Monkeying Around
The controversial topic of the primate-testing laboratories of Wilson Hall was revived in the last issue of the Orbis in an article entitled, “BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: Animal ethicists cite Wilson Hall's research lab.” The article recycled a 2006 Hustler article apparently inspired by PETA, whose webpage has added a link to the Orbis article to its on-going tally of Vanderbilt’s “transgressions.” But is there any validity to their claims of animal abuse? The recent Orbis article took great pains to elaborate on all of the lab’s citations, yet it failed to mention that investigations by the Vanderbilt IACUC and by the USDA concluded that no major violations occurred. Perhaps Vanderbilt’s “progressive voice”—with the help of PETA and SAEN, is trying to pull the cotton over our eyes…
Sometime in the next few months, a very select nine-member body will make one of the most important decisions affecting Vanderbilt University’s destiny, and by extension, the futures of all its students and alumni for years to come. Of course, I am speaking of the Chancellor Search Committee, and their decision of whom to select as our new Chancellor should definitely be of utmost concern to us as members of the Vanderbilt community. 
In an effort to better indoctrinate students’ minds with liberal propaganda and buzz words, Residential Life held their inaugural Vandiversity Week last month. Sponsored in part by the Dean of Students, the Dean of Commons, and VSG, as well as the standard diversity-promoting groups like the Black Cultural Center, the GLBT Resource Office, VU Lambda, and the Office of Active Citizenship and Service (Do the Affirmative Action and Diversity Awards ring a bell?), Vandiversity Week promoted itself as a “great week of dialogue and discussion.” 
As Hillary Clinton has assumed the mantle of Democratic front-runner for the presidency, she has been receiving an extra amount of press attention. Her presence in the public eye means that she tends to polarize voters, with very strong supporters but equally strong detractors. In order to revamp her image, she has embarked on an ad campaign to humanize her frosty image. Many feel that she is too liberal and that her goals are unrealistic, even misguided, in the current environment. The majority of her initiatives also represent a substantial increase in government spending. According to her myspace (yes, she has a myspace): “I always loved history and got good grades, but I never did well at math.” That could explain her contradictory plans of expanding government programs and reducing spending. One of my main qualms with Hillary is her tendency to support idealistic, incredibly expensive programs that are either inefficient or unsuited for our society. 
How much would you pay for something you could legally get for free?
A Brief History
Art historian Michael Baxendall has argued that the pleasure of ownership drove the consumption of visual art in fifteenth century Europe, but his conclusion certainly applies to the ownership of art today. However, this pleasure of possession stems directly from displaying the artwork in question. A painting relegated to the storage closet is merely colored goop on canvas, to borrow a favorite phrase of my thesis advisor, and is of no use to anybody except as a store of value for the artist’s labor and talent. 
On October 11, 2007, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs passed House Resolution 106 to be sent for a floor vote, which formally recognized the deaths of about 1 million Armenians under the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1916 as genocide and officially condemned the Turkish government for this crime against humanity. Under most circumstances it would be completely appropriate for the United States to encourage such a measure as this event represented one of the first systematic mass murders perpetrated by a modern government, but in this case, the Congressmen who supported this resolution may have sparked a diplomatic crisis with Turkey.
There always has to be the best of the worst in any competition, and when it comes to the Republican Presidential Primary, the award goes to Mike Huckabee. This is not to say that any of the candidates in this upcoming election are bad or unqualified, but just that there are the four candidates battling at the top, and Huckabee is the man that follows right behind them in the polls. 
As she notes from the very beginning of her new book, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans, Ann Coulter has been denounced by Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Durbin, Jack Reed, Dianne Feinstein, Frank Lautenberg, more than fifty Democratic House members, as well as “a slew of sissy Republican presidential candidates,” as she puts it. It does not stop there. Ms. Coulter has incited, during the course of her often-controversial career, denunciations and criticism from a wide selection of different types of people ranging from your typical New-York-Times-editorial-page-worshipping liberal to even some on the other side of the isle. Coulter also points out that the common criticism is that she has “gone too far” or has “crossed the line.” My response is: What line? 
