Newspapers / The Guilfordian (Greensboro, N.C.) / April 10, 2009, edition 1 / Page 10
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I k 10 WWW.GUILFORDIAN.COM Remember the people who keep the campus running You're walking past the salad bar balancing two plates, a bowl of half eaten-soggy cereal, a glass of water, an empty coffee mug, a set of silverware and a wad of used napkins. As you dodge around the line-up at the pizza station, a fork slides off your plate and crashes to the ground. You glance down and keep walk ing toward the dish line, rationalizing that someone is getting paid to clean up things like this. This kind of rationalization accounts for a lot of the hellish messes that accumulate at Guilford: in the caf, in the dorm bathrooms, and even in the meadows and woods. While one fork only takes a second to pick up, a day's worth of items left behind here and there from assorted students can tack hours onto the clean-up duties of staff members. Certain students have succumbed to a combination of laziness and ignorance. They assume that just because someone gets paid to clean and fix things on campus means that we don't have any responsibility to clean up after ourselves or respect our campus and grounds. It stems from a student body that often forgets that staff members are not faceless drones; they are members of our community just like our professors and fellow students. They get paid to do jobs, but that doesn't give us the right to make their jobs more difficult by being sloppy and immature. We should all make a concerted effort to think about the people who keep this campus in operation every day, and to acknowledge how those people are affected by our actions. If you see someone leaving a mess in the caf, tell them to pick it up. If someone is care lessly stomping across one of the flowerbeds, remind them that someone is going to have to come along and replant them. It might seem easier to just ignore it and move on, but that is not in line with our core yalues. Social activ ism is a global cause, but sometimes it helps to focus on the small things happening every day in our own community. After your friends drunkenly topple that trashcan outside Binford, Will has to clean it up. When you leave a bottle of soda under the table in the library, Lily has to throw it away. If you get bored and write on the walls in English, Jay has to come paint over it. This is not what they get paid to do. Cleaning up and looking after supposedly mature and responsible people only adds to the enormous workload they face on a daily basis. So do the respectful thing and clean up after yourself. The editorial board of the Guilfordian C0NSI5T5 OF FIVE SECTION EDITORS, VNO PHOTO EDITORS, A LAYOUT EDITOR, ART DIRECTOR, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, MANAGING EDITOR, AND THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF. Reflecting Guilford College’s core Quaker values, the topics and content of Staff Editorials are chosen through CONSENSUS OF ALL 12 EDITORS. FORUM Putting students before potholes By Jasmine Ashton Senior Writer In a March 20 Guilfordian forum article, entitled "Potholes of Parking," Paula Wilder dis cussed the issues surrounding the overcrowded, pothole-filled Hendricks parking lot, more spe cifically the $250,000 required to fix it. Wilder determined that in harsh financial times, when col leges need to prioritize, spend ing a quarter of a million dollars on asphalt seems like a waste. "Come on, 250 G's is a problem for Guilford? Instead of giving 10 students scholar ships or aid, get some wealthier full-paying students next year. There's $250,000 dollars, boom," said senior Corey Nelson in an online response to Wilder's arti cle. "We need to stop increasing the number of students until we can provide adequate accommo dations for current students." Wilder and Nelson's positions on this seemingly Guilford-specific issue reflect a larger dilemma faced by col leges across America right now. According to The New York Times, fallen endowments and needier students have led many colleges to look more favorably on wealthier applicants as they make their admissions decisions this year. What are colleges, like Guilford, who are already expe riencing budget cuts supposed to do with this influx of appli cations requesting more need- based financial aid? Do they prioritize facilities, hoping to attract a wealthier applicant pool? Or do they spend their limited budget on additional scholarsliips to pro vide an education for more needy students, allowing them the chance to better their lives and perhaps one day give back to their alma mater? According to the 2009 Princeton Review, 92 percent of Guilford students receive some form of need-based financial aid, with an average package of $15,596. This large amount of money spent on financial aid, copibined with the little funds spent fixing a deteriorated park ing lot, says a lot about where our college's priorities lie. Nelson and others who share his view may say that investing in facilities has an immediate return, while investing in stu dents doesn't. I would beg to differ. Guilford's dedication to its students, expressed partially through its commitment to diversity, is one of the reasons' it is nationally recognized as one of the top 40 colleges that change lives, an attribute that attracted me here in the first place, and I'm guessing I'm not the only one. Beyond being one of the college's core values that many of us deem important—valu ing diversity is instrumental to Guilford's competitive advan tage, arguably more so than fix ing a parking lot. To me, this is just as immediate a return for the college as investing in facili ties since some of these students pay full tuition. But beyond using our core values and student-centered education as a marketing strate