Don’t lock up the ballot box

By Emily Alpert / April 9, 2004

For his California robbery conviction, Abran Ramirez served three months in jail, 10 years on parole, and a civil death sentence. As a consequence of a now 20-year-old conviction, Ramirez is prohibited from voting for life. Unfortunately, his is not an isolated case. Felony disenfranchisement prohibits 2 percent of Americans from voting; among black men,...

Give prospies a chance

By Maroon Editorial Staff / April 9, 2004

While we have yet to see many rain showers on campus, we have seen many other things that April brings, most visibly, bands of admitted prospective students. If you have yet to see these wandering groups on campus, its time to start attending your spring quarter classes, because campus is full of them. For the...

Chávez revolutionized workers rights, deserves to be remembered

By Joel Lanceta / April 6, 2004

César Chávez Day was on March 31, last week, but you probably didn’t know that. What, you don’t know who César Chávez is? Look around; his influence is everywhere.To my social activist friends, he was the soul of the labor movement in the 1960s and completely turned around the status of many migrant workers demanding...

Racial divide in education must be addressed

By Barney Keller / April 6, 2004

It’s been 50 years since the famous Brown v. Board of Education decision that desegregated public schools and paved the way for equal educational opportunities for young blacks, a crucial step toward a truly color-blind society. There’s been progress since, but there is still a whole lot of work to do. To get to the...

Tom DeLay: the next Speaker of the House or the next political casualty?

By Andrew Hammond / April 6, 2004

As fearful as I am of the prospect of another four years of the Bush administration, when I think about our government ten or twenty years from now, I do not think of Cheney or Rumsfeld or even Dubya. They will be relegated to recent history. When I think of whom to fear in the...

SGFC spending ill-considered

By Maroon Editorial Staff / April 6, 2004

Student Government Finance Committee (SGFC), the organization responsible for doling out money to student groups, is out of money for the year. This is a direct result of SGFC’s new friendly and easy liberality and a reflection of the desire, stated by its officers, to receive a greater fraction of the student activities budget. SGFC...

Remembering Karl Weintraub

By Maroon Editorial Staff / April 2, 2004

Few professors are as deeply connected to a school as Karl Weintraub was to the University of Chicago. In 56 years he gave each of his thousands of students every bit as much as he demanded from them, which was a great deal. His dedication and intensity were legendary and, with his passing on March...

The Left’s warped view of the war on terror

By John Lovejoy / April 2, 2004

Liberals want to put terrorism behind us, not by ending it, but by pretending it is no longer a concern. The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof argues that other matters are more important in the presidential race. John Kerry refuses to acknowledge the existence of a war on terror. Considering that liberals think the...

Unfortunatelly, life demands that we do things

By Leila Sales / April 2, 2004

I used to have a sleeping bag. It was blue and warm, and it did not have an extremely large rip in it. But all this changed yesterday when my friend Reed and I came home to discover that my entire room was filled with fuzzy, white down feathers. We spent approximately two minutes trying...

Making the U of C a green campus

By Quinn Bernier / April 2, 2004

Spring is here and the grass is finally starting to look a little greener. But this is not all that is turning green here at the University of Chicago. The University itself is making remarkable strides towards improving its overall environmental sustainability. The efforts of the Green Campus Initiative (CGI), a group dedicated to improving...

GOP strays from war on terror

By Joel Lanceta / April 2, 2004

“Waving the bloody flag” was an old publicity tactic of the GOP during U.S. elections in the late 19th century to continually remind the public which party won the Civil War and sacrificed its sons’ lives to keep the Union together. This propaganda method actually worked quite well for the Republicans during and after the...

Vote in Illinois’s primary March 16

By Maroon Editorial Staff / March 12, 2004

The youth of America are constantly being reminded about the dismal voter turnout rates among 18- to 25-year-olds. Programs like MTV’s Rock the Vote have failed to significantly alter voting rates in this demographic, which is convinced that voting simply will not make a difference. In an effort to get teens involved in the political...