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Drexel moves fast. That’s not really news, though: everyone reading this article will be more than familiar with the stress of searching for a co-op, studying endlessly for midterms that somehow last all term, and knowing exactly what week it is at any given moment. Simply put, Drexel is indeed “different” — our 76 day winter term stands in striking comparison to UPenn’s 118 day spring semester. For many this term flew by, a feeling only aided by the sudden warm weather some consider a curse of climate change while others a blessing for finals studying.

Will all these responsibilities to consider, the Drexel student is forced to ask one incredibly important question: how should I spend my time? Given immensive workloads only magnified by stringent deadlines, it can be almost too easy to squander away the halcyon days of our collegiate youth through indecision. The fear of committing to something larger than ourselves and not being able to follow through is one that all clubs on campus face. After all, when forced to choose between their academic career or extracurriculars, a student will almost always forego the latter.

In some rare instances, this is not the case. The Triangle is one of the oldest active organizations on campus, having put out a paper at least weekly for 90 consecutive years. We’ve seen our share of ups and downs, but through it all, we’ve managed to remain an independent student organization, powered almost exclusively by dedicated pockets of the student body.

As the term draws to a close, it would be amiss for us not to acknowledge the contributions made by both Justin Roczniak and Jeremy Snyder, Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor, respectively, during their time here. For many years, they’ve both given up their Thursday nights to help put together what has been and will hopefully continue to be an honest, if not quality publication.

With finals week fast approaching, both their graduation and the arrival of the warm weather serve as two very different reminders about one very important thing: our time here is limited, and sometimes it’s worth risking a harder road for the powerful experiences it may yield. Be it in spearheading an organization or simply focusing on getting a project done faster to go out and play frisbee with your friends, remember that time is the most important resource you have. The only thing that really matters is how you choose to spend it.

Best of luck with finals week (and beyond!)

— The Editorial Board

The post Spring is in the air appeared first on The Triangle.

The following is the opinion of the Emerald’s editorial board and not Emerald Media Group as a whole. The editorial board is comprised of the 2015-2016 Editor in Chief, management staff and opinion editor.

On March 4, the University of Oregon Board of Trustees raised tuition by almost 5 percent over the voices of students yelling in protest. Not surprising — tuition at UO has increased every year for nearly two decades, and students have protested for just as long.

But this year’s tuition-raising process was also marred by several glaring failures, most of which began with the activities of one body: the Tuition and Fees Advisory Board.

The advisory board makes tuition recommendations to the the university president. Its meetings are the earliest opportunities students have to provide input on tuition. It has four student members: two are appointed by ASUO, and two are appointed by administration.

This year, ASUO’s President Helena Schlegel and Finance Director Shawn Stevenson were the only student members regularly attending advisory board meetings — cutting student voice in the discussion by half because the two administration-appointed members were not consistently attending meetings.

Although ASUO and the advisory board both make decisions that impact the lives of students, ASUO operates with a better sense of accountability than the group deciding tuition costs. The ASUO works under a system of clearly defined expectations and ramifications for not fulfilling them. Senators, for example, can’t miss an unlimited amount of meetings. But when they do miss them, they can find minutes from the meetings.

The advisory board has no such set expectations, and the head of the advisory board, Jamie Moffitt, admitted that it does not take official minutes for its meetings. Students also can’t readily find information about the advisory board through a simple Google search — and even if they do stumble upon the group’s page, all they’ll find is a scattered assortment of spreadsheets.

Information about who its members are, what is expected of them and how they are held accountable should be made available online. Not to do so is to exclude students from half of the conversation.

The advisory board also demonstrated its need for transparency in its January meeting. The board settled on its recommendation in the absence of the two consistently attending student members after they left for class. Later, the board told Schlegel and Stevenson that all remaining meetings were cancelled. This effectively cut them out of any further opportunities to weigh in on tuition. Students were, once again, left out. But in the current system they could do nothing to regain any control.

Unfortunately, this lack of transparency extends beyond the advisory board. Administration tells students that it has to fund many multi-million dollar projects, while simultaneously claiming it wants to do everything possible to keep tuition low.

But the administration and board don’t back those claims by showing alternatives for tuition-based funding like reallocation or budget cuts. That disconnect is incredibly frustrating to students and discourages them from engaging in the tuition-setting process. As it is, the influence they have is minimal.

After all, the Board of Trustees has the final say on tuition increases, and it has only one student member — one of the three board members to vote against next year’s tuition hike. Discussion about tuition would benefit if the Oregon state legislature added just one more student voice to the board, which is mostly comprised of members who graduated from college over two decades ago, when the average student wasn’t shouldering $30,000 in debt.

