4 - Friday, January 25, 2013 The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com 4 - Friday, January 25, 2013 The Michigan Daily - michigandailycom C 1 4C Michigan 43at4olij Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890. 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily.com MELANIE KRUVELIS and ADRIENNE ROBERTS MATT SLOVIN EDITORIAL PAGE EDITORS MANAGING EDITOR NOTABLE QUOTA LE Well, it didn't sound like a man. It sounded like a woman. fthe somehow made that voice, that's incredible. ANDREW WEINER EDITOR IN CHIEF 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. FROMTH EDAIL Advanced (dis)placement Denial of AP credit at Dartmouth will cost students Beginning with the entering class of 2014, Advanced Placement scores will no longer count for college credit at Dartmouth College. While students can still place out of certain courses with high AP scores, the scores will not count as progress toward their degrees. Because strong AP scores in certain subjects might qualify a student to place out of specific courses, they should be awarded college credit as well. Not doing so disregards a key purpose of taking AP tests: earning college credit to lessen the ever-increasing cost of undergradu- ate education. This sets a troubling precedent for other colleges. - Notre Dame libbacker Manti Te'o said during Thursday Gone (cat)fish Developed in the 1950s by the College Board, the AP Program offers more than 30 college-level courses that students cAn take in high school. Students who receive high scores on end-of-semester exams can receive college credit for those courses and possibly be exempt from some introductory college classes. For many high-school students, the purpose of taking an AP course is to gain col- lege credit and enhance their college applica- tions. The program even endorses this view, advertising on its website that taking AP tests is a way to "earn college credit and place- ment." Refusing to accept strong AP scores for college credit runs contraryto their origi- nal purpose. This practice takes advantage of students who take AP courses to gain entry to competitive colleges but are then denied credits for those courses. Denying AP credits has resounding finan- cial implications. At the University of Michi- gan, for example, a student with AP Calculus BC scores of 4/5 or 5/5 can be exempted from introductory math courses and earn four credits toward his or her degree. If the stu- dent is part-time, this 4-credit sequence would cost $2,432 if coming from in-state and lower division or $6,639 if from out-of-state and lower division. By doing well on the AP Calculus BC exam, which costs $89, a stu- dent can save $2,287 or $6,639, depending on where they live. Alongside these savings, granting AP credits also creates opportuni- tiet for students to pursue other courses, intellectual interests or employment - which is increasingly relevant given the rising costs of tuition. While some schools like Dartmouth pro- vide generous financial aid that aims to meet 100 percent of the students' need, the vast majority of colleges do not have this capa- bility. While certain schools might deny AP credits and still cover the financial burden of taking credits that one would'have other- wise earned, most colleges cannot. Schools that refuse to grant AP credits are setting a dangerous precedent for other institutions to follow. Should this trend be realized in schools that are not as wealthy, our institu- tions of higher education will become even less accessible. Colleges that don't grant AP credit must realize that one key reason students take AP exams is, in fact, to earn college credit. Dis- regarding this not only denies the useful- ness of enriching high-school education with advanced classes, but also places an unfair financial burden on students. By now you've likely familiar- ized yourself with the Manti Te'o debacle. The cuckolded, football star; the girlfriend who died, then didn't die, of cancer; the lonely Chris- tian band singer; the lazy sports magazine fact checkers. Clus- tering around E like bees protect- XU ing their queen, the media outlets do their best to make appropriate reparations. Sorry, they buzz. We are so,so sorry. "No, never," Teo said when asked if he played any part in the ruse. Uni- versity of Notre Dame, doing what all athletic departments do when backed into a corner, rallied behind its star player with ferocious convic- tion, releasing a statement claiming that "this appears to be, at a mini- mum, a sad and very cruel deception to entertain its perpetrators." Then, faster than you could say "Lennay Kekua," Te'o changed his tune. In an exclusive interview with Katie Couric on Thursday, he admit- ted that, whoops, he knew his girl- friend hadn't passed away when he received a phone call from a stranger purporting to be her in early Decem- ber. And yet, he still grieved for her "death" on national television two days later. "You stuck to the script. And you knew that something was amiss, Manti," Couric said, sternly. "Katie, put yourself in my situ- ation," Te'o pleaded. "I, my whole world told me that she died on Sept. 12. Everybody knew that. This girl, who I committed myself to, died on Sept.12." Te'o is better on the field than under the muted lighting of a net- work soundstage. Watching him gracefully sack opponents on the 20-yard line, his face shielded by his gold helmet, there's something vul- nerable about him - almost poetic. You want to root for this guy; this sweat soft-hearted hunk of a hero. In interiews, he's fine - calm, enun- ciates well - but is still somehow dis- ingenuous and unreadable. Ever since the sad, strange nar- rative exploded on Deadspin a little more than a week ago, ESPN has been covering the aftermath in careful, pointillist detail. Was Te'o complicit in the hoax or a victim of it? Experts dish up new theories by the hour, reading his eyebrows, the timestamps of his cell phone