34th Street Magazine's "Toast" is a semi-weekly newsletter with the latest on Penn's campus culture and arts scene. Delivered Monday-Wednesday-Friday.
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We, scholars of South Asia in the United States, have been appalled at the extent of vituperation and the insults leveled against three distinguished scholars because they wrote a letter opposing the decision of the organizers of the Wharton India Economic Forum to invite Narendra Modi as a keynote speaker.
So every once in a while, it’s a bit jarring to pause and realize that I’m living in 2013, in the United States, with a biracial president — and there’s still a current of latent prejudice everywhere.
I will never forget that first day of the riots, February 28, 2002. I watched a mob walk down my street and burn down a Muslim owned business as the police watched.
Since the retraction of Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s invitation to the Wharton School, events continue to unfold ominously. The opportunity for public discourse, multiple perspectives expressed in an open and civil manner, has been lost at least twice.
The University prides itself on elevating groups that have faced discrimination, but it is penalizing Asian Americans for their success despite prejudice.
Over the past 40 plus years, SWRK 613 proved to be an academically rigorous and profoundly important course in preparing students to become competent social workers with diverse populations.
We — Philadelphia — have everything. Well, almost everything. But you know what we don’t have? A weekly pub run. And do you know what would make Philadelphia an even greater city? A weekly pub run.
Economist William Shughart II estimated that daylight savings costs the United States approximately $1.7 billion a year. He arrived at that figure by calculating the opportunity cost of our time and the total amount of time it takes to adjust all of our clocks twice a year.
The episode at Wharton squelching the free speech rights of students is only the latest event in a long running campaign to shut out a billion Hindus from participating in political affairs around the world.
We are writing to say that we were deeply frustrated by the full-page ad posted on page six of Monday’s copy of The Daily Pennsylvanian. We found it to be offensive, disgusting and hateful towards Muslims.
However, your decision to publish such a distasteful, unethical, and downright degrading ad is extremely unnerving and does not deserve any place in our university’s atmosphere.
I was extremely disturbed to see the xenophobic, propagandistic ad that was published in The Daily Pennsylvanian on Monday. It portrayed isolated instances of violence by Muslims acting outside of permissible Islamic doctrine as the norm, and by doing so, targeted and isolated a segment of the Penn community.
Politics today is riddled with stories of candidates rising from the one-bedroom log cabin to the political stratosphere. Yet rarely have I come across a candidate quite like Williams, a man who, for nine months, had to plea for money, search for food — often in trash cans — and find a warm place to sleep.
Our constant consumption on and multitasking across various technologies may actually be training our brains to focus for smaller increments of time, which further decreases our ability to efficiently complete our work.
Opposing so strongly the invitation of an elected official because they feel that he is a dictator unfortunately gives me the impression that they have allowed personal opinions to cloud better judgment.
The events surrounding the cancelation of Modi’s invitation were not an inhibition of speech, but the product of dynamic free speech of private individuals without government intervention. Even if you disagree with the outcome, this was free speech in action.
Penn’s name attached to Modi would have granted him all of the legitimacy that comes with that name, and his cancellation is potentially a huge blow to his political ambitions.
Unfortunately, The Daily Pennsylvanian has revealed its severe miscomprehension of this very basic point and, in fact, has worried us with the very serious prospect of our suppressed speech.