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Letters Policy: The Vassar Chronicle encour-ages its readers to voice their opinions by writing Letters to the Editor, several of which will be se-lected for publication in each issue without regard to the author’s race, religion, sex, gender, sexual identity, or ideology. Please address correspon-

dence to VassarChronicle@gmail.com.

Advertising Policy: All advertisements will be clearly demarcated as such. Contact MICA.vsa@vassar.edu for rates. All material is subject to edi-tors’ discretion, without regard for race, religion, or sex.

Nota bene: The opinions published in The Vas-sar Chronicle do not necessarily represent those of the editors, except for the Staff Editorial, which is supported by at least 70 percent of the Editorial Board.

M.I.C.A. is a student umbrella organization that aims to further moderate, independent, conservative, and libertarian thought on cam-pus by sponsoring events designed to expand the breadth of Vassar’s political dialogue; to this end, M.I.C.A. produces The Vassar Chronicle. Contact MICA.vsa@vassar.edu to become involved with the club.

CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 2011

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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STAFF EDITORIAL

Administration Neglects Summer Students

Each year, Vassar students can expect the annual Princeton Review College Rankings to depict their school as a

halcyon bastion of liberalism and secular thought. Yet the publication also articulates a more troubling trend: the dismal “town-gown relations” between Vassar and Pough-keepsie. Despite removing the fence that previously encircled the campus and engag-ing in other ostentatious attempts to make the college appear more “open” and less elit-ist, the administration’s efforts have largely failed to address the more substantive issues dividing the college from the city.

With homeless shelters, battered women’s clinics, and legal aid organizations facing budgetary constraints and desperate for ad-ditional volunteers, opportunities to inter-act with the Poughkeepsie community are abundant. These non-profi ts offer students a more nuanced understanding of the city’s dynamics and facilitate direct communica-tion between Poughkeepsie residents and Vassar students. Unfortunately, the Vassar administration squanders its best opportu-nity to augment this relationship by treating the students who elect to remain on campus during the summer so poorly.

For instance, Vassar makes absolutely no attempt to offer access to any sort of food plan to the students working with social justice agencies. The Retreat holds irregular hours and declines to open any of the three primary meal stations for most of the sum-mer. The All Campus Dining Center (ACDC) proves even less accommodating: though they grant special meal cards to elementary and high school students attending sum-mer programs, Vassar students offering to pay cash provoke only confused stares from

“Deece” employees. This leaves students with two options: fi nd public transportation to Stop & Shop to purchase food to cook on a convection oven outside of the Retreat or eat out at a restaurant. Both of these possibili-ties are inconvenient and expensive.

The refusal to provide useful hours for the library and the gym only makes the Vas-sar summer experience more frustrating. The library operates from 8:30 a.m.-5:00 p.m. Monday to Friday and is closed on weekends. Students working the forty-hour week suggested by local agencies are waiting on Fulton Street for the bus at 8 a.m. and don’t arrive back on campus until well after 5 p.m. Rising seniors who were determined to avoid procrastination and work on their senior theses over the summer fi nd it impos-sible to begin their research.

Most alarmingly, the absence of virtually any food or transportation program unfairly impacts our poorest students and effectively precludes them from accepting local unpaid internships. Virtually everyone who accept-ed employment opportunities with Hudson River Housing, Dutchess Outreach, and Legal Services Corporation over the sum-mer reported that their experiences allowed them to communicate with Poughkeepsie denizens and gain a far deeper apprecia-tion for the local community. Yet students unanimously articulated how these unpaid opportunities forced them to carry a large fi scal burden and prompted many to rely on their families for fi nancial support. For many students though, calling their parents for constant cash infusions is simply not an option. As a direct result of this, one noticed a disturbing number of students huddled over ramen noodles every night.

Several students expressed that they wanted to work for a local organization, but they simply decided not to apply, un-derstanding that they lacked the fi nancial resources to support themselves for three full months. The very reasonable daily rate of $7 for lodging in Main and the creation of the Internship Grant Fund (IGF), a fund de-signed to support internship pursuits any-where in the nation, mark critical improve-ments. However, the administration must do far more to foster an inclusive environ-ment that respects the fi nancial constraints of many students.

Of course, Vassar offers The Commu-nity Fellows Program, a Field Work Offi ce administered initiative that pays $320 a week to 10 students who work with a local agency dedicated to pursuing social justice. This is Vassar’s most innovative attempt to mend town-gown relations. However, it was disturbing to watch the Field Work Offi ce scrambling to fi nd sources of funding for this program most of last year, stating for months that they doubted if they could sup-port it.

We are, ultimately, left with an adminis-tration that claims to promote improving town-gown relations, but seems conspicu-ously unsympathetic to students residing here over the summer. Their policies deter fi nancial aid students from seeking local employment and make it even more diffi -cult to endure the sweltering summer days in a Main single. Both Poughkeepsie citizens and Vassar students deserve far better.

—The Staff Editorial is agreed upon by at least a 70 percent majority of the Editorial Board.

To graduating high school seniors, few things matter as much as college rankings. There’s the gold standard of

U. S. World Report, the slightly less main-stream Forbes ranking, and other rankings devoted to more specifi c factors like dorm quality and food. These rankings are used by students and parents to fi nd the best col-lege, one that suits their individual needs. While the harm of these rankings is often debated, with many arguing that lesser-ranked institutions with great educational value are often overlooked, Vassar College never suffers too much. In fact, on many of these “fl awed” lists, Vassar does very well. Except for one college guide.

A new, up-and-coming list once again assigned Vassar, as well as several other liberal arts colleges, a grade of “F.” “What Will They Learn”: a guide published by former Harvard Dean Harry Lewis, claims that amidst the muck of other college rank-ings and guides, this new guide simplifi es the process and tells you what students will learn. The appeal of this is evident, since students and parents have a common goal: education. This is the entire point of post-secondary study, so, insofar that education is what What Will They Learn aims to quan-tify, it should be applauded for its intent.

The result of said intent has gone drasti-cally awry, however. With checklist in hand, the ranking site sees if colleges meet certain requirements: a U.S. History class, a com-position class, a foreign language class, a math class, an economics class, and a sci-ence class. These, according to the guide, are the things college students should be learning and, consequently, what colleges should require. Based on this colleges earn a grade on a sliding scale, indicating their strength or lack thereof in regard to general education.

Vassar, interestingly enough, earned a grade of “F,” indicating that not a single re-quirement was met. Evidently, a quantita-tive reasoning requirement does not fulfi ll anything on their check list, nor does our foreign language requirement meet their standards on language study because study is only mandated at the beginning level.

Does this mean you shouldn’t go to Vas-sar? In the eyes of What Will They Learn, the answer is yes. As the website proclaims, college graduates are failing to live up to the standards of the work place and institutions like Vassar only perpetuate the problem. You will not get a good general education at Vassar because we has no commitment to a well-developed general education, or so they say.

Something here seems wrong, and not just because, as Vassar students, we want our school to do well. Consider that Vassar, an “F” rated school, boasts a graduation rate of 93 percent, while City University of New York (CUNY) Brookyln College, which boasts an “A” rating, has a graduation rate in the 40 percent range. Is this because Vas-sar simply let their students coast by taking easy classes? I would argue not. Something seems strange if we are to believe this grad-ing system has merit.

This decree on Vassar’s worth is as prob-lematic as the grading system itself, which fundamentally misunderstands the point

of higher education. One glaring logical contradiction presents itself in particular: in order to give the list any sort of value or to believe it is a valid system, you have to think that general education is an inherent-ly important good. If you think that general education is an inherent good, you would already be taking the classes that comprise a general education regardless of where you attended college, thus rendering the list useless.

Why would students want to be forced to take classes that don’t interest them? It seems absurd. Are we really getting a sub-par education at Vassar because we are not required to take an economics class? What this system fundamentally misunderstands is that in order to respond yes to the above question, you’d have to think that econom-ics is important, and if you think econom-ics is important, you have probaly already taken an economics class.

This inconsistency is indicative of the stance What Will They Learn takes on education in general: students can not be allowed to take ownership of their educa-tion. At schools such as Vassar, you control your eduction. This self-determination is what What Will They Learn is against. It thinks students can’t be trusted, and, so they think, this is what is harming higher education. However, autonomy is not the problem. The problem is much more deeply rooted in how we view the purpose of post-secondary education and how we go about accomplishing it.

What Will They Learn moves to address the problem by commending schools who remove autonomy—but this does not suf-fi ciently fi x the problem. All the list ac-complished is pointing out which colleges don’t require core classes and brand them as “bad.” If this is the case, Vassar is in good company with schools like Brown and the majority of the University of California schools.

In the view presented by this list, top lib-eral arts colleges do a lesser job of educat-ing students than “A” schools like CUNY Brooklyn College. Let’s consider why schools like CUNY might need to have core requirement while Vassar does not from the schools’ stand points. CUNY requires a combined SAT score of 1000 to gain admis-sion, while Vassar accepts students with an average score of around 1400. From this statistic alone, it seems as though Vassar students have a more profi cient under-standing of topics presented in high school. But, according to What Will They Learn, it appears as though all college students are the same and must be taught the same thing.

Here, we see the incorrect premise the list is utilizing: all schools ought to serve the same purpose. This is problematic in a number of ways. First, when we accept the premise of all schools serving the same purpose we begin to frame the discussion of

whether schools are succeeding by whether students are making general gains in sub-jects like critical reading skills.

This seems reasonable and is what books like Academically Adrift, published last February, point out as one of the major fl aws of the higher education system. It is true many students are not making the kinds of gains we would like, but the solu-tion to the problem isn’t more core classes and it’s not more intensive schooling. The solution is reframing the debate. This may seem only nominal but it is extremely im-portant, considering that if we change how we view this type of education, we see why certain problems are not actually prob-lems.

First, let’s look at why it is not the role of colleges to present basic education. What Will They Learn argues that it is the job of colleges and universities to teach students the things they will need to be informed citizens—this is why they say a U.S. history class is important. But this is problematic because such things are the task of a high school. Why? Because not all U.S. citizens go to college, so this means that we must be satisfi ed with what high school graduates know in regard to citizenship. It is not the job of colleges to fi x the problems created by our public educational system. It is not fair for colleges to be forced into correct-ing this problem, and it is even more unfair to have a ranking system which penalizes schools for not attempting to fi x this unnec-essary problem.

This is, of course, not to say that fi xing the problem is not a laudable goal under-taken by many schools. Some schools like CUNY see that their students have not learned these key lessons in their pre-col-lege schooling and are taking steps to cor-rect for this, but at Vassar, where students demonstrate excellent scores on the SAT,

ACT, SAT IIs, and APs, it is not necessary to reteach these skills. Vassar assumes stu-dents have the necessary skills that render an intensive core curriculum unnecessary, and the assumption is correct because ad-mission standards ensures a level of excel-lence in Vassar students. Core curriculums must fi t the school and the students. A stan-dard, ubiquitous core is not the answer.

This gets to the second problem: the goal of secondary schools should not all be the same. As Vassar students we value the liberal arts, which is good, but it is incor-rect to assume that we would necessarily benefi t from a country of only liberal arts schools. Countries raise standards of living through division of labor. This division of labor necessarily entails different learn-ing environments and standards. Just as liberal arts students would dislike taking business classes, business students would dislike taking liberal arts classes.

While our society perpetuates the idea that all students should go to four-year colleges, in reality we may be better off if we recognize that four-year colleges might not be for all students, and, as a society, we should give more information about alternatives for those students who might desire them. We should stop pushing stu-dents into situations for which they are not academically prepared and focus on im-proving public schools and ensuring access to higher education for qualifi ed students regardless of socioeconomic class.

By seeing that, as a society, we would benefi t from a more varied post-secondary education structure, we can change how we talk about the post-secondary education system. No longer would we judge schools under the same framework of what classes they require, because fundamentally differ-ent types of schools with different types of students should require different classes.

VASSAR & LOCAL

CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 2011

Standardized Core Requirements Detrimental To Higher Ed.Jessica Tarantine

Vassar & Local Editor

PAGE 3

Wikimedia Commons

The recent rankings given to Vassar incorrectly assess the amount of work required by students.

“It is not the job of colleges to fi x the

problems created by our public educational

system.”

Fro-yo, Brad’s granola, and “Eggs All Day.” These are the highlights of any Vas-sar student’s trip to the All Camus Dining Center (ACDC) and last Thursday I had the fortune of encountering all three of these delights in the same meal, allowing me to leave the ACDC estatic at my good luck. The next day however, I travelled to Amherst for a debate tournament. At their dining facility, I encountered deli-cious tacos, soft served ice cream, and a “Make Your Own Smoothies” station. The juxtaposition shook me and I returned disillusioned through the unguarded Main Gate.

When thinking about the dining ex-perience at Vassar College, “The grass is always greener on the other side” is the old phrase that I try to instill in my mind. But sometimes when I hear about schools with multiple dining centers, made to or-der food, and ice cream endowments, that old platitude about greener pastures.

I know that I’m not alone with my dissatisfied feelings. Rarely does a day pass when I don’t hear complaints about the quality (and sometimes quantity) of the food at the “Deece,” more formally known as the ACDC. But my main cri-tique of Vassar’s dining services is not the lack of made to order fajitas and chronic cup shortages but is the cost of the din-ing plan. At Vassar, on the standard meal plan, each meal ends up costing a stu-dent around $13.66 per meal. The costs of visitor meals are equally outrageous, topping off at $13.50 for dinner. This seems unreasonable.

Since obsessing about the lack of op-tions and the high cost of our meals, I became curious as to the costs of other dining plans at other comparable educa-tional institutions. Was Vassar alone in its high cost and low flexibility?

I’m not sure if what I found was sur-prising, but it made me question why Vassar’s dining services have stayed at the same poor quality.

I did a quick study, comparing simi-lar educational institutions –Amherst, Skidmore, Claremont McKenna, Wes-leyan, Swarthmore, Middlebury, as well as Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, which use the same food provider, Ara-mark. This study wasn’t scientific at all; I simply browsed the schools’ websites for information and emailed a few dining center employees when the information wasn’t readily available—something all students could do.

The price of Vassar’s meal plan does not far outweigh other colleges’ costs (the meal plan that the average student purchases is actually less expensive than four out of the 7 colleges studied) but what you get for the meal plan is worth considering is perhaps the more alarm-ing part.

The main issue in regard to what the meal plan can get you is flexibility be-cause at Vassar, a meal swipe can get you: 1. Access to unlimited food at the ACDA, 2. An express lunch consisting of a sand-wich, chips, cookies, drink, and a piece of fruit, or 3. A smoothie/cookie/water

combination at UpC late at night. While this might seem pretty flexible, other col-leges provide much more freedom.

At Swarthmore College, students can use their meal credits at the snack bar (our version of the Retreat) for the fol-lowing equivalent cash amounts: $2.60 for breakfast, $3.75 for lunch, and $4.60 for dinner. While this definitely discour-ages people from using their $9.06 priced meal at this location, it still provides op-tions for those who cannot or choose not to make it to the dining center.

At Skidmore College, there is an option for late night dining in their main cafete-ria from 8pm to 11pm that includes a lim-ited menu of pizza, snack food, desserts, ice cream, and etc.

Rose Hulman Institute of Technology, located in Indiana, which even boasts Ar-amark, still has a greater amount of free-dom for meal plans. For example, you can choose a meal plan that gives you the option of having half declining balance points and half meal swipes that wound up decreasing the cost of a meal swipe from $13.57 to $11.33, while giving you more freedom with the declining balance points. Another notable difference on the Rose Hulman campus is the presence of a Subway and a pizza restaurant on cam-pus. And, to make matters worse, stu-dents are able to use meal swipes (worth $5.00 in subway and $5.80 in the pizza place) at these establishments; giving students much more freedom in dining options than Vassar College offers.

Alarmed by these finding, I tried to lo-cate reasons that would make dining plans at colleges better or worse, and I couldn’t quite find a trend that stuck. Many of the Colleges—Wesleyan, Middlebury, Am-herst, and Swarthmore—surveyed have independent dining services belonging to the college, (not contracted out, like Aramark), which I assume makes them

cheaper than what Vassar is using. Cla-remont McKenna, which has the high-est possible ranking of dining service on College Prowler, a site giving reviews of campus dining uses Bon Appetit as their contracting option, proving that it is pos-sible to have a positive experience with a contractor. However, even the college that uses the same dining service as Vas-sar offers possibilities for cheaper meals with more flexibility, which raises the question: why the high cost and low flex-ibility with Vassar’s plan?

