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Letter to the Editor

Total Number of Articles: 57

First Article on this Page: November 17, 2017

Latest Article on this Page: May 5, 2023

Letter to the Editor

Letter to the Editor: An Invitation

To the editors, A PeaceWorks vigil has been active in Brunswick for the past 21 years. This letter is an invitation to all members of the Bowdoin community to join us when you can. Sometimes called “Honk for Peace,” we stand at the edge of the green opposite Walgreens every Friday from 5 – 5:30 p.m.

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Letter to the Editor

LTE: More informed and balanced views on Russia/Ukraine

To the editors, I see the college is hosting a series of lectures on Russia-Ukraine, the first of which was already held (virtually) on October 27 when Ukrainian scholar Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed delivered “Russia’s War On Ukraine: Culture, Memory, Politics.” I missed the lecture, so I can’t be sure how much the Orient’s coverage omitted, but I was troubled by Shpylova-Saeed’s neglect of historical context.

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Letter to the Editor

Thanks for voting!

To the Editors, We want to thank everyone who came out and voted on Tuesday. This year was vital for Maine and national politics, and it was more imperative than ever for us to drive progressive thinking and activism at Bowdoin and in our community.

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Letter to the Editor

Letter to the Editor: “Upgrades” to Pickard Field

To the editors, The proposals for the redevelopment of Bowdoin’s Pickard Field complex sent to members of Friends of the College a week or so ago are both surprising and troubling: surprising because I am coming to think of Bowdoin as an environmentally-conscious institution and troubling because the proposals set the College back several steps in the community trust earned from solar and geo-thermal installations.

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Letter to the Editor

Bowdoin, treat your Muslim students better

To the Editor: Just this past Sunday, I woke up to the chapel bells. The church bells wake me up every Sunday, serving as a reminder that I’m a foreigner in this land. No matter how many years I’ve been living here, no matter how many friendships I’ve made, no matter that I speak a colonizers’ language better than my mother tongue, the bells tell me that I do not belong.

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Letter to the Editor

Letter to the editor: the experiment worked

To the editor: Usually, I am happy when my experiments work. If they do, it affirms my initial assumptions and supports the story that I constructed around the available data. This is called hypothesis testing. But with Covid-19, I’m not sure I need to test the idea that masks prevent transmission, and I’m not sure I need to test my concepts of common sense.

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Letter to the Editor

Working together on COVID-19 working groups

To the Editor: Today marks the 51st day since the College announced the decision to move online. It goes without saying that the moment in which we now find ourselves is unprecedented. Last month, President Rose announced the creation of three working groups: the Budget Review Group to tackle budgetary changes for the 2020-2021 academic year, the Return to Campus Group to consider the physical logistics of reopening campus and the Continuity in Teaching and Learning Group to develop remote learning models should the College decide to continue with online instruction in the fall.

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Letter to the Editor

Thank you, community

To the Editor, On April 2, we started a mutual aid fund to support Bowdoin community members affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The concept was simple: we would fundraise to fulfill individual requests submitted by students, staff and community members who needed immediate, direct financial assistance.

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Letter to the Editor

Expand mental health services

To the Editor: Among 38 elite institutions, Bowdoin College is ranked third in the number of students who seek counseling and mental health services. This statistic is not inherently negative—in fact, it demonstrates how, in some ways, Bowdoin is doing something right.

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Letter to the Editor

Classical myths are as relevant as ever

To the Editor, In your January 31 editorial board opinion, Classical Mythology is called out for seeming “tangentially related to current issues of social differences.” Classical literature, and Myth especially, have always reflected a deep concern with the issues of social difference, not to mention the roles of power and inequity.

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Letter to the Editor

Misleading sustainability statistics

To the Editor, I recently was shown the latest issue of the Installment, which is published by the campus Sustainability Office. The following was provided as resulting from the energy challenge between dorms. They were able to save 6,452,949.1 pounds of CO2e resulting in reductions up to 27.1 percent.

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Letter to the Editor

Housekeeper speaks out

To the Editor, I would like to thank everyone for all your support for a living wage. I feel it was a little weird for President Rose to announce our wage increase right before “the fall social” and “parent weekend.” Now with my increase, my pay in July, as I understand it, will be a little more than $2.00 more than someone starting new.

