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April 18,
2003
Front-Page
News
Women in Uniform
Martha Ackmann, senior lecturer in women’s studies,
wrote in a opinion piece in the April 8 Newsday that
those calling for restrictions on the role of women in the military
may end up keeping women from their own free choices—in
the military and elsewhere. Ackmann notes that while some are
calling for women to be more restricted from combat postions in
the wake of two female soldiers being taken prisoner and, in one
case to date, killed in the war in Iraq, that call is shortsighted.
(The two female POWs are now free.) “Women have served with
distinction in military operations from World War II, when they
ferried bombers, to Operation Enduring Freedom, when they captained
ships sent to support troops,” Ackmann opined. But the renewed
call for women to be prohibited from combat roles has repercussions
for all who seek work that may put them in dangerous situations.
“It is not much of a leap from asserting that women should
not be in threatening military jobs to claiming that women should
not be war photographers, for example, or astronauts. We must
be reminded that photojournalist Molly Bingham, recently released
from being held captive in Iraq, and astronauts Kalpana Chawla
and Laurel Clark, who lost their lives aboard the Columbia shuttle,
freely chose their work and loved it. We should respect their
choices and their ability to make decisions for themselves.”
Eye on North Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is
after “regime survival” in his insistence on direct
negotiations with the United States over his country’s nuclear
program, Calvin Chen, Luce Assistant Professor of Politics, told
listeners to WFCR-FM, the National Public Radio affiliate serving
western New England. “They recognize that the United States
is very concerned about the nuclear program that they have in
place and the consequences, the possible proliferation of nuclear
weapons materials throughout the world, especially to what we
consider to be rogue states,” Chen told WFCR’s Bob
Paquette in an interview aired April 9. “And so they realize
that they have an enormous amount of leverage when they are in
direct talks with the United States.” With the North Korean
economy “in a state of shambles,” Chen said, Kim must
find a way to secure food, energy supplies, and other products
that his country cannot produce, or risk losing his grasp on power.
Football and
Title IX Laurie Priest, director of athletics, was quoted
by Village Voice writer Alisa Solomon in an article on
the new guidelines on Title IX that Secretary of Education Roderick
Paige is expected to issue. In “Title IX Was Always About
More than Sports. So Is the Fight,” published April 9, Solomon
writes that “right-wing policy groups…have taken aim
at Title IX as one more target in their wide offensive against
civil rights legislation. The wrestling coaches lining up with
them—by scapegoating women for the loss of their programs
to behemoth budgets for men’s football and basketball—are
at best being used. Indeed, according to Laurie Priest, director
of athletics at Mount Holyoke College, men’s coaches pressing
against Title IX have declined invitations to join forces with
women to hold back the enormous, distorting expenditures on men’s
basketball and football. ‘They said they know it’s
not really Title IX’s fault, but they can’t go up
against football,’ says Priest. ‘They’ll use
what they can to get attention.’
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