4 - Friday, September 12, 2008
The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com
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ANDREW GROSSMAN
EDITOR IN CHIEF
GARY GRACA
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
GABE NELSON
MANAGING EDITOR
Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily's editorial board. All other signed articles
and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.
The future of textbooks
New technology offers worthwhile solutions
s your first full week of classes comes to a close, if you
haven't stood in the ridiculous line at the bookstore, you've
certainly walked by it. Regardless of whether you stood in
an endless maze of a line, you certainly felt your pocket burn when
purchasing your textbooks. That burn was probably a little less
severe if you bought your books online. Thankfully, that is an option
the University will be making easier starting next semester. If the
University hopes to help students in the future, though, it's going to
need to keep up with changing technology.
YouTube was being used by Islamist
terrorist organizations to recruit and
train followers."
- Sen. Joe Lieberman (l-Conn.), responding to YouTube's ban on videos that incite violence, as reported
yesterday by the Washington Post. Lieberman had pushed for the change since earlier this year.
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Websites like Amazon.com and Halfcom
allow students to shop directly for cheaper,
used versions. To make things even eas-
ier, many sites are emerging that help in
the search for used textbooks, including
Uloop.com and local upstart mtextbooks.
com. Uloop.com simply connects students
with sellers of used books. Mtextbooks.
com, which launched this semester, took
that a step further, compiling lists of the
textbooks needed in courses and then con-
necting students with people selling those
books or offering them information about
other options.
Beginning next semester, the University
will finally throw itself into this mix with
the next program UBook. The program will
connect with CTools and allow students to
find the books needed in a course and stu-
dents sellingthose books. The logic goes: If
students know about their textbooks earlier,
they'll have more (and therefore cheaper)
options. Combine that with a student-to-
student exchange, and textbook buying just
got a lot easier and cheaper.
Here's the catch: Professors won't be
required to list the textbooks for their
courses. They should be. In light of the
other private websites like mtextbooks.
com sprouting up, it is especially impor-
tant that the University makes UBook the
most trustworthy place to get textbook
information.
Besides UBook, which is an excellent pro-
gram and hopefully will live up to its lofty
expectations, the University needs to keep
up with the changing textbook market.
Because the University didn't keep up with
online markets, a survey last year ranked
the University 38 out of 39 colleges in terms
of textbook affordability.
For example, new electronic read-
ing devices like the Kindle are becoming
increasingly popular. This wireless read-
ing device, which cost about $350, allows
people to download books at roughly 60
percent of their original cost on average.
The University makes a lot of its joint effort
with Google to digitize all the books in the
University library. Why couldn't the Uni-
versity take the lead in connecting these
two advancements to make digital text-
books available?
UBook will hopefully be a program
worth celebrating next semester. But if the
University wants to rank higher than sec-
ond from last, it's going to have to be proac-
tive from now on.
A toast to Amethyst
Since July, 130 university chan-
cellors and presidents have
signed onto apetition callingon
U.S. lawmakers to
rethink the nation-
al drinking age. A
stale issue, right?
In our lifetimes
we've all wondered
why, at 18, you can
serve in the mili-
tary, vote and sit on x
a jury but not have
a beer. The Ame- ARI
thyst Initiative has PARRITZ
incorporated these
arguments (and
more) into its petition, but it has done
so on an academic and professional
.level. And it has a cavalry of univer-
sity presidents on its side.
So maybe it's not such a stale issue.
The Amethyst Initiative wants us
to take a closer look at the efficacy of
the National Minimum Drinking Age
Act of 1984. And it explicitly doesn't
ask that Congress lower the drinking
age to 18.
In other words, these college presi-
dents just want to talk.
Unfortunately, efforts to critically
challenge and review policies like
the 1984 National Minimum Drink-
ing Age Act have been stifled by the
explosive emotions surrounding this
issue. For example, many critics of the
Amethyst Initiative - including the
national president of Mothers Against
Drunk Driving and University .of
Michigan President Mary Sue Cole-
man - accuse the petition's support-
ers of advocating underage drinking.
Others accuse the petition of trying to
shift the responsibility of regulating
underage alcohol consumption from
university officials to high schools.
These critics' accusations are
straw-man arguments. Though these
types of arguments are effective in
advertising, lobbying and convincing
kindergarteners to share their toys,
they aren't appropriate in an academ-
ic debate.
Then why do these arguments
always win? Well, try arguing with a
mother who has lost a child to a drunk
driver. Or try arguing with a univer-
sity president accountable to both
lawmakers and parents.
On campus, the Greek community
experiences a similar struggle with
emotional responses to alcohol con-
sumption. The Greek system's current
policy - largely created in response
to Courtney Cantor's tragic death
nearly a decade ago - is ambiguous,
and its enforcement is laughable. As a
past fraternity president, I recognize
these problems. Yet most attempts to
re-evaluate the social policy are met
with strong and often overwhelming
emotions, and these emotions do little
to improve the situation.
