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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (March 3, 2000)
Empty expressions ‘Hurricane’ Carter’s speech amounts to a slight breeze By now, the majority of you are aware that Rubin “Hurricane” Carter spoke last week at the Lied Center. If you were lucky enough to miss his per formance, I’m sure that you caught the highlights on the news or in the news paper the next day. It’s not often that we Nebraskans are lucky enough to listen to a black man in a suit talk, you know. Along with 99 percent of campus (narcoleptics and chronic masturbators excluded), I initially was excited about the chance to attend a speech by a man who is so highly esteemed. Much of my excitement wore off, however, when the entire Lied Center crowd (excluding myself and a friend) gave Carter a standing ovation upon his entrance. He hadn’t even spoken a word. You can call me disrespectful if you’d like, but I don’t think being a prizefighter freed from prison warrants boisterous applause and an automatic standing ovation. Regardless, I realize my disagree ment with the audience’s initial reac tion to Carter had nothing to do with his message. I had no idea what “Hurricane” was going to talk about. Unfortunately, I don’t think he did, either. After graciously accepting the key to the city of Lincoln, Carter opened with some random thoughts on Gov. “Johanson’s” failure to sign a moratori um on the death penalty. “Your governor is not an intelligent man,” he told the audience. Most of them cheered. I wouldn’t have had any problem with the applause had those doing the applauding done so with reason. However, the ache in my kneecap tells me Carter’s charisma instantaneously transformed about 2,100 spectators into “Johanson” haters. That’s scary, folks. I did think that much of what. Carter had to say about human “tribes” (instead of races) was initially valid and thought-provoking. Unfortunately, the main thought it provoked in me was to wonder what happened to the sixth tribe. He described the white, black, brown, red and “mixture” tribes in depth. The mysterious “sixth tribe,” however, was left unnamed. Vietnam veterans were fuming. What about the yellow man? Or maybe the mysterious sixth tribe will be the one that takes over the white tribe in a few years. (I’m sure the crowd would go wild.) Another thing that nagged me throughout the evening was Carter’s use of a quote by Mark Twain. The quote was great. The years, however, didn’t settle with me at all. He said Twain said the phrase 60 years ago. Twain died almost 90 years ago. Tfl were the champion of the world, I would check my speech’s dates before getting paid. Er, I mean “speak ing.” Minor inconsistencies aside, I felt there was still a lot that was wrong with Carter’s message in general. I can’t pinpoint exactly what it was that I expected to hear from Carter. I guess I thought he might spend more time talking about his life and struggles in prison, or what he did to keep the faith that one day he might be set free. I hoped for more substance, rather than the shibboleths that inflamed the emotions of the audience. I think we would have gained more from a talk on how he had rigorously disciplined him self not to give in while incarcerated. Instead, he was just another in a long line of diversity speakers. However, it’s probably to his advantage that he kept his ramblings intellectually emaciated. The rest of the campus had no desire to hear substance - they had come to see a celebrity, damn it. They didn’t want any thought provoking statements to get in the way of their applause. But when Carter said the white tribe “will not be in power forever,” one of my friends raised his hands, prepar ing to bring them together in a show of approval. Then he realized he was a member of the white tribe and lowered them; his head hung in shame. Most of the audience didn’t even think that much. They clapped when he spoke, they clapped when he paused to take a drink of water and they clapped when he “rode the cloud,” a visual ges ture celebrating his current life status. “Hurricane” brought a flash to the Lied Center that has been missing since Michael Flatley’s “The Lord of the Dance” left town. It was fine for the majority of the glitter-hungry audi ence, but it’s really not what I expected to see. His celebrity flare and big smile had the audience on its feet. Frankly, it made the indention in my padded seat even deeper. Come to think of it, I guess there was some good that will come out of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter’s visit. Maybe now the legions of people who walk around boisterously singing the first seven words to the refrain of Bob Dylan’s song “Hurricane,” will stop doing so. However, if you’re classified as one of these people and do not plan on stopping, I have a little gift for you - the rest of the words to the refrain of the song’s first verse. Here comes the story of the Hurricane, The man the authorities