All this represents an inefficient use of student voice in a system that must change in order to bridge the gap between students and administration. Students literally can’t afford to have so little awareness and agency in this process.

The university won’t be able to afford projects such as improving campus Wi-Fi and providing faculty raises if its students can no longer afford to be taught.

Wikipedia: Anita Sarkeesian

After thousands of Gamergate participants (sometimes referred to as “Gators”) threatened to rape, kill or maim Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn were described by many as misogynistic hate campaigns, the Gators cried “but actually, it’s about ethics in games journalism!” There are still many who stand by this frankly pathetic excuse for a justification even today, though by all metrics their argument no longer holds ground.

In 2009, Sarkeesian released her first series of vlogs criticizing the portrayal of women in popular culture in various media, with a focus on movies rather than video games. The arguments she made there were characteristic of early feminist ideas. To some degree, she didn’t even have enough language at her disposal to make valid criticisms about the media she was inspecting. Even those that focused on women in games were far from flawless: her analyses weren’t always well-founded and often featured numerous incorrect assumptions about games or how they were played. At the time, there was not only a space but a need for intellectual discourse on her material. Simply put, Sarkeesian’s work needed to be questioned and, when required, shut down.

That all changed when the Gators reared their ugly heads. Jim Sterling, popular gaming critic put it best: “[T]here are some solid criticisms you can level at [Sarkeesian’s] work. I’m not 100 percent on her side, you know. She’s not perfect by a long shot and her video series seems already to be a little off base, with some of the examples she’s named as targets. But we can’t talk about that anymore, because the debate’s not about whether she’s right or wrong. The debate was invalidated when people tried to ruin her life en masse. The chance to debate her on merit was lost once people started threatening to rape her.”

Sterling’s statement displays what was wrong with the Gamergate knee-jerk reaction — the response was directly contradictory to the Gators’ supposed want for an intellectual discussion. Here, they were presented with a chance to call into question the methods of feminist analysis and criticize them, but elected instead to engage in borderline illegal actives that ruined the lives for many women involved in the gaming industry.

Given all that she’s gone through, it makes sense that the Canadian critic’s name is now borne by “Anita’s Law,” one of many feminist internet laws used to describe behavior frequently encountered by women online. The law reads as follows: “Online discussion of sexism or misogyny quickly results in disproportionate displays of sexism and misogyny.” Now that the smoke has cleared, one thing has become apparent — the fact that a rational conversation cannot even be held about feminism surrounding video games indicates that the Gator community is not interested in a rational conversation at all.

The post It’s not about ethics in video journalism appeared first on The Triangle.

The Philadelphia tri-state area — Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware — contains 101 colleges. Philadelphia itself has thousands of students who spend their 20s in the city. While the city is an excellent place to grow and learn in, after graduation, students tend to move away. The city is notoriously underfunded and overcrowded public schools scare off graduates when they’re ready to start families. As many graduates know, the chances of being able to send your kid to a great public high school here … well, they’re pretty slim.

Instead of sticking around to try and raise children in row homes next to their ex-group partners, recent college grads are seeking out housing far away from the Market-Frankford Line. They’re all buying hondas and moving to the suburbs, leaving Philadelphia with a 24 percent population of residents with a four-year degree. While the abundance of colleges in the tri-state area make it pretty clear that Philadelphia knows the value of college attainment for the workforce, there’s a clear discrepancy between students attaining degrees in Philadelphia and Philadelphia retaining these students as residents.

Drexel, like all businesses (technically, a “non-profit”) in the Philadelphia area, is very aware of this fact. Knowing that Philadelphia probably won’t be retaining most of the graduates the school produces, the school has taken an interest in making the city a better place for young families.

This fall, Drexel’s Dornsife Center will welcome one such public school that causes this problem: a Philadelphia partnership middle school — effectively bringing the Philadelphia public school system to campus. The Science Leadership Academy Middle School is part of a new, innovative district magnet school in The School District of Philadelphia. If they’re accepted after an initial application process, these students will spend their middle school careers “rigorous, college-preparatory curriculum with a focus on science, technology, mathematics and entrepreneurship,” as described by SLA’s site. They’ll be learning by completing projects and working with subjects hands-on to demonstrate understanding, rather than taking tests.

In Drexel’s mission for civic engagement, the opening of SLA in Dornsife represents the community’s revitalization effort — an effort to build up Mantua and Powelton and help improve public school options for families in these neighborhoods. Hopefully, it will be a step in improving the public school system and eventually adding to the number of families who would like to remain in the city.

The post Drexel goes to middle school appeared first on The Triangle.

