The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 86, No. 25, Ed. 1 Friday, April 30, 1999 Page: 3 of 16
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THE RICE THRESHER
FRIDAY, APRIL 30, 1999
moo moo MOO
End of men's team part of scary trend
Last week , the Rice men's swim
team was cut from the athletics pro-
gram. For Rice, Title IX was not a
factor in the decision, but similar
losses at universities
around the country have
raised the spectre of Title
IX abuse.
Title IX was put into
action about 30 years ago
to clear up gender ineq-
uity in collegiate sports.
The idea was that it was
unfair for many very de-
serving athletes to be
barred from competition
at the collegiate level be-
cause of their gender. Title
IX was passed to ensure that those
athletes would have the full oppor-
tunity to participate.
So it is quite ironic, at least in my
mind, that Title IX has been used as
a powerful excuse to reduce oppor-
tunities for student athletes, specifi-
cally male ones. The original idea
was not to cut men's sports, but to
add women's sports — to create
greater opportunities for one group,
not to deny them to another. But
today Title EX allows administrations
to slash the budgets of their athletic
programs and still seem to be acting
in the interests of their athletes.
On the other side of the issue of
women in sports is the current labor
continue to use them in situations
that don't really apply, or use them to
discriminate against people, then we
run the risk of undermining their
effectiveness in the situations in
which they are necessary.
On the whole, I think I can better
Zach
Bonig
strife in the WNBA. The women of
the WNBA are fighting for better
wages using the equal job-equal
pay argument. They say that it is
unfair for them to make
chump change in com-
parison to their male
counterparts in the NBA.
Both groups are playing
basketball, but one group
is getting paid much
more for it.
Now, besides my gen-
eral feeling that play in
the NBA is closer to
street brawling than bas-
ketball, the real problem
behind their argument is
that WNBA and NBA players, are
not getting paid to play basketball.
They are entertainers, first and fore-
most, and are largely paid accord-
ing to the audiences they can draw.
So until the WNBA draws as many
fans as the NBA, I think the women
should be paid less than their male
counterparts. And I think Jerry
Seinfeld deserves more money than
guys at open-mic night.
Equal opportunity laws mean just
that — equal opportunity for every-
one. I know they are imperfect, but
it bothers me when we start to inter-
pret them to mean something else.
It may be time to rethink the way we
deal with these laws. Because if we Zach Bonig is a Lovett College senior.
So until the WNBA
draws as many fans as
the NBA, I think women
should he paid less
than their male
countrparts.
accept the loss of the men's swim
team because the administration has
simply admitted that it doesn't want<
to fund athletics any more than it has
to. And 1 enjoy WNBA games and
think they do have the right to fight
for more money. But I wish we could
deal with these things without bring-
ing in irrelevant or misinterpreted
laws. Doing so completely under-
mines some very important and oth-
erwise worthwhile principles.
Angelique
Siy
So if there are any homophobes
or bigots out there who don't be-
lieve they can inhabit a world in
which homosexuals or another cer-
tain group of people live,
there are only two ways
to avoid a hypocritical
existence. The first is for
the intolerant to go on a
killing rampage, eliminat-
ing all the inappropriate
beings. The second is for
members of that group to
stand in a therapy circle,
light some candles, sing
some supremacy songs,
maybe write a manifesto,
then as a group, place an
Uzi or other weapon of choice
against the head of the person in
front of themselves and simulta-
neously fire. If bigots realized how
easy that would be, the world just
might be a better place. Heal the
world, I say.
These are play-pretend sticks and stones, Alia
The way to live life is through acceptance
A great many people who live and
work at Rice sit around a lot. We
may be productive while we're sit-
ting, but that doesn't change the fact
that it's mostly what we
do. And we accept this.
Students, faculty and
administration are very
good at accepting. It's of-
ten the easiest way to go
about doing things —
there's only so much time
we can spend questioning
reality before becoming
consumed in skepticism,
unable to actually proceed
with life.*""
Anyway, acceptance
isn't really optional — the only alter-
native to aqcepting what you encoun-
ter is to kill yourself. Romeo didn't
want to accept his life without Juliet's
existence, so he ended it. Denial
won't help change reality. The only
way to get out of accepting some-
thing is to take yourself out of the
picture. If you keep living, then
maybe you can do something about
the situations you don't like.