Imagine this emotion as a thick
cloud of fog, smothering any call for
rational debate. Well, Amethyst just
bought a pretty big fog light. And
they're shining it at you.
What can you do?
As a source of fresh logic, looking
at the actual initiative is a good place
to start. But what does it actually say?
Nowhere in the statement does the
petition advocate reducing the drink-
ing age to 18. And nowhere does it say
that regulation responsibility should
be shifted to high school adminis-
trators. Rather, it calls upon elected
officials "to support an informed and
dispassionate public debate over the
effects of the 21year-old drinking age;
to consider whether the 10% highway
fund 'incentive' encourages or inhib-
its that debate; and to invite new ideas
about the best ways to prepare young
adults'to make responsible decisions
about alcohol."
Innovative. But incomplete.
A possible solution to the petition's
shortcoming would be some new
research. Fortunately, research hap-
pens to be the lifeblood of universi-
ties, and who better to launch and
supportnew research than university
presidents.
Many of the numbers are there,
produced annually'by the National
Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alco-
holism and the University of Mich-
igan's Institute for Social Research.
But so far the data has been incon-
clusive. Critics have pounced on this
fact, including Coleman, who cited
statistics fromthe1970s when she told
the Daily that some states' lowered
drinking ages caused higher levels of
binge drinking (Coleman responds to
Amethyst Initiative, 09/04/2008). She
also cited a National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration estimate that
the minimum drinking age of 21 has
saved more than 1,000 lives a year. But
how many students die each year from
alcohol poisoning? According to the
NIAAA, 1,700.
Alcohol debate
smothered by
emotions.
There is clearly room for new
research. How do similar statistics,
for example, compare from countries
in the European Union, where most
national drinking ages are 18? Or Can-
ada? Or China? Ifyou've ever visited a
foreign country and interacted with
its adolescents and young adults, you
quickly realize that the U.S. culture
of alcohol binge and excess is unique.
And it's clearly dangerous.
At this point, there is little incen-
tive to participate in and fund original
research. For a university president to
maintain the status quo of a 21-year
minimum drinking age is, regretta-
bly, easy.
Ad Parritz can be reached
at aparritz@umich.edu.
EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS:
Harun Buljina, Emmarie Huetteman, Emily Michels, Kate Peabody, Robert Soave, Imran Syed
JOSHUA BIRK / IN
Real community organizers
The Democratic Party and its support-
ers have taken grand exception to the jabs
that the Republican Party has thrown at
the resume of their beloved presidential
nominee during the past few weeks. In his
viewpoint Wednesday (What isa community
organizer?, 09/10/2008), Scott Kurashige
stomped his feet in righteous indignation at
those fraudulent, conniving, almost comi-
cally evil Republicans.
How dare Republicans mock commu-
nity organizing? Community organizing,
Kurashige wants us to believe, is something
very noble - so noble that those miserly
Republicans are blinded to its power by
their own selfishness. It's above their char-
ity grade. Only the most "politically active
and astute young Americans" (read: col-
lege liberals) can see it. And we should
take Kurashige's word for it. He is politi-
cally astute because he sharply critiques the
Right. And he is active because he has lived
in Detroit, worked in Detroit and taught
about Detroit. Oh, and did I forget to men-
tion the two books in progress?
Well I, too, have lived in Detroit. I am a
native of Ypsilanti, but spent the past year
working for a non-profit youth work organi-
zation in the Motor City. I mainly spent my
time working one-on-one with high school
students from the local housing projects. My
work involved everything from helping the
kids find summer jobs to taking them to foot-
ball practice. It was rarely glamorous, and
truth be told, it wasn't often fun. It was just,
hard work. Along the way, I saw things that
brought me both tears of pain and tears of
joy. But my story is immaterial to the issue at
hand, because the fate of Detroit is not about
me. It is about the people of the city. I was
merely a specter. I was there for a moment
and then I vanished.
I made no deep roots in the city and thus
I hesitate to deign my work with any predi-
cates that suggest anything more than a brief
stint of service. I wasn't a "community orga-
nizer" in Detroit, despite the fact that I orga-
nized service projects to help the city and its
people. I was merely a link in a long chain
of people who had at some point decided to
do the same - sacrifice a little in the short
term with the hope of accomplishing a lot in
the long term. I tried my best to be a good
role model for a few young men and women,
but I knew one year of inadequate me wasn't
enough time to patch up all their bumps and
bruises. Many more people needed to come
into the'lives of those young people in order
to leave a truly lasting impact. "
A real community organizer is not some-
one like me, the one-and-done sort. Nor is a
community organizer someone like Barack
Obama, who manages to squeeze in a few
years of inner-city work before heading off
to Harvard Law School. Kurashige wrote
that the best community organizers spend
their time "getting to know the people who
make up communities and gaining inti-
mate knowledge of their problems," while
"empower(ing) people to express their needs
and concerns." But this work, while admi-
rable, fails to capture the essence of what it
means to be a real community organizer.