In the end, maybe the grass is always greener on the other side, and the made to order burritos and ice cream options at other colleges may become old, but the question still remains as to why our cost per meal remains so high and why our options remain so few. While Vassar may not have a choice to find another food provider, we must seriously consider cost and flexibility in our upcoming contract negotiations.

—Meg Mielke ’14 is the Treasurer of the Vassar Prison Initiative and a Stu-dent Fellow in Lathrop House.

VASSAR & LOCAL

CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 2011

Meal Plan Comparisons Prove Vassar’s InadequacyMeg MielkeContributor

PAGE 4

“I’m not sure if what I found was surprising, but it made me question

why Vassar’s dining services have stayed at the same poor quality.”

Pavel Shchyhelski

CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 2011

The Judicial Board, like several in-stitutions on campus, considers itself progressive. While the intent

and process of the Judicial Board may be commended, often the realisation of the former, in reality, may not live up to expectations and careful deliberation should be undertaken to understand how the process should be modified to better correct this mismatch of ideal and reality.

Rather than a strict adherence to precedents in deciding cases, the unique situation and context of the student is incorporated in order to create the most effective solution, in line with the intent of the Judicial Board. This may be achieved through a variety of ways: personal statements made at the hear-ing, character statements from friends, witnesses, a support person to bring along to the panel hearing, and a new development—an impact statement.

This impact statement allows the stu-dent to produce an essay in addition to their personal statements made at the hearing that may provide greater con-text and allow the student to speak more on their own character in general rather than simply putting forward their ac-count of the events discussed in the judi-

cial hearing. The addition to the impact statement, as well as the opportunity for character statements from friends natu-rally provides an interesting question regarding the notion of discipline and bias in college regulation implementa-tions. Namely by this means, is a fair system being provided?

In a purist judicial sense, it seems somewhat counter intuitive. Prover-bial judicial “blindness” is removed in favour of painting a detailed and emo-tionally textured picture of the student. The main objection is the contrasting abilities of students to be personable or an object of compassion may have a significant impact on their sanction. The eloquence of the student’s friends is yet another factor, allowing for the possibility of a sympathetic and touch-ing portrait out of a rather unfortunate set of circumstances.

There are definitely several argu-ments in favour of it this more holistic view, however, that go hand in hand with Vassar’s more educational approach towards sanctions. Often, the conver-sations in the room repeatedly assert that there is no intention to punish the student. In fact, punishment is a rather dangerous word to use when discussing sanctions. So when the aim is to educate rather than chastise, sanctions almost take a remedial touch, where the ques-tion is “how can we help the student, as

an individual, to not do this again?” as averse to “how can we make sure he or she doesn’t?” How can we propose a so-lution that, in this case, this student will react to positively?

It is, as it sounds, a difficult task in-deed.

Letters of apology and letters of re-flections are ingredients as they are ostensibly more educational than pu-nitive in nature. Some letters of reflec-tion have been known to be no more than a page, double spaced. Although such things as discussing page lengths seems to amount to quibbling, a letter of recommendation of this length begs the serious question on whether there was only the beginning of what could have been reflection, or whether there was any reflection at all. These reflec-tion letters are not edited for content and have also been known to be rather interesting in sentiment and assertion. When received, they are put with the rest of the contents of the person’s file. It would be ludicrous to think that they should be looked over and assessed, which they are not. This is not a history or politics seminar after all. In cases that involve the student’s personal ac-tions, it is odd to propose assessing let-ters of reflection for their strength of argumentation —though this standard is applied to the other facets of student writing at Vassar.

In fact, the college’s impressive em-phasis on writing might indicate that using letters of reflection in order to encourage the aforementioned reflec-tion and change of habit might not be such a good idea. Charging a student to write a letter of reflection is designed to make them think deeply about the mat-ter through a careful process and hope-fully leading them to resolve on a better way of conducting themselves. As Vas-sar students, we are inevitably exposed to freshmen writing seminars and other such writing intensive courses at some point or other in our supposedly illus-trious college careers. We have had to argue for such obscure things such as the female emancipation of women in Beowulf. Writing an essay on why it was not a good idea to inhale a certain sub-stance at a particular time of night and being caught would be, comparatively, a piece of cake. The work of minutes, in fact. And if one can write about female emancipation in Beowulf, without much believing it, it is possible to write about things with a similar, cultivated and more effortless sense of detachment.

Although the intent of creating a more holistic approach to college regulation enforcement at Vassar is not only com-mendable, but indispensible, it is safe to say that some of the elements could and should, require a little bit more of that thing we call reflection.

More Refl ection Needed in Judicial Board SanctionsArushi RainaContributor

PAGE 5

VASSAR & LOCAL

It’s common knowledge that for sev-eral years now, a Serenading tradi-tion has been Strong’s light-hearted

roasting of the senior class. This gentle teasing does not in any way imply that we do not respect the seniors—they are partly made up of former Strong resi-dents, and we really love them just as much as any other House. That being said, we realized that with our song be-ing of a “roasting” nature, there was a possibility that something might go slightly awry during the event. The tra-dition can generate a sense of animos-ity between the freshmen and seniors, especially when the songs are shouted down by “boos,” a memory that is still fresh in the minds of Strong sopho-mores. We determined as a house team that this year we were going to make a conscious effort to improve the experi-ence for the freshmen.

The bonding experience that came out of the time spent writing, learn-ing, and choreographing the song was fantastic, bringing the house team and the residents closer together and in-creasing Strong House pride. Thanks to 2012 President Pamela Vogel’s hard work, many of the Strong girls have told me how positive the Serenading experience was. However, while the Senior Class Council did a good job preparing for the event, the conduct of one of its members during the judging was particularly disparaging and did much to undo what was otherwise a great job. The comments were related to “menstrual blood” and suggested residents of Strong House were “just jealous because their parents made them live in Strong.” These comments, heard by many Strong residents, were quite hurtful and triggered an angry set of reactions inside the house towards what was otherwise a great event. They insulted not only Strong, but also the

female community at large, which, given Vassar’s history as a female col-lege, only intensifies its unacceptabil-ity. That these remarks were said after Strong’s main group had left Ballantine Field was particularly upsetting, as we were given no chance to defend our-selves from such low-blow remarks.

I also want to take the time to in-terject here that improvement is not a one way street. Strong Team and its residents are actively trying to change its perceived image and the stereotypes that are associated with it. While we’re in the midst of this active progression, the progress that we’ve made forward is vulnerable, and these steps forward can all too easily be undone. Yes, Strong is an all-female dorm, but this one char-acteristic does not mean we are a dif-ferent species of student. We are the same type of fun loving, hard working, diverse Vassar students that are found in every dorm across campus—despite what the stereotypes say.

In making this criticism, I want to state that I am aware of the discussion over whether or not Serenading should continue to exist. Though I could be proven wrong, I feel that these nega-tive comments during the Serenading judging from an isolated individual are far from enough to invalidate and cause the removal of it. In fact, I hope that a fruitful discussion can come out of this incident, and we can make things better for future generations at Vassar. Overall, Serenading this year was a cru-cial event that got all the freshmen fa-miliar with another facet of Vassar life and served as a further induction to the Vassar community. Serenading is a tra-dition we should keep, and as long as discretion, good judgment, and respect is maintained by all parties involved and adjustment is made where these qualities are lacking, I see no reason why Serenading shouldn’t continue to be an exciting part of the Vassar First Year experience.

Manning WuContributor

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Strong House President Calls for Serenading Reform

I enjoy a good party as much as any Vassar student, but I have never been inclined to host one myself.

I’ve never understood why anyone would want loads of drunk students they don’t know stumbling through his or her own house, bringing mess and destruction in their wake. My new housemates do have this desire though. So, last month, I spent an hour attending the “party registration safety course.” I have no problem with Vassar conducting these courses, and I actually think it is the responsible thing to do.

The course teaches party hosts how to be responsible. I was instructed how to recognize when someone is overly in-toxicated and at a safety risk, how to re-act appropriately to these situations, and how to seek appropriate help, and how to prevent these situations all together. I hope you believe me when I tell you that none of this was ground-breaking news to anyone in the room. In general, I be-lieve Vassar students are pretty good at this. However, there is always room for improvement, and we never want to take any chances. That’s really the motivation behind these courses, so Vassar can say they educated you. If something terrible did ever happen, the college can defl ect responsibility. This is a standard proce-dure, and, in general, it is a good prac-tice for the college to engage. More safety education never hurt anyone.

The Offi ce of Residential Life (ResLife) can really only preach so much though. Ultimately, it is up to students to act re-sponsibly. But what happens when every-thing we are told is the responsible thing to do is in confl ict with the policies Vassar chooses to adopt? Such is the case in the most important objectives of these safety trainings; how to prevent students from becoming overly intoxicated, and to help someone who has managed to become so. When I began my freshman year, I think the policies in place encouraged students to act responsibly on these two fronts, but over the past three years the school has managed to change the incentives and turn responsible students into irrational ones.

The fi rst problem is one that has gotten a lot of attention lately: the infamous keg ban. One of the things they teach you, not only in these safety courses, but also in the Alcohol EDU course taken by every fi rst year, is that hard alcohol is much more dangerous than beer or similar drinks. In addition to this, mixing hard alcohol with sugary or carbonated drinks actually speeds up alcohol absorption. Obviously, it is better to encourage students to avoid drinking these beverages if they want to maintain a healthy drinking culture.

I will not be the fi rst, nor the last, to point out why a keg ban encourages ir-responsible drinking behavior. If this rant seems redundant I apologize, but it is only because the measure is so clearly shortsighted. Let me make it abundantly clear where the problem is with empirical evidence and not just generalizations.

A standard keg holds 165 12 ounce serv-

ings of beer (this is slightly more than what a registered party is allowed to have, but for equalities’ sake we will assume 165 drinks is our standard). The price of pur-chasing a keg varies depending on brand, but, according to www.savemorbeer.com, a keg of Natural Light—one of the cheap-est beers and a Vassar favorite—can be purchased for $60.99. This works out to about $0.37 per drink. Of course, you will have to pay a keg deposit which covers the actual keg and the tap, but that mon-ey is refunded to the purchaser when you return the keg a day later.

What does it cost to purchase rough-ly the same amount of Natural Light in cans—a permissible practice? If someone shops around a case containing 30 cans of Natural Light can be found relatively cheaply at around $13.99 a case. Five of these cases doesn’t quite get you to 165, but it’s close. The cost to buy fi ve cases, or 150 cans of beer, would cost about $10 more than the keg, $69.95. We aren’t quite fi nished though. New York state charges a $0.05 deposit for each individ-ual can (you know, because they we care about the environment here. When did Vassar stop supporting sustainable prac-tices?) Realistically, students at a party are not collecting these cans to bring back to the store for their deposit. This adds an additional $7.50, bringing our total to $77.45. Since there are only 150 drinks, this works out to $0.52 per drink, 40 per cent more expensive than buying a keg!

Clearly, based on tastes and the safety measures drilled into students, beer is the preferred choice of drink for a party. Try-ing to replace a keg (an environmentally more sustainable beer drinking practice) with individual cans does add a signifi cant cost, and no one wants to throw an under-stocked party. How will students replace this? They’ll replace it with “punch” made from cheap, hard liquor.

A standard shot is 45 milliliters (ml.). Crystal Palace (another Vassar favorite), 1.75 liter bottles of vodka, can be found for $12.99 a piece. A 1.75 liter bottle would be about 39 standard drinks. Buy-ing four bottles of this (about 156 drinks) can be had for $52.16 (including the $0.20 bottle deposit). Adding two and a half gallons (appx 9.5 liters) of fruit punch or Gatorade can be made from a mix for around $5.99. Our total cost is $58.15, or $0.38 per drink.

What does this mean? It means that kegs and “punch” cost roughly the same (the keg is actually slightly cheaper). With no ban, the choice is up to the host, but beer seems to be much more popular. With this ban in place though, the choice becomes much clearer, the “punch” will inevitably become the drink of choice.

Maybe I am being ignorant though. Isn’t it true that, with kegs, people will have a harder time keeping track of how much they have consumed compared to cans? Doesn’t fi lling a cup give a higher amount of beer than a can but the illusion of the same amount? Didn’t the Com-mittee on Campus Life fi nd studies that found parties with kegs are more likely to result in over intoxication? Yes, these are all true, but what is the comparison? The comparison is not kegs versus cans, it is kegs versus large buckets of “punch.”

It isn’t rocket science to realize the prob-lems with keeping track of drinks and consumption are the same with kegs and “punch” because they both use plastic cups instead of cans. I am also pretty sure that, if we compared studies of parties with vats of “punch” with parties without those vats, there would also be plenty more over intoxication! Anyone who has tried to drink a lot of beer will tell you, after a little while, it becomes more diffi -cult to drink because you get bloated and feel full. Not so with “punch” and mixed drinks. Also we have been taught that the alcohol in sugary drinks is absorbed faster. The end result is a clearly less safe drinking environment.

Fine, now we have a bunch of drunk kids at our parties because it was too expensive to provide more responsible alternatives. How do I deal with this? When I was a fi rst year student, it was drilled into my head that Vassar has a “Good Samaritan” policy. That is to say, if I were unsure if my friend or another student were over intoxicated, it was al-ways best to seek help from Emergency Medical Services (EMS). The policy guar-anteed that no one involved, the caller or the intoxicated student, would get into trouble or receive disciplinary action. This is a great policy, and a number of times unfortunately my friends and I had to utilize EMS. We never got into trouble, and the person in question was usually sent to Baldwin where overnight nurses could sober up the students and monitor their health. By morning, they would be released.

This all changed a few years back. As far as I know, the same policy exists; no one is going to get in trouble. However, due to budget cuts, the school has been forced to eliminate its overnight staff at Bald-win. So what happens when a students are over intoxicated now? EMS comes and makes a determination if they are fi ne to sober up on their own (so far there is no difference from before). If the stu-dent does need overnight attention and care though, the only option is to send him or her to Arlington or Vassar Broth-ers’ Hospital. This wouldn’t be terrible,

but the way students are brought there is almost always by ambulance, and, once there, even simple services such as an IV and overnight observation become billed costs to the student. I have also unfortu-nately had friends put in this situation.

It is true that sometimes, before Bald-win cut its hours, particularly bad stu-dents would still need to go to the hos-pital for more radical procedures (e.g. stomach pump), but now students that could have been observed on campus without additional fees attached are be-ing sent to the hospital. Many aspects of these hospital trips are not covered by most students’ insurance policies, and I know several students who have been hit with bills ranging anywhere from $700-$2,000 in fees.

What does this mean in terms of incen-tives? Well, students are always taught to err on the side of caution. If you are un-sure if someone is really too drunk, it is always better to seek medical attention. Doing so is fi ne because no one can get in trouble; your friend will, at most, be slightly inconvenienced by waking up in Baldwin and having to walk across cam-pus. Now though, when I am in that area of uncertainty, I do not know if I will err on the side of caution. I know that, by call-ing EMS, it is very likely my friend will go to the hospital (much more annoying in and of itself) and be stuck with a poten-tially large bill. Not everyone can easily afford to pay these medical fees and there is signifi cant probability that my friend will become upset that EMS was called.

Vassar does all of these great things to promote a safe drinking culture. Students are reminded year after year, and taught courses on how to develop a safe environ-ment for parties and how to act respon-sibly in dangerous situations. Simulta-neously, Vassar is trimming the budget fat in ways that endanger students’ lives. In an attempt to decrease the drinking problem, Vassar has enacted policies that push students to make even more irre-sponsible decisions. How can we expect our classmates to make good decisions when the policies Vassar puts in place skew the incentives?

CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 2011

VASSAR & LOCAL

Keg Ban Contradicts Alcohol Philosophy at Vassar

Wikimedia Commons

The recent keg ban runs counter to Vassar’s traditional drinking culture and Brewer legacy.

Todd Densen Contributor

PAGE 6

CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 2011

Earlier this month, President Obama unveiled his $447 billion “American Jobs Act.” After the

fanfare surrounding the timing of the whole ordeal, the much-anticipated an-nouncement certainly provided plenty of political fodder for both sides of the House to utilize in the coming weeks. The announcement comes shortly after the debt-ceiling crisis that left everyone in congress looking pretty awful. The right blamed the left, the left blamed the right, and the American public blamed everybody. Well, the jobs bill seems to be a direct challenge by the President to the GOP. If you are serious about fixing the economy, no more delays, no more mis-communication: pass this bill. Near the end of his speech to the joint sessions of congress the President spoke:

It’s been a commitment to stay at it—to be persistent—to keep trying every new idea that works, and listen to every good proposal, no matter which party comes up with it. Regardless of the arguments we’ve had in the past, regardless of the arguments we will have in the future, this plan is the right thing to do right now. You should pass it. And I intend to take that message to every corner of this coun-try. And I ask—I ask every American who agrees to lift your voice: Tell the people who are gathered here tonight that you want action now. Tell Washington that doing nothing is not an option.

