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T—nTTTT\A“ iTFTlOi online poll I 1 1 1 / I B / \ % f B 1 L 1 Should medical and law school I LJ m 1% I B WI B I students have reserved football Page 4 I P J V V I \ / \ I L ] www.dailygamecodk.com to Monday, September 20,2004 B B A f f B _ l. i _B_ vote. Results posted on Friday. THlfeAMECOCK EDITORIAL BOARD EDITOR Adam Beam UColuN UIKtCIUK David Stagg NEWS EDITOR Michael LaForgia THE MIX EDITOR Meg Moore COPT DESK CnIEr Gabrielle Sinclair VIEWPOINTS EDITOR Wes Wolfe SENIOR WRITER Kevin Fellner IN OUR OPINION Football ticket plan unfair to undergrads While most students stand in line at the Russell House for football tickets, law and medical school students have reserved tickets and can bypass the line. Apparently, USC feels that not all students are equal. This long-used policy wasn’t noticed until the Georgia game when 11,000 student tickets were gobbled up in three days. USC’s policy is that The ticket policy students are not guaranteed a gives law and ticket, just the right to have one. medical school But about 800 students from students priority USC’s law and medical schools at the expense of didn’t have to worry because undergraduates. they are guaranteed a ticket. According to the ticket office, students in USC’s law and medical schools simply swipe their Carolina Card at the beginning of the foot ball season to reserve a ticket for every home football game. If students don’t pick up their tickets, the tickets are returned to the ticket office. That’s potentially close to 800 student tickets students can’t use. Usually the ticket system isn’t a problem. But as the Georgia game showed, the policy does have an impact on bigger games. This policy should be changed to ensure students are the ones using student tickets. If students in the law and medical schools don’t pick up their tickets, they should be redistributed among the student population, not sent back to the ticket office for sale. Student’s pay for those tickets through activity fees and deserve to use them. It doesn’t make sense for the athletics department to sell student tickets to nonstudents. The athletics depart ment should let the students have their section. Anything else is unfair. IT’S YOUR RIGHT | Exercise your right to voice your opinion Create message boards at www.dailygamecock.com or send letters to the editor to gamecockopinions@gwm.sc.edu GAMECOCK CORRECTIONS In Friday’s The Mix, the ice cream pictures should have been credited to Jenni Dillard. The Gamecock regrets the error. If you see an error in today’s paper, we want to know. E-mail us at gamecockopinions@gwm.sc.edu. i--——-1 ABOUT THE GAMECOCK --, EDI I UK Adam Beam DESIGN DIRECTOR David Stagg COPY DESK CHIEF Gabrielle Sinclair NEWS EDITOR Michael LaForgia ASST. NEWS EDITOR Jon Turner VIEWPOINTS EDITOR Wes Wolfe THE MIX EDITOR < Meg Moore SPORTS EDITOR Jonathan Hillyard ASST. SPORTS EDITOR Daniel Kerr SENIOR WRITER Kevin Fellner PHOTO EDITOR Jason Steelman SPORTS PHOTO EDITOR Katie Kirkland PAGE DESIGNERS Erin Cline, Jennifer Logan, Chas McCarthy, Jessica Ann Nielson COPY EDITORS Jennifer Freeman, Steven Van Haren, Anna Huntley, Daniel Regenscheit, Jason Reynolds, Jennifer Sitowski, Joey Wallace ONLINE EDITOR Brian Cope PUBLIC AFFAIRS Jane Fielden, Katie Miles < TO PLACE AN AD The Gamecock Advertising: 777-3888 1400 Greene St. Classified: 777-1184 Columbia. S.C. 29208 Fax: 777-6482 CONTACT INFORMATION Offices on third floor of the Russell House. The Editor in Chief’s office hours are Monday and Wednesday from 3-5 p.m. Editor in Chief: gamecockeditor@gwm.sc.edu News: gamecocknews@gwm.sc.edu Viewpoints: gamecockopinions@gwm.sc.edu The Mix: gamecockfeatures@gwm.sc.edu Sports: gamecocksports@gwm.sc.edu Public Affairs: gamecockPR@yahoo.com Online: www.dailygamecock.com Newsroom: 777-7726; Sports: 777-7182 Editor’s Office: 777-3914 TUDENT MEDIA I RECTOR cott Lindenberg ACULTY ADVISER rik Collins REATIVE DIRECTOR usan King USINESS MANAGER ;arolyn Griffin DVERTISING MANAGER arah Scarborough LASSIFIED MANAGER herry F. Holmes RODUCTION MANAGER 'atrick Bergen REATIVE SERVICES lurke Lauderdale, Ihelsea Felder, Laura lough, Joseph lannelly, Kristen i/illiams DVERTISING STAFF !obert Carli, Ryan lorman, Caroline Love, esica Johnson, Katie tephens The Gamecock is the editorially independent student newspaper of the University of South Carolina. It is published Monday, Wednesday and Friday during the fall and spring semesters and nine times during the summer, with the exception of university holidays and exam periods. Opinions expressed in The Gamecock are those of the editors or author and not those of the University of South Carolina. The Board of Student Publications and Communications is the publisher of The Gamecock. The Department of Student Media is the newspaper’s parent organization. The Gamecock is supported in part by student-activity fees. One free copy per reader. Additional copies may be purchased for $1 each from the Department of Student Media. TA^NtSttlVC? PApApt5p NO^TWWARO /AIOPATionJ UtMMK<cl-Y____ Keep politics out of the classroom ■ Some professors can’t seem to separate facts from opinions The American Association of University Professors’ 1915 “General Report of the Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure” cautions professors to avoid “taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating them with the