A real community organizer doesn't need
to spend his time "getting to know people"
because a real community organizer is one
of those people. A real community organizer
doesn't need people to sit around in a circle
and "express their needs and concerns"
because a real community organizer already
knows what those needs and concerns are.
Those of us who swoop into cities like
Detroit or Chicago - whether it be with the
University of Michigan or the Developing
Communities Project - should be hesitant
to speak authoritatively for these 'cities'
inhabitants. Because, at the end of a year or
two or five, almost all of us will go back to
the cozy confines of Ann Arbor, Kenwood,
Ill. or some other place away from the hurt-
ing community that we so often, and arro-
gantly, claim to be a part. Might not that air
of arrogance be what the Republicans find
so funny?
A famous Michigan man once said that,
"Those who stay will be champions." Such is
the case with our communities. Those who
stay with their hands to the plow, year after
year and decade after decade, those are the
community organizers we should herald.
Their work is not funny and seldom fun. But
you probably won't hear that from them,
becausethey're busyworkingwhilethe major-
ity of Ann Arbor is still flabbergasted that an
ignorant conservative from Podunk, Alaska,
would dare make a joke about The One.
Joshua Birk is a Law School student.
JENNIFER SUSSEX VIEWPOINT
An unconventional message
Pat Buchanan hailed it as "the
greatest convention speech" and
said it topped other speeches he saw
live, including Martin Luther King,
Jr. and Ted Kennedy. Begrudg-
ing praise from staunch conserva-
tive commentators aside, Barack
Obama's acceptance speech at the
Democratic National Convention
attracted approximately 40 million
viewers. It beat the ratings from
the American Idol finale. Does this
mean the information generation is
finally getting with it?
Given that most 18 to 25 year olds
have been inseparable from their
televisions since our neonatal days,
it's not surprising that a group of
college kids clustered around the
television two Thursdays ago. The
flummoxing part is that we piled
into a pint-sized room without fir
conditioning, willingly forsaking
the usual Welcome Week frolic.
Another bit of oddity was that I was
happy to grab a couch cushion to sit
on instead of standing in the door-
way, considering that there were
more than 25 people in the room.
All of that because someone
stepped ontothe porch and said two
words (two and a half counting the
conjunction): "Obama's talking."
It would be simple to hypoth-
esize that the reason why our gen-
eration is tuned in to this election is
becausethe Obama-McCaindebates
are analogous to the first televised
presidential debates between Ken-
nedy-Nixon in 1960.
Obama is eloquent enough to
wow even Pat Buchanan. Similar-
ly, John F. Kennedy impressed his
critics and overshadowed Richard
Nixon with his luminosity. Like
Nixon, John McCain is a disaster at
the podium. McCain gave a speech
in Kenner, La. that was so bad, even.
FOX News admitted it "wasn't his
best." McCain has trouble reading
the teleprompter.
Many news networks juxtapose
Obama's youth against McCain's
age and turn it into a question of
experience. Some challenge that
Obama is too green and that would
make him a poor representative
of the nation. I find it difficult to
believe that Obama would be more
inept than George W. Bush who was
born into Washington prestige.
Within eight years, he has man-
aged to plunge the country into
trillions of dollars worth of debt,
conduct a war on false premises and
take away rights granted to prison-
ers under the Geneva Convention
- to name a few. McCain's years of
experience in Washington, D.C. led
Obama to remark that his opponent
was so similar to President Bush
that Americans don't want "the
next four years to look just like the
last eight" and "eight is enough!"
Obama's speech in Denver made
it clear that what's in store is more
chimerical war-mongering as
Republican politicians extol the
value of finding new sources of oil
by drilling through the habitats of
furry critters in Alaska. McCain
and his cronies have found another
source of black gold in Iran.
While anyone can address the
obvious problems with a conserva-
tive triumvirate, Obama has man-
aged to succeed at this same strategy
where John Kerry failed. Kerry
couldn't get the votes of middle
America as someone who married a
ketchup heiress. Nor, will McCainif
he continues to define the middle-
class individual as someone who
earns less than $5 million a year.
Obama's talking, and we want to
hear more than the standard rheto-
ric that is far from the reality these
candidatespurport to represent.
Obama summed itup best by say-
ing, "I don't believe that Senator
McCain doesn't care what's going
on in the lives of Americans; I just
think he doesn't know."
At this remark, everyone watch-
ing Obama's speech with me
laughed. And the people hold-
ing "Change" signs waved them
around in applause. Then, I started
to realize that this is like noticing
- in mid-chuckle - that the joke's
on you.
I'm reluctant to believe thatpoli-
ticians - including Obama - have
soft spots in their hearts for each
of us, but at least Obama can com-
prehend life beyond the upper ech-
elons of society. You know, that
"stuff" like being able to afford
"medicine," having a "job," being
able to pay "rent" and having a
"home" with "heat."
Jennifer Sussex is an LSA junior..
0i
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