These are strong and targeted words. Now the President may claim that this bill is not about politics, but I believe the speech and timing of the proposal abso-lutely are.

It is perfectly valid to question the politics of this move from either side. From a Republican perspective, I am sure they do not appreciate the implied blame placed on them for the debt crisis. The Democrats should also question the timing and forcefulness of the proposal. If the bill doesn’t pass through the House (which doesn’t seem very likely), what will President Obama have to show for his economic record come election sea-son?

Shelve the politicking for a moment though and look at the meat of Obama’s proposal. First of all, it has become clear that from a monetary standpoint there is little else that can be done. The Fed’s in-vocation of “Operation Twist” last week offered a brief glimmer of hope, but ul-timately the markets remained unim-pressed and unconvinced of its effective-ness. Keynesian economics would claim the recent evidence from monetary pol-icy seems to indicate that we are deeply entrenched in a liquidity trap; continued monetary policy will have minimal ef-fects and the way to climb out is through fiscal stimulus. This is an opinion that has been echoed by several economic and political journalists of late. So maybe fis-cal stimulus might be what we need, and there is actually some sound policy in the President’s proposal.

The bill raises money to pay for itself by reforming the tax code. It does this by

eliminating many deductions and loop-holes for taxpayers earning more than $200,000 per year. It takes this money and uses it to compensate for several other tax cuts and credits. The bill prom-ises to offer tax credits for hiring new workers and veterans. Money is also set aside to prevent teacher layoffs and build infrastructure. And perhaps the most universally welcomed reforms are the job training measures and unemploy-ment insurance reforms which have been praised by both sides of the House. All of this sounds wonderful indeed.

But some of the tax cuts that the Presi-dent champions are in question. One of the most prominently featured benefits of the bill is a cut of the payroll tax for most American businesses. The tax cut works in several ways. Businesses with payrolls under $5 million are required to pay only half the existing payroll tax for each employee. New hires or increases in payroll result in a payroll tax holiday for businesses. It also cuts employees pay-roll tax in half. The hope is that this will allow businesses to hire more workers, give raises to existing employees, and provide tax relief to families.

The first problem with this measure is that the current social security system is already unsustainable. Cutting the tax that funds social security will certainly not help this. This might be an early in-dication that social security reform could be the next big political hurdle congress will tackle, but there have been no indica-tions from the Obama camp or the early GOP candidates that this is a priority.

Next there is an issue of whether the tax cut will actually have any of the pur-ported benefits it claims. Under the plan, what is the incentive for businesses to pass on the payroll savings to employees? And even if this does result in more hir-ing, wages of new employees are unlikely to be higher because of the businesses saving money on the payroll tax. They might even be lower because companies know that the individual is saving money from their portion of the payroll tax.

But maybe I am wrong about this. Maybe the bill won’t suffer from these problems and the economics will work out the way the Democrats claim. If this is true though, the Democrats must ad-mit there is utility in a recent Republican proposal as well.

Just this week House Budget Com-mittee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R WI) unveiled a new proposal for repealing “Obamacare” and reforming the health-care system. There is plenty to debate about the Presidents attempt at health-care reform, but a few things are clear. Most Americans do not support it. And while it may or may not solve problems associated with access to healthcare, strong evidence is emerging that health-care premiums are actually rising signifi-cantly as a result (some reports say faster than GDP).

The new proposal is a second attempt by Representative Ryan at repealing the President’s plan in favor of an alterna-tive. Last time it didn’t work out so well for the young congressman. The re-form never made it through the Senate and many pundits panned the bill. Well

this new proposal is actually garnering some positive attention from the media. Ryan’s bill attacks what he sees as one of the main problems with the current healthcare system, employer provided coverage. More specifically tax exempt employer coverage. In a speech given at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, CA last week he expressed his concerns with the current system:

Under current law, employer-spon-sored health insurance plans are entirely exempt from taxation, regardless of how much an individual contributes to their policy. This tilts the compensation scale toward benefits, which are tax-free, and away from higher wages, which are tax-able. It also provides ways for high-in-come earners to artificially reduce their tax-able income by purchasing high-cost health coverage – which in turn can fuel the overuse of health services…These structural flaws push affordable coverage out of reach for millions of Americans.

Ryan goes on to propose a “free mar-ket” solution. End these tax breaks he says, instead give tax credits to individu-als. Have individuals shop for coverage. While this will probably make shopping for healthcare difficult and burdensome while the market is still adjusting, it pro-vides several benefits.

It makes healthcare more portable. Employees no longer need worry about losing coverage when changing careers, they can take there insurance with them. This also effectively ends the problems of providers denying coverage for pre-existing conditions without a mandate to do so. This is because people will not suddenly lose coverage from their old employer and only be eligible for one af-fordable solution from a new employer that can simply block access. Portability means having to change coverage less often and only if the individual actively decides to. This means there is no oppor-tunity for someone who develops a “pre-existing condition” which would prohibit access, to lose coverage from changing employment.

The Ryan plan also would increase competition amongst providers and choice for consumers. Instead of signing on with whatever provider an individuals employee chose, they would have several choices of providers, and those providers would have to compete with each other

to attract individual customers.The largest benefit though is actually

that initial tax credit to individuals. Al-though Ryan does not say so, many see this credit as a method for actual uni-versal coverage. Why? Because by giving individuals a tax credit for signing on to health insurance rather than businesses reaches everyone, not just the employed. And combined with a more competitive insurance market and coverage portabil-ity, coverage will be come extraordinarily attractive for buyers. This sentiment of universal coverage is echoing through-out numerous publications and political blogs.

So why do I bring up Ryan’s healthcare proposal when talking about Obama’s jobs proposal? These two politicians could not seem more dissimilar, and it is no secret that they really don’t care for one another all that much. I bring it up because the benefits the Obama camp sees a payroll tax cut having on expand-ing employment and increasing wages also exist in Ryan’s plan by cutting em-ployer costs of providing healthcare. Pro-ponents of the Ryan plan make the same claims. Lowering the financial burden on businesses per employee will increase hiring and salaries. Obama shifts tax sav-ings and Ryan shifts untaxable benefit savings into the pockets of workers.

So what does this all mean? Maybe both Rep. Ryan and President Obama are both right? With all the finger-pointing going on in Washington, both sides of the House are missing the big picture. That politics have devolved. The eco-nomic principles that each party sub-scribes to really aren’t so different. In fact they actually advocate very similar principals for stimulating growth. Yet both inexplicably fault the others identi-cal reasoning. The moral of the story is, there is still plenty of good policy to be made to repair the American economy, and it’s coming from both sides of the aisle. Bipartisan cooperation can fix the little problems each party has with these bills, then pass them and get the coun-try moving. The new healthcare and jobs proposals are far from perfect, but they are both stepping-stones to a more pro-ductive economy. Washington has done enough nothing, that hasn’t worked. Let’s get talking, and let’s get moving to-ward a solution.

United States Congress Must Pass Comprehensive Jobs BillNATIONAL AFFAIRS

President Obama presented the American Jobs Act before a joint session of Congress on September 8, 2011.

Wikimedia Commons

PAGE 7

Todd Densen Contributor

CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 2011

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

Whether I am watching MSNBC or Fox, the consensus seems to be that Republicans don’t have

a candidate that they truly love for 2012. I see what these folks are saying: Hunts-man’s a liberal, Perry likes mandated vaccinations and is potentially lack-ing a brain, Romney’s a Mormon from Massachusetts, and the rest of them are nuts. Although a simplified summary, this closely resembles what many Re-publican Primary voters and caucus go-ers are feeling. The crazy thing is, this is not the first time this has happened. In fact, the 2012 Republican primary cycle closely resembles each cycle since the Reagan era. So, when Rachel Mad-dow makes fun of the right for “having no one,” or Bill O’reilly can’t understand how the GOP can’t find the right nomi-nee to beat the “anointed one,” I beg the question, how is this year different?

Let’s take for example the 2008 GOP nomination fight. During the spring and summer months of 2007, what were folks saying? 2008 was going to be a Clinton vs. Giuliani race. All polls showed Giu-liani as the national front-runner, and, while I won’t analyze the democratic side, the same could be said for Hillary. While Giuliani led, were primary voters “happy,” like so many pundits claim no one is now? The answer is no.

Many pundits consistently asked, how can the Italian Mayor of New York

City, with multiple bad marriages and support for liberal social policies take the nomination of the GOP. Doesn’t this seem similar to the question many have asked of the spring and summer’s front-runner Mitt Romney? I think so. Wheth-er it is Romney’s health care mandate or his seemingly John Kerry-like flip-flops, the same questions have been asked of Governor Romney.

What about Rick Perry, the candidate who so many in late August claimed was the one who would unite the party? He’s a better-looking Fred Thompson. With McCain’s “straight talk express” having numerous flat tires, and Giuliani facing low approval among social conservatives, everyone thought that the Actor/Sena-tor from Tennessee was the guy to beat Giuliani in the 2008 primaries. Upon entering the race, Thompson’s numbers neared the top—with Giuliani’s steadily sliding—and most pundits thought that he was the guy to beat, much like they have recently thought of Rick Perry. And then the debates came, and it be-came clear that Thompson would much rather be in a rocking chair in Tennes-see than on a debate stage. This is likely exactly where we are right now. There is a reason that as I write this, the name Chris Christie is being talked about on every news outlet. Perry has proven in-adequate to the business community, and may very well be starting to become weak among his core base of southern conservatives. So, the media, and prob-ably GOP donors, are looking for the savior.

I must break it to these folks: he or she won’t come.

This savior won’t come out of the wood works, because they never do. Even Rea-gan, a man revered as the modern GOP king, took a few attempts at running for the presidency before becoming the star of his generation. So, in all likelihood, we are looking at the field, and the few scenarios that can unfold.

Does Romney become Giuliani, and totally fall off the face of the earth? Probably not. This would only occur with the emergence of a strong moder-ate Republican, much like John McCain in 2008. Jon Huntsman, no matter how many languages he speaks, will not be that guy. He certainly is trying to pull off the magic of “Mac is back,” building an enormously expensive New Hamp-shire operation. Yet it is hard for me to believe that with the strong presence of Romney’s money, and Huntsman’s own flaws (e.g. working for Barack Obama) that he will be the 2012 John McCain.

Does Perry fade like Thompson, giv-ing way to a lesser social conservative candidate such as Bachman or Santou-rum to be the Huckabee of 2012? Prob-

ably not. No one has Huckabee’s talent on the stump, and Perry isn’t nearly as bad at politicking as Thompson. Yes, he gets tired on stage and puzzled by his own words, but he fits in well with so-cially conservative Iowans and tends to impress on the campaign trail.

This gives us what many see as a bor-ing nomination battle between Perry and Romney. And if history proves ac-curate, the more moderate Mitt Romney will be the nominee.

This is almost identical to McCain’s victory. Yes, McCain pulled off an amaz-ing comeback (both electorally and fi-nancially) but Romney will be, as McCa-in was, someone who does not perfectly satisfy the base, and may provide Rush Limbaugh with some extra (potentially unnecessary) anger. But, just as McCain selected Palin, Romney will take a loud tea partier like Mario Rubio to satisfy the bitter right, and then hope that the anti-Obama sentiment carries him to victory.

Did the GOP love Dole, Bush, or McCa-in? No, they were all flawed in one-way or another. The GOP, to some extent, is always searching for the more per-fect candidate. But, as history shows, it doesn’t matter all that much. To beat an incumbent, the sitting President’s num-bers matter most, not the GOP nominee. If Obama keeps up his poor approval ratings, keeps Joe Biden on the ticket, and hails over a notably bad economy, a Romney-Rubio/Daniels/Christie/Mar-tinez/Paul (Rand)/Hailey ticket will fair just fine come November.

Republican Nomination Process Historically ConsistentDavid KeithContributor

PAGE 8

Every day, 82 percent of Pough-keepsie Middle School students receive free or reduced lunches.

That means that over three-quarters of all students’ families make under $40,000 a year. This means eight out of ten middle schoolers are not just wor-ried about fitting in and trying to get rid of their acne; they are worried about their families’ futures. The percentage at local Poughkeepsie High School is also very high, at 70 percent. Seven out of ten high school students, in between studying for their SATs and filling out college applications, are also worrying about from where the next meal will come.

Statistics, of course, can be manipu-lated, but these numbers do not lie; pov-erty is a serious issue in Poughkeepsie. The Lunchbox at Dutchess Outreach, which provides food for community members in need in downtown Pough-keepsie, has seen and felt the effects of the economy personally. After Hurri-cane Irene flooded its basement and ru-ined much of the stored food, it has seen a significant increase in local need.

“Our stores are the worst I’ve ever seen, and we need food now more than ever” says Carol Hegener, a Dutchess Outreach employee who has worked there for more than 10 years. One in four Poughkeepsie residents are cur-rently living below the poverty line. These are people who now, more than ever, are relying on local food pantries to feed themselves and their families. Dutchess Outreach is not the only food pantry struggling; across the area, food pantries are seeing an increase in cli-ents, but a decrease in donations. Un-employment continues to rise, meaning more and more families are unable to get the food and housing they need.

Of course, poverty is not just a local issue. As politicians continue to bicker about the best way to solve the current economic crisis it is we, the citizens, who continue to suffer. But what can we do to fix Washington, or even Albany? Encourage your politicians to support anti-poverty initiatives or help for the neediest Americans; advocate extend-ing unemployment benefits and provid-ing more funding to food pantries and homeless shelters. How to fix unem-ployment is a political issue, but helping those in need is a civic duty.

Vassar College students are extremely

privileged; no matter what our eco-nomic background, we are receiving an education that will give us the tools to prevent poverty and empower the com-munity around us. Poverty is not just a Poughkeepsie problem; it is a Vassar problem as well. As we grow and learn the tools to better the world around us, we must also consider what we can do to better our own Vassar/Poughkeepsie community. To assume that the two are mutually exclusive is absurd, but to con-sider the two to be the same is equally ridiculous. As college students, we face different pressures than Poughkeepsie community members, and, as a result, we must be cognizant of both our differ-ences and of what we can do to inspire the community around us.

I do not contend that Vassar can al-leviate all the suffering going on in Poughkeepsie; however, each and every student, faculty, and staff member can do something to reduce local poverty. Help out at an after-school program, giving children the tools they need to succeed in the future. Take any course related to poverty in the Sociology, Edu-cation, Economics, and Political Sci-ence departments—many are available. Student organizations such as UNICEF, Hunger Action, and Habitat for Human-

ity all deal with poverty-related issues, too. With politicians displaying little interest in expending political capital on strengthening the welfare state, it is even more important for American citizens to combat poverty in their local communities. Vassar students need to gain a more nuanced understanding of urban poverty by both taking appropri-ate classes and by participating in orga-nizations that directly interact with the broader community.

Specifically, if you’re interested in getting more involved with poverty-spe-cific food security issues in Poughkeep-sie and helping out local food pantries, consider volunteering at a local food pantry or participating in a food drive. Operation Donation has food drives nearly every weekend to raise food for Dutchess Outreach with the help of the Poughkeepsie community, and they will be holding a canvassing event that will ask the whole Vassar community to par-ticipate. We cannot end poverty without serious support from our government and an economic policy that addresses the fundamental roots of poverty. How-ever, it is still our responsibility to make empowering Poughkeepsie during this difficult economic time our priority as members of the community.

Greater Student Participation Needed to Combat PovertyLauren MacLean

Contributor

“The GOP, to some extent, is always searching for the

more perfect candidate.”

CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 2011

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

The United States of America is em-broiled in an ongoing debate regard-ing innovation. In light of the recent

failure of Solyndra, members of Congress and the Obama administration are reeval-uating the methods of how the government becomes involved in research and develop-ment. Despite this, the level of awareness regarding innovation in the United States varies sharply from person to person, with many Americans content with “in-novation” being left as a linear economic variable. However, this linear view of in-novation is overly simplistic and counter-productive. The fi rst step toward regaining our competitive edge in the world market of technology is to discuss the nature of in-novation, and in order to do that, we must fi rst be introduced to the primary innova-tive engines in the country.

