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You know it's hell week when you get out of class early and you're excited because you have more time to study.
Remember the time when your level of skill was measured by how quickly you could run up a slide?
Good call on not being in love with the drummer. It's a long line and a brutal competition for that one. To all those interested: escape while you can!
Don't judge me! I'm from Costa Rica and we say "chao."
FALSE! Wescoe was supposed to be a laser tag arena and an on-campus bar.
Grunting was the first language used by man. Followed shortly thereafter by emoticons.
"I'll call the Sprint Center "Allen fieldhouse east" if I want to call it that it will be full of KU fans, so why not?
Canned oranges are one of the tastiest things ever!
Your Kirby is inferior to my Zoidberg (V)(...)(V)
I can't wait for the tulips to bloom on campus!
Does no one realize we're the little brother and K-State is just the screw up big brother?
I'm officially voting for whatever student group will spend less of my student fees on sidewalk chalk.
I think I'm addicted to Netflix...
Dear Kansas Union, Please repair the Jayhawk whose head you brutally sliced open. Signed, Baby Jay.
To the person who wants to know who would eat oranges out of a can. Someone who wants to save 30 cents. That's who.
Basketball players get full tuition paid for, that's not enough compensation?
You know you're a student when an hour ends at the 50th minute rather than the 60th.
I'm proud to say I've slapped the basketball band drummer.
I cried tears of happiness when I saw Tyshawn in the paper.
I'd really appreciate it if midterms didn't kill me.
Apparently K-Staters hate the little brother joke. Troiolol.
THURSDAY, MARCH 14, 2013
Is there going to be a good KU football punter next year? Because I'm a soccer player, and I think I could deliver!
<('.^')<('.')>(`^`)> Kirby dance
party!
Tell your roommate, "If I'm going nowhere, at least I'm getting there quickly."
Men need to confront sexual violence
We have a nasty habit of victim-blaming when it comes to sexual violence in our culture. When someone is raped, or sexually harassed, we tend to throw out questions like "Well, what was she wearing? " "Was she drinking?" "Did she flirt with the dude all night?"
We tell women to protect themselves from violence, to not wear their hair in ponytails, to carry pepper spray or mace, to never walk alone at night. Even in the language we use, we order the attention on the victim: violence against women, battered women—there's even an increasing trend in newsprint to call the victim in a case of rape not the victim, but the accuser.
We question the victim's motives, and seek to find a flaw within the victim instead of looking at the source of the problem in the first place. The perpetrator. The harasser. The rapist. The one
who enacted the violence.
And, as the statistics tell us,
these enactors of sexual violence
against women are overwhelmingly men.
Now, please don't think I'm proclaiming "All men are rapists!" That would assume that men have some biological predisposition to be unthinking, violent, aggressive creatures, which is obviously messed up. That's kind of the point of my article today. Men are in no way inherently rape-machines, and this type of thinking, that rape and sexual violence is an unquestionable reality in our society that will never go away is an insult to men.
Men can totally not rape. Tons of men never rape. I know quite a few of them, and I can testify that it is completely possible for a bro to go through the entirety of his life without ever committing sexual violence against another person. But we do have
to acknowledge that we live in a culture that encourages violence toward women, and that it is nurture, not nature, that makes a rapist. Which is why—bros, you got to call out your bros before they commit sexual violence against another person.
Personally, I think everybody needs to call out individuals who do or say sexist things (or racist things, or homophobic things, or transphobic things — really, all the ignorant things). But especially when it comes to sexual violence against women, the importance of men talking to other
men about being a decent human being is super vital. Men possess privilege in comparison to women in our society, and men who have been raised in a culture that values men's voices over women's respond better to a bro saying "Dude, knock it off," than say, me, going "You're behaving in a way that is contributing to rape culture and is highly problematic and misogynistic."
This isn't to say men's voices actually have more value than women's. But in order to stop the cycle of violence men enact toward women, you have to stop the problem at the source — i.e. instead of telling women not to get raped, tell men not to rape. And when bros communicate that message to their bros, it carries a certain weight.
partying during Spring Break on the beach, and your bro has his eyes on the woman who is on the verge of black-out drunk, tell him if the girl is unconscious, it's not consent. When you go out to a bar, and your bro gets upset that the woman he grinded with all evening doesn't want to go home with him, tell him she doesn't owe him anything just because you danced. When your bro calls women derogatory names, tell him you don't want to hear that, because you have a girlfriend/mother/sister/friend you like, and he should treat woman like human beings.
So, to my bros who don't like sexual violence (which I assume is the vast majority of you), here's what you can do. When you're
Tell your bros to act like men.
And that the only requirement
to being a man is to be a person
who treats other people like people
worthy of dignity and value.
Gwenyn is a sophomore majoring in English and Women, Gender, and Sexuality from Dlatte. Follow on her Twitter @AllioidsGwenyn
Midterms ruin lives leading up to spring break activities
With spring break on the horizon and many students preparing to leave for exotic islands and cruise ships, there is a murky cloud of uneasiness that continues to hang over the school right up until Friday afternoon. This cloud is known as midterms.
