Cuban, and Canadian people.

In fact, there is substantial evidence that universal health care systems are inefficient. In Canada, for example, one study showed that 86 percent of American hospital administrators stated that the average waiting time in a hospital was less than three weeks while only 3 percent of hospital administrators in Canada claimed to have this short a wait. The waiting time measured includes delay for major surgery. In addition to these problems, there has been a steady decline in the number of Canadian doctors, leading to more delay as each doctor must take on more patients.

One event ominously left out of the film was the 2005 Canadian Supreme Court case Chaoulli v. Quebec, which began with a patient who was delayed several months for hip-replacement surgery. Together with his doctor, Chaoulli, the two challenged Quebec statutes that prohibit private health insurance. The Court ruled in a 4-3 decision that such statutes come into conflict with the “Quebec Charter” concerning human rights and security and three of those four judges additionally concluded that such statutes were in violation of the “Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” The majority concluded that public insurance (government-subsidized health care) is not provided in a timely manner. Therefore, Moore’s claim that health care is efficient in Canada can certainly be called into question if such a case of inefficiency is brought to the highest judicial body in Canada.

Yet we do not even need outside evidence to call the film’s premise into question; Moore does that for us. In one instance, Moore interviews a French citizen who received three months of additional sick leave for a disease he seemed to have beaten; he spent the three months partying in the south of France. Such behavior would certainly be considered a waste of taxpayer money, as all health services in France are free and therefore paid for by all French citizens.

Moore’s integrity is discredited further by his arguably illegal trip to Cuba. In what is probably the most baffling scene in the film, Moore takes three 9/11 rescue workers to receive free Cuban health care subsidized by Fidel Castro’s Communist regime. Currently, the United States is in the midst of an embargo with Cuba which means no American citizen is allowed on Cuban soil. The point of the segment seems to suggest that even the Cuban government treats American citizens better than their own government does. Moore is entitled to his beliefs, but the fact that he arguably transgressed U.S. law to prove a point shows a lack of moral clarity.

While the film does make some decent points about the health care system in America, Moore is guilty of self-righteous preaching. He states that we need to be a country of “we, not me.” Such health care policies that encourage public subsidies for all people may be accepted in France, where a citizen can party for three months and get paid to do it with no one caring, but Moore fails to take into account that America’s history and size do not allow well for a universalized health care system. America was founded on the classical liberal notion that the government’s purpose is to protect individual liberties and freedoms. As Rodney Dangerfield says, “you gotta look out for number one.” While some tragedies as exposed in the film are truly sad, it would seem unfair to have tax dollars pay for treating an ailment such as cigarette-induced lung cancer, a self-contracted disease. It is up to the American people whether or not they want to work together. No one has any right to tell anyone else how they should or should not help their fellow citizens.

My one solace in the film came in the parking lot of the movie theater. I found $11 on the ground, the exact amount of money it cost to see the movie. Was this a sign from God that I should get my money back for having spent two hours of my life watching the film? I think so.

Max Landaw is staff writer for The California Patriot, the Collegiate Network member publication at UC Berkeley. This article was originally featured in the September 2007 issue of The California Patriot.