Your Student Assembly passed the Get with the Times Act and the Defense of Free Speech Act during last Tuesday’s meeting, which saw the always affectionate Mark Constantine in attendance.
The Get with the Times Act allocates $4,250 for the purchase of 200 copies of The New York Times to be delivered to campus daily for 40 academic days at $0.50 each. While this bill is said to be at the request of students and is relatively inexpensive considering what an individual print copy of the paper costs, it is still wasteful and unnecessary. When the Times goes offline in 2011 I will support this bill in spite of my environmental concerns, but at the moment, regardless of the opinion of the 800 College students who voted for the Collegiate Readership Act, this bill is useless.
The Defense of Free Speech Act requests the removal of “free speech zones” during SA elections and charges the sponsors with working with the administration to establish a sensible chalking policy that respects the historical nature of the campus. As much as I would like to limit all SA candidates to veal crates during their campaigns, apparently the American government values your right to freedom of expression. Though Constantine described this type of behavior as a “free for all,” confining all students to free speech zones and even the mere use of such a depressing term as free speech zone is disgusting. In the same vein, how big of a scrooge do you have to be to not allow kids to write with chalk on the sidewalk? Constantine said that changes were on the way and that these were not his policies.
We’ll see.