We all know and appreciate midterms for what they are—teachers basically making sure that students are keeping up with the course load while using it as a chance to add a bulk of points to the overall grade. However, it's the timeliness, or really the lack thereof, that makes getting to this ever-important weekend of freedom a trudging task.
What is it about having to really dig in and study hard for a week straight (proud procrastinator here) that makes each midterm you take such a nerve-wracking experience? Sure, all the resources are there for you, but all of a sudden, we are thrust into a time crunch that has us worrying about personal vacation plans and important academic examinations at the exact same time. It can be very difficult for students to stay focused on the right priorities this time of year, and midterms stand right there in the path to hold you accountable.
Now in my senior year, I've grown to despise everything about the timing of midterm exams. I know I'm definitely not in the majority on this, but I'm also not alone either. Why not have midterms a few weeks before spring break? It keeps students on their toes during the semester while also giving them a week of preparation for whatever spring break plans that
may lie ahead. For teachers, the spring break week can be used as personal time in full without having to worry about grading the midterm examinations. Simply grade the midterms during the final week before spring break.
The ironic twist to this story is that I personally do not have any elaborate spring break plans this year. I suppose my sister's wedding next Saturday falls under the category of "plans," but for all intents and purposes, it's the timing of the examinations more than anything that really irks me. Consider this a personal farewell to midterm examinations from a disgruntled senior — it's been real, I definitely won't miss you, and I loathe you for what you will do to future generations of students wanting a little breathing room the week before spring break.
Rogue is a senior majoring in journalism from Overland Park. Follow him on Twitter @stephanerque4.
CAMPUS CHIRPS BACK
What are you excited to get away from during spring break?
Follow us on Twitter @UDK_Opinion. Tweet us your opinions, and we just must publish them.
@hannahwv92
*OUDA organism blackboard mobile.
I'm such a nerd...
@JDK_Owning 'I'll be stuck working,
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@Kaydubbed
@book.brown school work, k-state fans, and snow. Not in that order.
springbreak
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@UDK Quinnion I'm excited to get away from not sleeping! #Seriously #NaptimeOverEverything
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Student loan debt a growing problem
Let's start with the obvious: student loan debt is a problem. Debt from student loans is now a bigger source of consumer borrowing than credit cards—things notorious for leading ordinary people into bankruptcy and financial struggle. What's more alarming is that student loan debt default is on the rise, meaning that more and more people are not fulfilling their obligations of repayment and leaving lenders, mainly the government, on the hook for money that was lent out.
According to CollegeCalc.org, here at the University, about 45 percent of undergraduates take out a federal student loan to help finance their education. According to FICO via Forbes Magazine, the average amount of student loan debt among college graduates is $27,253, and according to adviserperspectives com half as much as the 2011 median annual income for 25-34 year olds.
For some more perspective, the inflation rate of college costs is over 500 percent since 1982 according to Steve Odland at Forbes and inflationdata.com. Finally, according to CNN, the median yearly income for a family of four in the US for 2011 was just over $50,000 (from US census data), and the average yearly tuition at a four-year public institution is over $8,000. So it's no wonder people need student loans to finance their education; without them, thousands of deserving students at the University and millions throughout the country simply wouldn't be able to go to college.
There are dozens of reasons for the explosions of college costs, but according to the New York Times, funding cuts from states as one of the top reasons for the increase, while Steve Odland said that it has to do with inflated salaries and lack of cost control from within the institutions. Of course, there are hundreds of others, but I only get so much room to write.
This might seem at first glance like a personal financial issue instead of a political or policy issue, and to a certain extent, that's correct. Just like with credit cards, student loans should be used prudently and not recklessly, to finance an education and not a lifestyle. Still, why so much debt? And how do we solve the student debt problem while still preserving the opportunity for every deserving student to pursue a college education?
Some have posed an idea that scares the living crap out of a lot of people: According to Huffington Post, college might
not be necessary, or even worse. Fox News said that it's a harmful scam. This is, of course, mostly bunk. According to Los Angeles Times, graduates with a four-year degree still make 84 percent more throughout their lives than people without one. Nevertheless, a degree, like all things in life, shouldn't be taken as a guarantee of anything.
But even with such huge amounts of student debt, it's important to remember that this problem has a common root with most other pressing problems in America right now: the gargantuan, nearly unprecedented recession we've been trying to claw back from for the past five years. Students have borrowed more because they need the money to live on while in school, because they or their parents don't have money to pay out of pocket, or because scholarship and grant funds have dried up in the wake of the recession and widespread budget cuts. This isn't to say when and if the economy fully recovers that the student loan problem will magically resolve itself. It's going to take a lot more than that, but it is a big piece of the pie.
Of course, there are immediate steps every student should support to make sure an entire generation of borrowers doesn't spend a huge portion of their adult lives chained to a debt they had little choice in taking on, unless of course they postponed or forfeited college altogether. These include keeping interest rates for loans reasonably low, allowing graduates to "work off" part of their debt by taking jobs in the public or non-profit center, and expanding funds even in a recession to grant and scholarship programs knowing that a more educated work force is going to be worth the investment. What we might ultimately need is a change in the way we think about college—an updated syllabus, if you will. But that's a topic for another column.
Schumacher is a senior majoring in political science and English from Topeka.
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