Category: Opinion

To the editor:

I was disappointed to see such a negative response printed to John Stevenson’s article in the last issue of The Bucknellian. The letter goes to great lengths to minimize the significance of facts and exonerate those involved from blame. For all its equivocation, however, someone is obviously responsible for the drinking problem on campus. John simply recognized the dire situation on campus and held all University students accountable for their actions. For this he should be commended, not condemned.

No matter the underlying demographics, a 300% increase in drinking-related hospitalizations is alarming. So long as the statistic is controlled for students only, it is serious. That an administrator claimed 35% of the hospitalizations were Greek bears no weight because Greeks are not the only students to attend registered events. In fact, Greeks regularly invite non-Greek students to their events. The issue is not “how many Greeks are abusing alcohol,” but “how many students are abusing alcohol, and why?” John correctly identified pervasive drinking among Greek organizations as a causal factor. Sadly, contemporary college culture glorifies alcohol abuse. In my time at the University, I cannot recall a single fraternity or sorority which was ever ostracized due to drinking excesses. Students should understand the dangers alcohol abuse poses and set some standards. If students truly avoided Greek organizations known for fomenting drinking, alcohol abuse would naturally fade over time and self-policing would be viable. Students, however, are not angels; hence the need for authority.

Public Safety and the administration should reacquaint themselves with the age-old concept of deterrence. A more aggressive policy of enforcing not only the University’s regulations, but also state law, would deter students from drinking, for fear of retribution. As inebriated students stumble home–whether from Bull Run, a Wednesday-night frat party or a dorm binge–Public Safety can and should intercept the visibly intoxicated. The administration can oblige by punishing students accordingly instead of coddling them, and toughening its drinking-point punishment system. For those students who live off-campus, Public Safety can coordinate operations with local law enforcement, informing them that students are prone to alcohol abuse–thus a high risk to themselves and others–and should be vigilantly policed during drinking hours. Making an example of these students will send a message to the rest that drinking infractions will not be tolerated. Such methods may seem draconian, but students have left Public Safety with little recourse.

As a fellow Brother of Mr. Stevenson, I can say with the utmost certainty that he harbors no ill will towards the Greek system. Rather, he simply stands for the virtues it has traditionally upheld rather than the den of iniquity into which it has recently degenerated. What Greek life is and what it should be are worlds apart. How the University answers this question will make a life-or-death difference on campus.

James Rutledge Roesch

Class of 2010

To the editor:

To quote an oft-used colloquial phrase, “haters gonna hate.” Engineers have been denounced as “oompa-loompas of science” on TV and are sometimes viewed as pretentious. I personally have nothing against the College of Arts and Sciences or the School of Management. In fact, my second major is management. I appreciate and enjoy being able to take classes in departments outside the realm of engineering. There is also no law stating that a liberal arts major can’t take an engineering course. Personally, I have never said that I am better than a liberal arts major simply because I’m an engineer. However, when I read that someone (who is obviously jealous, insecure about their major choice, or possibly both) was degrading my major, I became incensed. I’m not denying that there are some engineers who feel a sense of superiority over other majors, and as a result, flaunt it like there’s no tomorrow. Nevertheless, generalizing all engineers like this is simply uncouth. For the most part, engineers are trying to do what everyone else is doing: get through college so we can get a good job and pay our loans off.

It’s true, E-Week is incredibly competitive (not contentious) and engineers enjoy dreaming about winning the Golden Hammer. E-Week is also an outlet for engineers to express the right side of their brain. Poetry, painting, drawing and videography are all arts; they aren’t simply something we “associate with the liberal arts.” As such, these competitions are taken seriously; engineers are proud of their poems, drawings, banners and videos. We don’t scorn the engineers who enjoy these activities. We applaud them. However, I feel that E-Week also has an underlying theme, a theme that pervades all engineering majors: teamwork. A building designed by one person would almost certainly fall. A computer programmed by one person would probably crash. Teamwork is the failsafe that catches one person’s flaws and E-Week is a much more fun way of learning that than weekly group lab reports.

The ability to work in teams is a useful skill for anyone to have in their artillery. I think hosting a College of Arts and Sciences Week is a great idea. It might even be fun to call it “Sciences and Arts Week” so it can be abbreviated SAW 1, SAW 2, etc. However, when someone says that they “do not desire a pity party,” writing a column complaining about not having a week of their own proves that a pity party is exactly what they want. They feel left out and want attention. The same can be said when banners are posted pre-emptively offering acceptances of a thank-you. Math is fundamental, Olin-ites, but it was first used to construct structures properly (in other words, to engineer).

What bothers me the most, though, is how people want to compare apples to oranges. Majors such as education and engineering are almost polar opposites. I for one could never teach a classroom with 20 screaming, booger-filled children. An education major can’t design a highway. However, it doesn’t matter because the two have nothing in common in the first place. One isn’t better than the other; it is merely different. Both have aspects that make the respective major difficult at times, and easier at other times. A major should not have to feel like it needs to defend itself. If the liberal arts want their own week so badly, organize it, get it approved by the University and have a blast. Until then, leave E-Week alone.