One thing many at Rice accept is
our general state of unfitness. We're
unhealthy because of irregular sleep,
alcohol, caffeine, unbalanced diets,
cigarettes, drugs, uneven and un-
predictable portions of stress and
free time, inadequate exercise due
to sitting around a lot, environments
contaminated with the germs from
several hundred other people, and
our being indoors all the time. We
don't want to accept the resulting
lack of muscle or lumps of fat (or
maybe both), but we do.
I've only temporarily accepted my
unfitness. Once classes are over, I
won't feel guilty about taking a quick
run instead of working on a paper. I
won't feel that I'm being distracted
from work if I decide to get some-
thing else done that instant: "now."
(And getting things done now is the
only way things ever get done. If
they're going to be done later, that
means they're obviously not already.
There's an infinite amount of later
and only one now.)
Rice is also very good at accept-
ing different people's cultures and
lifestyles', especially compared to
how well normal people accept the
unexpected and unfamiliar. Sure, we
may be ignorant, but we're pretty
tolerant. Tolerance is acceptance,
you know.
I won't feel that I'm
being distracted from
work if I decide to get
something else done
that instant: "now."
event at a family friend's house. I
used hair spray, because my mom
wanted him to look nice. Everyone
there complimented both of us on
how neat he looked, until after he
ran around playing with the other
boys at the party. His hair had turned
white. Because my brother's little
noggin smelled like her ironing, my
mother figured that I'd used her
home-mixed starch, which she dis-
penses from used-up spritz bottles,
instead of hair spray. Oops.
When we got back home, his opin-
ion was that I had done this.inten-
tionally as a practical joke. I said it
was purely accidental. So my brother
accepted my apology and never gave
the episode another thought, be-
cause the simplest way to move'for-
ward was to accept what I'd said. He
had better things to do than argue:
There were new issues of Nintendo
Power and Ranger Rick, for instance,
and dessert in the fridge.
Angelique Siy is ads production man-
ager and a Sid Richardson College
senior and can be reached at
alia@rice.edu.
LUNPGM
The making of a professor
Back in the 1960s, Rice de-
cided that it would be a world-
class institution. The changes it
made to that end — charging
tuition, desegregating,
pursuing big-time fed-
eral research grants,
building a huge foot-
ball stadium, scrap-
ping its original core
curriculum — are still
familiar as recurring
debates.
But one change
somehow slipped un-
der the radar. In the
1950s, Rice still had
only a dozen profes-
sors, generally one per depart-
ment. The rest of the faculty was
rffade up of "instructers," whose
duty was simply teaching, which
they did prolifically: Four courses
a semester was normal. In the
new order, teaching would be
done by professors, all of whom
would research and all of whom
would have doctorates.
By the time I got along, that
had become a basic assumption.
I came to Rice because of it; I
figured it was the sign of a good
education.
Several things have come to
make me doubt that. The first
was majoring in e/igineering, a
field that is, unlike. English or
physics, fundamentally about
practice, not scholarship. My
teachers had devoted their ca-
reers to an aspect of the field that
I was not interested in. In turn,
they were not necessarily inter-
ested, as I was, in building things.
Then I went to graduate
school. That gave me a lot of
respect for the faculty (I've had
trouble enough getting a
master's, and that's nothing com-
pared to a doctorate) but it also
made me wonder about the pro-
cess that makes professors.
Graduate school rewards
those who are willing to spend
long and lonely hours poring over
details. That makes excellent re-
searchers, but it doesn't neces-
sarily make good teachers.
It starts to sound really strange
if you think about it.
Question: What qualifies you
to teach university students?
Answer: Spending six years
learning how to do research.
Some graduate programs do
teach their students something
about teaching. But a good num-
ber don't. It is somehow assumed
that their graduates will be able
to figure it out themselves once
they get a faculty position. As
students, we've seen the results
Christcfc
Spieler
of that assumption, not just in
professors who can't teach but in
professors who wanted to teach
well but got frustrated and re-
treated into mediocrity.