Giant research facilities are often found in science-fi ction movies (e.g. The Island) or computer games (e.g. the Portal series), yet there are many impressive research and development projects that exist well within the realm of reality. At a time when “innovation” is the buzzword amongst politicians, I believe that it is imperative that more people are familiar not only with traditional innovative practices but also with the growing movement towards alternative models. Firstly, the current, and more traditional, structure of Ameri-can innovation sits in three, well-defi ned areas: research universities, private indus-try, and federal laboratories. Almost all of the total research and development within the United States takes place in these three areas.

The fi rst of these is perhaps the most rec-ognizable. Research universities, or at least researchers/professors/graduate students from those universities, are often the sub-jects of front-page news when it comes to a new discovery. Institutions like the Mas-sachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of California at Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), have contributed massively to the understanding of the world around us, with each institution capable of boasting its fair share of Nobel Prize laureates and innovations.

Indeed, the research university model has many benefi ts. For the most part, re-search universities generally have a large population of enthusiastic research assis-tants from which to draw (i.e. students), and, when coupled with professors/re-searchers who have defi nite projects, they can lead the university towards becoming a center for innovation and discovery. How-ever, the model does not lend itself well to projects that span multiple disciplines, as the research tends to be individual, rath-er than team driven (although there is a growing movement towards team-based research). Regardless, research universi-ties continue to contribute to new ideas and new patents.

The second form of innovation actually dots the landscape around Vassar College and Poughkeepsie. Private laboratories such as those used by IBM to develop new

computer components represent a siz-able portion of total patents developed in the United States of America. Another ex-ample of private innovation is Pfi zer Inc., which is a world leader in pharmaceuti-cals. The list goes on.

Unfortunately, there are a number of is-sues with the current patent system that allows for very large gaps when it comes to marketable innovation. Under the cur-rent patent system, there is no regulation for the implementation of an inventor’s or a corporation’s patent. This leads to situ-ations in which companies and individu-als leave their patents in databases, wait for other companies to attempt to develop in the same fi eld, and then sue the latter company for infringement. In many ways, this is counter-productive to economic de-velopment and exposes the primary fl aw under the private industrial model: private industries innovate for profi t. When moti-vated purely by profi t, private industries will often not develop technologies that are no longer patentable or brand their in-novations as “trade secrets” (like the Coca-Cola formula), stunting overall technologi-cal growth.

The third primary form of American innovation rests with the federal govern-ment that operates on both indirect and direct systems of research and develop-ment. The fi rst one, which revolves around subsidies, tax breaks, guaranteed loans, contracts, and research grants, serves as a major source of funding for the private laboratory and research university models of innovation. For example, the National Institute of Health (NIH) is the largest single source of funding for medical re-search in the world while the Department of Energy Offi ce of Science is responsible for 40 percent of research in the physical sciences in the country.

The second, and slightly more contro-versial system is the vast network of fed-eral laboratories that exist throughout the nation. Ranging in scale from four fi eld researchers studying bees to the weapons development of Los Alamos National Lab-oratory, the federal laboratory system fi lls an important niche in overall national in-novation. While research universities are primarily individual-driven and private industry is interested in the market, fed-eral laboratories provide two things. First, they form multi-disciplinary research teams to address issues at the nodes of scientifi c fi elds. Second, they support the scientifi c community through what are called “user facilities.” These facilities in-clude the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the Continuous Electron Beam Accelera-tor Facility (CEBAF) at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF). They provide scientists and researchers, not only from the government but also from educational institutions and private laboratories, facilities that would not oth-erwise be in existence.

Although the above research and de-velopment models are the predominant sources of overall U.S. innovation, there is a growing movement towards decentral-ized scientifi c projects. One popular exam-ple of how ordinary people can take part in science is the website of the United States

Geological Survey—usgs.gov. If you follow the link, on the left-hand side is another link that reads, “Did you feel it?” This link allows an individual to report whether or not they felt an earthquake, which then leads to a constantly updated physical map that shows the epicenter and depicts how far-reaching the earthquake was. More re-cently, a team of scientists developed an even more interactive means for regular people to participate in high-impact sci-entifi c projects. Through the online game “Foldit,” the researchers posed a puzzle to the gaming community that scientists were unable to solve—the structure of a retrovirus enzyme in an AIDS-like virus. Foldit allows players to predict the struc-ture of proteins, allowing individuals or teams of gamers to compete with one an-other. These projects are in the same vein as allowing the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) to use your computer when it would otherwise be in sleep mode to process data.

Engaging the general public in science

has many potential benefi ts. First, it allows the public to actually be exposed to science. At a time when very few people can actual-ly discuss the technological underpinnings of an iPod and when the United States is falling behind in math and science educa-tion, simple exposure to science leads to renewed interest in understanding how the world around us works. Second, putting projects like data processing and fi guring out the structure of proteins into the pub-lic sphere allows for a more effi cient allo-cation of scientifi c resources. For example, instead of having several PhD’s run mod-els for hours on end with supercomputers, those same scientists can engage their su-percomputers to run sensitive calculations or process data that should not be released to the public (e.g. government top secret calculations or potential trade secrets like Google’s search algorithm) by having thousands of computer gamers essentially performing the modeling. Despite its in-herent limitations—such as limiting par-ticipation to data processing or computer modeling competitions (as harder science requires a better understanding of scien-tifi c and technological principles)—this populist style of scientifi c discovery may become more of a paradigm as the United States’ leadership in science is challenged by Asian and European competitors.

Another alternative to the three primary research and development models is one that is being pioneered in the deserts of the southwestern United States. In Sep-tember 2011, Pegasus Global Holdings—a technology development fi rm—announced

its plans to construct a “fake city” in the state of New Mexico. The company aims to reconstruct a typical American city, com-plete with a warehouse district, downtown, “old city,” residential suburbs, and agri-cultural communities, that would be able to house 300,000 people. The thing is, the company would only allow a select few to live there—350 engineers who would oc-cupy underground laboratories.

Dubbed the “Center for Innovation, Test and Evaluation,” this city would serve as an integrated research laboratory that would fi ll the gap between a sterile labo-ratory environment and urban settings where a technology may fi nally be imple-mented. Possible projects include testing the limits of wireless networks, operating driverless vehicles, and implementing geo-thermal energy sources in offi ce buildings. At an estimated cost of $200 million and spanning twenty square miles, this city would be rented out as testing grounds to universities and government agencies. In this way, this project diverges signifi cantly from traditional research and develop-ment models that stem from the private sector.

Instead of constructing a new laborato-ry, Pegasus Global Holdings, Inc. hopes to utilize the “Center” as a place for research-ers to collaborate. In a sense, it would fol-low roughly the same philosophy as the government’s “user facilities,” but with-out the direct cost in infrastructure to the taxpayer. In the company’s view, by pay-ing for the entire project, this would free up government resources to be invested in projects for sustainability, green energy, and robotics.

Why the lack of people, you ask? Well, for one thing, it would be a huge liabil-ity for the company if a driverless vehicle ploughed into some unlucky pedestrians, but the bigger principle that the company wishes to address is the idea that humans are too random to be variables. Herein lies the fundamental critique of the “Center:” If humans are deemed as random vari-ables, then how will researchers know if the technologies they hope to test in the city are actually applicable?

The second critique of the “Center” is that it buys into the idea that technology moves linearly. In contrast to a populist-based scientifi c model, in which society actively participates in the development of an innovation, the philosophy behind the “Center” almost rejects society com-pletely, preferring instead to break down the intricacies of urban life into equations and computer models. Although technol-ogy can be viewed as a series of inputs and outputs, that view is insuffi cient in that it is incomplete. Just as the market affects what products are sold, society affects the end result of technology.

In the end, innovation can be an amor-phous topic, which makes it perfect for politics. The more vague a subject, the easier it is for the public to accept it at face value. In reality, innovation is a complex issue that operates on multiple levels and different scales. Before we engage in dis-cussions on how to increase innovation, we should start by developing a better un-derstanding of what innovation is and how we can achieve it.

The Shifting Trends of American Innovation Alaric Chinn

Editor-in-Chief

PAGE 9

The Molecular Foundry is a Department of En-ergy Offi ce of Science user facility—a premier nanoscience research center in the U.S.

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CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 2011

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

On July 11, 2011, just under one hundred West Virginia residents traveled to the Capitol, in Charles-

ton, to rally for a meeting of the Legisla-tive Select Committee on Marcellus Shale. Leaning against the modest number of folding chairs assembled for the rally were signs, ranging in vitriol from “Ask Ques-tions First, Drill Later!” to “If Bin Ladin (sic) had thought of fracking, he would have rejoiced at the opportunity it is pro-viding.” Lawmakers, would-be politicians, environmentalists, and concerned citizens spoke, sang, and preached against the hori-zontal drilling hydraulic fracturing process, popularly known as hydrofracking. Some warned against potential environmental consequences, others called for stricter regulation and government involvement, yet others decried the “oilmen” swindling elderly West Virginians and stealing their land to pollute it and make a profi t. Most of the speakers came from Morgantown, a city in north central West Virginia between the two panhandles, a city that maintained a tenuous hold on the unfractured gas be-neath its surface.

Morgantown banned horizontal hydrau-lic fracturing within its city limits and up to a mile outside of them on June 22, 2011 in response to public outcry against North-east Natural Energy LLC, a drilling compa-ny that earlier made a contract with private landowners to drill two wells within a mile of Morgantown’s main water supply, the Monongahela River. Legal battles and gar-bled rhetoric emerged from opponents and supporters of the ban. Calls for an extended ban were met with demands for jobs and energy; calls for immediate drilling were met with skepticism.

People in Morgantown took sides, or at least a few people did. For an issue that made the front page of Morgantown’s newspaper, The Dominion Post, the resis-tance and concerned citizens groups were surprisingly small. One group, able to mobilize a large number of supporters to spill outside city council meetings to speak against the drilling, and eventually fi ve hundred to join an e-mail list, was respon-sible for the ban. The opposite side, those in favor of hydraulic fracturing, also had a strong core consisting of employees from natural gas companies, an occasional West Virginia University economist, and fi rms with correlating business interests.

The politics of mobilization make hy-draulic fracturing diffi cult to understand. Anyone seriously interested in investigat-ing the danger or benefi t knows that the problem is not interpreting a vast number of reports and data collections, but rather interpreting the sparse non-political scien-tifi c materials we have. And for those who just want to take a cursory look and see if there is an economic benefi t, or an environ-mental cost, it is too easy to get caught up in exaggerated claims and half-truths.

So when I attempted to refl ect on my just completed freshman year, in the back seat of my parents’ minivan on the way from Poughkeepsie, NY, to Morgantown, WV, and I heard my parents talk about hydrau-lic fracturing, I wanted to get involved. I

contacted the people in charge of the anti-fracking group, eventually christened WV-4MOM (West Virginians for a Moratorium on Marcellus shale drilling), and started researching for their website, occasionally attending city council meetings and rallies.

Although the ban was passed, the fi ght seemed like a losing battle for the environ-mentalists and WV4MOM members. Every day, driving to work, I saw Northeast Natu-ral Energy’s well pad next to the Mononga-hela River, a reminder that it was already built, and just being postponed. And even though I worked with a resistance group, I could not shake the feeling in my mind that I did not know the whole story, or even part of it. I read the Times Topic on natural gas drilling, the few public Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cases, Gasland, industry responses to Gasland, Gasland re-sponses to industry responses to Gasland, and my local newspaper, but I still did not feel like I fully understood what was going on. So, as Lucy Maynard Salmon, founder of the Vassar History Department, pre-scribed, I went to the source.

On a rainy afternoon on Monday, August 15, I traveled to my local IHOP to meet a hy-drofracker. Dennis Xander, Vice-President of the Independent Oil and Gas Association of West Virginia, a portly man with a fi rm handshake and a thirst for iced tea, told me he has been in the natural gas business for

more than 37 years. I asked him if Marcellus drilling was a

recent development. “Well, no. We have drilled through the Marcellus for years, we’ve never thought it was productive until recently.” Mr. Xander explained that this is one of the general misunderstandings of the hydraulic fracturing process. Most people hear the term hydraulic fracturing and associate it with a “new” process of get-ting gas from the ground, but gas has been drilled on American soil since the 1940s. The difference that has been making the news is not that drillers are using water, chemicals, or entirely different materials, it’s the scale. The development of horizon-tal fracturing and discovering the correct chemical composition to fracturing the Marcellus shale plate have been the new

part of the story. Dave McMahon, a founding member of

the West Virginia Surface Owners’ Rights Organization and prominent West Vir-ginia attorney, explained the difference in a phone conversation. “Fracking has been done for decades, they used to use a little bit of water, now they’re using three Olym-pic size swimming pools.” This distinction becomes important when interpreting data. Mr. Xander gave me a document en-titled “A Fluid Situation: Typical Solution* Used in Hydraulic Fracturing.” The asterisk is for a disclaimer at the bottom: “The spe-cifi c compounds used in a given fracturing operation will vary depending on source water quality and site, and specifi c charac-teristics of the target formation. The com-pounds listed above are representatives of the major material components used in the hydraulic fracturing of natural gas shales. Compositions are approximates.” On the document text on a large blue wa-ter pail boldly states that Frack fl uid is “99.51% water and sand.” The amount of water needs to be considered here, 99.51% of 7.5 million gallons of water comes out to 7,463,250 gallons of water, meaning there are still 36,750 gallons of other chemicals: other chemicals, of course, being one of the defi ning aspects of the fracturing debate.

The composition of fracturing fl uid used in Marcellus drilling is controversial for many different reasons. Some sources claim that fracturing fl uid contains ben-zene, a chemical familiar to any students in organic chemistry. Benzene is extremely toxic and heavily regulated by the Clean Water Drinking Act, legislation that natu-ral gas drillers are not required to comply with. “The Halliburton loophole?” said Mr. Xander, referring to the popular title of the exemptions. “The government set up the Clean Water Act, it’s a federal law that I have to comply with and that everyone else has to comply with.” Xander contin-ued: “They granted exemptions to certain industries for certain reasons, they looked at [natural gas drilling] and they said no incidence of any problems with fracking so we’ll give them an exemption on the use of water.”

“When we build a tank we have to build a dike around it to prevent a rupture.” Xan-der noted that when ruptures do happen, it is mostly due to vandalism. “So you have to have a dike around the tank, that’s an EPA rule. We then have EPA rules and regula-tion with state. A lot of the things like ero-sion and sedimentation control plans fall under federal guidelines too, so on your soil and erosion control plans the state pre-scribes a procedure you have to follow that the feds approved, so by complying with the states you’re complying federally with the EPA inspections.”

Kathy Cash, leader of WV4MOM, in an interview on August 15, 2011, took issue with the federal exemption and state over-sight. “The WV DEP (Department of Envi-ronmental Protection) has never refused a permit and they’ve never cited any driller for contamination. You go to Wetzel Coun-ty and you look at the pollution there, there is evidence of contamination there.”

“I was talking to one farmer, he has skin infections, his dog lost its hair. I think 80 of his lambs last year died; that’s never hap-

pened before. When people come forward and they see this they say, ‘Oh you’re get-ting contamination from some junkyard down the road.’ But they never had con-tamination before in their water, but they’ll cite something.” Ms. Cash continued, “In effect they’re lying, I don’t know how else to describe what they do. What’s happening is people are being told don’t drink your wa-ter. Why are companies telling people don’t drink your water, why are people in Wetzel County drinking bottled water if there is no contamination?”

Determining what caused contamina-tion and pollution is a problematic aspect of hydraulic fracturing. Critics like Josh Fox, maker of the fi lm Gasland, argue that the lack of federal regulation results in un-derfunded state environmental protection agencies skimping on regulation or being unable to perform necessary tests. Mr. Xan-der disputed this argument by referencing the notable scenes in the Gasland fi lm, where people begin setting their water taps on fi re. “In West Virginia, people with wa-ter wells, their water is coming off the coal seams. Methane is on coal seams. When they got to investigating this and they took a sample of the deep Marcellus gas and the shallow water level gas, and ran it through a chromatograph, they showed a totally different chemistry. The chemistry proves that it’s not coming from Marcellus gas.” Mr. Xander also referenced the area of Wirt County, WV, known as Burning Springs be-cause of the natural (in the sense that it was there before human manipulation) gas that would bubble from the water.

“I fractured a well 500 feet from my house, and 500 feet from my water well, do you think for a nanosecond that I would have shit in my own mess gear and frac-tured a well that might have caused my children or my family any kind of harm? I fervently believe there was no danger there or I wouldn’t have done it.”