gy, Guilford would be hypocriti cal if it didn't also follow these ideals. This means that, in addi tion to having a curriculum and extra-curricular activities that address these topics, Guilford's commitment to diversity must also be expressed through admitting students from varied class backgrounds. Social class can be seen as one of the greatest ele ments inhibiting upward mobil ity. Even more significant than one's class, is the role of educa tion as one of, the most signifi cant determinants of a person's career and financial success. The combination of these two factors is reason enough to allow these hardworking and intelligent students a chance to rise above their economic circumstanc es and achieve the American Dream. In a time when families are falling out of the middle class, it is the job of our higher educa tional institutions to provide stu dents with the chance to exceed the financial backgrounds they were bom into. And if a few potholes in a parking lot are all tliat's stand ing in the way of achieving that—I don't mind the sacrifice. Letter to the Editor In response to me In my time at Guilford, I have been quoted many times in the Guilfordian. Most of those times occurred this year due to my participation in many controversial events and discussions on campus. While I would not say that I have ever been misquoted in the Guilfordian, the full intent of my words rarely seems to make its way into print. It is the nature of journalism to take the more extreme quotes out of an interview so that the journalist can present clearly the different sides of an issue. However, this dichotomous means of presentation can convey a perception that our school is far more polarized than it actually is. When I read my quotes, it's often hard to believe I actually said them, since they were surrounded by mitigating statements. The truth is I usually say many of the same things the other side does, but we've simply reached different conclusions. Readers would never figure that out from the articles, and odds are, they won't ever question what they read. However, we owe it to ourselves and our community to question it. We are blessed by the size of our school and the openness of our environment to begin dialogue with nearly anyone here. When we read two or three sentences in the Guilfordian from a twenty minute interview, the onus is on us to seek that person out and find out what opinions we share rather than focus on our differences. Journalism is a powerful tool, but it can never be more powerful than personal conversation. It is our choice to allow journalism to open up dialogue and bring our community together, but it's also our choice to accept the dichotomy and allow journalism to stifle discourse. Hopefully, we as a community can make the right choice. Viaoria Mallett Campus underappreciates IT+S efforts By Nick Bunitsky Staff Writer Can you remember that meeting you attended where a fine young gen tleman set up and fixed the overhead projector even though no one thought it would work? Do you recall the crash of the laptop you had in your first year and the help that arrived to resuscitate it? Or is outdated equipment all you think of when you hear the letters IT&S? If that's the case, perhaps a refresh er is needed: even in turmoil like our recent e-mail lag, IT&S is on the up- and-up when it comes to technology and making sure we get the most out of it. Recently, the majority of campus has noticed a large fluctuation in the time it takes an e-mail sent within the network to arrive at its intended destination after it's been sent. While everything has returned back to its previous state of electronic equilibri um at this point, a culprit has already been found and dealt with. An overwhelmed spam filtering server for the Guilford network that has been in place for six years caused the delay of e-mail delivery on cam pus. The server passed its technologi cal life span two years ago. "For these last two years IT&S has put band-aid after band-aid on the server to try and extend its life, and there are no more band-aids that can be applied. We have ordered a new SPAM filtering server, and it should arrive on-campus Monday (March 30) so that we can begin configuring it," said Chief Technology Officer Kyle Johnson on the IT&S blog in a post on March 28. "The new server is capable of han dling three to four times as much e-mail," said Johnson. The server did indeed arrive, though shortly after the old one delivered most of the delayed messages and e-mail once again took its depersonalizing toll on our lives. Johnson estimates that the system delivered "just over 53,000 queued messages" from last week alone. The mail arrived at its final destination, albeit with a bumpy ride. For some it was just in time but for others, it was far too late. Students across campus complained about inconsistencies, late assign ments, and missed last-minute read ings. Inconvenience was on the minds of students across campus, despite the new and improved server. But doesn't IT&S still deserve praise? Sure, the broken SPAM filter ing system backfired and maybe the proverbial band-aids put on the server over the years should've been looked at more carefully, but when the system finally crashed, IT&S wasted no time getting a new one. They do everything they can to make sure that this campus is tech nologically sound, and have shown impressive service to the faculty and students of this school for quite some time now. Guilford may no longer be on Yahoo! Internet Life magazine's "America's Most Wired Colleges" like we were in 2000, but fhanks to IT&S, we're still on top of our troubles and breaking new ground constantly.
The Guilfordian (Greensboro, N.C.)
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April 10, 2009, edition 1
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