As any Lehigh Student will tell you, there are an excessive number of New Jerseyans attending our school. The Bergen County area is particularly well represented amongst the Lehigh student body. These students should be aware of the fact that local police in their home area are arming with military style weapons and vehicles. This excess on law enforcement’s part is something that local residents of North Jersey should be aware of and protest.
Cornell is similar to Lehigh in many ways, and the former is considered to be an “aspirational peer,” of Lehigh – a gentle way to admit academic superiority to another school without damaging one’s own ego.
The “aspirational peer” technique has been one of the ways that Lehigh has looked to justify the creation of a Chief Diversity Officer (CDO), as evidenced in Lehigh’s VPEC benchmarking report. While Cornell wasn’t a school included in the report, they have gone through a similar process.
Cornell created the office of Chief Diversity Officer in 2007. The result? From the looks of things, they have created both a University Assembly (equivalent of our Student Senate) and a school paper so terrified of Free Speech that they would each suggest willingly that Cornell should not have such freedoms.
No one is advocating hateful speech, or harmful discrimination, but Free Speech is a cornerstone of our society and, quite ironically, journalism. Cornell has clearly done a good job on crafting a student body and especially a journalism wing so inline with school policy that they would openly denounce the first amendment.
With President Gast seemingly following this path as quickly as she can and with our dear Brown and White seemingly unwilling to go near controversial issues, it seems we could see a similar Lehigh within a few short years.
N.B. This article was not actually censored in any way. The message is in parody of what might happen to things written at Cornell in a year or two.
Hillary Clinton shared a laugh this week with Saudi Arabian college students over the prospect of Sarah Palin being elected president. If Palin was elected, Clinton declared she would not emigrate to Canada, but would, in fact, visit often. NYT Article: Clinton Enjoys a Laugh Overseas About a Palin Presidency
While it may be entertaining to envision Palin as president, why are Americans not more unnerved at the proximity Palin achieved to the vice presidency in 2008?
Each Sunday, the Patriot will provide a look at some of the news issues that you should know about. We know it is tough for college students to keep up-to-date on current events. The Patriot’s Sunday News Beat is your answer to that. This week’s column will be mainly an aggregation of links, due to time constraints.
George Will describes the Demorat’s attempts to prematurely end a school choice program in Washington D.C. designed to help lower income families, and how it demonstrates the Democrat’s consistent approach to make citizens dependent on the government. Article here.
Walter Mead takes a look at the New York Times attempt to cover the latest climate controversies, and details the extensive level of bias reporting within the article which leaves readers still without an adequate scope of the issues at hand. Article here.
Salena Zito takes a look at the current Congressional landscape, and discusses the crucial role that many Pennsylvania races are poised to play in 2010: Article here.
Mark Landsbaum of the Orange County Register has the most comprehensive list of falsifications and scandals perpetrated by climate “scientists.” There will be more to come on this later in the week. Article here.
Additionally, The Times (UK) covers the research of Dr. John Cristy, former head of the U.N. IPCC. His research has found that much of the warming reported at multiple stations worldwide was due to issues in the immediate area, and do not serve to explain the climate at all. Article here.
Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick, of the Washington Post, expose the fact that the Obama Administration has preferred killing terrorists to capturing terrorists in overseas operations. They discuss some of the possible reasons for this radical policy, as well as the possible implications: Article here.
In addition to all of that, the Winter Olympics have begun in Vancouver, Canada. Unfortunately, the start of the games was marred by the horrific death of a luger, Nodar Kumaritashvili, who died while making a practice run on the course. Samantha Shields of the Wall Street Journal describes some of the aftermath of the terrible death: Article here.
“The Pentagon’s most recent inventory of bases lists a total of 716 overseas sites. These include facilities owned and leased all across the Middle East as well as a significant presence in Europe and Asia, especially Japan and South Korea…
The count also does not include any sites in Iraq where, as of August 2009, there were still nearly 300 American bases and outposts. Similarly, U.S. bases in Afghanistan — a significant percentage of the 400 foreign sites scattered across the country — are noticeably absent from the Pentagon inventory.”
