Forum Feedback

Dear Ms. Stewart,

First, let me congratulate you for the work that you and your staff have done. We desperately need more informed, politically-oriented student publications, and your newspaper fills a niche that has been sorely under-represented. Secondly, I want to commend you for the length and depth of your pieces. It’s refreshing to see more than a few column inches of “sound-bite” news.

I do have a suggestion, however. Given that yours is a new paper, one of your tasks is to “hook” new readers. If you could vary the format of your selections, and augment the longer ones with more call-out quotes and perhaps a few side-bars and “teasers” you might be able to grab the attention of readers who need a little persuasion before delving into a long, texty article. (You did a great job with this, imhho, with the “It’d be Funnier if it Weren’t True” cartoon that accompanied the piece on Karl Rove.)

Kudos for the thoughtful reporting and for representing a range of opinions. It’s heartening to see students doing some serious issue-based writing, especially for an audience of their peers. I look forward to the next issue.

T. Fishman

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Excellent issue, but one complaint (we are liberals after all, complaining is our cup of tea). I was suprised, dare I say frightened by the scarcity of the word “liberal” in the issue. I am afraid that we tend to stay away from the word as if it had negative connotations. “Liberal” is a positive term that encomasses our forward and progressive thinking and actions. Conservatives have brainwashed us into thinking the word should be lumped in with those evil four-letter words. I am a liberal and proud of it, and nothing (not even all of the Conservative spin in the entire Bible-belt) can change my mind. It’s time to embrace the word for what it really is and take it back as our own.

Jake Lappi

Junior, English Major

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You’ve got to give respect to get respect.

Most of us have heard this adage all of our lives, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have taken root with many of the contributors to the Forum. Take James Yeh, for instance, in his article “What I Would Have Done Had I Known Karate”: while I can imagine the frustration of being the product of racial stereotypes, and while I appreciate the creative and humorous way he responds to it, he nonetheless wrecks his credibility on the front end by committing the same crimes he rails against. After beginning the article with a tired grocery list of liberal stereotypes which no intelligent person holds, (which is intended to stereotype the stereotype-rs) he proceeds to insult the town of Easley, calling it “depressingly ugly and ignorant” (people, not towns, are ignorant). We are left with the impression that Mr. Yeh is not the better person, but simply has a bigger vocabulary.

Regards,

David Bedsole

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Dear Forum:

As a tree-hugging, environmentally conscious liberal, it really chaps my butt to see students hanging around the free printer in the library, waiting for 20, 30, or even 50 pages to print – all one-sided! When printing, it only takes about 10 seconds to click:

file -> print -> properties -> finishing -> print on both sides

Not only are some students abusing the free printing privileges by printing an entire treatise when they only need material from a few pages, but they are wasting paper. Did you know that two-sided pages print just as quickly as one-sided ones? Faster copying would certainly reduce the size of the morass of students standing around the printer at peak times of the day. Some colleges give students a printer code and only allow a certain number of free printed pages per student per semester. I can see that happening right around the corner here at Clemson. If we as students had to pay for all the copying we do at the library, I’d lay odds on printing costs dropping as precipitously as classroom attendance does on the Friday before a big game!

Cindy Burke

Communications Major