calls, a receipt from 1-800-FLOWERS and anything else they can grasp onto that would indict or salvage the hap- less football player. What's struck me most about the coverage of the Te'o storyline is the witch-hunt-like, us-versus-them mentality writers have taken on. Te'o is either vilified as a publicity-seek- ing faker or a sweet, spotless fool, with in-between. The audience, for it part, has eaten it up with the breathless excitement of a criminal wiretap. But, why all the fascination? Why do we feel personally offended that agirl we never knew didn't die of. cancer and that a guy we've only seen onthe Big Ten Network might have a fetish for whisperingsweet nothings to a wall of static? The kicker is that Nev Schulman, creator of the film "Catfish" and the MTV show of the same name, has been crowned the authority on all things Internet hoax, oft sought- after in interviews to arbitrate Te'o's innocence. Never mind that Schul- man's own "discovery" that the girl he was so in love with who ended up being a lonely, overweight lady from rural Michigan had its own whiffs of deceit. It seems suspicious that this twenty-something Jewish boy in skinny jeans could have been hood- winked by a woman two times his senior, and that the whole endeavor an interview with Katie Couric on q regarding his fictitious girlfriend. zing wasn't really just an excuse to cash out and become famous - that the making of "Catfish" wasn't a kind of catfish in itself. We all throw half- truths of our lives into cyberspace. In my humble, non-evidentiary opinion, Te'o probably had some idea of what was going on - maybe not at the beginning, but certainly at the very end.:Why am I so sure? Because we all do it: we all cat- fish. Ever since our lives migrated online, there's been this American Dream-like possibility of self-con-' structing how the world should see us. We throw fabulist, half-true- half-not tales of our lives into cybersphere, carefully editing and tagging our photos to produce the lives we'd like to have. We're not so different from Te'o, who cat- fished a beautiful Stanford student with a "warm smile and soulful eyes," or from Sports Illustrated, who catfished a great, Greek epic in its fawning October profile of Te'o, titled "The Full Manti." This mutual exchange of fact and fiction is part of an invisible contract we sign when we power up our laptops and log onto Facebook. The story of the fallen Heisman contender resonates because we have all been Manti Te'o. We've been both ver- sions of him: the cuckoldee and the cuckolder. But what happens when the con- tract breaks, as Te'o's has? Then the shimmering versions of the selves we'd like to be dissolve like Pepto- Bismol tablets. No, that can't be what I really look like. Oh, but it is. EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS Kaan Avdan, Sharik Bashir, Barry Belmont, James Brennan, Eli Cahan, Jesse Klein, Melanie Kruvelis, Patrick Maillet, Jasmine McNenny, Harsha Nahata, Adrienne Roberts, Vanessa Rychlinski, Paul Sherman, Sarah Skaluba, Michael Spaeth, Derek Wolfe AARICA MARSH I It's legalization time 0 Jennifer Xu can be reached at jennifxu@umich.edu. The irony of gentlemen's night' In the United States, a marijuana user is arrested every 42 seconds. With that many people arrested, imagine the even greater num- ber of people who are associated with someone who was once incarcerated for using, possess- ing or growing pot. It could be anyone: perhaps it was your college friend just having some weekend fun or your great uncle with stomach cancer who was once locked up on possession charges. Maybe it was you who was arrested and suffered the consequences of the outdated U.S. marijuana laws. What are the police really solving by busting these users? Are they actu- ally creating a safer and freer country as they have been telling us for years? Approximately half of all drug busts in the United States are pot-related with 87 percent of these arrests being for the non-violent pos- session of marijuana. Because most of the drug arrests are non-violent offenders, their time spentincorrectionalfacilitiesisoftenmoreinju- rious than beneficial. Instead of being "rehabili- tated," many of the nonviolent citizens actually become more aggressive and spiral deeper into the criminal system. In order to survive, they must mimic the ways of actual violent offend- ers surrounding them. To solve'this issue, the federal government must reclassify or totally eliminate marijuana - and potentially other drugs - from the Drug Enforcement Agen- cy's controlled substance list. Drug offenders need authentic rehabilitation, not seclusion or repeatedexposure to violence. Under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, marijuana is classified as a Schedule I drug with no use for medicinal purposes and high potential for abuse. It occupies this cat- egory alongside more dangerous drugs such as heroin, LSD and crack cocaine. It's ridicu- lous that pot is classified as a higher risk than extremely addictive drugs like cocaine and oxycodone. By classifying weed as a Schedule I drug, people who have exposure to the drug may believe the government is implying that other drugs have similar side effects. This, however, is deceptive and dangerous. Compared to pot, the other drugs in the Schedule I class are extremely dangerous. More than one-third of U.S. citizens have tried marijuana with no reports of addiction or death. Furthermore, as of the November election, 18 states and Wash- ington D.C. now have marijuana-friendly legislation. The majority of the American pop- ulation recognizes the harmlessness of THC. Why can't the federal government? "Marijuana should be legalized for many reasons, but the most important reason is because it is a civil rights infraction," Miles Gerou, president of Eastern Michigan Univer- sity's chapter of Students for a Sensible prug Policy, said. "There is too much fact to show that marijuana is relatively