Deceiving Ourselves
In response to increasing anti-American sentiment overseas, military officials proposed Monday to create an Office of Strategic Influence. The office would provide news, both false and accurate, to foreign news organizations in order to influence public opinion and policy makers in both enemy and allied countries.
The military already participates in information warfare -- the U.S. government dropped leaflets and broadcasted messages in Afghanistan while it was still under Taliban rule. However, creating a multi-million dollar agency that will intentionally disseminate misinformation can only do more harm than good.
If the U.S. government is certain that its military is fighting to uphold worthy ideals, it should not be necessary to misrepresent them to anybody -- friend or foe.
And with the media becoming increasingly globalized, the Pentagon's adulterated information is sure to seep back into American newspapers and television networks, undermining the credibility of the Department of Defense on U.S. soil and deceiving the American audiences that the governement intends to protect.
The Pentagon needs to rid itself of the antiquated Cold War attitude of secrecy and mistrust. The government has been legally barred from planting false information in the American press since the 1970s, and it should not be held to lower standards in the rest of the world. Check the calendar. The year is 2002, not 1984.
The Learning Curve
Implementing the proposed Race, Ethnicity and Migration distributive requirement would raise significant problems. While the requirement might open new ways of thinking about culture, it forces students into taking selections from a narrow field of study.
The current system, which requires a student to take one course each in European, North American and non-Western oriented subjects, is equally constrictive. It operates on an older, Anglo-centric set of definitions that allows students to receive very little instruction in courses outside the Western spectrum. But the REM proposal does not broaden the system -- doing little to change the importance that ideology plays in the World Culture system as it currently stands. REM just replaces an older terminology with a new set of values.
Structuring the World Culture requirement according to geographical boundaries makes more sense than either the current system or the REM proposal. In this new system, the student would take courses that focus on three of five geographic areas. Obviously there is still a bias inherent in the demarcation of area boundaries, as they are Western-imposed. But, as one professor put it, the question "Where is Africa?" is much less contentious than the question "Where is the West?"
A geography-based requirement would also avoid the problems of REM requirement by allowing students to take courses in a wide variety of departments, from a wide variety of perspectives. A liberal arts education should foster intellectual diversity while maintaining individual choice.
In the Public Eye
The misdiagnosis of the bacterial pink eye outbreak has left students without an on-campus healthcare provider they can visit with confidence. When doctors at Dick's House assumed that patients had the less severe viral strain of conjunctivitis, they let down a community that had higher expectations of its medical staff.
A widespread flare-up of the pink eye bacteria is rare, so the presumption of a virus was statistically sound. But Dick's House should not be playing the odds with students' well-being. Doctors had nothing to lose by conducting tests early in the outbreak to determine the nature of the disease, yet they waited.
Memory of this lapse in judgment will outlast the pink eye. As a result, students will be less inclined to visit Dick's House the next time something goes wrong. Why go to the trouble of hiking to 5 Rope Ferry Road if you expect to return without adequate treatment?
The inevitable loss of faith in Dick's House means that more students will allow themselves to go without proper medical care -- in cases that may be much more serious than a bout of itchy, red eyes. By shirking its commitment to campus health, the staff of Dick's House has not only extended the life of the current pink eye outbreak, but it has also damaged the credibility of the medical center.
