Irretrievable Opals

By William Baude / June 8, 2004

All right, I admit, I haven’t been a very good columnist. I agreed to produce at least 15 pieces this year for the Maroon and I have produced…6. Somehow every quarter I would sit down with a bunch of things I meant to write, and somehow every quarter would go slipping through my fingers before...

Privacy rights for students and professors at a private university

By William Baude / April 13, 2004

A professor recently sent an e-mail to everybody in a class I took, giving each of our grades on the final paper (by name) and a few comments on the failings of our work. Like several of my angry classmates, I was quite surprised—surely this violates some norm of privacy, if not the Family Educational...

Cure the disease, not the symptoms

By William Baude / February 6, 2004

The death penalty, we are frequently reminded, is “broken.” The Illinois Commission wanted to reform it with more safeguards while also making it more rare. Former Governor George Ryan granted amnesty wholesale to Illinois’s death row. Poor people with overtaxed lawyers go to the electric chair when rich defendants do not, black defendants are disproportionately...

Mars: What’s $600 billion between friends?

By William Baude / January 13, 2004

This week President George W Bush will announce his plans to ramp up the space program and put a man on Mars. As Garfield the Cat continually laments, “It’s amazing the things people would rather have than money.” When the first president Bush announced similar delusions of grandeur, the cost was about 400 billion dollars...

Deciding where to cast my vote

By William Baude / November 14, 2003

The economy’s up, so maybe George Bush’s fiscal policies haven’t been as disastrous as they seemed. The reconstruction’s down, so maybe his foreign policy has been worse. Wait, no, maybe the economy’s down again. What was that Howard Dean said about Confederate flags? The election is a year away, I’m totally baffled about whom I’m...

Drinking observations from the UK

By William Baude / October 28, 2003

The legal drinking age in the U.K. (where I’m studying this year) is 18, and I’ve had the dubious privilege of hanging out with all of the “freshers” as they go through their orientation week. This has been a culture shock—nearly every orientation mixer (all of them college-sponsored) has involved alcohol. Drinks in the Old...

After the teacups

By William Baude / August 1, 2003

Lip-painting has always struck me as a curious phenomenon. On clowns and harlequins in search of wide, false smiles, on harlots and whores covering up traces of disease, the custom of applying sticks of waxy grease makes some sense. But why on earth do millions of otherwise attractive women slather their mouths with the stuff?...

Race blind criticism

By William Baude / July 10, 2003

Ah, the affirmative action debate. Those optimists expecting a sweeping rule from the Court have been disappointed. Twenty-five years after Bakke, Justice O’Connor has clarified a few lines and submitted the whole thing for another 25 years of revision, like those maddeningly unhelpful professors who make one or two cryptic marks, and write “Pretty good...

We need school choice

By William Baude / May 29, 2003

Wide numbers of people, from urban teachers to suburban parents to President Bush, will tell you that we should take action to save our schools. Of course, none of them can agree whether the solution involves more money, more testing, or more “school choice.” I have a simple proposal to reform our schools, and it...

Courts should punish hazers

By William Baude / May 15, 2003

As anybody who has wandered within six feet of a Red Eye or Red Streak probably knows, a giant hazing incident took place earlier this month. Senior girls invited junior girls to a secluded location, then punched and slapped them, and threw pig and fish innards, blood, beer, and trash. The girls were all students...

Santorum I: Privacy violated

By William Baude / April 28, 2003

In an AP interview that has now become somewhat infamous, Senator Rick Santorum complained about the possibility of a Supreme Court decision overturning anti-sodomy laws. “If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home,” he said, “then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to...

Let students choose where to eat

By William Baude / April 18, 2002

University of Chicago students in housing will soon receive a description of the new dining plans available to them. The end result of these changes is likely to be the restriction of Bartlett to those living in Max Palevsky Residential Commons. Students at other dorms may be able to purchase meals using Flex Dollars, but...