The flip side is that
there are many people
out there who would
make excellent profes-
sors but can't because
they're not the type that
would do well in gradu-
ate school. Probably the
best teacher I've had at
Rice, the one who
changed my outlook on
life the most, never got
a graduate degree. In-
stead, he spent a long career in
industry, learning things that no-
body can learn in academia.
That makes me wonder what
else we're missing by insisting
on that Ph.D.
Over in architecture, they con-
sider practice a worthy substi-
tute for a doctorate when it comes
to tenured faculty positions. The
students benefit from a mix of
backgrounds, practitioners who
want to teach get the chance, and
the faculty gets a richer intellec-
tual environment.
A university, after all, is all
about bringing together differ-
ent ideas and backgrounds.
The same goes, incidentally,
for graduate student teaching.
Not only can it benefit future stu-
dents by educating future faculty
on how to teach, it can lead to
excellent classes, taught with
energy and a different perspec-
tive. As it turns out, graduate-
taught classes at Rice (there are
a few) often rate very well.
The problem, besides institu-
tional inertia and perhaps a hand-
ful of#rnery profs, is people like
me who came for the chance 10
interact with real. honest-to-go< >d-
ness Ph.Ds. 1 was right, in a way.
I would never want Rice to be like
the University of California at
Berkeley, where the graduate
students are so overworked and
ill-supported in their teaching
assignments that they organized
with the United Auto Workers
and went on strike. And I hope
that there will always be distin-
guished researchers teaching
lower-level classes. But there is
also something wonderful about
people who have proven them-
selves outside of academia find-
ing a home in it.
Christof Spieler (Sid '97) is design
consultant and a graduate student
in civil engineering//<" can be
reached at spieler@rice.edu.
There are limited cases of the
word "accept" in which non-accep-
tance does not require having to
eliminate something from exist-
ence: Groups or organizations can
refuse further association with ap-
plicants or proposals, but they can-
not, in Dilbert fashion, refuse to
accept that those things exist.
As humans, we recognize (an-
other way to accept) conflicting mes-
sages as valid. We're suppose^ to
turn the other cheek when we're
wronged, but we're not supposed to
be wimps. So we try to strike a
balance. We're supposed to be
proud of ourselves as we are while
staying driven to improve our flawed
personalities and lives.
My brother ha£ known how to
reconcile opposing but equally rea-
sonable perspectives in a way that
makes his life more enjoyable. I
remember when he was about four
years old, I fixed his hair for some
the Rice Thresher
Jett McAlister, Mariel Tarn
Editors in Chief
Brian Stoler
Senior Editor
NEWS
Jennifer Frazer, Editor
Ixslie-Liu, i4ssf. Editor
Gordon Wittick, Page Designer
OPINION
Joseph Blocher, Editor
Michael Sew Hoy, Editcr
SPORTS
Jose Luis Cubria, Editor
Chris Larson, <4ss/. Editor
Carter Brooking, Page Designer
CALENDAR
Amy Krivohlavek, Editor
LIFESTYLES
Riki Conrey, Editor
David Chien, Illustrator
PHOTOGRAPHY
Abi Cohen, Editor
Nick Zdeblick
Business Manager
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Mari'sa Levy, Editor
Macy McBeth, Asst. Editor
Michelle Tham, Page Designer
COPY
Ben Weston, Editor
Elizabeth Jardina, Asst. Editor
Robert Reichle, Asst. Editor
BACKPAGE
Kathleen Corr, Editor
Susan Egeland.^u/i/or
Malcolm Wardlaw, Editor
Eden King, Ads Manager
Lynlee Tanner, Asst. Ads Manager
Angelique Siy. Ad Prod. Manager
Carly Halvorson, Office Manager
Sol Villarreal. Distribution Manager
Christof Spieler, Design Consultant
Su Yin, Asst. Business Manager
Dale Webster, Macintosh Manager
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"I am very interested in the Ahndergroooiind
at Rice ..." S<j are we, George. So are we
' c COPYRIGHT 1999.
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McAlister, Jett & Tam, Mariel. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 86, No. 25, Ed. 1 Friday, April 30, 1999, newspaper, April 30, 1999; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth246650/m1/3/: accessed May 22, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.