On April 10, hundreds of community members gathered at the Rhode Island State House for a House Judiciary Committee hearing, which featured the introduction of six bills governing reproductive rights in Rhode Island. Five of the bills proposed limitations on abortion access; the lone bill aimed at safeguarding ...
Political engagement has skyrocketed since the 2016 election. Mass rallies are increasingly frequent, more non-politician candidates are running for local office and research indexes of political engagement have shot upwards. But in a time when hours on our phones are spent complaining on Facebook to ...
Turn on any cable news channel, and you are likely to be inundated with punditry. This has always been a staple of news coverage but has especially increased since the 2016 election. The structure of election cycles is conducive to punditry — there is no true referendum for an incorrect position until ...
Many Brown students assume that Rhode Island’s status as a blue state — and its reputation for progressivism on the national stage — means that we live in a safe haven of reproductive rights. But in fact, NARAL Pro-Choice America ranks reproductive rights access here as “severely restricted,” ...
Anyone who has written for the Brown Daily Herald has had to put up with the stain of barbarism that persists in its style guide. I am referring to the rule that prohibits the use of the Oxford comma, or the serial comma, which is the comma placed before the coordinating conjunction in a series of three ...
During orientation week, all first-year students are given a welcome package that includes a reusable water bottle. This policy can be traced back to 2008, when the student organization Beyond the Bottle pushed the University to scale back its use of disposable water bottles. Today, Brown Dining Services ...
When the University established need-blind admissions policies in 2002 and then in December 2017 announced the elimination of loans from undergraduate financial aid packages, it joined many of its peer institutions in making a profound statement to the world that a student’s ability to pay should ...
To the Editor: I appreciated the proposals included in the April 12 editorial entitled “Reforming the First Readings program.” I have been an undergraduate representative on the First Readings committee for the past two years, and I am committed to our stated mission to “offer an intellectually ...
In recent weeks, ideological diversity has become a major topic of discussion on campus. The Herald has certainly facilitated this larger discussion, publishing a wide range of op-eds about free speech, the SPEAK coalition and Jeb Bush’s upcoming lecture. These articles all touch on the idea of ideological ...
Earlier this week, a group called Students Supporting Israel — which has no affiliation with Brown Students for Israel or, as far as we know, with any student group on campus — tabled outside of the Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center last Wednesday. We, as leaders of Brown Students for Israel, approached ...
I think most Brown students agree that while everyone is entitled to an opinion, not everyone is entitled to a platform to present those opinions; when we create space for certain people and groups to speak, we implicitly give their ideas some minimum level of legitimacy. To be clear, by inviting someone ...
As a member of the Brown community for the past 11 years, I have come to treasure and expect the diversity of backgrounds and perspectives that we find on our campus. It’s one of the reasons why I came back after taking time off as an undergraduate and why I again came back to Brown as a medical student. ...
On April 5, 2018, the Brown Immigrant Rights Coalition launched a campaign to gather support from students, faculty and community members to encourage the University to critically reflect on the impact of its scholarship and to commit to increasing its support of the immigrant communities within and ...
Since 2007, the University has requested all its incoming first-year students to read a single book (or, in one case, watch a movie) and then discuss it in small seminars during first-year orientation. The First Readings program, as it is called, was designed to create a “shared intellectual endeavor ...
To the Editor: I really enjoyed reading Emily Miller’s ’19 April 10 commentary on visual art on campus, “Let students leave their mark on campus art.” Student art is distributed across campus, and it’s so fantastic you may not realize it’s student art! Places where student work is permanently ...
To the Editor: In his April 6 op-ed “Inviting Jeb Bush to speak is irresponsible,” Michael Froid ’21 argues that Jeb Bush should be uninvited because his views are those of a person with low moral character. While I disagree with his premise, why can’t people of low moral character speak at ...
To the Editor: I am writing in response to Brendan Sweeney’s ’19.5 April 10 op-ed “Why we must respect Jeb Bush’s right to speak.” I agree with both Mark Liang ’19 and Sweeney that Jeb Bush should be allowed to speak at Brown. However, Jeb Bush has no right to my respect — to argue that ...
In 37 states and Washington D.C., voters may cast a ballot in person at some point before election day; in Rhode Island, you cannot. This poses a barrier to accessing the ballot for people with inflexible work schedules, childcare responsibilities, lack of access to transportation and other reasons ...
In 2015, Kevin Swartout, an associate professor of psychology at Georgia State University, seemingly confirmed long-held doubts about the demographics of perpetrators of sexual assault when he published his article, “Trajectory Analysis of the Campus Serial Rapist Assumption.” Swartout dismantled ...
Jeb Bush should be allowed to speak at Brown. In his Apr. 9 op-ed in The Herald, Mark Liang ’19 offered many good points for why this should be the case. But his arguments about why Bush should be allowed to speak endanger liberal democracy by encouraging tribalism and exacerbating political polarization. ...
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