Oct. 16 will be a very important day in the history of the College. That morning, we will inaugurate Biddy Martin as the College’s first female president. The ceremony should be a grand event, with the crowd facing the Holyoke Mountains while the band and choir proclaim the historic moment. Representatives from the other schools in the NESCAC, local leaders and other dignitaries will all be present as witnesses to the grand event. The ceremony sounds like a wonderful thing, save for one thing — it’s outside, and Massachusetts is rainy.
Defensive medicine is a practice that is both wasteful and costly. In order to protect himself from being sued, a doctor will perform expensive, complicated and unnecessary procedures. One of the goals of President Obama’s healthcare bill was to make it harder for doctors to be sued in order to eliminate this wasteful practice. Healthcare, however, isn’t the only place where one can find elements of preventative law intruding upon effective practice.
Walking into Val for the first time since my arrival on campus, I immediately questioned whether or not I was in the right building. Was I dreaming? Surely this couldn’t be the Valentine Dining Hall of yesteryear: where was the tacky carpet? The sweaty clump of sports teams who just got out of practice? Perhaps somebody had spiked the coffee with some sort of psycho-hallucinogenic drug concoction?
On Sept. 23, the Palestinian Authority (PA), led by Mohamed Abbas, will formally submit its application for statehood to the United Nations (U.N.). This appeal for statehood began after the tectonic shifts in Middle Eastern politics following the popular uprisings last spring. The PA’s new approach, a U.N. bid, marks yet another transformation in the Arab World, a transformation which may leave Israel, the United States and diplomats puzzled over their former Middle Eastern policies.
In what might be the most dramatic standoff in recent AAS history, the Senate and College administration continue to stand at odds over recent social policy decisions.
Last year, then-AAS Senator (and now current President) Romen Borsellino started a column in The Student to keep the student body in touch with the weekly doings of the AAS. Romen sensed (correctly) that few outside of the Senate understood what went on in Senate meetings, and even fewer believed that the AAS was serving a real, valuable purpose on campus.
It is Sept. 14, 2011, and we are at war. I’m not talking about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan; the secret CIA-lead wars in Yemen, Pakistan, or Somalia (and who knows where else); or even the “War on Terror.” No, the United States is in the middle of a civil war — a political civil war, ironically fought along many of the same geographic, racial and ideological lines that still stem from the last. Although the consequences are perhaps not as clear-cut as the physical division of our nation, they are nonetheless grave.