This Feb. 14, at 2501 McGee Street in Kansas City, Missouri, bonuses will be awarded, champagne will be poured, expensive dinners will be had, and at the afterparty, presumably high-stakes blackjack will be played and copious quantities of scheduled substances will be consumed in a recreational manner. That’s the headquarters of Hallmark Cards, which you may know as “the company that makes all the cards” because you’re not creative enough to think of your own card with a picture of a kitten on it. Meanwhile, at 333 West 34th Street in NYC, Govia Chocolatiers are binge eating their own product, and at Three Limited Parkway in Columbus, Ohio, Victoria’s Secret is having an enormous (well, probably just a slightly bigger version of the normal weekly) lingerie party. (Probably the most exciting thing ever to happen in Columbus Ohio, let’s get real.) All will be making record profits related to this weekend’s Valentine’s Day celebration.

It’s easy to be cynical about Valentine’s Day like that. It’s commercialized. It’s overblown. It encourages copious consumerism and depresses the singles amongst us.

And without copious consumerism and egregious marketing, Valentine’s Day wouldn’t exist. The American public pours an estimated $13.2 billion into gifts for the holiday annually, according to the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association.

Is this worth being cynical about? A 13 billion dollar stimulus to the retail economy is nothing to sneeze at. Whether you’re single and alone on the holiday, or snuggling with your, what is it that millennials call it, “Bae,” you might say that this holiday isn’t for you. It’s for Hallmark Cards. Or it’s for global cacao suppliers, of which less than 1 percent are fair trade. Or it’s for the Thai workers making $7 a day manufacturing bras for Victoria’s Secret. It’s for Georgia-Pacific and Weyerhaeuser, producing paper for Hallmark, outside the eyes of the Forestry Stewardship Council. Your ethics mean that for Valentine’s, you can’t give puppies because they come from mills, and you hate Steven Singer, not for his low, low prices, but for the blood diamonds he sells.

This cynicism about ethics, or commercialism, or capitalism, is all great, well-founded, and largely correct. But, why confine it to one particular day? This cynical article was composed on a laptop built with Foxconn parts (the company with the suicide nets) on a word processing system run by a company that owns and profits from our private information, transmitted to your home or to our printer via a Comcast-owned fiber network which has a legal monopoly on Philadelphia-area broadband. This holiday is not uniquely consumerist or unethical.

There is no ethical consumerism under capitalism. Happy Valentine’s Day.

The post Love and capitalism appeared first on The Triangle.

A recent study from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind found that 68 percent of Americans agreed with the idea that “a big problem this country has is being politically correct,” an assertion that comes directly from the mouth of none other than Donald Trump. One of the most common arguments against politically correct (PC) behavior is that it hampers freedom of speech. From one perspective, this may be the case, but looking at the concept from a more objective standpoint reveals that the opposite may in fact be true.

Political correctness is the active avoidance of language or behavior that aims to either exclude, marginalize or insult people who are considered “socially disadvantaged”. Like anything, it’s best done in moderation: college students will forever have off-color humor, but there’s a difference between situational comedy and intentionally hurtful language. The term has come to be associated with censorship in some circles, though that isn’t a valid connection to make. To illustrate this difference, it’s best to look at these ideas from the perspectives of those who believe them.

In a post on the Excelsior Spring Standard titled “Calling me Politically Incorrect Violates my Freedom of Speech”, a self-proclaimed good Christian woman recounts her experience having been told that she used language that was offensive to her conversation partner and was being “politically incorrect.” She pointedly noted: “… I was made to feel like I should be censored.” While this could be very true, it’s important to note that she was not, in fact, censored. Rather, she was able go online and write an entire article about how she disagrees with political correctness. This seems like a prime example of freedom of speech being exercised by both parties, rather than the censorship of one in favor of another.

The key thing to remember about political correctness is that, in the words of Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti, “PC culture is not about your freedom of speech. It’s about our freedom to be offended.” Provided the movement is used as a tool to give minorities a language with which to discuss their struggles and prompt dialogue in a beneficial light, we fail to see any sort of downsides to its growing momentum. So go forth — share your controversial ideas, talk about race and gender and respond to the views of others. That this kind of exchange can even happen indicates that our freedom of speech is thriving and well-worth exercising… just don’t cry censorship when someone disagrees with you.

The post The right to be offended appeared first on The Triangle.

