Funding before filesharing
While the College Access and Opportunity Act being worked out in Congress has the potential to make higher education more available to low- and middle-class students, a short clause in the lengthy legislation could wrongly put universities and students at risk for losing important federal funding to turn colleges into Internet watchdogs, charged to keep students from illegally sharing files through on-campus networks.
Congress could harm the wrong students if it does not strike parts of legislation requiring colleges to inform students in detail of copyright infringement laws and penalties associated with peer-to-peer file sharing. Writing legislation that could give the record and movie industries a strong tool to prosecute students and colleges, the filesharing clause would bring Congress into a legal battle between universities and the Recording Industry Association of America that unreasonably asks schools to surrender information about Internet use and prosecute their own students.
-Boston University’s Daily Free Press
Amidst the blazes rises compassion
Most San Diego State students probably went to bed last Sunday expecting a normal week. Your to-do list: Paper due Monday. Grocery store on Tuesday. Biology test on Thursday. Halloween party, Friday night. But by Monday morning, those plans literally went up in smoke. Students and professors were under evacuation orders. Roads were shut down. Lunches with friends, coffee dates and classes were canceled. Some students were wondering if they’d have a house to go home to after Monday. It kind of puts that big intramural flag football game into perspective. Still, it would have been easy to ignore the disaster. SDSU was not directly threatened by the fires, and the people who live around campus were safe. We’re college students. We’re supposed to take this as a free week off from school – Halloween break.
And some people did just that. But they were in the minority. The fires blazing across the county lit a metaphorical fire under its residents. Qualcomm Stadium – one of the largest evacuation centers – had so many volunteers that they had to turn additional help away. On campus, Peterson Gym was turned into a center for displaced students and faculty. At one point, there were more volunteers than there were evacuees. If you watched the news, you probably heard a thousand different stories of people turning from San Diegans into good Samaritans.
-San Diego State University’s Daily Aztec
Billing our GIs
The phrase “”Support the troops”” is quite popular these days. It’s the fallback motto for any politician to cue a round of applause and an agreeable bumper sticker. But when support is truly needed, it seems that many of us have forgotten what this phrase really means.
This is surely what went through the minds of troops from the 1st Battalion, 133rd Infantry, a National Guard unit based out of Iowa, who were denied GI Bill benefits because some of their orders were for less than the cut-off of 730 days. Ironically, due to increased need for deployment, they have actually been deployed longer than any other combat unit, inspiring their nickname, the “”Ironman Battalion.”” To add insult to injury, several of the soldiers’ orders were for 725 to 729 days.
It has come as a bit of a nasty shock to many of them, who failed to realize that a problem existed as they began to register for classes. This problem can only be described as ridiculous, a vast administrative oversight that should have never existed in the first place. For a society that has agreed so wholeheartedly that the military deserves our support, hanging these soldiers out to dry is nothing short of embarrassing. We simply can’t allow a disconnect between the military and the rest of society.
-Indiana University’s Daily Student