Brandeis University's Community Newspaper — Waltham, Mass.
Over the past year, the Fair Trade Brigade has encouraged the Brandeis administration, Aramark and the rest of the schools student body to make a complete switch to Fair Trade Coffee sales and consumption. In our effort to push this change, several potential problems have been brought up by those concerned with possible unintended consequences of a complete switchover, so Id like to address some of the ones that Ive heard often.
A panel of eight experts presented their analyses of the varying effects of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in a Teach-In called Understanding the Post-Katrina Crisis, which took place in the Schwartz Auditorium Monday night.
On Friday the 23rd at the Shapiro Center Theater Vaclav Klaus, current president and former prime minister of the Czech Republic, addressed a packed gathering of press, faculty, and students from colleges around the Boston area.
An advisor to a Middle-Eastern monarch will teach at Brandeis in fall of 2006. Joseph Lumbard will leave his post as Jordanian King Abdullahs advisor on interfaith affairs to join the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies department as a professor of Islamic studies.
There will be a formal petition to gauge undergraduate student support for completely replacing regular coffee with coffee grown under conditions in which those growing it receive a living wage, announced Union President Jenny Feinberg 07 in response to last weeks Hoot editorial decrying the use of a previous poll as official support from the students.
I recently attended one of the new student send offs in my area before returning to campus, and was confronted with the responsibility of having to show off all the great things about Brandeis. Dont let this articles title lead you to believe that I dislike Brandeis in any way, but I actually had trouble making the school sound good. After all, even though the school has an excellent academic reputation, everything else just plain stinks.
A while back, I was indulging in my hourly ritual of checking Facebook. Ok, fine, maybe Im exaggerating a little. Make that my five times-daily ritual. Thats much more accurate. Dont laugh, you know you do it, too.
During orientation, baskets were passed around to collect money for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. A triumphant email one day later announced that we had raised over $1400 for the cause. In the grand scheme of things, $1400 isnt that much money, but it is a lot to ask a group of new first-years reaching into their pockets on the spur of the moment to donate.
Yesterday, in the midst of another crazy day of classes and club meetings I happened to stop by my mailbox. I wasnt expecting much, I figured all I would find would be some flier inviting me to this club or that dance, but amongst all the stuff I usually recycle, I found an envelope addressed to me decorated with sparkly purple and green star stickers.
We would like to commend the Brandeis administration for working with student and professor groups towards a common goal of equal pay for both contract and non-contract workers at Brandeis. However we want to caution anyone who uses adjectives like victory to describe this achievement. While it is an admirable goal to have workers who do the same jobs get paid the same amount, it may have unintended consequences. For example, several workers around campus have privately complained that it was students doing the negotiating in their name.