Several state environmental regulators claim that one gallon of benzene can con-taminate up to one million gallons of water. Mr. Xander denied that any West Virginia driller would use a chemical as toxic as ben-zene. He claimed that spray deodorant con-tains more toxic chemicals than frack fl uid. He added that perhaps in other mineral plates, like the Balkan shale in the Dakotas, drillers may have used diesel fuel and tolu-ene, another toxic chemical, to break up the chemically different oil shale.

Yet the regulation question remains. “The feds don’t regulate what you pump. Some crackjob with mineral rights says, ‘you can pump anything you want down those wells,’ and you could. If it’s liquid you could pump it.” Mr. Xander recalled the story of a mineral rights owner who re-fused to sell his land to drillers. “He said, ‘You could even pump medical waste down those wells.’ Where did that come from? Basically chemicals are expensive, and you aren’t going to pump something that you don’t need.”

Mr. Xander’s last claim is disputed. Dur-ing a later interview on August 17, 2011, Hiram Lewis, a West Virginia attorney, for-mer Marine, and Republican candidate for Attorney General, Secretary of State, and the United States Senate says otherwise. “There’s no regulation as to what is put in

Dennis Xander, Vice-President of the Indepen-dent Oil and Gas Association of West Virginia.

Nathan Tauger

PAGE 10

See Misunderstandings on page 11

Nathan TaugerContributor

Vassar Student Investigates Hometown Hydrofracking

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 2011

Misunderstandings Plague Hydrofracking Debate

PAGE 11

frack disposal sites. Drillers can get paid to dump other companies’ waste; that’s the part of the industry they don’t tell you about.”

This leads to one of the more important clarifi cations for people wishing to be just “informed” about hydraulic fracturing. Mr. Xander insisted that besides one anomaly, a shallow vertical well in Jackson County WV that polluted groundwater, that hy-draulic fracturing is entirely safe—the pro-cess of using water to fracture shale many thousands of feet below the ground has never polluted water or been condemned by the EPA.

But when the entire procedure is taken into account—the heavy traffi c from semi-trucks transporting thousands of gallons of water and chemicals, the disposal of waste water and other chemicals, and what to do with the well after drilling—it has poten-tial fl aws. Mr. McMahon understood this: “The world needs to understand it’s not just fracking, but the whole process.” He referenced his presentation, called “The Industrialization of West Virginia,” which he prepared for surface and mineral own-ers that own either the property above the shale or the shale itself. In it he emphasizes the auxiliary problems of hydraulic fractur-ing: wells owned by companies that have gone out of business and that the state lacks resources to plug, rural roads damaged by large water and chemical transport trucks, and sections of forest and wildlife killed by sprayed waste water (a permitted action).

Ms. Cash also brought up roads. “We were in Wetzel County, and one day there were 80 truck accidents.” Ms. Cash contin-ued, “The parents have been so worried that their children are going to get hit by trucks that they’re following the school buses and staying there when their children have to cross. The roads are crumbling.”

Quality of regulation depends on the number of regulators. Mr. Xander argued, based on a sheet he gave me titled “Natu-ral Gas Industry Facts,” that because the number of new well permits has sharply declined (and it has, from 1959 vertical shallow wells and 23 horizontal deep wells in 2007 to 142 shallow wells and 41 deep wells in 2010) that more regulators would be a waste of taxpayer money.

Mr. McMahon opposed this claim. “That’s laughable. There are 4,000 wells out there that still have an operator that should be plugged. The state is not making [the op-erators] plug them because there are not enough inspectors.” McMahon continued, “There are 5,000 wells that we’ve waited so long to plug that the operators have gone out of business, and the state is plugging 25 a year, using our money.” There is also rea-son to believe that operators may be slight-ing regulation. “I can’t tell you the number of times the surface owners call me: ‘I’ve caught him red handed, here’s a prob-lem.’ The inspector comes out and they’ve already fi xed it. The inspectors don’t do enough fi nds to deter them.”

Ms. Cash also protested the lack of in-spectors. “I was just in Tygart, Philipi (Barbour County), there’s one area where they’re going to put up 86 wells, they’re drilling for 86 wells in this one small area, and no inspectors, or two inspectors? How

are the inspectors going to manage this, the inspectors are going to need specifi c train-ing, they need to be there when they’re pouring the cement, they need to appear regularly.”

Why are there so many abandoned wells? About mid-way through the inter-view Mr. Xander remarked, “I really think all these environmental problems are going to get solved because people are just going to stop drilling.” There is a very reasonable economic phenomenon that explains why this is happening. “What people don’t un-derstand is that this is an industry that’s been so successful that it’s quickly putting itself out of business. You can’t afford to go spend 5 or 6 million dollars for one of these wells if the price of gas is lower than 4 bucks. But every time a fi rm go out and dig a new well they’re increasing the supply.” Large drilling companies, like Dominion and Exxon, are able to move from econom-ically unproductive activities like fracking to other methods of natural gas extrac-tion; smaller companies face the prospect of bankruptcy. Many smaller fi rms now see buying wells as a kind of future investment for a potential overseas or more receptive American market.

This explains the ambivalence to more regulation for hydraulic fracturing. More

regulation occasionally means more un-necessary steps, such as a proposal that encouraged gas drillers to capture and “re-cycle” gas unfi t for domestic use or effi cient purifi cation, which hurt the revenue of a

company. The real harm from not recog-nizing that there is a legitimate reason for natural gas drillers, or any other business owners, to oppose steps that unnecessarily hurt their revenue is the effect on discourse. A lack of concern from citizens regarding the economic livelihood of gas drillers or other fi rms is matched by a lack of concern regarding environmental or social issues.

“People seem to think oil and gas is a zero sum game. They seem to think that if Exx-on is making money you’re losing money. That’s bullshit. If Exxon is making money the economy is doing well, everyone will have jobs. Exxon’s rate of return corporate-wise is shitty. Coca-Cola’s rate of return is better, Coca-Cola doesn’t have any explora-tion risk.” Mr. Xander continued. “Explain to me why Apple is a bigger company than Exxon, what risk has Apple ever taken? They’re bigger than Exxon, why aren’t all these whackos mad at Apple? The funny thing is, all the whackos have Apple, they’re not mad at Apple, they’re mad at Exxon, I don’t get it, I just don’t get it.”

In addition to environmental concerns,

social issues have emerged from horizontal fracturing. “The naysayers want to paint this as a big battle between surface owners and big gas companies.” Mr. Xander said, referencing the dichotomy present in many West Virginia counties. Some property holders own only the surface rights, and not the minerals beneath their property. Mr. Xander continued. “What about the mineral owners, they want to legislate all these things, you can’t drill here; you can’t drill there. What about the guy that owns the minerals that’s been paying taxes for the minerals for the past 75 years? What about his rights? If you think that I lay awake at night thinking of ways to screw over the surface owner -- why would I want to do that? That’s why I work in Barbour County; surface owners own their minerals.”

For other parts of the state, the con-fl ict between surface and mineral owners has been very real. “Wetzel County wasn’t prepared for what was going to happen to them.” Ms. Cash said. “Their community has been destroyed not only in terms of roads, air quality, and water, but their fab-ric of life has been destroyed in that you have people in families and neighbors not speaking to each other, fi ghting. It’s creat-ed a kind of unfortunate Hatfi eld and Mc-Coy type of situation.”

At the end of the interview I walked out-side to Mr. Xander’s truck to pick up a few fl iers. As we walked he told me about one of the State Legislature’s special sessions, held to gather public opinion on gas drilling for constructing legislation, in Clarksburg, WV. After explaining that there were not as many out of state cars as the opposition to drilling alleged, he commented on another one of their claims. “It was 11 pm and they said, ‘Oh look the gas industry left, they’re scared!’ These guys have to get up at 5:00 AM in the morning to work, most of these other clowns don’t even have jobs.”

On the drive from Morgantown to New York I wanted to forget about hydraulic fracturing. But knowing that even if Mor-gantown was temporarily safe (the ban had been lifted a few days earlier, but an appeal was in the works), that people in Wetzel County and other areas of West Virginia might be exploited for cheap gas bothered me. I still have not reconciled my skepticism of hydraulic fracturing with my implicit support of it, my use of electric-ity and products that exist because of the energy supplied by it. I do not see an end to fracturing coming any time soon; Mr. Xander pointed out that analysts estimate that there is enough gas in the Marcellus to keep the nation running at its current ener-gy use for 93 years. And as long as we keep demanding energy, and alternative energy sources remain underfunded and problem-atic, we are going to end up using the Mar-cellus. I can only hope that people of West Virginia are able to push for the proper and necessary regulations to keep all inhabit-ants of West Virginia safe and healthy.

On Friday, September 30, 2011, North-east Natural Energy began fracking in the Mylan Industrial Park, less than a mile outside of Morgantown. On Thurs-day two people protested, on Friday none. The committee from the State Legislature has not yet passed any kind of law or new regulations with respect to inspectors or disclosure of chemicals.

An example of anti-hydraulic fracturing statistics.

Continued from Vassar on page 10

Nathan Tauger

CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 2011

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Palestine’s Disastrous United Nations Statehood Proposal

Mahmoud Abbas (right) meets with Benjamin Netanyahu (middle) and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (left).

Flickr.com

PAGE 12

Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, sparked a diplomatic crisis by announcing

plans to appeal to the United Nations Se-curity Council for international recognition of a Palestinian state. In order to secure full U.N. member voting powers, the Palestin-ians would need to secure affi rmative votes from nine of the fi fteen nations on the Se-curity Council. As one of the fi ve permanent members of the committee, the United States possesses veto power over any proposal, and American offi cials have repeatedly informed Abbas that they intend to veto any resolution demanding Palestinian statehood. After this process fails, Abbas could submit his pro-posal to the U.N. General Assembly, where Palestine enjoys widespread popularity, and request to be elevated to an enhanced non-member observer status akin to the Vatican. This would allow Palestine to sit on numerous committees, and obtain more direct access to such international institutions as the World Bank and International Criminal Court.

Quite simply, Abbas’s policy marks a wildly irresponsible attempt to circumvent direct negotiations with Israel. Employing the cheapest of political theatrics, Mr. Abbas, who at 76 has stated his plans of retiring next year, aspires to avoid the painful concessions required of all parties.

International recognition of a Palestinian state will do absolutely nothing to ameliorate the violence in the region. Since the peace ne-gotiations of 1979, diplomats have struggled to defi ne the borders of a Palestinian state, respect Israeli security demands, fi nd relief for Palestinian refugees, and determine the fate of Jerusalem, a city claimed by both sides as their capital. A United Nations resolution resolves none of these issues. In fact, it would probably exacerbate tensions and lead to more bloodshed. Obviously, any declaration that contradicts Israel’s perception of the cur-rent state borders will facilitate a deadly con-fl ict between the two parties. If Israel’s con-sent to any fi nal resolution is so fundamental to achieving regional stability, it is diffi cult to understand why Abbas wants to utilize the U.N. at all.

Several recent quotes from Abbas reveal that he understands just how damaging this process will be for his own people. He con-ceded that several American offi cials warned him of how “things will be very diffi cult after September,” reminding him that any push for U.N. statehood would inspire U.S. policy-makers to impose punitive measures against the Palestinian Authority.

True to their word, numerous Congress-men from both political parties engaged in an escalating competition designed to see who could craft the most draconian punishment. For example, Representative Steve Israel (D-NY) supported a measure that would end all bilateral military assistance to any country that voted in support of the Palestinian Au-thority. Representative Joe Walsh (R-IL) advanced an even more anti-Palestine bill, advocating Israel’s right to seize the West Bank in response to any Palestinian call for statehood.

Such extreme assertions have shifted the debate so much that simply cutting off direct

aid to the Palestinian Authority now looks like a nuanced, moderate compromise. Pass-ing this legislation would be nothing short of disastrous for the Palestinian people. Despite the soaring rhetoric of Arab brotherhood and nationalism, it is actually the United States and Europe that provide the vast majority of the vital aid keeping Palestinian refugees alive. Last year, the United States provided over $200 million directly to the Palestinian Authority’s budget, constituting over 15 per-cent of their aggregate budget. The Palestin-ian Authority suffers from a $600 million defi cit and remains unable to convince other Arab states to provide their promised pay-ments. The loss of American provided “Eco-nomic Support Funds” would ruin the Pal-estinian Authority’s admirable advances in state building over the past decade. In many respects, President Abbas sold the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority to the interna-tional community by highlighting how his administration augmented the region’s in-stitutional and infrastructural strength. The economic deterioration resulting from his U.N. gambit will impede any future advances

and, consequently, weaken the legitimacy of his government.

Several media sources confi rm that Repre-sentative Nita Lowey (D-NY) sent President Abbas a detailed accounting of this legislation and urged him to return to direct two-state negotiations. His decision to place a dramatic political gesture above the welfare of his peo-ple demonstrates an appalling callousness.

President Abbas also risks inspiring a broader xenophobia and anti-internationalist spirit within the United States. The chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), drafted a bill depriving funds “from any U.N. Agency or program that upgrades the status of the PLO/Palestinian observer mission.” This bill simply serves as one manifestation of a narrative that depicts all international organs as vast bureaucracies exclusively interested in strengthening terror-ists and challenging American sovereignty.

The Palestinian Authority appears quite content to neglect the lessons of the last

twenty years in international confl ict resolu-tion. In every diplomatic impasse deemed intractable, solutions have only resulted from constructive dialogues between the two op-posing parties. While states external to the dispute are frequently required to moderate these talks, enduring peace treaties can only be constructed through good-faith negotia-tions, not international declarations. From the Dayton Peace Accords to the Good Friday Agreement, the two opposing groups over-came disputes historically thought irreconcil-able.

Indeed, even Israel’s own experience with Egypt highlights the critical role of direct ne-gotiations. With the Camp David Accords, Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Is-raeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin re-solved the future of the Sinai Peninsula and initiated what, at worst, could be deemed a “cold peace” between Israel and Egypt. A U.N. declaration proposing the future of mili-tary commitments in the Sinai surely would have been as ineffective as a U.N. resolution striving to defi ne the borders of Palestine in our contemporary crisis.

Unfortunately, the Palestinian Authority’s chronicling of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process also obfuscates how close they came to achieving a substantive two-state solu-tion in July 2000. The Camp David Summit witnessed President Bill Clinton moderate a discussion that would have provided Pales-tinians with the vast majority of their West Bank and Gaza Strip demands, with only some Israeli bypass roads deemed essential for security purposes. Historians may dispute the merits of this agreement, but both Clinton and Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami observed that the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat failed to advance a Palestinian coun-ter-proposal. This seminal summit provides two essential insights: all parties must be pre-pared to submit constructive solutions (even if they contain diffi cult concessions), and the Israeli government was willing to move to-wards a viable two-state solution. Although the rise of conservative politicians in Israel has made it increasingly diffi cult to negotiate,

it remains disingenuous to denounce two-state dialogues as counter-productive and unlikely to engender a meaningful peace.

From a strictly legal perspective, it remains doubtful if the current construction of Pales-tine even meets the standard for statehood entrenched by the 1933 Montevideo Conven-tion on the Rights and Duties of States. Es-tablishing a declarative theory of statehood as a component of customary international law, this treaty articulated four criteria for statehood: a) a permanent population; b) a defi ned territory; c) a government; and d) the capacity to enter into relations with other states. Several legal theorists doubt whether Palestine actually fulfi lls this fourth principle. There exists a divide between the Palestinian Authority, the governing body of the West Bank that accepts Israel’s existence, and Hamas, the terrorist organization that rules Gaza and perpetually calls for the destruction of Israel. With this unresolved tension in gov-ernance, it remains diffi cult to see how Pales-tine could engage in diplomatic relations with other states in any sort of coherent fashion.

Of course, none of this analysis should obscure the stunning ineptitude of the Ne-tanyahu government. Faced with a virulently anti-Israeli movement brewing in Egypt (as evidenced by Cairo’s ejection of the Israeli diplomat) and deteriorating relations with both Turkey and Jordan, Netanyahu has failed to modify his alienating, far-right for-eign policy in any substantial way. Instead, he relies upon his American allies for help on every major crisis, and threatens to exploit his immense infl uence over Congress if Presi-dent Obama even considers a new Middle East platform.

When the Palestinian Authority announced its intention to call upon the United Nations, Netanyahu had two options: either shape the U.N. debate with his own proposal calling for a two-state solution or offer to initiate a meaningful direct discussion with the Pales-tinian Authority. He elected to do neither.

