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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 16, 2001)
Opinion ZM/yNebraskan Since 1901 Editor Sarah Baker Opinion Page Editor Jake Giazeski Managing Editor Bradley Davis “Our freshman class has done a terrific job for us all season.” Dan Kendig, gymnastics coach, commend ing the women’s gymnastics team’s newest members this season “Question: How can you tell when the uni versity doesn’t care what students think? Answer When they’re making a decision about something.” Columnist Tony Bock, on the relevance of student opinions in upper-level decision making at the university “To think is to be capable, at least, of under standing the category ‘information.’ To per ceive the very fact of information instead of merely responding to it.” Columnist Mark Baldridge, while outlining the nature of information and the beings which feed upon it "Art students need to be able to see work done by their peers and others outside the cam pus on a regular basis.” Dan Howard, professor emeritus of art and art history, on the opening of the Eisentrager Howard Gallery in Richards Hall "It seems like the kids are influenced posi tively by the changes that we make. It’s a really healthy situation to have a team that is really comfortable playing with different people.” Scott Jacobson, women’s tennis coach, on mixing playing partners for doubles teams "It expresses really well the breadth and vari ety of the university.” Gail Latta, former Academic Senate presi dent, on the recent release of the university’s prioritization list, which will help direct fund ing to bolster important programs “My ultimate goal in coaching is to allow Christ to coach through me, so that when peo ple see me, they’re seeing Christ.” NU Wide Receivers Coach Ron Brown, on his duty to his God and his team “I shared a locker with Christopher Cross once.” Street musician Charles LeMan Barnes (LeMans), on his hob-nobbing with prominent musical figures "There’s a great deal of very adamant homo phobia in this state.” UNL associate English professor George Wolf, explaining the source of opposition to legislation such as LB 19 “It depends on how these guys perform. They all know they’re fighting for a spot out here.” Mike Anderson, NU hitting coach, on shuf fling spots on the baseball team “When we started, we were really into intro ducing the most powerful music from different countries. Over the years, we’ve fallen in love with the music itself and expressing the inten tions behind the music.” Stephanie Heidermann, a performer in the a cappella group VIDA, on the philosophy behind her group’s repertoire “On its face, the intelligent design movement simply pursues scientific truth through the best evidence available. In reality, however, most proponents of intelligent design theory believe it is a way to cure the primary ill they associate with belief in evolution: loss of faith in God.” Columnist Jeremy Patrick, on the true moti vations of intelligent-design theorists Editorial Board Sarah Baker, Jeff Bloom, Bradley Davis, Jake Glazeski, Matthew Hansen, Samuel McKewon, Kimberly Sweet Letters Policy The Daly Nebraskan welcomes brief letters to the editor and guest cohsnns, but does not guaran tee their pi*iloalion.TT» Daly Nebraskan retains the ri^it toed# or reject any material submitted. Submitted materiel becomes property of the Daly Nebraskan and cannot be returned. Anonymous submissions wN not be published. Those who submit letters must identify themselves by name, year in school, major anchor gnxp affiliation, if any. Submit materiel to: De«y Nebraskan, 20 Nebraska Union, 1400 R St Lincoln, NE 68588-0448 E-mal: letlBieOdalyneb.com Editorial Policy Unsigned edtoriais are the opinions of the Spring 2001 Daly Nebraskan. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Nebraska-LJncoin, its employees, its student body or the Untastsfty of Nebraska Board of Regents. A column is solely the opinion of its author a cartoon is aolaiy the opinion of Is artist The Board of Regents acts as pubisher of the Daily Nebraskan; poli cy is sat by the Daly Nebraskai Editorial Board. The UNL Publications Board, established by the regents, supervises the production of the paper. Accatdng to policy set by the regents, rssponsl blty tar tie edtortai content of the newspaper les solely in the hands of Is employees. I_ I Megan Gody/DN ASUN hypocrites abound Talk about saying and doing anything to get elected. In last year’s ASUN election, four parties talked about the need for more student involvement. They were going to make changes and get the student body more involved. Three of those parties have some sort of representation in ASUN. This year, those same candidates, now senators, are not only NOT getting the student body involved, they are having a difficult time getting involved themselves. It seems it is task enough for them to attend a meeting once a week themselves, much less get others involved. I find this disrespectful and rude. Additionally, three parties criticized one party and accused them of having a negative agenda and pushing for rampant underage drinking on campus. Again, these candidates, now our student gov ernment, are actually against stricter penalties for underage drinking on campus. Hal Hansen, Government liaison Committee chairman, said he felt the Legislature acted “unfairly.” He said they asked biased questions and that they were “disre spectful and rude.” But I see this year’s ASUN government as hypo critical and disrespectful. After attacking people on the same issue last year and asking the same biased questions during debates, these people now feel offended by these types of actions. It seems that ASUN