Douglas Bell | Ian Urriola | Emi Ruff-Wilkinson | Jeremy Riffle
Metro needs Obama’s focus
By Douglas Bell
Last Tuesday, the Obama Administration announced their proposal to invest $53 billion over the next six years for national high-speed rail construction. Obama has said that this investment will create tens of thousands of jobs and be a key factor in modernizing America’s infrastructure.
Respectfully, Mr. President, I’ve got a newsflash for you: We already have a sizable amount of public transit infrastructure that is woefully underfunded. And as that infrastructure continues to grow older and demand more repairs and modernization projects, we really should be setting aside more of our funds toward improving the infrastructure we utilize today.
There is no region in the country more dependent upon the vitality of public transportation (except for New York City) than here in D.C. Metro is the artery of Washington and the surrounding metropolitan area, and it’s used daily by hundreds of thousands of commuters, tourists and, of course, college students. So when Metro is in trouble — whether it’s getting snowed into underground-only mode or recovering from a major accident on the rails — everyone in D.C. is affected.
Last year, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority barely got through a major budget deficit without cutting service because D.C. residents made it clear that they would prefer to stomach fare increases over any cuts to rail or bus service. But this year, WMATA is facing a $72 million budget gap — about three times as much as last year — and local jurisdictions aren’t exactly in a solid place to cough up the extra cash right now. Throw in a new Republican Congress looking to make cuts in federal contributions to both WMATA and the D.C. Government, and it becomes very likely that Metro may have to further increase fares or else institute some of the biggest service cuts in Metro’s 35-year history.
One of the ideas for saving money is cutting late-night service on Friday and Saturday nights, which the WMATA Board seriously discussed recently. Not only would eliminating after-midnight service save Metro approximately $3 million per year, but it would also provide the equivalent of 45 more days per year for track maintenance. As someone who hates the extra wait while Metro is single-tracking, it’s hard for me to oppose that argument.
But of course, eliminating late-night service is a move that would favor riders who use Metro for their commute over riders who use Metro for pretty much everything. Obviously, college students tend to fall in the latter category, and for many of us, late-night weekend service is a necessity. Cutting after-midnight service would also put more cars on the road and increase the prevalence of drunken drivers.
But regardless of the pros and cons of any particular service cut or fare increase, this is the wrong time for our mass transit systems to be facing cutbacks. Metro’s infrastructure is over three decades old. Its rail cars need replacing, its tracks are cracking, and its escalators are breaking faster than it takes someone to say “hold onto the handrail.” Furthermore, experts are predicting that Metro will be at capacity by 2030, and there are already segments of the system that have become major choke points, including the western segment of the Red Line that AU students know and love.
Sure, high-speed rail has the unique quality of being an infrastructure investment that sounds sleek, modern and sexy. But even if high-speed rail systems are completed by the 2020s, they will never become what Metro already is today for District residents. We need investment in the public transit that we already have so that it can continue to serve the communities that rely on it every day.
And so, Mr. President, on behalf of all of us SmarTrip Card-carrying students and public transit riders across the country, I ask this: Don’t reinvent the rail until we can fully fund the one we’ve already got.
Separating dorms by class: Worst idea to come out of AU since ‘Wonk?’
By Ian Urriola
Housing and Dining has announced that starting next year, all residence halls will be segregated according to class status. All freshmen will live in Letts, Clark and Roper.
Sophomores and upperclassmen will live in McDowell and Leonard. And juniors and seniors can live in the terrace, first, and second floors of Anderson, as well as the first and second floors of Centennial.
Housing and Dining’s logic is that they will be able to plan better activities that are more relevant to the students living in each hall.
This is a bad idea.
It is a known fact that each side of campus has different … let’s say personalities, whether Housing and Dining acknowledges them or not. If you want to stay in and enjoy a quiet evening with your friends, go to North side. If you want to go out to a frat party or have a wild evening, go to South side. Starting next year, all freshmen will be forced to live on South Side. Housing and Dining says that if all the freshmen are living together, they will be able to plan more activities focused on alcohol abuse for them. While this is noble on their part, forcing freshmen to live on South side seems to negate their reasoning. They would be throwing freshmen into the lion’s den.
However, I do realize why they have to put the freshmen on South side. The dorms on South side have more rooms than North side, and seeing how many upperclassmen live off campus after their freshman year, there are just more freshmen who live on campus than there are sophomores, juniors and seniors. So this raises the question, why segregate the dorms in the first place?
As a freshman who lives on a floor that has members of every class year on it, I have valued the relationships I have made with my upperclassmen peers. Sophomores, juniors and seniors are able to help freshmen through their first year at college. They know what we poor, little freshmen are going through. Any advice or life lessons they give us are far more valuable than anything Housing and Dining can ever give us.
This raises another question. Why does Housing and Dining think that they need to provide “activities” for residents? Their job is to give us housing and to feed us. As students we already have a myriad of resources at our disposal for getting academic and health-related advice. We have academic advisors, peer advisors, professors, writing centers, career centers, technology centers, a student health center and a wellness center to name a few. Students know where to find any help they need for their short four-year stay at this university.Students should be able to choose where they want to live, not forced to live where the University tells them to. The saying goes “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Well Housing and Dining, the housing system isn’t broke, so don’t fix it!
AU sidelines CAS students with intellectually rigid ‘Wonk’ campaign
By Emi Ruff-Wilkinson
I finally thought the Wonk nonsense was over. Everyone’s had their time to vent, those free T-shirts have been shoved to the back of people’s drawers and it seemed to be swept under the rug for the time being. Until we opened up the pricey new welcome center with a giant “WONK” emblazoned on the wall so that everyone can know just how wonky we are. And it’s more than just a sign: James Raby, the director of Enrollment Marketing, sees this as the University’s “first public launch” of our rebranding.