Brian Shoener ’13

Civil Engineering and Management major

To the editor:

As a rare reader of The Bucknellian, when I heard about John Stevenson’s article “University’s attempts to halt binge drinking inadequate” I assumed that he was just calling University students a bunch of alcoholics. After picking up the article for myself I finally understand why people were talking about it. He points out the increase in drinking incidents and begins to call out the Greek system, Public Safety and the University itself for not preventing this from happening. He does so articulately and passionately, not as one who intends to insult the school as a whole, but as one who hopes to make it better. However, if I completely agreed with John I wouldn’t be writing this. First off, he claimed that there was a 300% increase in the number of reported sexual assaults. It is a 300% increase in the number of hospitalizations from the semester before. We had 42 hospitalizations last semester, but only a total of 20 hospitalizations for the whole year prior. While John has the best intentions, I feel as though he calls out the wrong people. I first want to point out that we are only hearing the whole statistic. We hear no breakdown of guy/girl, year, Greek/non-Greek, 4Loko/non-4Loko. The only thing we hear is the increase in hospitalizations and number of alcohol-related incidents. When I asked a Dean flat out, I was told that about 35% of both hospitalizations and alcohol-related incidents were Greek. He either didn’t have the breakdown by gender or year in front of him or he refused to tell me. On a campus that is more than 50% Greek (freshman included) this tends to indicate that the Greek students are being safer than non-Greeks. With the numbers stated above it seems like I imply freshmen are to blame. I have no breakdown by year, so I give no comment. To say Public Safety sits idly by while drinking occurs on campus is an insult to them. There are only three places where drinking occurs: downtown, fraternity houses and in dorms. Out of the total drinking incidents that occur (a little more than 250 last semester) more than 60% occur downtown, which is out of the jurisdiction of Public Safety. Public Safety is not here to get us in trouble; they are here for our safety. Greeks are in constant talks with Public Safety almost daily. And as any Greek member knows, if someone gets too drunk at your house, you get in trouble–not only that, it makes your fraternity look bad. So what needs to be known is that the Greeks self-police themselves and those who attend their parties, whether this is because fear of getting in trouble, worries about image or decent human empathy. So this leads me to dorms. You can’t expect Public Safety to station an officer in every dorm every night, can you? No one can blame the RA’s. Like Public Safety, they are not here to bust freshmen, but are here for our safety. While John said the student body must receive aid from the school, I disagree. Now that these numbers are around campus and the student body is aware of the situation, I honestly believe the alcohol-related incidents will decrease, but it is our job to be active and self-police to prevent the increasing trend in alcohol related incidents. We must remember that we are adults and while the school and Public Safety are here to help us out, they are not here to hold our hands and baby us through life.

Tej Pahwa ’12

To the editor:

Katherine Bourque considers it “disturbing” that, in a university student newspaper, one would criticize erroneous claims, as I did in my recent letter to the editor. But this is the very business of a university. Facts are our tools, and we must get them right. It is understood here that an opinion must be undergirded by facts, and when it has none or when it gets the facts wrong, it must be corrected. Ms. Bourque, however, sneers at “book learning” and rejects the very possibility that one might know more about a topic than someone else because one has informed oneself of the state of the research. She dismisses any argument that does not support her a priori beliefs as “partisan” and thereby hopes to avoid the hard work of reading and understanding. Given all this, it is unsurprising that her letter is littered with the same kind of gun lobby-manufactured falsehoods I criticized in the original article. Although The Bucknellian allows her considerably more than their 600-word limit, she cannot respond to even one of the factual claims I made and seems not to have followed basic elements of my argument.

She returns to the red herring of total bans on private handgun ownership, despite the fact that I made clear I was not arguing for this. She believes she has demonstrated how splendidly things work when citizens are heavily armed by referring to the vigilantes who, during the 1992 civil disturbances in Los Angeles, perched on rooftops and fatally shot people who were taking tennis shoes from stores. It speaks volumes that Bourque believes the idea that property is worth more than human life is self-evident. Does she know that exactly one Korean-American died during the LA uprising, and this was 18-year-old Edward Lee, who was shot by a Korean-American vigilante who thought Lee was a looter?

She proceeds next to a talking point on how cities with strict gun laws have high crime rates, while those which allow concealed carry see crime rates go down. I wrote nothing about the effects of firearm availability on crime rates generally and argued only that outlawing high-capacity magazines would make it harder for criminals to walk into a mall and kill many in seconds. Yet even if we engage her issue, we find that Bourque has the facts wrong. The consensus in the research community is that John Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime” hypothesis is not supported by the data. Ian Ayres and John Donohue III have written two of the major articles dismantling this hypothesis; Bourque should read them.

On the question of why many guns manage to get into cities and states with significant gun restrictions, much research exists, but Bourque apparently hasn’t even a faint familiarity with it. The data show that the vast majority of these criminal guns come from neighboring states and localities with weak gun laws; hence, only a federal response to proliferation has any chance of effectiveness.

Later, Bourque moves from the uninformed to the absurd. If sociopaths can’t have high-capacity magazines, she claims, they will use rat poison. I leave it to readers to decide whether they believe that Jared Loughner’s visit to the Safeway would have been unchanged if, instead of a pistol with a high-capacity magazine, he’d have had only a bag of d-Con products with him. The point is not that taking 30-plus round magazines from madmen will render them completely harmless. It is that it will eliminate the most efficient means they currently have to kill many quickly. And the law-abiding public will lose just about nothing if such devices are outlawed. This is why Bourque’s attempt to equate gun and power tool deaths is so feeble. Those latter objects, while responsible for some harm, also produce easily discernible public goods that outweigh that harm. What is the public good produced by 30-plus round magazines?

Alexander Riley

Dept. of Sociology/Anthropology