I must confess, that after reading the piece entitled “Academics for Athletes Come Under Fire” in your March 21st edition, I was thoroughly insulted. As a student-athlete here at UM, I feel obliged to reply to the personally offensive article, expressing my sincere disgust. I will not comment on the Andre Johnson case; simply, it is none of my business. Nor will I comment on the Honor Council and its procedures. My sole objective is to rebuke, and therefore, to hopefully dismiss some of the generalizations and stereotypical statements regarding student-athletes, which can be found in the article.

After reading your article, one would think that student-athletes at UM are here only for athletics. If this were the case, the term “student-athlete” would not exist; there would be UM students, and there would be UM athletes, but no one would fulfill both roles simultaneously. However, this is not the case, as scores of true “student-athletes,” individuals who successfully balance the intense challenges of both academics and athletics, walk the UM campus daily.

To imply that student-athletes are worthless once they step off the field is not only invalid but also ignorant. The bottom line is that UM student-athletes excel all around – not just athletically. Please allow me to use myself as a modest example. I am a 4.0 student, in the honors program, (and although I was recruited for athletics) on academic scholarship. I hold leadership positions in my fraternity, as well as in a dozen other organizations/volunteer groups on campus. I also have a part time job. I am well aware that many student-athletes at UM have similar credentials; in fact, several teammates of mine have resumes that far exceed my own.

I cannot argue that all student-athletes here strive for scholastic excellence; for some, the only goal is merely to make the grades needed in order to stay eligible for athletic competition. One will find UM athletes who “are at a 10th grade reading and writing level,” to quote the former UM English professor who was interviewed in the article. One will also find athletes who choose “majors that require minimal course requirements and to enroll in classes of professors who are ‘easy graders,'” as stated by the same professor. However, one will also find students, who are not athletes, at the same reading and writing level and pursuing the same “easy” majors. Taking the easy way out academically is a matter of one’s personal integrity and self-motivation, and it is in no way correlated to one’s athletic status.

I would greatly appreciate it if you would avoid making generalizations about groups of students in future publications – especially those groups of students to which I belong. Stereotypes do nothing but reveal one’s own ignorance.

Sincerely,

Billy Bludgus

University of Miami Men’s Cross Country/Track and Field

There is a brokenness I do not understand.

It shows itself in strange places and when we are not looking. It shatters quiet and steals happiness as a pin takes water from a balloon.

I wish I could wrap my arms around it when I see it in the face of a friend. I want to gather all the pieces again for the ones I love or for the strangers whose eyes have lost their light.

One time the shower door shattered while my old roommate was washing her hair. She screamed, and I thought she had slipped on the soap and fallen, but then she started laughing, so I knew everything was okay. Tiny aqua shards were all over the bathroom, though: under the rug, behind the trash can, in the crevices with the mildew. We swept them up with a wet broom and carried the frame of the door out to the dumpster, but we sometimes still find tiny remnants on the undersides of our shoes.

We wondered as we swept why the door just exploded like that in the middle of her shower; she hadn’t even touched it. Our landlord wouldn’t pay to have the door replaced. He said it had broken because we had slammed it open too many times.

Maybe he was right.

Maybe the shattering comes from too much opening and too much closing and too much force. Or maybe it is the steam repeated every morning. Or maybe the contrast with the breeze that comes in through the open window becomes too much to sustain.

We scuttle to reach our arms around ourselves, or others, to hold it all together. Yet something always seeps out. We plug the tiny holes that our disappointments have left us with, but the leaks spring somewhere else.

This happens with nations, with lovers, with families, with friends, and none of us can ever seem to find the reasons. It is as if we could just find something that would wrap itself around them, hold them, it would be okay. We all search for that everywhere: peace talks, college degrees, important careers, and relationships; but those too trickle out.

Where is the resurrection?

I have sought it everywhere: institutions, literature, religion, and psychology, even my own scribblings. And this Easter weekend I sought it still. I thought of spring and how things promise to be born again. I thought of a tradition that promises that we too can be reborn out of our own little deaths, that we can start again, that we fall down and, ultimately, we do get up.

My mind grasps for the certainty this tradition once gave me, and sometimes I do manage to take hold.

More often it is a struggle to trust the things I’ve come to question, but like spring, the struggle always has me returning to the place where I began. I’m beginning to think this handhold trust I’m lately learning is more like faith than the blind acceptance I used to know.

It is a trust that says there is a healing from the brokenness that surrounds us, a satiate for the hunger we rarely acknowledge. It is a trust that is reborn slowly every time I see a friend step in to mend another’s broken life.

The truth, though, is that we just don’t have enough fingers to plug all the leaks, neither in ourselves, nor in the ones we love. We must trust that there is someone greater whose hands are large enough to hold us all, whose fingers cup to catch the hope we would surely otherwise spill.

Angie Henderson is a graduate student in the School of International Studies

Is Britney Spears a slut or what? I wish she would make up her mind.

Her songs are undeniably catchy and yes, she does get more and more appealing in her physical appearance (implants or no implants), but she is an enigma wrapped inside of a contradiction. She’s either incredibly smart or very oblivious.

Her song titles say it all. First it was her feisty debut single, ‘Baby One More Time.’ Hit what again, Brit? A few songs later, it was the weepy, corny, good-girl anthem, ‘From the Bottom of My Broken Heart.’ Then with her second album, came ‘Oops I Did it Again,’ another catchy pop confection with an apparent double meaning. Did what again exactly? More specifics please! Anyway, the pop princess had no club appeal at this time as she was catapulting to teenybopper stardom.

