Rice University’s Student Newspaper — Since 1916

Friday, March 14, 2025 — Houston, TX

Life's a Mitch: Keep your pens inked, or fingers above the keys

By Mitch Mackowiak     8/27/15 12:07pm

Welcome one and all! Since I took the yoke of Opinions Editor, we have run a few self-ads encouraging readers to write opinions articles. Please note the change in tone of the ad, from a request to a reminder:

 

As the calls of slammed trunk doors die away



and towers of boxes and bins dwindle

Between brimmed buckets of announcements

poured over our bewildered ears and eyes

I wish to share with you some hopes.

If you want to shout your thoughts from a roof

Fondren’s will garner widest audience, but

I hope you think the Thresher a good roof.

 

If you have saved some public monologues

snuck in the corners of your mind, you will

find columnists welcome to the Thresher. 

 

Should recent news spark your strong reaction

the act of writing allows thorough thought

and I hope you think thoroughly through us.

If your convictions fall on ears unhearing

or everyone seems out of earshot

plenty of eyes study newsprint, like yours.

 

You need no invitation to write us

but, as any teacher might subtly threat, 

should no one raise a hand, I shall call you

as empty opinion sections are lies.



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Condemn DEI censorship, protect campus research

The Office of the Provost announced that Rice’s DEI office will be renamed to the Office of Access and Institutional Excellence on Feb. 28. As a graduate student, I am not privy to the reasons for this rebranding. I hope that, in light of recent federal and state directives and ongoing censorship, it is obvious why I am wary, even if the office claims to continue to promote values of diversity, equity and inclusion while removing these words from its website.

OPINION 3/4/25 10:53pm
Dismantling subtle racism by reshaping incentives

Before moving to the U.S., I had been cautioned about racism, but I reassured myself: It’s a new generation; people are more conscious. For the most part, I wasn’t wrong. But what no one warned me about was the racism that lingers in the air, unspoken yet deeply felt. It exists in the assumptions people hold, in the way they speak with confidence about other cultures while knowing so little.


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