Given Israel’s intransigence and the contin-ued production of settlements, it is clear that President Obama must exert greater pressure on the Netanyahu government to begin a productive dialogue with the Palestinians. He quite justifi ably fears what an antagonized Is-rael Lobby will do to his electoral chances in 2012. But maintaining the status quo proves even more dangerous. Since the inception of negotiated conferences for a two-state solu-tion, America has strived to play the role of the “honest negotiator.” This recent diplomatic crisis has challenged America’s status as the pre-eminent power broker in the region, and invited other European nations to take over this role. Surely losing nearly 70 years of in-fl uence in the most important peace process in the world to the French will not play well with the American electorate either.

The United States must, therefore, ex-ert greater diplomatic pressure on Israel to engage in good-faith negotiations with Pal-estine. However, the Palestinian people de-serve a leader who is more concerned with their fundamental human rights than carving out the most superfi cial of political legacies. Democratically elected leaders possess an af-fi rmative obligation to promote the welfare of their citizens. Mr. Abbas has abrogated this responsibility in the most shameful fashion in order to perform a sweeping political gesture bound to devastate the Palestinian people.

Thomas EneringNational & Foreign Affairs Editor

CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 2011

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

On May 1, 2011 the White House an-nounced that Osama Bin Laden had been captured and killed; an opera-

tion that had been in the works for at least four years, beginning when intelligence discovered the name of Bin Laden’s most trusted courier. The operation offi cially began on March 14, 2011 when President Barrack Obama held the fi rst of fi ve national security meetings to discuss plans for action. The operation, how-ever, was never offi cially discussed with any other country, including Pakistan.

Fire opened when Bin Laden resisted the assault. Weapons were found in the room, and Bin Laden allegedly never made any attempt to retrieve them. The successful mission left him, three other men, and one woman, said to have been used as a human shield, dead.

Bin Laden’s body was then fl own to Af-ghanistan and buried at sea, in accordance with Islamic tradition. Muslim burial law has four requirements—washing, shrouding in white cloth, ritual prayer and burial. Islamic law experts argue that there was no need for his body to be buried at sea, and that it was in fact inappropriate to do so, as it was untrue to claim that no one in the Muslim world was ready to receive his body. US of-fi cials contended that they did not want Bin Laden’s grave to become a shrine and there was no time to negotiate with other countries on behalf of a possible burial space.

Jubilance and euphoria swept the nation as crowds swarmed the White House in an-ticipation of the news. Across the country, citizens rejoiced and openly celebrated the news of Bin Laden’s death. Often thought of as public enemy number one, Bin Laden’s defeat offered a profound sense of closure to many citizens. Others, however, feared repri-sals.

After 10 years of hunting, Bin Laden was found in the city of Abbottadad, an hour

north of Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. Natu-rally, many questions were raised about the country’s involvement in the search for Bin Laden. The Pakistani military leadership was deeply humiliated and angered by the raid, having received no warning about the American plan. The United States’ operation to capture Bin Laden was thus intended to be a stealth mission: move in and move out completely under Pakistan’s radar.

Three weeks later, militants attacked the Pakistani naval base in Karachi. The Paki-stani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack and argued that it represented a re-taliatory strike for the assassination of Bin Laden. This attack appeared to affi rm the pundits’ bleakest predictions: the assassina-tion of Bin Laden would ultimately usher in an era of regional volatility sustained by ter-rorists’ avenging strikes.

Pakistan clearly demonstrated their dis-satisfaction with the raid by arresting fi ve informants who had supported the CIA dur-ing the operation’s developmental stages. At the same time, the Obama Administration sought support from Pakistan in ending the war in Afghanistan, but acknowledged their recent intransigence. When asked to rate Pakistan’s cooperation with the United States on counterterrorism operations on a scale of one to ten, Michael J. Morell, deputy CIA di-rector, replied with a “three.”

Similarly, American offi cials hoped to exploit the momentum derived from killing Bin Laden to launch more expansive attacks against other prominent Al-Qaeda offi cials. They expressed their anger when Pakistan policymakers attempted to distance them-selves from American intelligence and coun-terterrorism operatives.

In many respects, launching an attack against Bin Laden without obtaining any pri-or consent marked the fi nal injustice in a long string of overtly aggressive U.S. policies. For instance, last January, a CIA contractor killed two Pakistani civilians on a street in Lahore,

prompting the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to refuse to participate in CIA opera-tions any longer. The struggle American of-fi cials face in obtaining visas marks one more manifestation of Pakistani resistance.

Following widespread outrage that an os-tensible ally supported Bin Laden and en-gaged in pervasive misuse of U.S. military aid, the Obama Administration suspended hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Pakistani military in July of 2011. By adopting such a hardline stance, the Obama Adminis-tration hoped to force Pakistan to accept the return of American military training per-sonnel, vigorously target terrorist cells, and employ greater transparency measures to minimize corruption. Previous aid packages included reimbursement for costs of deploy-ing more than 100,000 soldiers to combat terrorism, training assistance and military hardware, as well equipment that Pakistan refused to accept. Desperate to root out ter-rorists remaining in Pakistan, the Obama Administration has suggested that it would resume aid in exchange for gaining greater ISI support.

Unfortunately, the extreme tension of the past months makes clear that Pakistan and the United States will not be able to foster the relationship hoped for when the Obama Ad-ministration gained power. Keenly aware of the collapse of diplomatic relations in 1990, the Obama Administration is struggling to maintain ties with Pakistan, but the situation continues to deteriorate.

“Trust issues” comes to mind when I think about Pakistani and U.S relations. The situa-tion here is lose-lose. Had the United States provided Pakistan with signifi cant informa-tion, we might have risked losing Bin Laden. Now, because we didn’t contact their govern-ment, we may have lost Pakistani support.

Perhaps American offi cials also unjustly anticipated a monolithic response of adula-tion from the Pakistani people after the as-sassination of Bin Laden. Drone attacks and

invasive counter-terrorism programs have alienated large portions of the Pakistani pop-ulation. It was clearly unreasonable to expect the response in Islamabad to replicate the exuberance of Washington D.C.

In many respects, the cuts in military aid appear shortsighted. Former Pakistani diplo-mat, Maleeha Lodhi, points to how the U.S. imposed sanctions on Pakistan during the 1990s, and consequently, witnessed its in-fl uence with the military diminish. It seems likely that the same thing will occur today. Indeed, the Pakistani military experienced great humiliation when the United States’ Special Forces penetrated deep into the country without being detected by the ISI. A policy as combative as eliminating aid seems unlikely to ameliorate the ISI’s chagrin or inspire a closer relationship. As a major nu-clear power and a neighbor to Afghanistan, Pakistan remains vital to American security interests.

Therefore, I wonder why the U.S. so hast-ily determined to reduce military funding: restricting fi nancial support hardly seems the best way to encourage Pakistan to aid the United States in its fi ght against terrorism. If anything, reducing aid diminishes America’s soft power presence in the Middle East.

Perhaps the initial operation should have aspired to capture Bin Laden rather than ex-plicitly seeking to kill him. Holding Bin Laden accountable for his crimes, which in the end are arguably punishable by death, may have prevented such diplomatic fallout and the subsequent retaliatory attacks.

By this point, it may be impossible to re-build a mutually benefi cial diplomatic rela-tionship with Pakistan. Reliance on them as an ally appears precarious, at best. The Unit-ed States should carefully observe developing political trends in Pakistan and remain cogni-zant of how it fi ts into our larger geo-political interests, but security interests might be bet-ter served by carefully cultivating alliances with other nearby states.

United States-Pakistan Relations Require ReevaluationShivani DaveContributor

PAGE 13

The European Economic Community (EEC) is currently at the precipice. For the third time in less than two years, the Greek

economy looks like it will collapse, and Italy doesn’t appear too far behind. The fundamen-tals of the Greek economy are unsound, and their current government has not taken the initiative to make the necessary changes.

Established in 1958, the EEC predates the European Union (EU) by more than three de-cades and the currency by almost 41 years. Yet in a continent as economically diverse as Europe, fault lines have divided countries into two distinct camps: those suffering from crippling debt and faltering economies, and those that have come to be viewed as economic powerhouses, namely Germany and France. Outside of China, the Ger-man economy is the world’s strongest coming out of the Great Recession. In modern history (excluding very short aberrations), the North-ern European economies have dominated their neighbors to the south, and, with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent establishment of a greater economic community, their econom-

ic superiority has become conspicuous to even the most oblivious observers.

The European Union is being criticized over the way it has dealt with struggling economies, particularly Greece and Italy—two countries with a substantial welfare framework but little to sup-port even the most basic fundamentals necessary for growth. Basic economics can be employed to highlight why incentives in these countries are perverse. Welfare initiatives are a necessary part of the modern economy, and socialist govern-ments have traditionally sought to entrench ex-pansive state-funded social programs. However, the heavy burdens caused by such a system are hindering the Greek economy’s ability to grow by allocating more money than the state possesses to a relatively young populace (the average age in Greece is roughly 43 years old). This will obvi-ously cause the economy to sputter and die.

The problem with pushing austerity measures in countries like these should be obvious; the state would stem the flow of aid to the needy, without providing any legitimate alternative measures. There are no grand jobs programs available, and few funds exist to spur job creation. Furthermore, the regulatory climate surrounding the finance institutions in these countries is nonexistent (the

only country in the world with adequate regula-tory systems in place is the Republic of France, which only introduced them after a myriad of scandals).

This is the second time that Greece has tee-tered on the brink of collapse in as many years. This alone should throw up red flags, since it re-flects a problem of economic management. There is a systemic problem in the Greek economy that cannot be solved simply by fanning the fire with money. The proposed bailout amount is 109 bil-lion euros (roughly $148.6 billion). So, why not, for once, let the acropolis burn so that we can rebuild it? Bailouts, if not applied correctly, can engender perverse incentives and will ultimately lead to stagnation, and, in some cases, a repeat of the recession.

By no means should the European commu-nity stop aiding Greece, but the proposed stop-gap measures simply will not work. As such, we should let Greece fail, forgive their debts, and use the money otherwise allocated for the bailout to help rebuild the economy. We can implement conditionality with more positive measures, provide supplemental aid to stimulate their economy, and restructure every aspect of their economy, especially the financial sector. Pro-

posed bailouts may keep Greece from immediate default and provide them with enough capital to keep themselves afloat for another few years, but these policies don’t promise long-term, sustained economic viability. Greece would still be obligated to demand additional bailouts every few years.

Naturally, perpetually demanding additional aid would likely provoke anti-bailout sentiments throughout Europe. Ample signs of such dis-content are already appearing in Germany, the nation that would be obligated to carry the great-est share of any bailout plan. Mass disapproval would constrain the German government from repeatedly offering substantial aid, ensuring that each successive bailout would carry stricter terms and carry less financial aid.

The lesson from all of this is obvious: let Greece fail now. We can provide a more fundamental restructuring to their economy with the money currently arranged for stop-gap measures and ensure that they could participate as a competi-tive member of the global economy. This allows us to bypass the unpopular bailouts bound to produce regional strife.

So let Greece default. The cavalry will be just beyond the horizon, ready to ride in and save the day.

For European Union to Survive, Allow Greece to FailNik GoldbergContributor

CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 2011

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Thomas Enering: As you know, October 2011 marks the 10 year an-niversary of the United States’ in-

vasion of Afghanistan. Although the U.S. rapidly defeated the Taliban, the military struggle to eradicate Al Qaeda’s infl uence in the region—locating Osama bin Laden and constructing a modern democracy—proved more problematic. Two years later, the Bush administration would be accused of going into Iraq with few goals and few objectives of what victory meant. Do you think that the same allegation can be said about the Bush administration going into Afghanistan in 2001?

Robert Brigham: I don’t know that it was a lack of goals or a lack of defi nition of what victory meant that led to problems in Afghanistan. I think it was a lack of un-derstanding of what you can and cannot do with military force. It’s very diffi cult to do border security, nation building, counter-insurgency programs, economic development, regional security structure building, and providing a framework or an architecture for peace—it’s diffi cult to do all those things in the best circum-stances. Afghanistan, over history, has proven to be a place that usually presents adversaries with the worst circumstances. I think it was just—more a matter of just a total lack of understanding of what’s pos-sible with the military.

Enering: With this conception of what was possible with the military, we saw how this new notion of counter-insurgency emerged. Can you describe what counter-insurgency looked like in Afghanistan?

Brigham: I think it was unevenly ap-plied. “Counter-insurgency,” of course, is the political side of war where troops—light infantry troops—are usually put in-side population centers to protect people. That’s the new defi nition of counter-insurgency. The center of gravity is the local population, it’s people-centric. The idea is that, if ordinary people, ordinary Afghanis are secure—in their livelihoods, in their daily lives, in their homes—then it helps build a bridge to the govern-ment and its national program. Coun-ter-insurgency is an effort to use light infantry troops to provide security but also to provide structure on which high-modernist development projects can take place. The combination of security and these modernization projects is aimed to create a tie from ordinary citizens to the national government that then dries up the pool of potential recruits for the insurgents. It hasn’t quite worked that way in Afghnistan. There are claims of success in Iraq—I think that’s debatable. I don’t think anyone was claiming that counter-insurgency has been a success in Afghanistan. I think even that talks of troop draw-downs don’t really indicate success. Success is the word that replaces victory in counter-insurgency. So, how do you defi ne success? We clearly know that insurgent deaths are no measure of

success. The rise in number of insurgents killed has no relationship at all with the government’s ability to construct a viable state. So, success replaces victory, but then the defi nition of success is slippery. I think at this point, what you’re trying to do in Afghanistan is to create an environ-ment where total collapse isn’t possible. Essentially, what you’re after is a decent interval between a U.S. withdrawal and the chaos that’s obviously going to ensue in Afghanistan once the United States does withdraw its military forces.

Enering: One of the largest complaints we see from the Afghani government, now that Obama has said that we’re going to start withdrawing troops, is this notion that local troops haven’t been trained suffi ciently. In counter-insurgency wars, why has training local forces and actually improving their capacity been so prob-lematic?

Brigham: I think training is always problematic. There’s never enough time to train, there’s never enough live dem-onstrations, there’s never enough capable trainers—this is, in a way, when you have a foreign army training a local army, and this is the norm. There are huge gaps in training effectiveness and effi ciency. You can say that about any army that’s work-ing closely with a more powerful ally. I don’t think Karzai has any unique claim here that his national army—for example, the South Vietnamese army training regi-men was just pathetic, despite good-in-tentioned American efforts. It just never worked. To do training work, you have to rotate divisions out of the fi eld. In a place like Afghanistan, that’s impossible. To set up a rotation schedule that meets your se-curity needs as well as your future train-ing needs—it’s a nightmare.

Enering: I think that, during the Bush administration, we also saw a shift in the narrative in terms of Afghanistan. Origi-nally, it was justifi ed as a security im-perative, but then, as we continued for-ward, we saw humanitarian causes being infused—we saw Afghani women coming into the discourse more and more. How do you think counter-insurgency works in advancing these human rights goals?

Brigham: Well, that’s exactly why you move to counter-insurgency. Counter-in-surgency is all about the political side of warfare. With the FM324, the Army and Marines’ fi eld manual that ushered in this new counter-insurgency era—when you place the citizen in the forefront of mili-tary, political, and economic activity—in the new manual, what you’re doing is that you’re safeguarding their human rights. It shifts the conversation purposefully. One interesting thing would be to see how have human rights improved in Iraq and Afghanistan since the introduction of counter-insurgency. I would argue that they haven’t improved much at all. A lot depends on how you defi ne human rights, but I think there are still gross human rights violations by the state in both of those nations. It’s a natural development to have human rights discourse come into the picture when you move to modern counter-insurgency. That doesn’t mean

that it’s actually being addressed, but it does mean that it’s part of the discourse.

Enering: You mentioned the new ma-rine counter-insurgency guide. Propo-nents of this call it a really revolutionary reform to counter-insurgency, and that this is a radically new proposal. Do you think that this is a new proposal or does it have historical roots?

Brigham: I think there are elements of this that are new. Obviously, there was a huge counter-insurgency program in Vietnam, and the major criticism against that counter-insurgency pro-gram was that the violence perpetrated in its name was too indiscriminate. The level of violence needed to pacify the countryside in the Mekong Delta really meant increased levels of violence that would alienate the local population from the state. In other words, counter-insur-gency is about building bridges from the local population to the state, but if you have to increase violence to effectively counter-attack an insurgency, you dimin-ish the capability to build those bridges. FM 324 starts where Vietnam left off. It starts with the premise that there was too much violence aimed at ordinary citizens in Vietnam and that you have to correct that fi rst before you do any of the winning of hearts and minds. In that way, it is a departure, and I think that most of the human rights scholars and NGO leaders who were invited to Fort Leavenworth to help construct FM 324 have backed away from seeing it as a panacea. They realize today that there are numerous human rights problems in Iraq and Afghanistan that counter-insurgency didn’t solve. I’m sure all of them would like to see human rights issues placed more at the forefront of efforts—especially in Afghanistan. But it’s also a useful discourse, to think of Af-ghani girls not being able to go to school or having acid thrown on them. That im-age is just so loaded with coded meaning that it helps politically sell the confl ict, but I’m not sure if it’s very effective, ac-tually, from a strategic, or even a human rights, standpoint.

