A great deal of attention has been paid to sexual assault problems over this past month. In an editorial published in the Brown Daily Herald on October 11th, Lily Shield ’09 writes, “For a school of our size and with our money, Brown has an appalling lack of resources dedicated to helping sexual assault survivors.” [...]

How do you define racism? If you answer that question in a literal sense, racism is “the belief that people of different races have different qualities and abilities, and that some races are inherently superior or inferior.” In today’s day and age, most of us (hopefully) know and believe that this is not true, that [...]

Public education is the best state-run solution to poverty aside from direct welfare payments. Unfortunately, for a multitude of reasons, public education is failing those it most needs to serve, primarily the urban poor. Charter schools, however, have proven incredibly effective at educating students that many have written off as hopeless because, for instance, those [...]

There is an old joke that starts like this: a Democrat walks into a bookstore. He looks for George Soros’s latest book, The Age of Fallibility, and upon finding it, decides to pay the cashier $24 for it, and then goes home satisfied with his new purchase. Wait, back up. Actually, the man does not [...]

In a letter in Thursday’s edition of the Herald (“Spectator’s views on free speech hypocritical,” Nov. 2), members of the Queer Alliance charge members of the Brown Spectator editorial staff with having interfered with the Queer Alliance’s right to free speech. The letter quickly moves to an attack of all political conservatives, stating, “Conservatives [...]

He is the perennial punchline. We have all heard a multitude of good jokes about Robert Kennedy Jr., most especially the more serious one about how every day he metaphorically spits on the grave of his uncle, JFK, by continuing to tarnish the Kennedy name that once stood for greatness, but which now stands for [...]

The gender gap in the Class of 2010 applicant pool was too large to escape attention; the applicant pool was 39.4 percent male, while the entering class was 49 percent male. With a gap this large, my natural inclination was to assume that some sort of preferential selection had taken place, and I went to [...]

The Reagan Revolution has been properly feted of late as its architect bid a final farewell to the field of battle. Given that one says nothing but good of the dead unless they were President, his critics have been remarkably quiet – largely limiting their contributions to suggestions that the Soviet Union would have collapsed [...]

President Ruth Simmons has exhumed the most divisive subject in the recent history of Brown: slavery reparations. The new committee on “slavery and justice” is in a sense a good-faith attempt to engage in the dialogue that never happened in the spring of 2001 when conservative theorist David Horowitz published an antireparations ad in the [...]

In the spring of 2001, I placed an ad in the student paper at Brown giving “Ten Reasons Why Reparations For Slavery Is A Bad Idea – And Racist Too.” I thought it was a bad idea because it was being proposed 137 years after the fact, and that it was racist because it made [...]