But Wonk is wrong for AU, and the fact that the University continues to forge ahead with its plan to define us as the Wonkiest of the Wonks truly stupefies me. It excludes the entire humanities and arts departments by definition, perpetuating a long-standing problem of ignoring the College of Arts and Sciences in favor of improving the already-great School of International Service and School of Public Affairs.
The old news is that AU happened to choose a word that pops up in the dictionary as “a student who spends much time studying and has too little social life.” But that joke has faded, and the bigger issue is the actual reason to choose “wonk” as the word that defines us. The version of “wonk” that AU was presumably going for (unless they really have a low opinion of their own student body) was the one referring to “foreign policy wonks,” people who are obsessed with a subject and are certifiable experts in their respective field. But is that how AU should be defining itself?
“Wonk” has a very specific connotation to the political, international relations and public policy field. And the problem with AU is that we’ve overemphasized those parts of our school while pretending that the rest of our academics barely even exist. As a sociology major/creative writing minor, a “social theory wonk” is the last thing I want to be. Pretending to know all the answers undermines the entire purpose of seeking to understand society — my Social Research professor has a rule of thumb that our research should always bring up new questions at the end. The entire purpose of the humanities is to be constantly questioning and to never stop exploring new possibilities.
The same thing goes for the arts. We have the only MFA in Creative Writing in D.C., and Howard University is the only other university with an MFA in Studio Art. Those are not Wonky subjects. They’re devoted to constantly improving work that comes from an authentic place. It may be a passion, but it is far from a Wonk-like obsession with potable water in Somalia.
The University already has a bad habit of ignoring the College of Arts and Sciences and Wonk dismisses this part of our school. It places the focus sharply on SIS and SPA. Teresa Flannery, the director of Communications and Marketing, said that the reason for “Wonk” is that “our reputation lags behind our quality.”
Here’s one reason: we’re ranked at No. 79 by U.S. News & World Report. (For the record, Georgetown is No. 21 and GW is No. 51.) And yet, BusinessWeek put Kogod at No. 28 on their list of undergraduate business schools, U.S. News & World report put SPA at No. 14 for public policy, and Foreign Policy magazine put SIS’s undergraduate program at No. 11 and its graduate program at No. 8. So how the heck did we wind up at No. 79?If the University really wants to attract better students and improve our image outside of D.C., then that’s going to require becoming much more than just a trade school for Wonks. And it’s not like we’re starting from nothing. CAS is already a thriving academic community with truly stellar professors. So rather than throw away what is now adding up to $525,000 on a four-letter “rebranding” effort, why don’t we spend some of that money to actually improve the rest of AU? In the long run, upping our rankings will have a greater impact on how the university is perceived, and having a more diverse curriculum will help us gain a reputation as the vibrant community that we already are.
Time for the U.S. to forgo the status quo in the Middle East
By Jeremy Riffle
Beyond a doubt, history occurred last Friday. Hosni Mubarak, one of the Middle East’s most entrenched autocrats, stepped down in the face of 18 days of protests by Egyptian citizens. And now, people around the world, including students at AU, are asking the question that can only be answered with the passing of time: What now?
There have been some commentators who have expressed the hope that the Egyptian revolution, and the Tunisian revolution that inspired it, are the start of a wave of democratization throughout the Middle East and North Africa. It is possible that such a wave of democratization will occur and similar unrest throughout the Arab world has suggested that this might be the case. There is, however, the possibility that the remaining autocracies will learn from the Egyptian and Tunisian examples and remain in power by avoiding the critical blunders of Mubarak and the former Tunisian president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
There is also the question of what will rise in the place of those regimes that are overthrown. Perhaps what the Arab world is experiencing isn’t so much a wave of democratization as a reshuffling of an autocratic card deck. Or perhaps those revolutions will instead be hijacked by Islamists in a copy of the 1979 Iranian revolution.
It is a sad fact that, even if these concerns turn out to be unfounded, a democratic Middle East alarms those who have come to rely on the status quo. Israel is looking at the possibility of a democratic Egypt with trepidation. Free and fair democratic elections in the Palestinian territories brought Hamas to power, and even the slimmest of possibilities that a similar outcome will occur in Egypt must be a harrowing thought indeed. The 1979 peace treaty between the two states relieved Israel of much of the military threat against its existence. If an elected government adopts a belligerent attitude, Israel could be at its most vulnerable in decades.
The United States as well has clung to the status quo in its dealings with the Middle East. When prompted with the choice between the known evil of autocratic government and the unknown of genuine democratic elections, the U.S. has supported the former in the Middle East almost every time. One of the rare exceptions was the 2006 elections in Palestine, which were resoundingly won by Hamas. Such a result reinforced American ambivalence toward democracy in the region, and the refusal of the Western world to accept the results of these elections left them reeking of hypocrisy.
Attempting to allay the fear of the unknown by relying on the status quo, however, is a self-defeating denial of the nature of change. The world is not static. Autocracies eventually fall, and while Arab democracies may elect parties and politicians that the U.S. and Israeli governments find distasteful, that is the nature of democracy. To stand against the democratization of the Arab world is akin to standing against the passage of time. It is futile, and a waste of an opportunity to be on the right side of history.Whatever may happen in the months to follow, history has been made. We are witnessing it unfold before our eyes, and the Middle East will never be the same. The time for democracy has come. It will not materialize instantly, and there will be many setbacks on the long road toward it, but the events in Tunisia and Egypt demonstrate that it is a question of when, not if, these autocratic regimes will fall and are replaced by systems of government accountable to their people. It is up to the rest of the world, especially the United States, to no longer stand in the way.
Voting closes at 11:59 p.m. on Thursday.
