Outside Opinions

April 5, 2013

Student Returns from Convention Jazzed on US-Israeli Relations, Weary of Iran

By Abriel Brotman

Gauchos for Israel is a bipartisan group of student activists and campus leaders educated to be confident advocates for Israel on our UCSB campus. It is a pro US-Israel relations group that aims to promote and strengthen...

April 5, 2013

New “CAUCUS” Group Focuses on Unity between UC/CSU/CC Students, Aims for Empowerment

By Sam Swift

  The three tiers of education in California have acted independently of one another since their very creation. Every CC, CSU, and UC has had their own slate of issues laid down and divided by the state’s board of...

March 5, 2013

Cyberspace Classrooms and E-Professors: One Laptop Learner Considers the Merits and Downfalls of Online Classes

By Matt Conway

UCSB has recently begun to experiment with teaching online classes. Many parts of the traditional face-to-face lecture class work well online, but some do not. Knowing the difference between when the web works and when i...

March 1, 2013

Transfer Woes: A Word To the Wise Transfer Student

By Mai-Lynn Tran

Transfer students at the University of California, Santa Barbara increasingly face a variety of issues including culture shock, problems getting into their major, difficulty obtaining research positions and various other...

February 25, 2013

From Drone Strike Policy to Campus Rape Awareness Campaigns: Musings on Male Culpability in the 21st Century

By Jason Garshfield

  On Tuesday, Feb. 19, two Nexus articles caught my eye. The first was titled “Campus, Community Groups Run Campaign Against Sexual Assault.” The second was a “Left Said” opinion piece on drone strikes. Alth...

February 21, 2013

The Pains of Political Correctness

By Navid Ebrahimzadeh

As students of a generally left-wing Southern California university, we are fortunate enough to form part of a culture that preaches tolerance and diversity. While I do not wish to decry the value of such ideals, I wish ...

February 12, 2013

A Student’s Call to Arms: Divest Now, Reap Mother Nature’s Rewards Later

By Eli Arata-Reshes

Following the example of those who protested the South African apartheid divestment campaign of the 1980s, students in the U.S. are advocating a nationwide divestment of university endowments in the fossil fuel industry....

February 8, 2013

Dirty, Oily Money Students Voice Concerns Over Regents’ Environmentally Un-Savvy Investments

By Risa Jensen

Currently, the UC Board of Regents has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in the fossil fuel industry. Because these investments go against our UC value of sustainability and the efforts of students and staff to ma...

January 30, 2013

Come One, Come All! The IV Housing Circus Is Back In Town

By Maya Salmon

With Community Housing Office (CHO) as your ringleader, you won’t get “clowned” during the Isla Vista housing shuffle. Here are some dos and don’ts regarding choosing roommates, finding a place and signing a leas...

January 18, 2013

Concerned Student Warns, No Nuclear Weapons for Iran

By Avrohom Kahn

There are many reasons why Iran must not obtain nuclear weapons. The strongest one is the fact that Iran continues to support terrorist organizations around the globe, which could one day obtain such destructive technolo...

January 17, 2013

Alumn Pleads: “Mark Massari, tear down that sign!”

By Larry Yells

On behalf of the tens of thousands of UCSB students who transformed our Campus Events Center into one of the loudest, most raucous places to watch a college basketball game in the mid ’80s through the late ’90s, we a...

January 16, 2013

Expensive Upkeep: Why Keeping UCSB Postcard Perfect Comes at a Price for Gauchos

By Michael Dean

Hard to miss after three weeks away from campus is the great expanse of sky newly unobstructed after the removal of a number of trees from the perimeter of the library. Soon to replace them and presently queued along the...

January 15, 2013

To the Lady Elephant: Think Before You Trumpet

By Bridgid Twomey

The Lady Elephant’s article published Friday, Nov. 30 reminded me of an important truth: Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but that does not mean all opinions are created equal. Let’s start with the Elephant’s ge...

November 30, 2012

Female and Republican? One Lady Elephant Trumpets Her Case

By Anonymous

My parents never talked about politics. One night in a bar, this somehow gave me validity as a Republican. The fact that my ideologies were neither a choice to mime my parent’s party politics, nor the cliché rebellion...

November 30, 2012

Choosing the Moral High Road When Funny Isn’t So Funny

By James Cobb

My story begins at the start of this quarter; one of my classes which I looked forward to taking was titled “Asian Americans in the Media,” a class that I thought would be mostly about watching indie Asian films and ...

November 30, 2012

Whether You’re on Your Roof or Your Rent Is Through It, CHO Is Here with Answers

By Maya Salmon

When is the best time to start searching for housing in Isla Vista? We’ve all heard “the early bird gets the worm,” but when it comes to housing for next year in I.V. and all of the other options you might want to ...