Enering: We’ve also, I think it would be fair to say, that in recent years, seen a very revisionist history of Vietnam emerge. With Mark Moyer and Louis Surley advancing notions that the United States had victory within its grasp. Do you think that this re-conception of Vietnam infl uenced the administration’s thinking in both Afghanistan and Iraq?

Brigham: Oh absolutely. I also don’t think it’s just Moyer and Sorley. General Petraeus—that’s at the heart of his PhD dissertation, that the United States drew the wrong lessons from Vietnam, that pacifi cation had been far more successful than the United States realized. I think there is an entire generation of people who believe that strongly. I think that’s highly debatable. I think that research by David Elliot and others who really looked into Vietnamese language sources in the delta would really show that pacifi cation was riddled with problems. That, what was perceived as success against insur-gency in the south was really just a de-

population of the countryside through this intensifi cation of the violence. Draw-ing on Vietnam lessons to fi ght in Iraq is problematic on a hundred different lev-els. But, you do have to review Vietnam to try to do counter-insurgency again. It was an absolutely necessary intellectual act for those who supported intervention in Iraq.

Enering: I think that, of those that supported it, we saw a rise of this neo-conservative ideology over the past de-cade that really became the dominant discourse of the 2000’s. Would you say that this is a static ideology of the Bush administration or did it evolve over its two terms?

Brigham: I think it was dead by the second half of the last term. If you looked at Condoleezza Rice’s—when she became Secretary of State—if you looked at her efforts at transformative diplomacy, it’s back to kind of multi-lateral approach—all of the talk of muscular U.S. foreign policy, all of that is gone. It’s replaced in a sense by counter-insurgency. Counter-insurgency removes the ideologues from policy positions, in a sense, because they were wrong. They were wrong about the U.S. ability to transform societies through a certain kind of use of military. Their views aren’t replaced with the notion that counter-insurgency is now that transfor-mative power, but counter-insurgency at least acknowledges that there are limits to what you can do with your military, and that was something that the neo-conservatives were unwilling to embrace. So, I think when you see the surge come in late 2006, what you’re also seeing then is the last two years of the Bush admin-istration not being ideologically driven by neo-conservatives. And you see them leaving the administration in droves, ei-ther willingly or unwillingly.

Enering: Some liberals who endorsed Obama wanted a more radical break in foreign policy from the Bush administra-tion. Do you see changes from the Obama administration in his policies on Afghani-

Robert K. Brigham, Professor of History.

Thomas EneringNational & Foreign Affairs

Vassar College

PAGE 14

OFFICE HOURS WITH ROBERT K. BRIGHAM

Refl ections on 10-Year Anniversary of America in Afghanistan

See Future on page 15

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 2011

Future of American Foreign Policy in Afghansitan, Iraqstan and Iraq?

Brigham: Not really. Personally, I would have liked to see a lot more. It’s clear that he accepted the basic premise of counter-insurgency, that he saw it as a way to achieve success if victory was elu-sive. It seems to me that he’s just contin-ued the policies up until the draw down, and the draw down, in a sense, was really Gates all along. I don’t think there was radical departure—at least in my view, not a signifi cant enough departure. How-ever, and this is a big caveat, even though counter-insurgency is still the tail wag-ging dog in U.S. policy, we aren’t seeing it being implemented in any nations ex-periencing the Arab Spring. I think that would be something worth noting. That the notion that counter-insurgency was so effective, that the United States could come into a state that was relatively bro-ken, engage in regime change, and then roll out government in a box, which is essentially what counter-insurgency is. I think that notion has been dismissed by key policymakers in the Obama adminis-tration.

Enering: In June 2011, President Obama said that we could begin with-drawing troops because we had largely achieved the goals that we had set out in Afghanistan. How do you see the ultimate endgame looking for Afghanistan and the U.S. there?

Brigham: Probably just what we should’ve done all along in Afghanistan—containment. Some of Obama’s policy looks like containment. And containment in Afghanistan recognizes that the border is porous, that military affi liations follow a different pattern, that the state’s power often stops at the end of the paved road, that there are limits to what the central-ized authority can accomplish militarily or politically. You have to work with all of those variables, and that leads you to a containment policy of sorts—that you have at least a presence militarily, some-how, either through surrogate troops or through your own troops. Even with the draw-down, there are still going to be U.S. troops in Afghanistan. So, that’s part of a larger containment strategy—you harass insurgents, you interdict supplies—but

you don’t engage in a huge nation-build-ing project supported by a large military. So the scale is much smaller, you’re trying to contain Afghanistan, you’re trying to isolate it. If it starts to fall to insurgents, you try to isolate the insurgents from the general population or from external sup-port. I think that’s where we’re heading. Something that looks a lot more like what Bill Clinton did in Iraq or what George W. Bush did in his fi rst two years in Afghani-stan.

Enering: So do you see the possibil-ity of reincorporating Iraq or Afghanistan into a broader Middle Eastern peace pro-cess?

Brigham: Well, that’s always been the goal of the realists, right? In a lot of ways,

the Iraq Study Group report by Hamilton and Baker really is a call for realism. In that, what they’re trying to do is trade off some level of sovereign power for a region-wide agreement. Especially with Iraq, the whole idea was that you made Iraq’s six contiguous neighbors share-holders in the problem of Iraq, and you provided incentives for them to cooperate in containing the violence inside Iraq and actually trying to draw down the sectar-ian nature of that violence. So, in a sense, this realist paradigm where you look after state power and you build up regional al-liances that recognize the sovereign au-thority of the state—that seems to me that it will resurrect itself.

Enering: Some scholars have argued

that the Middle East has really just served as a diversion over the last decade. The last century was largely predicated on great power struggles, and now we’re going to move back into these [power struggles] in terms of a greater Chinese-American confl ict or a Chinese-India relationship really dominating foreign policy. Where do you see the Middle East’s role in U.S. foreign policy as we move forward?

Brigham: As long as the United States remains energy-dependent, the Middle East will always be on the front burner. Of course, the question of Israel is always one with domestic and international com-ponents to it. I don’t see the Middle East as sliding in signifi cance at all in a whole host of international affairs issues.

PAGE 15

An Iraqi soldier watches a U.S. army patrol vehicle drive by during counter-insurgency operations.Wikimedia Commons

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SUBMIT COLUMNS AND LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.CONTACT VASSARCHRONICLE@GMAIL.COM

“SPEECH IS CIVILIZATION ITSELF.” - THOMAS MANN

Continued from Refl ections on page 14

After the controversy surround-ing an audience member shouting “Yeah!” in response to the question

of whether an uninsured thirty year-old individual should be allowed to die at the CNN/Tea Party Republican presidential debate on September 12, the question of healthcare reform, and that of Social Secu-rity and Medicare reform in general, has again been raised.

Todd Densen: It is my hope that the next president (or the current one, if he is fortunate enough to be reelected) will ad-dress the growing problem of Social Secu-rity reform. The current system is unsus-tainable. While estimates may vary, there seems to be little disagreement over the fact that if the current system continues to op-erate, eventually the Social Security Trust Fund will run out, and the money collected from the Payroll Tax will no longer be suffi -cient to pay out benefi ts to current retirees. I hope that a new plan will advocate for a system that offers higher returns, probably a partially privatized plan that could mimic the plan President Bush advocated in 2005 but was unable to enact.

Ethan Madore: Bush’s plan of priva-tization allowed personal retirement ac-counts with different investment options?

Densen: That is the essence of the plan. Individuals have the option to open a per-sonal investment account that would utilize up to a third of the individual’s payroll tax payments.

Madore: This substantially reduces the amount of money that a person would con-tribute to the general Social Security fund?

Densen: Yes, this is true, but it also substantially reduces the amount that they would take out of the general fund.

Madore: My problem with this is that these private retirement funds seem tailor-made for specifi cally wealthy individuals. First, this plan is only personally benefi cial if your income crosses a certain thresh-old where the amount you would person-ally contribute is greater than the general populace. Second, poorer people typically don’t have the experience in investing that is required to make this access to multiple investment options advantageous or even a safe bet. This just seems like a ‘fi rst class’ section of retirement planning that allows the rich a pass on paying for the poor.

Densen: I think you misunderstand both the current system and Bush’s pro-posed reforms. First of all, the current sys-tem enacts a 12.4 percent tax on income that is diverted to Social Security (and some to Medicare), but the amount of income subject to this tax is capped (currently at $106,800). In actuality, the current system is abusive to the poorer individuals because they pay a higher real percentage of their income than the wealthier individuals. Also, the current system only pays you ben-efi ts after age 62, and when you die, your income payments stop. Poorer people are generally less likely to live long enough to receive benefi ts from the system into which they pay and are more likely to receive ben-efi ts for a shorter period than wealthier individuals who may have had better ac-cess to health care in the past. A partially

privatized system is actually better for the poor. First, they can still opt into the exist-ing plan, but the partially privatized sys-tem is still a better option. This is because, even though they will have less money to contribute to their personal retirement ac-count, the funds they have choices to invest in are all likely to give greater returns than the current system. The options are lim-ited to fi ve, widely diversifi ed funds that are generally safe investments. Secondly, a partially privatized system allows indi-viduals to keep the remaining money in their personal account as a nest egg to pass onto the next generation. This would help improve the generational wealth of poorer families that would other wise receive no posthumous benefi ts.

Madore: You claim that the privatiza-tion plan is better, even for poorer individ-uals, under what situation would someone not opt into it?

Densen: I don’t imagine it is likely that people will not choose not to opt into it, but if people are especially suspicious of the open market, I suppose they might choose not to.

Madore: Thus, less money will be put into the general fund, leading to the neces-sary cutting of some benefi ts or, under the case of near-unanimous selection of the privatization option, people will get dras-tically different payouts at the end, based on how much they could afford to put in. Correct?

Densen: Yes, the benefi ts would be less for non-investors than they are now. This will not be the case for most people though, because the market generally outperforms the current benefi t structure, so most peo-ple will be much better off. There is strong evidence for this, not only from market fi g-ures, but from the alternative plan to social security in Galveston, TX. Also, because there are likely to be only fi ve investment options, and all of these options are highly diversifi ed, the returns for these fi ve plans will not be drastically different. The per-centage return investors receive is not de-pendent on the amount they put in at all.

Madore: Yes, but there’s a consider-able difference between a percent of thirty thousand and three hundred thousand dol-lars, right? My concern is that the more you claim that the privatization option seems more benefi cial to investment-minded people, the less redistributive the system becomes. The only people who will not opt into the private system will be those who do not believe that they could put enough away with their limited incomes in order to survive retirement. Carried to an ex-treme, there comes a point where the cuts to general benefi ts drive the quality of life provided to those at the bottom of society to a point that I would consider unaccept-able. There is a minimum standard of life that needs to be sustained, there is no rea-son for the government to need to facilitate greater disparity between the rich and the poor, which would happen under this sys-tem. Having decent, roughly equal retire-ment benefi ts allowed for all people, with people who can afford it investing extra for their own savings is the most acceptable option currently on the table.

Densen: I don’t really even think that is an option. The current system will run out eventually, and then the status quo option

doesn’t even exist. Beyond this though, the current system is too redistributive in my opinion. It really ought not to be the gov-ernment’s responsibility to plan for your retirement. Social Security was enacted after the onset of the Great Depression because many people lost their entire life savings in the crash. It was a safety net. In modern times though, many people neglect to save at all and rely on Social Security to fund their retirement. This is fundamen-tally not the responsibility of the federal government. If people save properly, there is no reason the reduced benefi ts under my system wouldn’t be enough, and those who privately invest would be signifi cantly better off. Even if you don’t agree with this function of Social Security, I think the cur-rent system is more unequal. Wealthier citizens already receive nominally more in benefi ts, and, due to the income cap, wealthier individuals pay much lower real percentages of their income into the sys-tem. Since the wealthier generally live lon-ger, they draw from the fund longer and receive greater real levels of benefi ts any-way. Under a privatized system, it is techni-cally less redistributive, but in real terms it is unclear if it is actually less benefi cial to the poor. Either way, both the rich and the poor make out with better benefi ts overall, so why is redistribution a problem?

Madore: You suggest that this system will result in full privatization anyway, so why not just advocate that in the fi rst place? Even if it is the same percentage, the amount of real money people can put away differs dramatically, yet the expense of sustaining themselves through retirement does not. There is a point at which a person can live, paycheck to paycheck, but can’t set aside enough to live on in the future. Even if they’re forced to save a fi xed percent by your initiative, there is no guarantee that it will be enough. Those who do earn enough to substantially benefi t from privatization are probably those who already are involved in a culture of saving and investment, ren-dering this measure little more than over-

kill for the rich and disastrous for the poor. Throughout the course of a person’s life, their ability to earn money, to fi nd a good job and a stable home environment--even their capacity to be a “hard worker”—is so dependent on external factors beyond their control that those who can afford a com-fortable retirement are largely more fortu-nate, not more deserving. As we’re discuss-ing this, our own retirements are decades away, and we cannot be certain that we ourselves will not be on the unlucky side of life. Isn’t it better to design a system in which the government ensures an accept-able result for all, even at the expense of some superfl uous luxuries of the few?

Densen: My system allows the benefi ts you want for lower income savers. They aren’t left behind as though there were full privatization. However, if we continue the system we have, soon, there won’t be enough benefi ts for everyone. The system is unsustainable and impractical. Unless you advocate some alternative method that can ensure the system is solvent, I think government directed partial privatization offers the best compromise. The system becomes more sustainable and remains somewhat redistributive so that everyone can guarantee they receive benefi ts. Even if it is less redistributive, if the market is giv-ing those who save worse returns than the current system, they still retire with more money. I don’t see why it is better to give everyone less in your scenario.

Madore: More taxes and more redistri-bution, and the current system can work. At least it will not leave people with no-where to turn after a life of misfortune and hardship, not having made enough to carry them through their fi nal years. In addition, you’ve given no way to transfer to this new system, with millions already dependent on benefi ts from those paying into it. When it folds, people get hurt—a gold-plated, government-insured savings account that lets the rich keep their taxes in their own bank accounts simply cannot be a priority over real need.

CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 2011

Ought Social Security be Partially Privatized?DEBATE & DISCOURSE

Todd Densen, ContributorEthan Madore, Senior Editor

PAGE 16

“I prefer to think of it as a sustainable Ponzi-structure.”Pavel Shchyhelski

Following the collapse of Muam-mar Gaddafi’s 42-year-long regime in Libya late this Sep-

tember, much speculation about the whereabouts of the deposed dictator has swirled about, ranging from re-cent National Transitional Council (NTC) reports that Gaddafi is hiding in his embattled hometown Sirte to more exotic speculation that he had fled to Zimbabwe. Indeed, speaking at the 66th session of the United Nations General Assembly last week, Zimba-bwe’s 87-year-old president, Robert Mugabe—who has ruled the country for 31 years but is increasingly besieged and has been in awkward power-shar-ing agreement since disputed elections in 2008—roundly condemned NATO intervention in Libya as an imperial-ist rush for Libya’s oil, and, in solidar-ity with his long-time ally, denied that Gaddafi and his forces had killed civil-ians. Yet, while Mugabe publicly pro-claims his support for the ousted Lib-yan ruler (going so far as to expel the Libyan ambassador to Zimbabwe after he declared for the NTC), the recent peaceful transfer of power in neigh-boring Zambia, following incumbent president Rupiah Banda’s electoral loss to opposition leader Michael Sata, bespeaks a potential shift in sub-Saha-ran Africa away from the dictatorships that have defined the region politically in recent decades. A thoughtful Mugabe may well consider these lessons in an-ticipation of projected elections in Zim-babwe in 2012 and as he (potentially) harbors the deposed Gaddafi.

