Monthly Archives: December 2009

Feel free to do this out of spite.

Feel free to do this out of spite.

That’s right. Paper. How is this possible, you may ask? Well I’ll tell ya, back in the day, paper was everywhere. In your printer trays, your newspapers, your course guides. Today? Not so much.

When I was a freshman at this fine institution, there was so much paper that we didn’t know what to do with it all. Some days I’d just see people wearing it around all over their bodies, just for the hell of it. Silly? Sure, but we were young and stupid.

These days, those displays of youthful innocence and exuberance are gone. We’re taught to treat each piece of paper like it’s literally part of a tree and the “environment.” That’s all well and good. I like the environment. I live in one. It provides me oxygen and other useful things like that.

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A new week. A new USG-related brouhaha. The Prince breathlessly reported this morning that the USG had failed to follow through with a recently passed referendum—that all USG members publicly declare whether they’ve signed a pledge to never solicit recommendations from University administrators. If the Prince comments are any indication, a handful of students have gotten pretty vitriolic about making sure USG members are prohibited from asking administrators for references because of a possible “conflict of interest.”

I understand the spirit behind the pledge—that USG members shouldn’t be unethical. But it’s unclear to me why getting a recommendation from an administrator has become the flashpoint over ethics and why asking for a recommendation should even be considered unethical. [Full disclosure: I'm the U-Council Chair on the USG.]

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