2008 Woodie Awards
Letters
Issue date: 11/30/07 Section: Editorials
Editorial cartoon ignores intricacies of Iraq conflict
The editorial cartoon in the Nov. 16 issue of The Miami Student was well below the standards of an otherwise excellent college publication. Nobody claims that Iraq will be all sunshine and long hugs when the American occupation ends. The country will devolve into civil war and chaos. The key point is that this will happen whether we leave next month, next year, or next decade-we can't put that genie back into the bottle. All that remains to be seen is how many American lives will be lost, and how many tens of billions of dollars will be wasted before that happens.
Dave Sobecki
Department of Math & Stats
sobeckdm@muohio.edu
Political correctness must not dominate free speech
While walking by the Seal I couldn't help but notice the bodies of several students strewn across the landscape covered in "blood." It got me thinking about what exactly our freedoms on campus are. Freedom of expression and freedom of speech is something that seems to be under fire all of time in what is supposed to be an academic and intellectual environment. Should these not be universal? Instead we see personal attacks on any activism, art, or intellectual curiosity. Recently, the institution we rely on for our academic freedom responded hastily to such an expression.
Our First Amendment doesn't come with strings attached. When a few students hang slip knots from a tree on Western, another few lay in the center of the Academic quad covered in simulation blood, a fraternity makes a T-shirt poking fun at overweight women, and when the pro-life group comes this spring to yell about how we're a culture of death, just remember that they all have that right. We all have the right to call them idiots or to call them bold. In the past year we have had "I Heart Female Orgasm," "My Life of a Feminist Porn Activist," and kind old men handing out pocket Bibles. Guess which faced a backlash by a university professor?Â
The editorial cartoon in the Nov. 16 issue of The Miami Student was well below the standards of an otherwise excellent college publication. Nobody claims that Iraq will be all sunshine and long hugs when the American occupation ends. The country will devolve into civil war and chaos. The key point is that this will happen whether we leave next month, next year, or next decade-we can't put that genie back into the bottle. All that remains to be seen is how many American lives will be lost, and how many tens of billions of dollars will be wasted before that happens.
Dave Sobecki
Department of Math & Stats
sobeckdm@muohio.edu
Political correctness must not dominate free speech
While walking by the Seal I couldn't help but notice the bodies of several students strewn across the landscape covered in "blood." It got me thinking about what exactly our freedoms on campus are. Freedom of expression and freedom of speech is something that seems to be under fire all of time in what is supposed to be an academic and intellectual environment. Should these not be universal? Instead we see personal attacks on any activism, art, or intellectual curiosity. Recently, the institution we rely on for our academic freedom responded hastily to such an expression.
Our First Amendment doesn't come with strings attached. When a few students hang slip knots from a tree on Western, another few lay in the center of the Academic quad covered in simulation blood, a fraternity makes a T-shirt poking fun at overweight women, and when the pro-life group comes this spring to yell about how we're a culture of death, just remember that they all have that right. We all have the right to call them idiots or to call them bold. In the past year we have had "I Heart Female Orgasm," "My Life of a Feminist Porn Activist," and kind old men handing out pocket Bibles. Guess which faced a backlash by a university professor?Â
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