members have reversed their positions of just a year ago and are now in support of underage drinking. They argue that police will have discretion to determine whether a person is intoxi cated. But isn’t this what they do when they pull over a person driving erratically late at night? Don't police have the preliminary discretion of determining if a person will be arrested for DUI? I am very disap pointed that ASUN has taken up these types of issues when, in fact, they have very important issues within ASUN to tackle, such as senator attendance. I encourage all candidates in this year’s ASUN student elections to be honest during the campaign and follow through on campaign promises. Don’t give lip service just to get elected. Jason Kidd is a former ASUN presidential candi date for the Duff party. Fulfillment of a legacy It's that time of year again. The time of year when UNL's best and brightest dust off their suits and come into the limelight with promises to make the world a better place if we elect R^te them to student govern- _ Betsy ment. Several The skeptics come out from under their rocks and sneer, “ASUN can’t do anything anyway.” And I am inclined to sneer along. But then I remember an election not so long ago when a party called the A-team made me quit sneering. Here was a group of outsiders to our system of student government - a system perceived to be run by greeks who wanted to pad their resumes. A-team talked about building community at UNL so that this school would become a place where everyone felt at home. And I believed. But what happened to that vision for commu nity? For that matter, what happened to the rest of their platform - online voting, a freshman orienta tion program, decreased credit-card solicitation on campus and (in the classified section of the DN, 2/29/00) the promise of “10 minutes of make-out time with their elected A-team officials” to every potential female voter on campus? I’d hope I would have remembered that! Well, in order to solve these and other myster ies, I sat down with ASUN President Joel Schafer and learned of his attempts to make A-team's vision a reality. The freshman orientation program, which would have been a structured time for freshman to get used to campus before everyone else got here, didn’t happen because of money. Apparendy, money is something this university doesn’t have much of, even though they have quite a bit of mine. Joel tells me UNL has $50 million less than its peer institutions. Energy conservation was another issue A-team campaigned on. The hope was to start by getting an energy audit of UNL, but “that costs money, and besides, we just had one in 1992,” claimed several administrators whom ASUN spoke to about the issue. I guess the older you get, the less long ago 1992 seems. Also, because UNL buys its power in a dif ferent way than most universities, we have less incentive to conserve. This issue should have been addressed by the Environmental Advisory Council (a small student government group), but the Environmental Advisory Council never quite got off the ground. Getting credit-card solicitors off campus is something Joel would still like to see happen, but nobody else would. Many student organizations get their funds by getting people to fill out credit card apps, and until a better system to fund student organizations can be put in place, we’ll continue to have opportunities to get free “Oakey" sunglasses and T-shirts with John Belushi on the front and the little green beach bum dog on the back. Online voting for student elections - someday it will be a reality! Information Services has been working on the software since last fall, and hope fully in late spring we'll be able to vote online on what we want as the migration game. Getting this to happen has been a long process because of the wording of the ASUN constitution. The constitution calls for voting to be held in vot ing booths or polling places, and the question is, “Can a Web site be reasonably inferred to be one of those?” The idea of creating a program where interna tional students shadow a senator turned out to be a bad one. The problem is that many international students are unaware of student government and the fact that they can take part in it in the same way everyone else can. But senators felt it was demeaning to say to international students, “Here, come to our meet ings and see what it's like to be a senator, but no, you can’t vote on our issues.” On the other hand, if international students are given their own special representative, instead of just going through their college, it opens up a can of worms. If the underrepresented minority of interna tional students get their own senator, why should n't the underrepresented minority of Mexican American students, gay and lesbian students or DN columnists for that matter? When asked about creating community on campus, an older and wiser Joel Schafer than the one I'd admired last winter said, “The pace of change on campus and within ASUN doesn’t move as fast as I’d hoped. You come in (from being elect ed) moving 100 miles an hour. The pace of change is like 10.” Another factor was the senators themselves. Joel thought the senate would be more involved and motivated than they were. Much of the senate was younger students, who perhaps didn’t know what they were getting into. He thought they would’ve been more active in taking up some of the issues and reaching out to other students. He hastened to point out that some of the senators worked very, very hard, but more than nine senators quit over the course of the year. Joel concluded that community was a difficult issue without an easy answer, and it couldn't be tackled without a concerted effort