teacher’s own opinions ... before he has sufficient knowledge and ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive opinion of his own.” Some professors at USC do not always heed the AAUP’s warning and instead use their position to convert students to their leftist ideology. Sometimes it’s a derisive comment about the president or conservatives as a whole. Other times professors will assign textbooks that are replete with liberal bias so that their students’ knowledge of that subject becomes increasingly grounded in arguments from the left. Take the Latin American history class I took, in which the required readings and the videos we watched were stacked to the left and blatantly anti-American, but the professor taught these materials as if they were objective facts. The textbook, “History of Latin America,” deifies Fidel Castro and explains that, despite its faults, Communism was a godsend to Cuba. No where does it mention such inconvenient facts like Castro urging the Soviet ALEX ymonK to HARPFR launch a nHKrtK nuclear strike FIFTH-YEAR against the ENGLISH United States. STUDENT The boQk also presents the Marxist Sandinistas of Nicaragua (1979 1990) strictly in a positive light. It claims that the uprooting and relocation of the Indian peoples along Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast was carried out to prevent the U.S.-led counter-revolutionary force from exerting its influence over them. In reality is that the Sandinistas killed and imprisoned close to 15,000 Indians because they preferred to be left alone and didn’t want to take part in the revolution. Amnesty International and the U.N.’s Human Rights Commission have acknowledged these atrocities, but the left refuses to. To do so would mean admitting that they’re followers of a bankrupt philosophy. Then there was this video, “The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker’s Struggle,” that talks about how great Chavez was for unionizing the Mexican grape pickers in California and forcing the growers, through extortion, to pay the workers better wages. However, neither my professor nor the video felt it was necessary to point out the fact that workers who questioned Chav'ez risked having their arms and legs broken by his men. This extra bit of information is kind of important given the fact that the video claimed that the growers were greedy and cruel for not embracing Chavez. And these are just a few . examples among many. The problem with that, though, is that the majority of the students probably had little prior knowledge of Latin American history. They likely assumed that since the professor was an expert, this version of the events must be the most logical. The result is that a great many students likely left the class with the erroneous impression that the Communist despots of Latin America are the good guys and that America is the bully. Professors have a right to teach their classes however they want, but they also have a responsibility to provide the right environment for students to form opinions of their own by exposing them to more than just one side of a given story. Otherwise, they’re not teaching students, they’re • indoctrinating them. IN YOUR OPINION Sorensen s choices benefit university I am writing in response to Jessica Tillinghast’s comments regarding parking on campus and tuition increases (“Students ignored regarding parking,” Friday). She mentions that we wasted money on the Strom Thurmond Center, The Colonial Center and the proposed new baseball stadium. I would hope that most people would agree that these venues have and will continue to make USC the great place that it is. The facilities are not only bringing substantial revenue to our university, but are also allowing students to have convenient places to exercise, attend sporting and entertainment events. Even though parking is an issue on campus, I don’t think that university officials are sitting around and doing nothing. As for the criticism of President Sorensen, I think people need to realize the great tasks that this remarkable man deals with on a daily basis. Jessica says two things 1 must refute. One is that Sorensen is spending his time in his office looking for ways to increase tuition. Well, Jessica needs to know that the President can’t possibly make that decision. The S.C. General Assembly allocates funding to the university, and whatever funds USC doesn’t receive from the state has to be covered by the students. Also, Jessica mentions that Sorensen has a nice parking space in front of his office and doesn’t care about where students park. I am pleased to tell you that even though he does have a space, he hardly ever uses it. Sorensen walks on the Horseshoe everyday on the path from his office to his home. I am sure during his walk he would love to have any student stop him to ask what great things he has done during his tenure here. TOMMY PRESTON Second-year political science student Republican Party plays to U.S. fears A column by Corey Garriott (“Conservatism isn’t compassionate,” Monday) argued that conservatism is in its Essence not something compassionate, and that compassionate conservatism is a contradiction. The rest of the column attempted to use this to suggest that the Democratic Party employs vague notions such as “caring” to push otherwise indefensible measures and reforms. I would like to respond to this by examining exactly