Stony Brook has done it again. On Sunday, author Junot Díaz shared the petition to Save Hispanic & Latino Studies at Stony Brook University, responding to the administration’s decision to suspend the doctoral program in Hispanic Studies and to combine…
I signed the petition to save the Humanities and the Arts at Stony Brook University because I’m trying not to feel completely hopeless. Because when the university releases a new financial plan, I can guess what was cut without looking.…
Most people think my bookcase is chaos. I don’t organize my books alphabetically, chronologically, or by genre. But there is a system and to me, it somehow makes sense: I arrange my books according to what authors I think would…
There is a circle of 10 empty chairs in the center of the room. Rows of fluorescent lights glow brightly from the ceiling, waiting for something to move beneath them. A few minutes before 4 p.m., a woman and a…
How much time do you spend choosing classes? If you are like me in my freshmen year, a lot. I combed the Undergraduate Bulletin for days, enamored with the collegiate sounding classes: Introduction to Political Science, Moral Reasoning, Society and…
I first saw Ferris Bueller’s Day Off eight years ago in my seventh grade health class on the day before spring break; a white flag from the teacher relinquishing any attempts of keeping us focused the day before vacation. I…
It was 6 a.m. when President Samuel J. Stanley Jr. awoke to the loud drone of a jackhammer. He lay on his back, sore from the stiff mattress, and stared at the ceiling. The white paint was peeling. “Where am…
In 1636, a farmhouse on one acre of cow pasture became America’s first establishment of higher education. As told in The History of American Higher Education by Roger L. Geiger—distinguished professor of Education Policy Studies at Pennsylvania University—the Great and…
Joan Didion called grammar a piano she plays by ear, but we can’t all be Joan Didion, wearing over-sized sunglasses and crafting sentences reminiscent of a Henry James novel. Instead, for us undergrads, grammar is often a piano played out…