Students lined the hall outside of President Stanley's office to protest PHEEIA and tuition hikes

Days after staging protests on campus as part of the national March 4 Day of Action, a small group of students at Stony Brook University sat down in the hallway outside of President Stanley’s office for hours and begged passersby for spare change to cover the rising costs of tuition.

Kevin Young and Nick Eaton (who is a contributing writer for Think) organized the event today, and were accompanied by roughly a dozen other students with jars and signs.

“I can’t afford to pay for tuition,” said James Ging, a freshman Engineering Sciences student. Ging’s concerns are with differentiated tuition, which would set varying tuition costs based on departments within the university.

“PHEEIA is going to make it harder for students to pay for tuition, especially for the engineering students,” he said.

PHEEIA, or the Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act, is the SUNY-backed proposal to reinvent the tuition model for the 64 member campuses that comprise the State University of New York. One potential affect of PHEEIA would be the implementation of differentiated tuition.

The students timed their protest to coincide with a press conference with President Stanley for campus media. President Stanley did not step outside his office to address the protestors, but several campus media stopped on their way out to speak with students.

During the press conference, President Stanley was asked about these student protests, including the one that was ongoing on the other side of the wall.

“I take it very seriously, obviously.” He said. “Whenever the students are speaking, I’m listening and I hear what they have to say.

“Hot air. Empty rhetoric,” says Nick Eaton. “If President Stanley was really interested in student protests, he wouldn’t send the chief of police outside and charge us with disorderly conduct.”

Campus police were dispatched to the Administration building when the students arrived. According to Ging, at the offset of the protest, there were five officers in the hallway with just 8 students.

Robert Lenahan, the chief of police for the University Police Department, was stationed outside the door. He would periodically step inside the office and speak with representatives from the president’s office.

According to Eaton, the plan was to have two shifts of protestors, one for before the press conference and one afterwards. After the arrival of the university police however, they “refused to leave on principle.”

“This event was supposed to be small and shed light on PHEEIA,” said Eaton. “It was escalated by the presence of the university police department.

The University Police Department was not immediately available for comment.

March 4 Day of Action at Stony Brook from THiNK Magazine on Vimeo.

Ahead of a nationwide day of action on March 4, hundreds of students at Stony Brook University took to the Student Activities Center Plaza on Wednesday to protest budget cuts and tuition increases recently proposed by the State University of New York.

Colorful signs and rhythmic chants lured passersby into the rally, which featured speakers from the United University Professionals and the student body.

After almost an hour on the SAC Plaza, the protest organizers took the rally mobile. A group of roughly 75 students marched to the Administration building loop to board a rented school bus that took them to the Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology complex where university President Samuel L. Stanley was wrapping up a meeting.

Students continued the protest at CEWIT for another hour, with heavy police presence looking on. President Stanley emerged from the building and was bombarded with chants demanding his support for keeping tuition costs low and fighting budget cuts. After quickly taking a letter presented to him by one protester, Stanley was ushered to a car and back to campus.

SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher was also at the meeting at CEWIT, but left shortly before protesters arrived.

The rally had been organized to shed light on proposals by the state and SUNY administrators to overhaul the tuition process at the 64 campuses that comprise SUNY. Those proposals could nearly double the current tuition rates in 10 years, in smaller annual increments.

Expensive purchases, like ambulances, are paid in large part by undergraduate students.

Your professor is in the middle of a lecture when he suddenly begins having severe chest pains and fears he is having a heart attack. Someone dials 911. An ambulance is dispatched, and within minutes, he’s on his way to the hospital. Everyone in the lecture hall probably took it for granted that a 911 call would receive this response. But whose ambulance responded, and who paid for that ambulance ride? The ambulance was likely operated by the Stony Brook Volunteer Ambulance Corps (SBVAC), and as for who paid for it, that answer may surprise you: if you’re an undergraduate student, it was financed in large part by the Student Activity Fees you and your classmates pay every semester.