In a not-so-shocking twist, two creators of the misleading anti-choice video, claiming that Planned Parenthood was engaged in the illegal sale of fetal tissue, have been indicted. The accused are the leader of “The Center for Medical Progress” David R. Daleiden and member Sandra S. Meritt, who were, respectively, indicted on a misdemeanor charge of attempting to purchase fetal tissue a felony charge of falsifying government records. The group now faces a lawsuit from Planned Parenthood after they spread libel about the nature of reproductive health and research.

Thanks to the rapid spread of these false videos through social media, many are now under the false impression that Planned Parenthood sells fetal tissue at a profit. Congress has ordered investigations into it, even, despite it being obviously false. It’s fairly obvious from this incident that people still don’t seem to understand what Planned Parenthood does.

Planned Parenthood’s medical services include treatment and prevention for sexually transmitted infections, contraception, breast cancer screens, pregnancy care and maintenance, medically-safe and legal abortions, education services, etc. Seventy-nine percent of their clients are people with income below the poverty line. All of the aforementioned services, abortion included, are extremely important for people of lower economic status on a personal, medical, and financial level.

Furthermore, many people to this day are very uneducated on the delicate, complex and highly-regulated nature of reproductive research but also fail to be taught the severe necessity of it.

The donation of fetal tissue or organs has been a common research practice since the 1930s, and an important one. Fetal research has led to extremely important medical feats such as the chicken pox, rubella, shingles, and hepatitis A. Fetal kidney cells were used to develop the polio vaccine. Research is also looking into possible treatments for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, and even stroke prevention. Fetal cells are more ideal for such research because of their high growth rate and their more ideal environment for viral propagation compared to animal cells.

“The Center for Medical Progress” then, is against everything its title would suggest it is for. We suspect most of our readers were already aware of its farce, but we caution that scientific and misinformation is rampant in the world of viral videos. Even today, other blatant falsehoods, like anti-vaccine advocacy and homeopathy are taken seriously by otherwise reputable news agencies. Don’t buy into it.

The post Don’t believe everything you see appeared first on The Triangle.

By now, everyone ought to be aware of the public health crisis in Flint, Michigan. To make a long story short, Flint was a town on the brink of financial ruin. The good Governor Rick Snyder installed an unelected “emergency manager” to run the town (rather than instilling the duty to local politicians) and find places to cut costs. One of the ways the emergency manager found to cut costs was to switch the town’s water supply. Thus, Flint went from buying water from Detroit to drawing water from the Flint River.

The Flint River has different water chemistry than the Detroit supply. It’s a well-known fact and can be easily corrected by adding phosphates to the water, but continuing on their budget-cut warpath, the emergency manager neglected to correct the water’s chemistry. Consequently, the Flint River’s water caused the city’s lead pipes to corrode. Lead leached into the water supply, poisoning kids and causing a major health crisis on account of how lead is extremely toxic, resulting in developmental difficulties in children. It is nearly also nearly impossible to remove from the body, making treatment extremely difficult. Lead poisoning can even be passed down through generations from mother to child.

These are all facts. Indisputable. Immutable. Painstakingly worked out and studied by a team from Virginia Tech and the Hurley Medical Center in Flint, who found elevated levels of lead in children in the area since 2014, when the water supply was switched over with no democratic input.

An official for Oakland County, just south of Flint, Lewis Brooks Patterson, disagreed with these facts, since, anecdotally, he doesn’t have lead poisoning from drinking the water. He said as much at a speech to the Detroit Economic Club at a luncheon, and was promptly fired from his position as a contributing writer at Inside Michigan Politics, a statewide political newsletter. (Though, notably, he is still a county executive.)

It’s nice to see some accountability in this situation. Once Patterson was found to be blatantly misstating facts, and making statements which endanger public health and safety, he was removed from the public forum. Free speech, as we know, has limits. The classic example of yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater holds, though this might be likened more to yelling “No fire!” in a theater already up in flames.

So why, then, do we tolerate other blatant lies and misstatements of fact by our politicians? The scientific evidence behind Flint’s water supply being poisonous is no less reliable, than, say, science indicating that humans contribute to climate change, or that 2 degrees Celsius of total warming will be disastrous for the planet. Congressmen come in and say that, anecdotally, there’s snow outside, therefore the climate can’t change. See a parallel?

Demand more accountability for your elected official’s statements. Or, in the case of Flint, just hope your state-appointed emergency manager can be held accountable.

The post Asking for accountability appeared first on The Triangle.

Thanks largely to the 24-hour cable news cycle, the line between “journalism” and “entertainment” blurs more and more with each passing day—but it seems like Rolling Stone Magazine is unaware that there should be a line at all. Rolling Stone is, of course, now famous for its “A Rape on Campus” story, a tale of a vicious and gruesome rape which went viral… and then turned out to be nearly entirely fabricated.