On Wednesday, February 10, Lehigh had its first snow day in 8 years. For those of us living in hovels, our campus was blanketed with nearly two feet of snow over the course of Tuesday night into Wednesday evening. I have no issue with trudging to class if my university and professors demand it. I honestly have no excuse to not get myself to my classroom that is a quarter-mile down the hill from my dormitory. Students who commute and professors obviously should be held to a different standard. It would have been absurd to demand them to drive to Lehigh on the day of the blizzard. I like our school’s stringent policy regarding holidays and days off. By not giving holidays off, we discriminate against no one. If there is a holiday that you feel obligated to take off then the university, and most professors, are usually more than willing to cooperate, as I found out for Good Friday. My issue is not with the school’s reluctance to give days off but rather the administration’s inability to communicate days off well enough, especially in potentially dangerous situations like massive blizzards.
Students awoke on Wednesday to no mass email alert from President Gast or whomever announcing that school was canceled. Rather, students had to dig through two or three layers of the Lehigh University’s webpage in order to obtain this information. It’s almost as if they wanted to keep this as low-key as possible. Apparently announcing that the school is closed does bad things for the administration’s collective ego: they must pride themselves on being tough guys who demand their students and faculty to report to their posts every day. What ensued from this lack of communication from people whose job it is to communicate, was chaos. Confused teachers arrived at campus to find that there was no parking and that buildings were locked. Really Lehigh? Locking buildings for snowstorms? Is that really an emergency that warrants a response like that? I myself only found out that the university was closed from my Gryphon, who seemed to have been more informed than the heads of some departments. There is a problem with this. One can only hope a real emergency never befalls this campus.
However, this article calls into question our societies aggressive support for heteronormativity. Should men in our society rule? Should we continue to take excessive risks on wall street? Is our encouragement of sport teams best for Lehigh?
Sodexo, the company responsible for feeding the bulk of the student population recently conducted a survey by e-mail and claimed that the survey taker would be rewarded at the end of the survey. (What follows is the actual e-mail recieved)
Dear student, faculty and staff,
Today we are requesting your participation in an important online
survey about your recent dining experiences on campus. You will
be rewarded at the end of the survey in return for your participation.
We are collecting this information on behalf of Sodexo. At no
point will pass your information on to any marketing
company. No personally identifiable information will be collected in the survey; we will only use
your responses in conjunction with those of other survey respondents.
This survey should only take approximately 7 minutes to complete.
I have no issue with Sodexo doing a survey; gathering information is a vital part of 21st century business. What I do have an issue with is the reward at the end of the survey. (Screen shot of actual survey end)
Sodexo Decides to Spend My Tuition Dollars
For your participation, Lehigh University will donate $1 to The WORLD FOOD PROGRAM – earmarked to providing needed food supplies to the people that have just survived the tragic earthquake in Haiti on your behalf.
Why is LEHIGH UNIVERSITY donating money on my behalf? I pay them for an education, not to provide philanthropy. Furthermore, the choice of charity offends me. As I have previously discussed, I disagree with the disproportionate aid for Haiti.
Looking into the charity benefiting from my “donation,” the Better Business Bureau reveals they are an outreach of the United Nations. Why is my money going to such a cause, besides to give Sodexo a very nice tax write-off?
As a service to both conservatives and liberals, the Patriot is proud to provide accurate commentary on some individuals who position themselves as Conservative thinkers but are, in fact, anything but. One of those polarizing figures is Sarah Palin, or “Failin” if you prefer.
While Palin is idolized by an undue number of conservatives, the blunt truth is that this woman rarely has any idea what she is talking about. Despite that this has been demonstrated virtually any time she talks, some people still refuse to admit that she is a walking disaster.
So, while we will eventually get around to detailing some of her past displays of incompetency, we thought we should begin with a current one, to be labeled Case #001 by the Lehigh Patriot. This is Palin answering a question at the Tea Party Convention about how Congress should change.
In this clip, Palin says that elected U.S. leaders ought to become “god fearing” again, and “ask for divine inspiration” to help make the U.S. safe and prosperous again.
As effective as that may be, this is a woman positioning herself for a run at the White House, and her answer to our problems is to ask her American God to give us some miracles to solve health care, immigration, deficits, unemployment, excessive taxation and Middle East turmoil?
Better yet, pictures taken during the event show she was reading off of her hand while answering the question, and photos taken by the AP clearly show the notes on her hand. That brings us to a quick session of “Life Lessons with Sarah Palin.”
How to answer questions from the “Gotch-ya” Media by Sarah Palin
Step 1: Wink, Smile, and talk about God. Step 2: Know questions in advance.
Step 3: Write notes on the inside of my hand.
Step 4: "Discretely" read the notes off of my hand.
