Bordeleau to leave Brandeis

Next week Sarah Bordeleau, Assistant Director of Student Activities, will leave Brandeis to become a sales agent for the American Program Bureau, a company that books speakers for universities.

As Assistant Director of Student Activities, a position Bordeleau has held since 2004, she met with students to help plan events, worked with the Union on club initiatives, advised the SunDeis Film festival, and aided in the development of the Student Activities Departments Take the Lead! program. During the summer she also redesigned the Leadership and Resource Handbook worked on the organization of the Activities Fair.

Union representatives work to introduce Hindi classes

Class of 2011 Senator Shiv Mundkur and Union Director of Academic Affairs Kimberlee Bachman 08 are working to create new foreign language classes at Brandeis including Hindi and American Sign Language.

Shiv [Mundkur] mentioned to be that there is demand for a Hindi class and I have experience creating classes, Bachman said. While they are very much in the preliminary phase, Bachman said, we have two goals;

ASL and Hindi.

Brandeis SSDP chapter organizes new club looks to alter national drug policies

After a year of planning, students have organized a Brandeis chapter of the nationally active group Students for a Sensible Drug Policy. Chartered by the Student Union last month, SSDP aims at promoting policy changes in the war on drugs.

Shopping for truth: To decide or not to decide, that is the question

Choiceso much meaning packed into such a small world. In any given minute, we all must make some choice of some sort. You should know something about me as you read this. I hate choices. Wait a minute, I love choices. Oh, I dont know, I just cant decide! So there you have it- at the same time, I am a girl who loves to decide, yet hates it at the same time.

Why we fear authority

A friend of mine who recently visited Wesleyan University told me that the students there arent afraid of the police. He said that when Wesleyan students pass a police officer late at night, they dont shut up and start walking faster, as Brandeis students often do. He said that they wave and say hello and that everybodys cool. He then went on to say that its because Brandeis cops have guns and its a culture of fear and blah blah blah (I dont really have an opinion on the Should the campus police have guns? debate because I dont think that decisions that could potentially involve peoples lives should be left in the hands of a nineteen-year-old girl who, until quite recently, believed that a chipmunk was a baby squirrel).

Sexiled: Whats your fantasy?

He trailed ice around my lips, down my neck, across myI think you can probably figure out the rest. His tie tickled my chin as he bent down to kiss me, his collared shirt barely unbuttoned, his slacks still on and buckled (or unbuckled, I dont really remember). My extremely short skirt was all but, well, ignored at this point, edging closer and closer to the bottom of myonce again, Im sure you can reach your own conclusions. We were on his desk, at work. At least, in my fantasy we were. Because in real life, we were on his couch and he was freezing my nipples off with the ice. So I had to tune out the baseball game and make up something much better if I didnt want him to strike out.

One tall voice: Leave your laptop at home

Ever since the earliest days of academia, people have inscribed their notes with ink and paper. For centuries, perhaps even millennia, students have required no other device in lectures but these basic tools of writing. Since the advent of the personal computer, the landscape has been changed. Now, students are able to be connected to the entire world while in class, all the while capable of taking more efficient notes. Still, there are certain drawbacks to the use of laptops in class. They provide an avenue for distraction, as many students are seen playing games or visiting unimportant sites while they should be taking notes. Also, I feel that the use of a laptop generates a patrician aura, as it presents one more segment of society where people play a game to get the best products to do the most seemingly simple of jobs. With all this being said, laptops are overrated in the classroom and should probably be substituted with good old fashioned pen and paper.

Lest we forget

October 27 marked the 60th anniversary of one of the most significant events in film historyone that most people fail to remember, but really should. On that day in 1947, the Committee for the First Amendment, a group of roughly thirty A-listers from the world of film, risked their careers by flying to Washington to protest the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Fighting with pinpricks: Chavez founds alternative bank

In a pamphlet composed a few weeks before the 1917 October Revolution, Lenin wrote that without big banks socialism would be impossible. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, our young centurys most exciting and successful socialist, seems to be taking Lenins advice. Tomorrow, Chavez will officially launch the Banco del Sur, a regional development bank which will provide South America with a socially responsible alternative to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The founding members of the new bank include not only Venezuela, but also Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

The Book of Matthew: Electoral college is ‘waste of time’

When the Founding Fathers of our country wrote the Constitution, they called for the creation of an Electoral College to choose the president every four years. This probably wasnt a bad idea in 1787, but times have changed since then and a Constitutional amendment is long overdue. We Americans can and should be able to choose our leaders without the aid of a higher body of electors.