This time, they’ve found a new and innovative way to debase journalism: clandestinely interviewing a known international drug producer and trafficker. In this gonzo piece, Sean Penn burns through seven-odd cheap cell phones and ruminates on farting in front of El Chapo, the leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel, amongst other things. He’s transported to secret locations and we learn from El Chapo himself that “El Chapo” is really not that bad of a guy—he pinky swears—and he’ll even fund a movie about himself.

Interviewing unsavory characters is neither a new nor bad facet of journalism. People have interviewed Ted Kaczynski, Osama Bin Laden, (other bad people here) and it’s perfectly legitimate. What makes El Chapo’s interview bad journalism? Well, not to worry. We’re going to clear that up for you.

The crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe. It was El Chapo’s interview, not Rolling Stone’s. El Chapo was given final editorial control over the piece, jeopardizing the piece’s integrity and calling into question the very reason (barring click-bait) to even bother putting together the piece itself. According to Rolling Stone, he made no edits, but that is irrelevant: it was always in the mind of the journalist and the editors that El Chapo would be seeing the article before print, and it was surely edited accordingly. Especially considering the dapper fellow’s position as head of a violent drug cartel.

This is an affront to journalism, and especially to anyone covering the narcotics beat in Mexico. Cartels regularly blow or shoot up Mexican news outlets who portray them unfavorably or who attempt to shed light on their influence in local affairs. Rolling Stone, an American publication located on American soil, has a duty to report on the truth. Instead they printed a movie pitch from El Chapo.

It was, in short, all about driving clicks. This article was pure entertainment and the public fell for it: everyone read it. It received a lot of media coverage. With the rise of VICE media, clickbait, leading headlines from Buzzfeed and the like, these kinds of entertainment articles disguised as journalism are becoming more and more common, while real news outlets can’t keep up. Just this week, Al Jazeera America shut down, and the ailing The New Republic has been sold for the upteenth time. Both are quality media outlets, and both have had dwindling viewership. Meanwhile, Rolling Stone chugs along merrily, despite its crass abominations of journalistic integrity. Que sera, sera.

In short, Rolling Stone Magazine is no longer in the journalism business. They’ve crossed over into the realm of cheap-entertainment and their reputation cannot be redeemed.

The post Journalism or entertainment? appeared first on The Triangle.

Somewhere between your mom’s home cooking and well-disguised sawdust lies the cuisine served at Drexel’s own Handschumacher Dining Hall. Students’ opinions don’t vary much on the quality of food: it’s been universally panned for as long as we can remember. Admittedly, a lot of the complainers don’t have dining plans anymore, but the popular sentiment remains.

All that came to a head last week, when inspectors of the Philadelphia Department of Public Health busted into the underground facility a few days before Thanksgiving, magnifying glasses in hand, and sleuthed out double-digit violations.

The Hans is not unfamiliar with health inspector trouble. A brief glimpse of health and safety inspections throughout the past few years reveal their noncompliance is nothing new. In 2011, they were caught with mice, mold, fruit flies and cockroaches. In 2013, an employee was observed handling food with their bare hands. In comparison, this year’s report—that racked up a mere total of nine foodborne illness violations—almost looks good.

Let’s discuss the real issue here: this is Drexel’s student dining hall. Up until this year, it was the sole dining hall for Drexel’s campus and how most freshman got the majority of their meals. This means that one foodborne illness, passed on through careless food preparation, could take out half of the student body, including all of our freshmen. (If that’s not hazing, then we don’t know what is.) Student dining halls don’t have to serve food that tastes good, but it should at the very least be safe and sanitarily prepared.

While we applaud the University for its effort to provide new dining options for student meal plans, the fact is that these same venues must be held to the highest standards of scrutiny, since they are not only the most common eateries for students with meal plans, they are sometimes the only eateries for students with significant financial needs. We appreciate that the health inspectors considered the violations not serious enough to warrant actually shutting down the Hans, and that there is probably therefore not a significant risk to public health.

However, the Hans has already earned a reputation from the student body for bad food, and now poor hygiene as well. Two years ago several students claimed to have gotten food poisoning from the Hans, with one case even resulting in hospitalization. An internal investigation by Sodexo, then operator of the Hans, and a statement from the Student Health Center indicated that the likely cause was the flu, and not food poisoning. However, the fact that students were so quick to blame the Hans over any other factor shows one thing clearly: our students do not trust the food they eat at the Hans or the service it provides. If the Hans has anything to work on urgently, other than, of course, correcting code violations; it is its own reputation.

The post All Hans on deck appeared first on The Triangle.