Mugabe: Oh God, Muammar, don’t you see? I ought to just quit. I’m get-ting too old for the strain of office—clinging to power despite international sanctions, agricultural and economic collapse, and the loss of public support. Now, look at this WikiLeaks business! As if anyone ever believed that those trips to Singapore were really for “cata-

ract surgery.” Now it’s clear as day that I’m dying from prostate cancer. My doctor didn’t even want me running in 2008 with my health, and I feel like this time it’ll kill me. Why even bother? Now that it’s been leaked that everyone from my vice-president to the Commander General of the army are jockeying for my succession like I’m already dead, how can I go on? If I cleared house of them all—and you know my methods of dealing with such sellouts—the whole government and party would implode! I can’t honor this power-sharing agree-ment with Prime Minister Tsvangirai. Our relations are too strained, and I can brook no rival. But the UN will never lift these accursed sanctions until I’m gone. No, it would be best for me and for Zim-babwe if I found a quiet way out of office before the elections and allow the MDC (Movement for Democratic Change) to reform the constitution. Look at Zam-bia, two peaceful democratic transfers of power in a decade, and they’re lauded by the international community! Then there’s you, and Mubarak, and soon enough, Assad and Saleh, driven out by protesters or bloody civil war, on trial or seeking asylum. I was a liberation hero once, and perhaps the only shred of a legacy I could have left would be to step down and let democracy come to Zimbabwe peacefully, unlike in Libya.

Gaddafi: Never! The leader of the revolution can never allow those NATO dogs and some drugged up protesters to drive him from his country! (Waves fist in the air) You are the liberation warrior who has brought glory to Zimbabwe, and all of your people love you—all! Al-Qaeda put drugs in the MDC’s NesCafe! With leaders like us, Africa shall rule the world! (Waves fist in the air some more) Your mistake is to exercise power through a party and to hold elections, which is inherently undemocratic, as party politics and parliaments only abort democracy. Zimbabwe, like Libya, needs one man to speak for the will of the masses. That is the only true form of freedom! And you speak of honor in surrender? Look at me, a beggar fleeing

his own country for asylum, with only my offshore accounts and business as-sets to support me! Do you think you’ll be allowed to retire quietly? That NATO court, the International Criminal Court, won’t forget what you and your North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade did in Matabeleland in the eighties. You’ll be hanged!

Mugabe: Hmmm, that is, in all like-lihood, true. But enough with all these lies about democracy! Even now, Liby-ans are stomping on copies of that Green Book of yours, with your nonsense about “people power” and “people’s congress-es.” This is the age of Twitter, and the people of Zimbabwe are fed up with the sham democracy I’ve been running. They, like the Libyans and the Egyptian protesters, can see the freedoms they’re missing. I can’t block their Blackberry service forever! Your mistake was self-serving complacency that your system would last forever. You believed that Libyans would be content with their rubber-stamp congresses and the re-distribution of some oil wealth, while the majority of the country’s money went to support you and your playboy sons. If you hadn’t been so nearsighted, you would have opened up the political system, given the people a real say in their affairs, conducted social reforms, given them more to hope for than cheap Green Book imitations of Rousseau and your two-faced “reformer” son, Saif.

Gaddafi: Listen to yourself! Deni-grating the Great Socialist Libyan Arab People’s Jamahiriya, the only true form of democracy on earth! No, the Libyan people were free, and the Bedouin war-rior could never have bowed to the de-mands of Western-backed troublemak-ers and Al-Qaeda “protesters.” As you valiantly said before the UN earlier this week, this was nothing more than a NATO invasion to steal the Libyan people’s oil and to recolonize an Afri-can country. Think of Zimbabwe’s sov-ereignty!

Mugabe: Yes, no doubt Britain will use discontent against me to erode the sovereignty we have fought for, to re-claim the land they stole. No, what am I saying? You could have averted this mess before the protesters ever gath-ered in Green Square! Zambia is the better model. Already, just today, work has resumed on drafting a new consti-tution for Zimbabwe, one guaranteeing human rights and doing away with our skewed electoral process. We are on track to meeting conditions for sanc-tions to be removed, if just barely. The only viable option would be for me to step aside, allow the coalition govern-ment to enact a democratic constitution in concert with the moderates in my party, and hold free and fair elections—then the sanctions could be lifted. Only then could a younger generation of leaders set about productively dealing with Zimbabwe’s ails: 80 per cent un-employment, a dilapidated health-care system, 11,000,000 per cent inflation, and a ruined agriculture. A leader must have dignity, and that includes knowing when to bend to shifting winds. Your “dignity,” with your outlandish outfits

and female bodyguard make you more a clown than a respectable leader. You’re a modern-day Idi Amin!

Gaddafi: You sound like the West (waves both fists in the air), always complaining about my yurts, mocking my outfits, laughing at my Amazonian Guard. Look at them (he gestures at a group women walking by), they would make a fine bodyguard for you in your revolutionary struggle! The West sim-ply doesn’t understand our genius or our great cause. We revolutionary lead-ers must double down in our resistance to protests and NATO aggression.

Mugabe: Your cause was lost when you turned a deaf ear to reform, and your doom was sealed when you turned foreign mercenaries and helicopters against your own people when they raised the call for more freedoms. All of your cabinet was for quick reform and transition. It was your stubbornness and brutality that escalated events. I can no longer sustain my regime by the usual tactics of sending war veter-ans and the military to rough up MDC supporters. My cabinet equally wants quick reform, with me out of the way. As you should know well, repression has become counterproductive. The only answer, I fear, is peaceful reform and transition to democracy, to spare us a civil war like you allowed to rage in Libya.

Gaddafi: No, the answer is more he-licopters.

Mugabe: Have you still learned nothing from these past nine months? You had let your military decay and kept its command decentralized so that it could not stand against you, creating discontent in the ranks and leading to the defections that turned events from protests to the armed insurrection that threw you out. My military is equally weak and discontented, and everyone knows that I can barely control the war veterans and the anarchy they cause, seizing farms and now trying to take over foreign-owned businesses. I could never respond with force to my opposi-tion—can’t you see that, after what has happened in your country?

Gaddafi: Leaders like you and me have no other choice! Your subordinates will never let you step down. Too much patronage would be lost, and NATO and their ICC will never allow you to peacefully seek retirement somewhere. There can be only chaos in Zimbabwe without you. Your military will tear the country apart in their factional strife, as those foolish rebels will destroy them-selves and all of Libya soon enough. You must never surrender to the impe-rialists! Plan A must be to fight and die in Zimbabwe, Plan B must be to fight and die in Zimbabwe, and Plan C must be to fight and die in Zimbabwe! Men such as ourselves may have no future, but we cannot bow to “democracy” and Western aggression. To do so would be to betray our characters!

Mugabe: Yes, you’re right. I can nev-er surrender to George Bush and Tony Blair! But what if NATO comes for me?

Gaddafi: Don’t worry, I know a place where we can crash in Pyongyang.

DEBATE & DISCOURSE

CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 2011

Dinner with Gaddafi : Lessons from the Arab Spring?Michael Greene

Debate & Discourse Editor

By Pavel Shchyhelski

PAGE 17

A ban on wearing burqas and niqabs in France results in a fi ne of $190 or, if the woman does not remove her

covering in public places, lessons in “French citizenship.” Forcing a woman to wear a niqab or burqa will be punishable by a year in prison or a $19,000 fi ne. While Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark debate pass-ing such legislation, Italy and Belgium have already done so. These laws are designed to emancipate Muslims and save Muslim wom-en from the backward infl uence of religiously conservative men. According to a 2010 CNN titled “French Senate Approves Burqa Ban,” the French government said the ban was implemented to “ensure the dignity of the person and equality between sexes” and that this practice, “even if it is voluntary, cannot be tolerated in any public place.” The ban in-cludes the burqa and niqab, but, apparently, excludes the hijab and chador because they do not cover the face. This is clearly a very misconstrued approach to equality.

The Qu’ran instructs both men and women to dress in a modest way. It instructs the men to talk to the wives of the Prophet Muham-mad behind a hijab, which originally did not refer to an article of clothing but to a spatial curtain that divides or provides privacy. Later, this instruction became more generalized, so as to include all Muslim men and women. At fi rst, only cloaks were worn in public and lat-er, the texts of the fi qh and hadith promoted guidelines for covering the entire female body

except for the hands, feet and face. Some Muslims,however, still believe that the guide-lines refer only to the wives of the Prophet Muhammad, and, therefore, do not adopt the dress. Men are also instructed to cover from the navel to the knees and, according to some interpretations, below the knees as well. Today different types of garments are worn including the burqa which covers the entire body with usually only a slit for the eyes, the niqab which is a cloth that covers the entire face, also with only a slit for the eyes; the hi-jab, on the other hand, covers only the head as a type of shawl, and the chador is more of a cloak that is placed over the woman’s body and manually held closed.

The purpose of the such dress it to express modesty and to protect women from indecent acts or thoughts. Rather than enslavement, many Muslim women view it as empower-ment. Muslim women cover themselves only in front of men who are not their husbands or direct relatives in order to protect themselves. It is believed that Muslim women should not be looked upon in a sexual manner by anyone other than their husbands. Many women tes-tify that they enjoy dressing modestly because it allows men to pursue them for their mind, personality, and character. In an article by IslamForToday.com by Sumayyah Hussein entitled “Why do Muslim women wear the hi-jab?” Rema Zawi, age 16, says “you feel modest […] and you feel like you’re covered up. You have more self-respect. You have more con-fi dence in yourself that you don’t need to care about [how] you look.” Others claimed that it gives them an “identity.” They don’t need to

tell people they are Muslim because it is made clear through their dress. Some women feel more comfortable and modest behind a veil.

A woman, if she chooses to, should be able to wear her hijab, burka, niqab or chador without feeling uncomfortable in public. If a woman is forced to wear the garment when she does not believe in its ideals, then one can absolutely argue against the custom. The prob-lem arises only when the woman is forced to do something with which she does not agree. Similarly, forcing women not to wear a veil in public is an act of religious persecution. We come full circle when we do not allow women to express their religion on their own terms; we are now just as guilty as the man who forc-es his wife to be covered. While France and other countries argue that banning the burqa will create equality in public places, it is actu-ally targeting specifi cally one religious group of people—this is hardly equality.

If a woman faces scorn and humiliation for wearing a veil in public, it is the fault of the public and not of the Muslim culture. In a recent political cartoon by Malcolm Evans, a woman wearing a burqa and a woman wear-ing a bikini are standing side by side. At fi rst glance, one can guess what the general con-sensus would be: the bikini-clad woman is a strong, independent woman living a life free from constraint and on her own terms. While this may be true, we often fail to see how con-strained she actually is. Women wear bikinis, mini skirts, and plunging neck lines because they are proud of their bodies, because they are confi dent, and because they are deter-mined to not let anyone tell them what they

can and cannot wear. Why are we women not proud of their minds, confi dent in their personalities, and determined to take a stand against objectifi cation of their bodies? Per-haps, if men were not so preoccupied with double-D’s, long legs, and fl at stomachs, there would be fewer women with eating disor-ders and more self-esteem. We see a woman behind a veil as a woman who is subjected to a “cruel, male-dominated culture.” What we don’t see is that that the covered woman is now being judged for her character, mor-als, and personality rather than her outfi t or her body. Perhaps that is the key to equality in society; a culture where men and women are evaluated on the basis of their minds. We should be able to respect and appreciate both women, and we should be able to understand the mentality behind both types of dress.

In the West, we often look at veiled women and feel sorry for them. We assume that the men in their families have forced them to cover their bodies. We judge their husbands as degrading and cruel to their wives and un-appreciative of women. The problem truly is one of ignorance, a lack of understanding of others’ culture, and the lack of a desire to discover new things. The image of a self-re-specting and confi dent woman may be one who dresses provocatively because she can, one who walks tall and embraces glances and comments from other men. In Islamic cul-ture, however, this is not the image that many women want to employ. Rather than judging the custom and trying to change it, we should try to understand it and see that it is not mis-construed.

CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 2011

Burqa Ban Demands Context of Cultural Values

Malcolm Evans, 2011

Shivani DaveContributor

DEBATE & DISCOURSE

PAGE 18

An Introduction to the Philosophical History of ChessDEBATE & DISCOURSE

CHRONICLE, OCTOBER 2011 PAGE 19

Chess is famous not only for its endur-ance and depth of strategy, but also for its semblance to ancient and medieval society. People with no familiarity to chess strategy can gauge the individual importance of pawns, knights, and kings. However, chess is not a truly medieval game in many re-spects. Despite its association with royalty, chess is an egalitarian and utilitarian game. Practiced by many of the great Enlighten-ment philosophers, chess provided a great medium for showcasing their ideals.

One reason why chess was popular in the 17th and 18th centuries was that chess offered philosophers a means of exercis-ing personal agency. Whereas in die-based games, where fate or chance were the pri-mary engines for victory, chess allowed individuals to engage an opponent in an arena where skill was more important than luck. During this time period, some of the fi rst common chess openings were explored—the King’s Gambit, the Sicilian Defense, the Ruy Lopez Opening.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, chess was a favorite study for the nascent fi eld of psychology. Particularly of inter-est were chess grandmasters that were capable of playing games simultaneously

against several opponents, blindfolded. Vladimir Nabokov studied chess-related psychological issues in works such as The Defense (1930), which explored the pos-sibility of chess leading to mental break-downs. In The Defense, the main character, Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin, spends much time developing a defense against a rival grandmaster in a game that would deter-mine who would face the world champion. During the game, Luzhin sees his carefully calculated defense fail almost immediate-ly, and while the game has no clear victor, Luzhin wanders the world in a surreal state thereafter.

Yet to analyze chess as a game, let us begin with an introduction to its origins. Chess’s association with royalty cannot be escaped, yet, in reality, few compari-sons can be made between pieces and their historical counterparts. The “back row” pieces on a chessboard, namely, the rooks, knights, bishops, queen, and king, represent the upper crust of medieval so-ciety. However this comparison is not only limited, but also superfi cial, making any far reaching comparisons between pieces and their real world counterparts a dubi-ous task. What we can do is look at these pieces collectively as the fi rst and second estates. There is a hierarchy of piece value, with each piece’s movement patterns rigid-

ly fi xed. A bishop can never switch colors, the knight must always move to a different colored square, and the king must consider its safety the top priority.

However, no piece can exert lasting con-trol without pawn support. In fact, the ar-rangement of pawns dictates the course of the game. Pawns hem in the rooks during the beginning of the game, keeping them from exerting their maximum infl uence, bishops have limited mobility if the pawns do not form openings to let them out, and knights can be forced to the edge by ambi-tious pawns eager for space in the center. Even the near-invincible queen cannot threaten an entire army without help from her subjects. A queen that tries to pick apart an enemy single-handedly usually ends up trapped, isolated, and under attack. The greedy monarch usually snatches a sickly pawn, but then realizes that the remain-ing pawns form the skeleton of a deadly snare. Finally, the king, for all its prestige and glory, is subject to protection from its pawns. Without the cover they provide the patriarch is at the mercy of his opponent’s assault. In this very basic illustration of the social contract, the pawns dictate the mon-arch’s course of action.

In contrast to the large pieces, pawns are dynamic and paradoxical. They are in-dividually weakest entities on the board,

but they are the most numerous and they dictate how the other pieces should ma-neuver. Unlike the other pieces, pawns do not want their course to be fi xed, they con-stantly switch columns and inch towards the others side of the board, dreaming of being promoted to a more powerful piece. At the end of a game, when the king is no longer capable of being checkmated by the remaining pieces on the board, the pawns quickly become the focus. The player who can promote his pawns fi rst usually ob-tains victory.

As David Schenk argues in The Immor-tal Game (2006), chess is “the epitome of meritocracy” where victory is determined on “the basis of skill.” Opportunities are afforded to each player with only a slight advantage for white (which always move fi rst) in non-competitive circles; no die rolls or obscenely unbalanced elements allow one player to dominate an oppo-nent of equal caliber. As for the gameplay itself, utility is the ultimate factor in mak-ing a move. Therefore, sacrifi cing stronger pieces for ones of lesser value is perfectly feasible as long as it leads to the capture of the enemy king. Robert James Fischer, the fi rst American World Champion, who traded a queen for three smaller pieces and dominated the board, demonstrated this principle in a famous game known as “The Game of the Century.”

Ultimately, in chess, no title exempts a piece from its duty. A clever player pre-tending to be a chess-playing automaton known as “The Turk” bested even Benja-min Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte, two of the most brilliant minds in history. Hence, chess depends on the dedication and the talent put forth, never on the so-cial or class status of the players or on the archaic social structure that chess seems to embody.

David GonzalezContributor

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White Black------- Pxe6+Pxe6 Bxe6+Rf7 Ne7+Kf8 Ng6+Ke8 Rh8+Kf8 Rxf8++

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Black to move, checkmate in 6.

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Madeleine Morris & Pavel Shchyhelski