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Obama endorsing gay marriage
For far too many years in recent memory, gay marriage has been used as an unnecessary wedge issue, a red herring. Most recently, the people of the great state of North Carolina decided against focusing on its hovering-around-10-percent unemployment rate, favoring instead a vote on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. So, call it a breath of fresh air to hear the president say something favorable about gay marriage. It may be a campaign maneuver, but it gets the job done on moving us one step closer to equality and once step away from a political waste of time.
I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle debuts soon
Next Thursday, the final play of the University Theatre season, “I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle”, will begin its session in Robinson Theater.@@http://pages.uoregon.edu/theatre/@@ According to the official theater website, “I Ain’t Yo’ Uncle” is a take on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, combining the literary tradition of melodrama in the 1800s and hip-hop culture of the 1990s. By all accounts, this year has been a pretty successful trial run of free student tickets for theater shows, with several shows selling out of these tickets quite early on. If you haven’t yet caught a play performed by our theater department, we absolutely recommend it; the atmosphere of campus theater is awesome to take in, and you really can’t say no to the price.
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University’s new public records policy
We talked about this at length last week, but it bears repeating: The changes to University public records policy are bad for transparency (essentially, the fee waiver has been removed for requests taking more than an hour to be fulfilled). To be clear, it is not assured requests will be artificially lengthened; it is the potential that that may happen that is simply bad for transparency. The fact that Interim President Robert Berdahl called out University professor Bill Harbaugh for a conflict of interest does not excuse him from not consulting the University Senate on this matter.
Sunny weather
We know, what?! It’s been beautiful with Vitamin D and shorts and sundresses and … a depressingly small amount of time studying. The amazing weather has created far too many excuses to not study, which was fine in the post-midterm break last week — but it’s getting closer to finals week. And the occasional productive, overcast day might be worth it soon.