Weighing the options: On or off campus?

By Jeff Trull

With UMass Dartmouth housing signups approaching and deposits due soon, I’m certain that many students are pondering where to live next year. While many students stay on campus all four years (or more) at UMD, some students decide to venture to off-campus apartments. Personally, I have lived on campus for nearly three years and off campus for one year. If you are pondering leaving the UMD dorms, there are some considerations you should make before doing so.

One factor that many students generally consider is cost. As many students realize, living on campus is extremely expensive. For the 2007-2008 academic year, the cost for majority of rooms in the Woodland Commons apartments was $6,690.00. Given that the school year only runs from September to May and students are on break in January, this amounts to over $800 a month per person!

Last year, I lived with one roommate in Westport for $950 a month and that cost was split between the two of us. Apartment costs in New Bedford may be even less than this, with some apartments costing only $350 a month per person.

One point to note with these figures is additional expenses, such as heat, cable, internet, and electricity. With UMD dorms, this adds up to only a few hundred dollars extra for the entire year on your bill and costs are fixed.

While some apartment leases include some or all expenses in the cost, this was not the case for me. For my apartment, utilities added an extra $100 a month and even more than that in the cold winter months. This cost varied month to month, so it was difficult to plan for some additional costs.

Despite the high heating costs, we kept our heat down to a chilly 62 degrees. And yes, we did use the plastic over the windows. These freezing conditions in my Westport apartment really made me realize how much I took heat for granted back in the dorms.

Besides money, there are other factors to consider when it comes to living on or off campus. One is driving.

Everything on campus is accessible by foot when living in the dorms. Moving off campus means having to drive to and from campus every day. Dartmouth does not have much to offer in terms of housing, so New Bedford and Fall River are more likely destinations for students. This means a 15- to 20-minute drive each way, fighting for a parking spot in the lots, and then walking to class.

Of course there is gas to pay for, which will be consumed more rapidly than if living on campus. The time taken driving back and forth to your apartment can be annoying if you want to be on campus a lot. Even if I planned to stay on campus for a full day and not drive back to Westport, I still had to plan out meals since eating out constantly isn’t affordable.

Living conditions away from campus will be considerably different as well. In the dorms there are always plenty of people around and plenty of stuff going on. Friends’ rooms are only a short walk away.

Off campus you may live with a few roommates but may have to drive to get to anything else. If you want to drink you will have to either sober up or crash on someone’s couch because you can’t simply stumble back to your dorm as other students can.

These factors all turned out to be a major factor for me. While Westport was nice for a quiet night’s rest, I often felt lonely as most of my friends were all back on the UMD campus.

There are still many other considerations with living off campus. Many landlords require a twelve-month lease, which is undesirable for students who wish to return home for summer. Some places may offer rent, which is month to month, or a nine-month lease, as in my case.

With dorms, students are required to leave campus during certain time periods, like winter break, whereas those in an apartment can come and go as they please.

Off-campus students no longer have to worry about RAs and other rules that the school may have. This includes building-wide charges, such as for broken doors and fire alarms. Renters will still be required for damages made to your apartment, though.

Food can be a factor, too. Meal plans are required for all freshmen at UMD, as well as those in Oak Glen and Pine Dale. Plans cost around $3000 a year. This difference pertains little to upperclassmen, as Woodlands residents are not required to purchase a meal plan.

After living off campus for my junior year, I decided that it was not for me. The only reason why I moved out of the dorms in the first place was to avoid crowded Woodland apartments with bunked beds, which no longer exist at UMD.

Next year the Cedar Dell will fully reopen and there will be plenty of room for everyone on campus. UMD Housing has announced other changes, like quiet housing and substance-free housing for those who choose to live there.

With all being said, I recommend staying on campus. While some people have moved off campus and enjoyed it, living on campus is still unbeatable for me.

‘Vagina Monologues’ damages UMD’s reputation

By Gregory Gravelle

This past weekend, the UMass Dartmouth administration reached a disappointingly low level of moral responsibility by allowing the popular show “The Vagina Monologues” on campus.

While the show is intended to inform and encourage people with elements of feminism, the extremely inappropriate and offensive manner in which its agenda is portrayed is actually detrimental to the causes that it supposedly represents.  Those involved in the production of the show who think that it may increase respect for women should seriously reconsider its content.

It does not require very much analysis to realize why “The Vagina Monologues” is so offensive to many people — the show is rooted in profanity and tasteless displays of sub-par messages.  One quintessential element of the show is its attempt to “reclaim” a certain word.  In its attempt to reclaim one of the most offensive words in the English language, the show provides a woman who repeatedly screams out the “c-word.”

While there are many legitimate issues in feminism that are brought up by the show, their validity appears diminished as the show rapidly loses any level of credibility through the language it uses.