came to blame, For something that he never done, Put in a prison cell, but one time he could have been the champion of the world. Scott Eastman/DN Christopher Gustafson is a sophomore agricultural economics major and Lucas Christian Stock is a freshman English major. They are Daily Nebraskan columnists. Resident segregation New honors residence hall will not better Honors Program So the university needs another honors residence hall. Silly me, I thought two would be plenty. But James Griesen said the nicest residence hall on campus (complete with suite-style housing) is going to be devoted to the intellec tual elite who comprise the Honors Program. The reasoning, as stated, seems sound enough. One, we need more rooms on campus, and as long as we’re doing it, we might as well load them up with space, bathrooms and computers. Two, the honors students need the rooms the most. So we devote the next residence hall to the Honors Program. But this reasoning doesn’t stand - housing pressure among honors stu dents would be alleviated whether we allocated these new rooms to “hon ors” or not. So why allocate them that way? The idea, of course, is to recruit honors students, even though Griesen didn’t explicitly state that. Sure, the phrase “we need to recruit honors students” sounds good. Certainly, we need to get the smart folk to come here more often than they go to, say, Harvard. But building an honors residence hall, devoting a special program tp them or building a huge monument in Memorial Plaza to the intellectual prowess of the Honors Program won’t get the honors students to come. When you look at some of the schools that are attracting the more intelligent students of Nebraska, you’ll find that their facilities rarely determine the quality of student. Some schools will be lavishly mod ernized and others will be historic, which is another way of saying falling apart. The Eastman School of Music, located in downtown Rochester, N.Y., has a guard at the front door. The practice rooms aren’t exactly soundproof, and you feel like you’re imprisoned in them. Eastman is one of the more high ly acclaimed music schools in the country. Talented musicians through out the country vie for membership in its program. The fact is, what attracts honors students isn’t the facilities. If you’re looking for intelligent students, they definitely aren’t going to be swayed just because you can promise them a bathroom they only have to share with one other person. They’re going to make a decision based on the qual ifications of the university itself. The only students a new honors residence hall will attract are oppor tunistic gnats who will suck from the university what they can in terms of scholarships and then flee when the program gets too tough for them. In other words, it will attract more of what the Honors Program is already attracting. What is the university thinking? What relatively intelligent student is going to be attracted by a book schol arship and an honors residence hall? We should be focusing on improving academic rigor while making the Honors Program more visible to prospective students. Granted, these two goals are not mutually exclusive. But if naming the new residence hall “honors” isn’t going to help significantly, why do it at all? This new residence hall, the only suite-style residence hall on campus, should be open to any student willing to pay the fees to stay there. Suite-style residence halls are very comfortable, and the added comfort and privacy that this new residence hall will provide will be appealing to almost every residence hall student. So why not open it up to the general population and charge a higher fee than for the other resi dence halls? Heck, why not provide for some of the amenities with extra money earned through the residence hall rates, which you can increase because of a larger pool of prospec tive boarders? Because almost everyone in the Honors Program is likely to be get ting money just for attending the uni versity, the advantages of making this residence hall available to all stu dents makes even more sense, If the university wants to attract these students and if the state wants to keep these graduates in the state, they need to think of incentives better than this. This residence hall will be the university’s equivalent to last year’s Lake Nebraska, an absurd pro posal to dam the Platte so that we would have a lake to keep young kids in the state. Sure, the lake would attract some, but they wouldn’t be the brightest and most promising of Nebraska’s youth. Some kids will get drunk on its shores occasionally. But besides that? This residence hall also will attract few. It won’t attract students who don’t want to come here anyway. So why should we go through all the trouble to enact this segregation? If the administration wants to give honors students a good reason to come here, it needs to do a little bet ter than this. Jacob Glazeski is a senior music and math major and a Daily Nebraskan columnist.