11 hours: ducking responsibility and leading from behind
The United States has a spending problem. Like an immature teenager with a brand new credit card, it keeps purchasing and purchasing with no regard as to how the purchases will ultimately be paid for.
Freedom: alive and well
The objectivity of pro-Western (for lack of a better denominative) reports on the recent street and Internet activism in Russia must be questioned in a number of areas.
The view from the virtual classroom
MITx and its spawn, edX, are much in the news, but do they merit the hype? Let me give you the view from the cheap seats.
edX is freeing education
This Wednesday, MIT President Susan Hockfield and Harvard President Drew Faust announced the edX platform for online education. I have been taking the pilot edX course 6.002x this semester, but it wasn’t until I saw these two women speak that I realized just how big this initiative could be. 6.002x is already an incredible technological achievement that accurately replicates an introductory Course VI class on the Internet. After the announcement this Wednesday, this revolutionary online experience of MIT classes made the leap to become a multi-institutional platform that could transform the delivery of education worldwide.
Fixing MIT’s failures in governance
I am deeply concerned by the management and governance of MIT. We need to reform how MIT makes decisions and how the Corporation oversees the President.
An unloved intellectual
Should a majority of the Russian middle class truly venerate such values and the deeply-rooted intellectual ideals that Western observers tend to attribute to them, one may also wonder why there seems to have been so little display of respect and remembrance for the late wife of Mikhail Gorbachev, Raisa Gorbachova, the highly active and first university-educated First Lady of Russia. She revolutionized (if only briefly) her position in the Russian system of governance, with her involvement in children and women’s issues and cancer programs, among others.
Notes from a women’s rights rally
Last Saturday, a rally was held at City Hall to protest the nationwide uptick in proposed and codified restrictions on access to abortion and contraception. The feeling shared by many women’s rights advocates is that the nationwide pro-life movement has become bolder, more extremist and, worst of all, more successful as of late. I attended the rally, one of many coordinated in cities throughout the country, and my reflections follow.
The new Russians: emerging and educated?
The United States and its supporters have hardly been able to contain their excitement at the winds of democratic change that they perceive as blowing in the Arab world and other regions following recent anti-government uprisings. But this has often led to misinterpretation and inflation of the actual number and honorable motives of the protesters. The Western media’s assessment of the recent street protests in Russia is no exception. The misjudgment and embellishment of the popular opposition and reactionary forces in Russian society by the West is in fact not confined to their size, but also their quality — or one could say, the “spirit” behind them.
Building better shuttles
Though the Institute is famous for its ability to innovate for the greater society, it is also equally well-positioned to solve for problems residing within its own walls. As opposed to bringing in expensive outside consultants or expanding the administrative hierarchy in order to address the dynamic issues/problems facing MIT, we would like to propose a paradigm shift towards looking inwards first to see what types of novel solutions can be generated far before RFPs and Calls for Applicants are ever distributed. As a basis for this hypothesis consider that this month, members of the Committee on Student Life (CSL) received a presentation from the Graduate Student Council’s (GSC) Transportation Working Group (TWG) which did just that: The TWG leveraged MIT skill sets to help it creatively solve shared problems and seize upon new opportunities.
CORRECTIONS
The headline for an opinion article published on Tuesday incorrectly states the number of people in Russia. The number is actually 143,030,106, not 1,234,571.
Some math about the Russian protests
While it is true that the 2011-2012 Russian street protests have been unprecedented in recent years in their scale — with a participation unseen since the 1990s — one may well want to take a closer look at the figures being trumpeted by Western and Russian pro-democracy observers and media (which incidentally have almost always been much higher than the official statistics from city authorities).
CORRECTIONS
An obituary for Phyo Kyaw published April 20, 2012 incorrectly spelled the name of a friend of Kyaw as “Di Yi.” The correct spelling is Di Ye ‘10.
Commemorating the Armenian genocide
During World War I, the world witnessed the first genocide of the twentieth century. From 1915 to 1918, 1.5 million Armenians (approximately 50 percent of the Armenian population at that time), along with other minorities living in the Ottoman Empire, were systematically killed by the Ottoman Turks. The Armenian Genocide is commemorated on April 24; it was on this day in 1915 that the Young Turks, the ruling party of the Ottoman Empire, ordered the killing of Armenian intellectuals, leaders, artists, and businessmen living in the Ottoman Empire. Following this day, many Armenian men were massacred and plans for the genocide were implemented.
Putin’s high IQ
One thing is sure about Putin: he is smart, very smart. You have to be, to maintain order over nine time zones, and stay at the top of the inner fightings of competing factions among the siloviki, desperate to protect the millions they have at stake from Russia’s economic boom. Putin has proved himself uniquely able to adroitly balance the various strategic interests of the competing parties. He has so far been a master at managing divisions within the government — and Russians know this.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
There has not been an election in recent history where individual votes have figured so greatly in the choice of the next UA president and vice president. We wanted to thank everyone for casting your ballot in this election, and in effect shaping the future of your student government.
Day of Silence
“Faggot!” I braced myself for the barrage of gum, paper, and pencils that they would throw at me. I quickened my pace to get to class before they could torment me further. I looked around for help but no one stood up for me — no students, no teachers, no staff. Almost immediately after I had come out as gay a few weeks earlier, the bullying had started.
CORRECTIONS
The first paragraph of an article published last Friday on orientation changes ambiguously described the nature of the change to the housing adjustment lottery. While the official “adjustment lottery” will not exist in its current form, there still will be an option for students to move to different dormitories after orientation. The difference is that this year, by default, students will remain in their assigned dorm but may opt-in for a change — as the article originally stated in paragraph four.
Nuclear Iran needs to step down
Last week, an international delegation met in Istanbul with the hope of securing a serious commitment from Iran to negotiate an end to its nuclear enrichment program. The talks, which resumed after more than a year without any negotiations, illustrated the broad global consensus against a nuclear Iran. It is critical that we too, as American citizens, fully comprehend the threat of a nuclear Iran to our national security and work in a bipartisan manner to prevent that end.