But wait, just when we think we have her figured out after her second album, in comes the very adult-oriented ‘I’m a Slave 4 U,’ which turns her whole image upside down yet again. Suddenly, she’s this erotic grown-up who, in her video, writhes around with her sweaty dancers in a seeming orgy of body parts and heavy breathing. Talk about owning your sexuality.

I have to say, I loved the song. It’s a groovy little ditty to dance to, as anyone who has been at a club knows: when it comes on, people seem to go crazy. The lyrics seemed to be very sophisticated: “All you people look at me like I’m a little girl…” Well damn, after this, I guess she’s not anymore!

But that’s still not it. Now we arrive to her latest single, another generic and cheesy ballad entitled, ‘I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,’ from her new movie Crossroads (don’t even get me started on that one). You give us ‘Slave,’ and now you’re telling us you’re still not a woman? I don’t get it.

In every interview I’ve seen, Spears is telling girls to be themselves, because that’s what she is doing. You hear her say that it’s not her responsibility to parent her 12-year-old fan club, she’s just an entertainer who loves doing what she does.

Okay, that’s fine. But when you’re so convoluted as to put out one song screaming sex, sex, sex and then immediately switch it up and come out saying you’re not ready to handle it yet, there’s something wrong– not with your critics, but with you. What does that say to people?

I don’t care what Spears says, for me she’s a contradictory pseudo-nymph who is jerking her fans around and has lost what little respect I did have for her. Maybe she’s in a struggle with her current management and will soon dump them to go off and pursue her own image, as I’ve heard other teen acts doing. Maybe she’s just a really confused girl(?). Don’t get me wrong, I firmly believe in flaunting it if you got it, and Spears has definitely got it in that department.

Whatever the case is, all I’m asking is that she be real with her audience. She needs to own up to what she is conveying to her listeners. Brit may not be a woman yet, but at 20, she is just too damn close to not start acting like one.

Derek Bramble is a junior majoring in broadcast journalism and theater.

Last Thursday I had the opportunity to attend and observe the naturalization ceremony for U.S. citizenship of an extended family member at the Miami convention center. If you’ve never seen a photo of a person having successfully jumped the old Berlin Wall or a Cuban refugee struggling up the beach at Key West, then I would submit that the looks on the faces of most of those being naturalized was pretty close. The placidity and sublimeness of a person that sees basic human freedoms and opportunity within his or her grasp is delicious to the eyes.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service put together an altogether moving and inspirational program for the sea of shining faces that made up the new additions to our uniquely American tapestry called the United States. I felt a great sense of pride and kinship as I witnessed the electric atmosphere that engulfed the thousands of on-looking friends and family members of the inductees as they each raised a right hand to reject past allegiance to foreign princes, potentates and states forced upon them by the unlucky virtue of a birth in foreign lands. These same lands, often dominated by oppressive dictators or regimes, decayed economic systems, failed ideas, and ever increasing obstacles to life and liberty, stifle human aspiration and incentive for superior endeavor.

As Attorney General John Ashcroft led the group through their oath of loyalty to our “American” ideal and nation, I silently mouthed the words with them, reaffirming my own dedication to our nation’s ongoing struggle to maintain the freedom that is the basis for economic and individual liberty, and the opportunity to build personal wealth and security for each citizen. With profound respect, I considered the experiences and sufferings of those seeking this newfound freedom, on the cusp of which the assembled now leaned forward.

No doubt you may have heard, or continue to hear from nay-sayers on American university campuses, within the press, and even from some individuals in our own government, that this nation never was or will never be the example of what passes for a “just” amalgamation of a modern society based on globalist vision. Well, there was nary an indicator of any of that at the Miami Beach Convention Center on Thursday.

I spoke with spectators and participants, INS officials and security guards. The reactions mirrored each other. A Peruvian husband would today be the first to lead his family effort in all becoming citizens. A Haitian woman would get her passport today and a chance to work in a job indoors. A young Ecuadorian man would lay his past to rest and share in the dream of a prosperous livelihood previously denied him for having the wrong last name. One more Colombian father would not have to brave guerilla violence in getting his agricultural products to a market now.

And through it all, we in the audience welcomed more Cubans who long to earn money for a car or have the privilege of using the Internet, Zimbabweans who wanted to vote in a real election, Jamaicans who wanted a better education, and even some former British ex-patriates who wanted to simply keep a fair amount of their earnings and escape the oppressive taxation that ruins entrepreneurial spirit and stifles initiative. There was not much hand wringing about injustice or a lack of diversity to be seen on that morning. On that day to almost all of us present, minus a few possible cynics and infiltrators, the United States still represented the best justice we could ever hope to achieve.

As I headed back to school, I realized that we are all mostly children or grandchildren of immigrants. In having been born here or having a U.S. citizen for a parent, freedom is something we manage to continually take for granted.

This is a privilege that permits us the virtue of a nearly guaranteed birthright with our blue passports. But the words of Attorney General Ashcroft also sounded a sobering call. Along with all the talk of rights we constantly wallow around in during this narcissistic and sometimes nihilistic age, he reinforced the just notion of responsibility and accountability we have as citizens.

We have the obligation to play within rules that, for us, are pleasingly unrestrictive. And these are loose for a reason: without that freedom to act and an understanding of responsibility as well as rights, we run the risk of rushing back to failed or disproved notions of justice and false securities of kings or despotic regimes, the likes of which my new companions had just fled with their lives.

Steven Stanley is a graduate student of International Administration in the School of International Studies.