Staff Editorial

By The Maroon Staff / August 1, 2002

The recent furor surrounding the news that Princeton University admissions officials gained unauthorized access into Yale’s admissions database is not entirely unwarranted. Nonetheless, we at the Maroon would like to remind concerned readers that only 11 records were actually accessed, which hardly constitutes a massive breach of security. But its small size does not make...

Staff Editorial

By The Maroon Staff / July 25, 2002

It has not been a good year for some of Hyde Park’s more beloved institutions; the City of Chicago continues to threaten the Point, the Hyde Park Theater closed, and the Harper Court Foundation (HCF) removed the chess benches from Harper Court. This last development is particularly disturbing because it was entirely senseless. Despite facing...

Time to end the bombing

By Justin Palmer / July 25, 2002

It seems that we may have won the war in Afghanistan only to lose the peace. This shouldn’t surprise any of us. Afghanistan has always been relatively easy to conquer, but it has proven nearly impossible to govern. The Soviets overran the country in just four days but were bogged down there for a decade....

Avoid campus stress problems

By Pamela Koszut / July 25, 2002

Last Thursday, Bill May, a retired professor from Indiana University, was found murdered in his Indiana home. Although his killer’s motive was probably robbery, the case interests me because of May’s profession. Whenever I hear about any sort of violence to one associated with a college, I feel an sense of remorse. This is not...

Protect free student journalism

By Tim Miller / July 25, 2002

The paper that you are holding or reading on the Internet was produced by students here at the U of C. That seems a pretty self-evident statement, but it is important to remember that there are student journalists, even at a place like the U of C where there is no journalism school. Some might...

Keep handguns out of Chicago

By Pete Beatty / July 18, 2002

Well, I guess I’m writing for two reasons: first, in response to J.H. Huebert’s article from last week, “Citizens need self-defense,” in which Mr. Huebert argued for a rethinking of Chicago’s law banning handguns. My second reason is just to say that I hate guns. Right out of the box I’ll say this: Mr. Huebert’s...

Tom Cruise does philosophy

By Andrew Moesel / July 18, 2002

Minority Report is an action packed movie based around a pair of interesting philosophical questions: can we predict human actions before they happen, and, with this knowledge, can these actions be controlled? The movie offers an accessible look at these timeless, complicated ethical and metaphysical issues concerning the freedom of man’s action. Audiences across the...

Staff Editorial

By The Maroon Staff / July 18, 2002

The College Board recently agreed to settle a suit brought by Disability Rights Advocates, which mandates the cessation of the practice of flagging test scores obtained under special conditions—most commonly extra time. Most education officials and commentators have observed that the end of flagging is a commendable change, in the sense that it reinforces the...

U of C: Dump Microsoft

By James Liu / July 18, 2002

Everybody knows that Microsoft is an evil monopoly, but of course, most of the advantage of being an evil monopoly is that customers have nowhere to turn. Since people have nowhere else to turn, they can do just about anything that they very well please. The key phrase here is of course, just about. Monopolies,...

Henry Crown nearly inhumane

By David Svolba / July 18, 2002

I am not in the habit of publicizing my rants, but feel compelled to do so on behalf of the thousand or so students each day courting heat exhaustion in what our beloved university mockingly calls a “gymnasium.” I am of course speaking of that small percentage of U of C students who, lacking the...

Staff Editorial

By The Maroon Staff / July 11, 2002

Let’s face it, there’s something just plain romantic about riding on a train—hearing the sound of the whistle, eating as the countryside flashes by, meeting other passengers, and so on. With the rise of the airplane and automobile, however, train travel has become an increasingly unfeasible option for many Americans. Train travel is not much,...

Amtrak can’t do the job

By James Liu / July 11, 2002

Amtrak sucks. Anyone who genuinely likes rail, and moreover, likes getting somewhere more or less has to agree. Sure, long distance rail travel is a charming way to see the country, but it is certainly not a practical way to go from place to place, at least not with the current system. America needs a...