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Letter to the Editor

The time of Richard Ford is over

To the Editor, The day following a 16 year-old female’s indictment of the devastation wrought by white western men at the United Nations General Assembly Climate Change Action Summit, Bowdoin hosted a conversation by two proud members of another flank of that canon—the part reserved for great important self-awarding white male writers (Richard Ford and John Banfield).

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Letter to the Editor

Daily demonstrations of respect

To the Editor, As members of the Residential Life Head Staff, we collectively live in all of Bowdoin’s residence halls and communicate regularly with Bowdoin’s hardworking housekeepers. We deeply respect our housekeepers and commend the Orient staff and contributors for their ongoing attention to the living wage movement.

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Letter to the Editor

Letter to the Editor: Bowdoin’s treasurer on housekeeper wages

To the editor, We have been concerned about misperceptions and incorrect or incomplete information published here, and circulating elsewhere, about Bowdoin’s compensation program for our housekeepers. I want to take the opportunity to set the record straight about our compensation, the importance we place on this issue, and our substantial, ongoing efforts to make sure our housekeepers are compensated appropriately.

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Letter to the Editor

Change in the world by voting

Dear Bowdoin neighbors, On Tuesday, November 6, 2018, you have a prodigious opportunity to exercise a precious and fragile right that we have as Americans. Your privilege to vote was made possible by hundreds of thousands of men and women that gave “the last full measure of devotion” to protect the freedoms that I treasure more than life itself.

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Letter to the Editor

Crossword correction

Corrections Corner: Here’s our issue with the latest issue: the crossword puzzle “Word-Up!” published on Friday, September 28. We would like to call attention to the incorrect clue of 65-across. As avid Olympic-heads/Olympic-aficionados, we couldn’t help but notice that the answer “Los Angeles” is not in fact the host city for the 2024 Summer Olympics.

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Letter to the Editor

Class Council election results show need for ranked-choice voting

Dear Editor, The recent Class Council election results are counter-majoritarian. Winners in four different elections won with less than 50 percent of the vote, due to the plurality system that the Bowdoin Student Government uses. Most egregiously, a supermajority (73 percent) of first years voted for a candidate other than Wilder Short ’22, their new president.

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Letter to the Editor

Rename Pine Street Apartments

Dear Editor, I can only assume that the Pine Street Apartments were named for the magnificent evergreens that surrounded them on three sides, sheltering residents from loud traffic. For years, many students chose to live there because of the beautiful and quiet environs.

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Letter to the Editor

The power of organizing

To the Editors, I want to say thank you for your story on the economic conditions of Bowdoin’s facilities workers. Your reporter deserves great praise for thoughtfully taking on a challenging subject. After graduating from Bowdoin in 1994, I helped organize a union for teaching assistants in the University of California system while I was in graduate school.

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Letter to the Editor

Everyone’s included in Theater and Dance

To the Editor, I appreciated reading Jonah Watt’s call for more queer-inclusive spaces, but I don’t recognize the theater he describes as displaying “largely heterosexual relationships” at Bowdoin. Theater has been accused of many things throughout its 2,500-year history, but heteronormativity is not often the foremost complaint.

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Letter to the Editor

In support of Susan Rice

To the editor, I must make two points in response to the article in the most recent issue of the Orient concerning Susan Rice as an Honorary Degree recipient at graduation. First, the number of communications to the College disagreeing with the above action hardly constitutes a “backlash” of alums.

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Letter to the Editor

Respect is reciprocal

The past two “Polar Views” articles are troubling. The platform the author has created is crucial to deepening conversations in the Bowdoin community, and comparing experiences of oppression has an insidious nature which alienates us from the problems at hand—I don’t wish to contribute to the conversation in that manner.

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Letter to the Editor

Defending the football program

I read with interest my fellow football alum Daniel Covell’s piece in last week’s Orient that takes a very academic and somewhat drastic approach to addressing Bowdoin’s football woes. However, sometimes turning a program around simply comes down to the right leadership, and Daniel neglects to mention this fourth, rather basic option, that I believe has the best chance for success: •   Hire a dynamic hard-charging head coach who played NESCAC football and has a track record of building football programs from scratch.

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