2008 Woodie Awards
At year-end, events unify student community
Jonathan Gair
Issue date: 4/1/08 Section: OpEd Page
This week's NATO conference in Romania will provide an enormous chance for member states to get a feel for the direction that the alliance will be taking in the near future-and the planned Russia visit for President George W. Bush will allow him to meet Dmitry Medvedev for the first time. While we can hope that this meeting does not result in the same level of soul searching that Bush's first meeting with former Russian President Vladimir Putin saw, it will nonetheless be important for the manner in which future U.S.-Russian relations will proceed. What we can most likely expect is a new Russian president willing to be open to guarded cooperation, but who will view his interactions with Bush as on limited time-just as the relationship that President Bill Clinton and President Boris Yeltsin had spent so much time cultivating seemed to immediately fade with Putin's rise. What the outcome of these conferences and meetings will mean is now only a matter of time before we can assess how NATO alliance members wish to proceed on a variety of issues. April fools.
We only have to look as far as any dorm, house or bar in Oxford with a cable TV to get a feel for the local and regional atmosphere that has been embraced as a culminating factor throughout the entire academic year. Just as some elements within NATO want to look to the east as a means of spreading subtle dominance, so too did (hopefully) every student, faculty member and worker in and around Miami University wish upon wish that our expedition to the eastern U.S. seaboard would have been a success. We now stand rebuked.
Sunday allowed us to realize something about our university and our students-that even having victory slip through our fingers, we saw the outpouring of support from all these supposedly self-centered, bubble-encased students who cheered together and fell depressed together. A crowd that waxed and waned with the ups and downs through the year had finally converged in this moment to watch and hold their breath throughout every overtime and close call.
We only have to look as far as any dorm, house or bar in Oxford with a cable TV to get a feel for the local and regional atmosphere that has been embraced as a culminating factor throughout the entire academic year. Just as some elements within NATO want to look to the east as a means of spreading subtle dominance, so too did (hopefully) every student, faculty member and worker in and around Miami University wish upon wish that our expedition to the eastern U.S. seaboard would have been a success. We now stand rebuked.
Sunday allowed us to realize something about our university and our students-that even having victory slip through our fingers, we saw the outpouring of support from all these supposedly self-centered, bubble-encased students who cheered together and fell depressed together. A crowd that waxed and waned with the ups and downs through the year had finally converged in this moment to watch and hold their breath throughout every overtime and close call.
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