harmless, and cer- tainly not lethal, to keep putting good citizens in jail for making healthier choices than the legal recreation drugs offered in our country." Though many Americans have come to the same conclusion, the federal government refuses to budge. THC is still described as more dangerous than Xanax, morphine, oxy- codone and many other legal substances in the United States. So instead of rolling up a doobie I should pop apill, right? Wrong. It's outrageous to believe that weed is more harmful than the subsequent drugs in lower class schedules. The idea that marijua- na is a "gateway" drug is also absurd. In most instances, people.experiment with nicotine or alcohol before trying marijuana. Therefore, the two most commonly used legal substanc- es in the United States are the first gateway drugs into the illicit substance community. For decades, marijuana has been wrong- fully labeled amongst our society. The time for change is now. Much of our country has legalized pot in some way, which alludes to the majority of American's acceptance for pot. Our right to use marijuana in a similar way we use tobacco and nicotine needs to be rec- ognized. The first few steps have been taken: marijuana prohibition is slowly ending state by state. Now it's time to tackle the federal government and their illogical classifications. It's legalization time. Aarica Marsh is an LSA sophomore. Last week, we had a "gentle- men's night" at my co-op. Just wait for the irony of that statement. Gentlemen's - night is essen- tially a Thurs- day ' night our co-op designates! for fancy vests, unfortunate fedoras and good beer. Female KATHERINE house members STEEN are invited, too, although we're technically the gentlemen's "dates." Basically, it brings in the weekend with a modest gathering of well- dressed gals and gents.Atleast, that's the way it's supposed tobe. This particular gentlemen's night ended up being a bit larger in size than I'm used to. I leaned against a doorway, surveying my gentle- menly kingdom, and I felt a hand on my waist - a grab. I hardly noticed it until I saw the hand that touched me wasn't attached to my boyfriend. He walked by without turning back. It was as if it didn't even happen, and for a little bit, I believed that it didn't. Then I saw him, again, come up behind a female housemate and clamp her body like bear trap, almost picking her up off the ground. She didn't even respond. Not a smile, not a playful shove, nothing. Hmm. "Maybethey'refriends",Ithought. "I shouldn't assume things." So I sat at a dining room table, watching him. But, as I sat there, a friend sitting next to me was busy asking me who even invited that guy. And while she began to list off all the women he had rubbed, groped or left a grease mark on that night, I watched him walk up to a house- mate sitting across me. I watched her pause, petrified, as she tried to process whose thick arms were now draped around her neck and chest. I asked her if she wanted him to be doing that, with the response of a nervous smile and "No." It seemed simple enough. I told him that he had grabbed half the women in this house. I received a response implying that I wished he would touch me. I told him to get the fuckoj. I f ticed a few things in the moment after he wandered off. I could feel the red rage glow on my face, my heart pound and the fight- or-flight response through every vein. I felt tense but poised, stand- ing a little taller than I usually do - maybe because I was wearing heels that night for the first time since high-school prom. And I slowly began to gain consciousness of the voices surrounding me offering their gratitude. That night, I had five women from my co-op thank me, citing their own personal grievances with that oily, oversized creep. Let me clarify: Five women from my own house thanked me for kicking a guy they all didn't feel comfortable with out of their own house. Why did it take grope number one, two, three - whatever - for us to finally do something about it? In our own damn house? Maybe for the same reason that I almost completely forgot he had grabbed me: It's easier to just do nothing. It's actually kind of awk- ward, even, to do something - or worse, terrifying. Was this a matter .of giving someone the benefit of the doubt four too many times? Or were we scared in our own house even when surrounded by our friends and housemates? I'm not being completely honest when I say I kicked him out. I told him to get the fuck out, sure, but the person to actually kick him out was a male housemate. He didn't leave when I told him to; he actually just moved to another room. What am I going to do about it, right? a , So, success - he left. But I still feel unsatisfied with the collective response of that night. We shouldn't need a guy to kick a creep out of the house. 0 First, I don't think he realized he did anything wrong. Perhaps he woke up the next day in a groggy, skull-splitting, hungover fog and then remembered some dude kicked him out of a co-op the night before. After which, he probably shrugged and ate a hearty breakfast of bacon and nice guy syndrome. I really don't think I got through to him, which is why I want to doit all over again.. I was more than capable of explaining the house rules to him in a civil, composed, cold fox manner. In fact, I wanted to prove that I was neither the damsel in distress nor a frantic feminist chucking ashtrays at his neck as he fled off our porch. Moral of the story: I just wanted to do it myself. We shouldn't need a gentleman to kick a creep out of the house. And you know what? We didn't really need him to. Yes, that night was termed a "gentlemen's night", butin reality, it should have belonged to the ladies - fuck it, to the women. We don't have to be polite or even nice. Actually, we should be angry. Maybe not ashtray-chucking angry, but we should be angry enough to say something. - Katherine Steen can be reached at kathelizaumich.edu.