While some of the issues represented in “The Vagina Monologues” are legitimate, there are certainly some that are questionable at best.  In addition to the reclaiming of obscenities, the show has a trend of portraying male-female relationships as vehicles for abuse.  The show is clearly portrayed with an anti-male bias.  These factors are also worthy of criticism, as they further destroy any credibility the show may have had.

It is important to draw a distinction between free speech and good judgment.  While the administration at UMass Dartmouth has allowed the show to be performed in the name of free speech, they have shown a severe lack of good judgment by providing what appeared to be no level of censorship.

The obscenity of the show not only offends people, but it also damages the reputation of the institution.   In having a woman screaming obscenities on a stage, the program misrepresents the student body at this school.  While the overwhelming majority of students on campus exercise at least moderate levels of moral responsibility, we are misrepresented as tasteless and morally devoid by the small group that performs the show. The administration should at the very least set some level of restrictions on future shows, as many other institutions do.

Speaking for those students at UMassDartmouth who have some level of school pride, I am obviously embarrassed by the way the student body was represented by the show. There are many channels available for informing people about important issues, but the creators of the Vagina Monologues have failed in finding one that has any realistic impact on society.

There are many important issues that women deal with. However, by addressing some issues that are highly debatable, the show wastes its opportunity to actually help women.  Shock-and-awe style performances tend to damage the causes that they are supposed to represent, and the Vagina Monologues are no exception.

TV addicts need to get off the couch

By Chuck MacDonald

People today are obsessed with having a world filled with a happy population, no calories and ingenious college graduates. Well, for having such an obsession, they screwed up pretty badly.

Today’s world is filled with fat, stupid, angry people. What a shock! The world needs a scapegoat. For me, it’s television.

Watching TV is a lot like smoking. People know all the crummy side effects and continue to do it anyway. Most smokers are aware that their habit can cause cancer and emphysema; most TV watchers know that their habit is mind numbing and wasteful.

TV is like a smoking addiction. This is the stage for the people who are almost exposed too much, like our genius who thought he could sue a cable company for his idiosyncrasies.

Back in 2005, according to the Census Bureau, 98.2 percent of American households owned at least one of the 248 million TVs in the country. That’s an average of 2.4 TVs per home. It was also recorded that adults watch about 4.6 hours a day, or 1,699 hours per year. Now for something that consumes that much of our daily lives how can it be a bad thing? I mean smoking makes people feel so damn good inside, right?

On a daily basis you will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience-participation shows, and formula comedies about totally unbelievable families. This is followed by blood and thunder, mayhem, more violence, sadism, murder, western bad guys, and western good guys; private eyes, gangsters, even more violence and cartoons, and finally, commercials—many pointless, redundant and some even offending. Those cavemen are getting me really pissed off. Didn’t they even have a show cancelled recently? Geico ought to send that cute little gecko over with a care package or something to calm them down.

All this time spent toying with the television is causing problems. Our children are overweight. According to the American journal, Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, overweight three-year-olds were more likely to be awake in rooms with a TV on for two or more hours daily. Can they help it when the commercial break is filled with greasy McDonald’s food? Even those intelligent marketing pros are getting in on the country’s ignorance. The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine also says African-American children are exposed to more commercials for junk food via BET than are children watching the WB or the Disney Channel.

This problem needs solving. Perhaps adjusting the programming will make people conscious of the issues with television. I suggest having 22 hour loops of Billy Mays, the Oxy-Clean man yelling at you to buy Oxy-Clean. But hurry and call in the next five minutes and you can get a second case free. The last two hours can be filled by either CNN, anything on C-Span, women’s basketball or any combination of the three.

At first this might really make some people angry, but that’s the point. They will finally shut off the numbing tube and go for a walk instead of waiting to see which value menu burger has been demoted to the dollar menu for the next few weeks. People will stop revolving their lives around Dr. McDreamy’s oh so demanding schedule, and maybe actually live their lives. They will go back to the days of heading out to Fenway Park, or The Boston Garden, instead of watching the broadcast at home eating microwavable mini tacos. Maybe they will start to realize what entertainment was before the television corrupted our lives. I’m pretty sure that libraries still let you take books out for free. Why not catch up on some reading? I’m not saying go kill yourself with Shakespeare, but maybe pick up a thriller by James Patterson or the new Stephen King horror about the TV that killed the first family.

Putting this 24-hour programming loop into action will just be the start of making the change. However, just like Britney Spears shaving her head before entering rehab, you might go a little crazy before finally realizing change is needed.

SOUL SIGHTINGS

Searching for a personal connection with Easter

As Easter Sunday approaches I feel once again the excitement of the day.