what the motivation behind conservatism and the Republican Party could be, since Corey and I are at least in agreement that it cannot be compassion. Instead I would suggest a different emotion: fear. The right is sustained by an enormous fear that certain core values held by the “common people” of the nation are in danger of being lost. Is this not the old opposition between the common man of the people and the outsider who is a morally lacking pleasure seeker who shifts and doesn’t even know what he wants? Garriott himself used these tactics throughout his column, and closed by linking the Democrats with Clinton’s loose zipper. The favorite image of the right today is that of Bush standing in the ruins at Ground Zero in a sublime display. Many conservative columnists have referred to'the anger felt by the left, but this anger is merely a justifiable reaction to the simplistic, fear-driven ideology of which Bush continually makes use. JASON PHILLIPS Fifth-year philosophy student Submission Policy Letters to the editor should be less than 300 words and include name, phone number, professional title or year and major, if a student. E-mail letters to gamecockopinions@gwm.sc.edu. Letters will be edited. Anonymous letters will not be published. Call the newsroom at 777 7726 for more information. Carolina shouldn’t restrict downloads m USC needs to push for private use of legal Internet music stores I stole Edvard Munch’s famous painting, “The Scream,” from a museum in Oslo, Norway, a couple of weeks ago. Missing a whole webk of class is nothing compared to pulling off an international art heist just so you can admire a painting every day while you walk to the bathroom. That’s right -- iiucrpui, cuiiic PATRICK an^ get me — AUGUSTINE * Z house8 FOURTH-YEAR Of course, POLITICAL this is a SCIENCE , , STUDENT ludicrous statement at best, and let’s all hope that the authorities won’t be knocking down my door late some night to check the veracity of my claim, but it’s also a perfect analogy for the problem USC and other universities are facing on the file sharing frontier. There has long been buzz that the university was looking into setting up a way for students to legally download music, and the rumor was finally confirmed through an article in this paper Friday. However fuzzy the details are at this point, it seems USC is already taking the wrong route in an attempt to cut down on digital piracy. It shouldn’t be a big deal for higher education in America to admit that it is at least 10 years behind in dealing with the impact of the digital revolution on media. In struggling to catch up, USC and peers may inadvertently implement solutions that will only encourage more illegal activities as students attempt to get around legal downloading. USC Chief Information Officer Bill Hogue was quoted as saying that his preference was for the RealNetworks system in place at the University of California-Berkeley, which confirms that Student Life has already failed to consider the implications of such a service on anything other than the university’s infrastructure. Take a look at the situation that Cornell University finds itself in a year after adopting the new Napster as a subscription service on campus funded through student activity fees. Napster, as well as RealNetworks’ Rhapsody service, are not compatible with Apple computers. Furthermore, the main portable audio player in use on college campuses (with a 70 percent market share) is the Apple iPod, which can be used with either PCs or Apple’s Macintoshes, but cannot play files downloaded from Napster or Rhapsody. Adopting a music downloading option offered by either Napster or RealNetworks would render these devices useless, and cut the primary user of such a service out of the loop. The only way to make a music service viable on campus is to ensure that it has enough content to dissuade students from illegally downloading through Limewire or Bearshare. Since the ultimate goal is to eliminate illegal file sharing, whatever service they choose must include adequate digital rights management. However, this is in ignorance of the fact that there are no protections against someone legally downloading an album and then ripping it to a format to share illegally. i Trr>> i •. o utai ujJiiuii w iv/ aggressively limit students’ ability to use illegal file sharing while encouraging private use of legal services such as iTunes instead of endorsing one and limiting choices. f COLLEGE QUOTE BOARD THE PITT NEWS gm&ii UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH Who needs an assault weapon? Those who do — military personnel, for example — already have legal access to them. Joe Schmoe doesn’t need an M-16 for hunting or self-defense, despite his secret desire to be Tony Montana. Considering that the ban led to the manufacturing and selling of civilian versions of assault weapons, Mr. Schmoe can substitute a Colt AR 15. THE HUSTLER VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY The whole intent of the Electoral College is to prevent an entirely popular system of selecting the president. While big states have a large chunk of the elec toral votes, the little states must not be squeezed out of the electoral process. In this way, all of America is brought into contact with the candidates, and the cam paigns are improved by this mandatory appeal to a broad sector of society. V U-WIRE •*