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Kansas is still my favorite football team
Did you see that the front wall of McCollum stayed up? What's that thing made of?
Nobody on Tinder cares about my Beanje Baby collection :(
KANSAN.COM | MONDAY, NOV. 30, 2015
I have real trust issues with people who have hardcore penciled eyebrows.
That moment when your teacher still shows up but it's 14 minutes late and all your hopes and dreams are crushed.
Shout out to my classes are never canceled for break
My mom shared several inappropriate Buzzfeed videos this weekend and I have mixed feelings about this.
Try playing candy crush when you're drunk. It is hard.
it's that time of the semester where class is optional and grades depend on extra credit
My roommate hasn't seen the office. Related: He thinks all my jokes are original and that I'm hilarious.
CHIEFS GOING TO
WIN THE SUPER
BOWLS
that I'm hilarious.
Can someone please photoshop Miley on a wrecking ball onto a picture of McCollum Calling down?
What human has class at 7:30?
I ate 14 potatoes this weekend.
I miss Tony Romo
Has anyone seen that vine of Adele's "Hello" but with Robin Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire? Anyone?
Pretty sure the rec is going to be full of people with regrets tomorrow.
My house is haunted.
Help me.
Pie... AM I RIGHT?!
I have a whole ham in my fridge. Right next to the empty shelf and PBR.
Read more at kansan.com
We must understand the difference between positive and negative liberty
JESSE BURBANK
@JBurbank1
Political debates in the United States are often premised on finding the ideal balance between liberty and equality.
This manifests itself in many ways. For example, should everyone be granted roughly equal healthcare or should a person's job and income determine the care they receive? Should citizens be required to pay more taxes to build a more equal education system, like through free college? Political questions like these are everywhere.
Political theorist Isaiah Berlin provides a useful framework for this in his essay "Two Concepts of Liberty." In it, he outlines two forms of liberty: positive and negative.
Negative liberty is often what people imagine when they think of liberty - the absence of restraint and the absence of mandates. In his arcane language, Berlin describes negative liberty as whether a person "should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other
As Berlin puts it, negative liberty means "I am a slave to no man." Conversely, positive liberty means "I am my own master," free to pursue the life of my choice.
Positive liberty, on the other hand, recognizes that true freedom is not simply the absence of restraint. It is a societal realization that freedom requires sacrifice. It requires the provision of services like quality schools and basic healthcare
But a person is not truly free if they are simply left alone. What ability do they have to change their station in life if they received a poor education, if they are starving, or if they have never had access to the means of fulfilling their own potential?
think critically, we are gaining agency to influence the direction of our own lives and of society. This is what positive liberty means.
As college students, we are learning the skills necessary to influence our own destinies. By learning how to better communicate, calculate, and
However, when thinking of how to balance liberty and equality, one must ask what liberty truly means.
Indeed, in some cases. negative freedom can actually represent a form of oppression. When a nation denies large groups of its citizens the agency to change their lives under the guise of protecting liberty, it relegates them to a more difficult, more miserable life.
Of course, positive liberty and negative liberty are not entirely mutually exclusive and both can be taken to extremes. However, recognizing the difference between the two is crucial for understanding the assumptions of political discussions and the goals that society should hold.
persons."
Every student should get the vaccine for HPV
ABBY PETRULIS
@apetrulis
THEKANSAN
@UNIVERSITY
DAILYKANSAN
Should I get the HPV
vaccine?
The short answer is yes, absolutely, but let's talk a little bit more about what it means to get the HPV shot.
Why is it important? HPV, or human papillomavirus, is an incredibly common virus. Nearly 80 million people, or about one of every four people, has a current HPV infection. But the HPV virus is complex — not all of these infectious strains can cause damage to your body later on. In fact, about nine out of 10 cases actually go away on their own and show no symptoms.
However, some strains can cause cervical, vaginal, penile or anal cancer, as well as causing some genital warts and even throat cancers. It's these few strains that we need
/THEKANSAN
to protect against, and since HPV is really everywhere,the best way to do that is through vaccination.
What is the vaccine?
Most people know the vaccine by its trade name, Gardasil. The newest vaccine, Gardasil-9, provides immunity to nine different cancer-causing strains of the HPV virus, though many people in college now were vaccinated with Gardasil-4, the first vaccine protecting against only four strains of HPV.