In my earliest days, it involved Sunday School and worship in a Lutheran church, with a strange emphasis (as I remember) on a coming back to life of someone. That someone was Jesus of Nazareth. He had been executed, I was told, on the Friday previous — executed for reasons unclear to me as a child. It just seemed so sad.

Then I learned the rest of the details, as the New Testament laid them out. I pretty much shrugged, until my second year of college.

In that spring, I was enveloped in anti-war issues with Vietnam as well as all the stuff with life on a big college campus such as partying, studies, girlfriends, owning my first car, and more. But a scholarly lecturer from Campus Crusade for Christ came to our campus and delivered a talk on the evidences for the resurrection of Jesus.

His agenda was to demonstrate their relevance.I was invited by some party-mates from my dorm, and reluctantly attended. I found myself fascinated with the lecturer’s approach.

He seemed dispassionate, reasonable, articulate and most of all armed to the teeth with details about Jesus and that day—details that I had never heard, at the Sunday School level. This included legalities (or illegalities) of the trials, a Roman scourging, crucifixion, resurrection claims and testimonies, ancient mentions of Jesus outside the church fathers, and finally apostolic claims as to the meaning of it all, which we call “the gospel”.

Easter and its events came to be the very mission of life for me. I continued in the undergraduate engineering program in which I was enrolled and worked as an engineer for a while after graduation. But a calling to vocational ministry would soon come, essentially because I became so excited about the power of Easter.  “He is not here. He is risen.”

Rev. Neil Damgaard
Protestant Chaplain

Ben Comeau’s Political Blarb

Power politics cause conflict on Kosovo

By Ben Comeau

Power politics are rarely admirable. However, in 1999 the nations of Europe and America, fused in the military alliance known as NATO, decided that the indiscriminate killing in the Balkan region of Kosovo had gone too far. They bombed the Serbian aggressors and sent troops to stabilize the province. They have been there since, training the Kosovars (as they are called) how to run a country.

Most of the world forgot about Kosovo after that. That is, until last week when Kosovo decided to stick itself right back into the headlines by declaring independence from its parent Serbia. America and most of Western Europe recognized its sovereignty; Russia, Serbia and a host of other nations did not. Ironically, it is power politics that has made this declaration of independence so controversial.

Serbia sees Kosovo as a historically Serbian state — it is the region where the country, which will become Serbia, was born even though most Serbs don’t live there anymore. That’s why the Kosovars declared independence: it’s 90% ethnic Albanian.

Unfortunately the Serbs really don’t like that. They don’t like that so much that a bunch of them gathered at a state sponsored demonstration, only to end up setting the U.S. Embassy aflame. All the while the Serb police watched on, not doing anything until the last possible second. At least one rioter died. The Serbian government has been accused of ordering its police force to stand down for as long as possible. The Serb President refuses to apologize for the incident.

It does seem like a lot of hoopla for a miniature state on the far side of Europe. Power politics is why this matter has become a crisis, only no one wants to admit it. NATO came to Kosovo’s aid because it suited their interest. It got their foot on the doorstep of a weakening Post-Soviet Russia and it allowed for Western (military) influence to be spread over the troublesome Balkan region.

Now Russia is stronger then it was and is looking to prove the end of the Cold War was a fluke. Serbia is being used by Russia to further anger the West. Almost certainly NATO wants to show they can close the deal and bring a country back from the brink — like they’ve been trying (and failing) to do in Afghanistan.

Imagine how embarrassed Europe would be if Kosovo, a pet project almost a decade in he making, failed in their backyard. This is the definition of power politics — prominent countries using all their economical and military strengths to manipulate weaker states.

In addition to Russia, countries like China, Spain, Israel, and most other Balkan states are reluctant to recognize the newly independent Kosovo. This is because they all have their own secession movements to deal with. Recognizing Kosovo sends mixed messages to the secession-minded regions of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh, Taiwan, Kurdistan, Palestine, The Republika of Srpska, Transnistria, The Basque Region, Northern Cyprus, and the list goes on and on. (Don’t worry if you don’t know any of these places. My computer’s spellcheck doesn’t either.)

All of these troublesome regions have suffered, much like Kosovo, but the West doesn’t care. It’s all about location and opportunity — that’s the name of the game in power politics.

Kosovo only shows how much this world really is run by power politics. The UN is powerless in struggles of sovereignty because powerful nations, like the US and Russia, have a louder voice then most. Not even the EU or NATO can agree on what to do — there are too many conflicting interests.

It is ironic, then, that Kosovo is actually in a unique situation, where the Kosovars should be free to complete the breakup of Yugoslavia and finish this ugly chapter in European history. Kosovo should be immune to these squabbles. Even in this age of globalism and liberalism, it all still boils down to those few states that can swing the whole world one way or the other.