from everyone involved. Even though none of the ideas he ran on have been fully realized at this point, Joel Schafer has nothing to hang his head about. As president of our student body, he was involved in moving NU On Wheels from a three day-a-week service to a seven-day-a-week service. He helped get David Spade to entertain us during Homecoming week, an event almost one out of four of us attended. An off-campus housing guide is now available online and in print for the benefit of the students. Soon it will be much easier to tell ASUN that they’ve ticked you off because their revamped Web site will have a discussion board. And finally, plans for a new culture center by the Union have passed the first leg of approval. The completion of the project is a few years off if all goes well. It's probable that by that time no one will remember the name Joel Schafer. But as I take in the hoopla of this year’s election, I’ll look for the party that I can believe in, even if I don’t get any make-out offers. Choosing the wiser of two gods'tales Last week end, I went to see the Hubble space telescope exhibit at the SAC Museum near Omaha. It’s a traveling exniDii --- that’s here from SimOTI the Smithsonian RingSITIUth and showcases the mother of all telescopes, the Hubble, and all the cool pictures it sort of takes. I say “sort of” because the images of far-off galaxies and supernovae that show up in textbooks are severely altered versions of what actually exists. The images the Hubble takes with its (and this was really in the brochure) “big-ass mirror” are not nearly as interesting as the final versions we see, which are col ored and composited so as to make all that funding seem worthwhile The only thing I learned for certain after viewing the exhibit was that space was really big. Very big. Apparently here are lots of big galaxies, planets, stars and who knows what else out there, even if you look at a part of space that looks empty. It's not, and we've now got the tele scope to prove it. The age of all this is about 14 billion years, or so the NASA geniuses say. Here’s where things start to get interesting. For years, I have been a firm believer in what is known as a seven-day creation. That is, he Earth, our solar system, and indeed our universe was created in sweeping brushstrokes by God in the space of seven Earth days about 10,000 years ago. After attending school here at UNL for three and a half semesters, hearing many lectures specifically on creation vs. evolution and finally viewing Mankind’s Masterpiece last weekend, I have emerged an enlightened individual, hence this column. I don’t just believe it any more. I know it Much of the argument of creation vs. evolution is a veil for the deeper philo sophical argument of faith vs. reason. Those who don’t subscribe to cre ation and listen instead to the god of sci ence will point to stacks and piles of evi dence, conjecture and theories that illus trate the Earth’s age and the evolution of species. God isn't included in this sort of scientific approach, but the general con sensus seems to be that it’s OK to believe in a god anyway, as long as the scientific aspect is acknowledged. The last part is what troubles me. One fact about the creation of the world or universe, however it happened, is that no one present was around to see it JNe’ve got to take whatever evidence and dis coveries we come across and apply it to our knowledge of everyday stuff to come up with some sort of theory. In the case of the Hubble, scientists have been able to pinpoint the age of die universe, give or take a few billion years. The truth here is that the mirror on the Hubble for which it is so famous is 2.4 meters across - about two feet taller than me. It seems outrageous at best to claim we can measure the age of the universe, along with its size and, get this, the rate at which it is expanding, with a mirror that’s just a littie higher than my fridge. Our planet is a tiny dot in the uni verse, and the Hubble is so, so much smaller than that dot How can we be so arrogant to presume we know so much when we are talking about galaxies, superclusters of stars and black holes so far away it takes light there hundreds of millions of years to reach us? There is no god but science, and NASA is his prophet I believe in a God who is capable of making everything we see, including sedimentary rocks that take millions of years to form and huge coal and oil deposits, in the space of a few days. How can we blindly assume that the geologic record contradicts creation if God created the geologic record? Who is to say that it took light millions of years to reach our planet from those distant galaxies? Could not God have simply cre ated the galaxies with their light already visible from earth? We are usurping the role of creator, throwing God out of the equation and telling ourselves we can know it all if we listen to science. Meanwhile, all the answers we seek lie with God, yet we shut our ears, unwilling to lower ourselves to the state of mere humans, incapable of figuring everything out with science. Tell a man that a bench has wet paint onit, andhe will have to sit onit to believe you. Tell a man that the universe is 14 bil lion years old, and he will believe you just because you told him so. If God created the world, he could have done it in any way he saw fit. My belief in a simple seven-day creation brought forth by God is unprovable, just like your belief in millions of years of evo lution, which is also unprovable. My belief says we are created in the image of a loving God. Yours says we evolved from apes. You think the Hubble shows proof of an incredibly old universe. I think it shows off God’s true artistry.