These nine strains have been identified as HPV and as cancer-causing, but there are over 150 strains of HPV we know of — again, not all of these are cancer-causing. In fact, only about 40 of the 150 different strains infect genital areas. The goal of vaccine development was to first identify which strains are most prevalent in causing genital cancers and then create an immune response. The vaccine is made from a single protein and cannot infect you.
Your immune system is pretty smart — it can recognize proteins that are usually on the outside of viruses or bacteria and mark it for destruction. A separate part of your immune system functions as memory. That means that every time you're exposed to something that looks like that, it will always be targeted for destruction — not just the first time. That's why we can use just small parts of infectious agents to create vaccines, and since it's not the whole germ, we can't get sick from it.
Who should get the vaccine?
Everyone should get vaccinated. Not just women men, you can get cancer from this too, and you can keep
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommends that children start getting the shots around age 11, though women can get it until age 26, and men can get it until age 21.
However, the vaccine works best if you get it before you're ever potentially exposed to HPV, which would be long before you're sexually active. That's why it's recommend at such young ages, though there is also an increased immune response in preteen children
spreading it if you don't get vaccinated.
HPV is everywhere — if you get the shot, it doesn't mean you're inappropriately sexually active, it just means you're taking advantage of modern medicine to protect yourself. Oh, and you absolutely cannot get HPV from a toilet
— a fancy way of saying the vaccination is more effective in younger people.
seat. You can only get it from sexual contact.
@KANSANNEWS
How do I get vaccinated?
You can easily get the vaccination here on campus at Watkins. However, the vaccine is not given in pharmacies (unlike the easy-to-obtain flu shot), so you'll need to schedule a visit to the doctor. This is partially because it's a three-shot series. The second shot is given one to two months after the first one, and the last shot is given six months after you get the initial shot. It's usually covered by insurance — so what are you waiting for? Protect yourself.
Abby Petrulis is a senior and second-year pharmacy student.
- Edited by Jackson Vickery
Required classes waste time and resources of students who want to jump into their majors
RACHEL GONZALES
@KansanNews
For many students, college is a time to learn skills that will help them start careers. Required, or core, classes at the college level make this more difficult and are both costly and time-consuming. At Kansas, students should be able to dive straight into the classes that are pertinent to their majors or interests, saving them time and money.
At universities across the country, students are forced to take classes that are not important to them in order to graduate. These classes can, in some cases, take up to a
couple years to complete.
Beyond the time that core classes take away from students is the financial burden that it places on them. A large part of tuition goes towards these classes. Many students struggle to pay for college, and not making them pay for irrelevant classes would
And while some people go to school full time, it is not uncommon for students to have other obligations like a job or a family, and they can't afford to waste time on classes that are irrelevant. Students with full schedules would benefit from being able to focus their time toward what they actually want to do.
significantly ease that burden. College tuition is expensive, and it's difficult to have to pay for classes that will ultimately not help you in your career.
rurther, these classes often repeat material that students have already learned in high school. For example, classes like English and Communications 101, which are required at the University in order to graduate, are similar to high school English and speech classes.
It would be more beneficial to spend the first two years of college learning new, major-specific material. At the college level, students have already spent 12 years learning general education. People go to college in order to start a specific career, and college should therefore be vocational in nature.
Rachel Gonzales is a junior from Fort Collins, Colo., studying journalism and sociology.
— stuff that I care about," Kyle Summers, a junior at the University, said about required classes.
While some may say that taking required courses provides a more well rounded education, students who are uninterested in the course material are not likely to remember the minimal overview of the subject anyway. According to Washington Post writer Daniel de Vise, some higher
Getting rid of the core requirements at the University would allow students to spend their money and time building skills that will help them in the futures they see for themselves.
education leaders believe that "the point of a college education is to teach students to think, solve problems and change the world ... not to download a compendium of facts."
"It just takes up time I could be using to learn other stuff
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CONTACT US
Katie Kutsko
Editor-in-chief
kkutsko@kansan.com
Emily Stewart Advertising director estew@kansan.com
THE KANSAN EDITORIAL BOARD
Members of the Kansan Editorial Board are Katie Kutsko, Emma LeGault, Emily Stewart and Anissa Fritz.
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