The idea for this article came into my mind as some friends and I, all relatively familiar with the Undergraduate Student Government budget, were casually discussing the issue of club funding before a USG Senate meeting. We were talking about which clubs received the largest budget allocations when someone mentioned SBVAC. Founded in 1970 and staffed by fully qualified student volunteers, SBVAC is not only our primary emergency medical service but also one of the largest and oldest student organizations on campus, and one that consistently receives some of the largest budget allocations from the USG. My friend opined that SBVAC provides a vital service to the entire campus community, not just undergraduate students – after all, someone had to respond when your professor was having that possible heart attack – and that it was therefore unfair for USG to bear the burden of being the organization’s primary source of funding. USG serves not only undergraduates, but graduate students, faculty, staff, visitors and anyone else who happened to need emergency medical attention while on campus.

I’d seen the USG budget many times before, and was aware of the large size of SBVAC’s budget allocation in comparison to those of other student clubs. In 2008-2009, it was the only club that allocated more than $200,000, or around 13% of the total allocation for club budgets, which was spread over 98 clubs. But I’d never given it a second thought; after all, as my friend had pointed out, running the primary emergency medical service on a campus with a population in the tens of thousands is an important job, and one that inevitably costs a lot more money than the operations of a typical club. Perhaps I hadn’t seen the ‘forest for the trees’: sure, SBVAC deserves to be well funded, but why was it treated not as a public service but as a student club, and why were undergraduate students disproportionately responsible for it’s funding?

A bit of cursory research on the web site of the National Collegiate EMS Foundation, of which SBVAC is a member, revealed that this arrangement is not terribly uncommon, but there is a wide variety of funding arrangements for college and university EMS groups. For example, similar organizations at Binghamton University and the University at Albany are funded in the same way as SBVAC, by their respective student governments. The ambulance service at SUNY New Paltz supplements funding from the college by billing the patients it transports, unlike SBVAC, whose services are provided free of charge. Outside the SUNY system, Columbia University’s ambulance service again relies both on funding from the university and on reimbursements from patients’ health insurance; Rochester Institute of Technology’s service is funded entirely by its Student Health Center; and at Cornell University, emergency service is funded much like SBVAC, through the student government. So despite the array of funding options on display, money from student governments seems to be a very popular way of paying for what seems more like an important public safety function than an activity for students (even if the organization is made up of student volunteers, as SBVAC is).

When I spoke to SBVAC President Christine Larose about her organization’s funding, she lamented the instability inherent in the USG budget allocation process, but did not necessarily welcome a change in its funding structure. She noted the large fluctuations in the size of budget allocations from year to year, and that it has been “lately, more down than up,” but was not particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of being funded by the university.

A direct financial relationship with the university “would have its pros and its cons,” Larose explained. “It might be financially beneficial, but we would lose some of the autonomy we have now.”

Direct funding from the university, of which SBVAC currently receives none, would mean more direct control by the university’s administration and less flexibility for the organization, a situation of which Larose is understandably leery. For now it seems that SBVAC is content to sacrifice a bit of financial security for greater freedom in conducting its operations. Besides, with rampant budget cuts always looming on the horizon, university funding might barely be less volatile than that provided by the USG.

So that leaves me where I started, with the issue of fairness to those of us who, as undergraduates, are mainly responsible for funding SBVAC. For the 2009-2010 academic year, SBVAC requested a budget allocation of $182,000 from the USG. Combined with a projected $2,000 in funding from the Graduate Student Organization and $25,000 from New York State – the latter being the only funding SBVAC receives that is not directly from student fees – it projected a total income of $209,000. In this situation, undergraduates would have provided 98.9% of SBVAC’s student-provided funding, with graduate students paying just 1.1%. This, despite the fact that undergraduates make up only 76% of full-time students and 66.4% of total students at Stony Brook according to the Fall 2009 enrollment figures provided by the university. And despite the service also being used by its employees, visitors and others, the university contributes nothing at all.

Regardless, SBVAC does not appear set to receive the $182,000 it requested from the USG; while budgets are still subject to revision, its current allocation for 2009-2010 is $145,209.30. Based on Fall 2009 enrollment figures, that’s approximately $9.85 per full-time undergraduate. (Part-time students don’t pay the Student Activity Fee.) This is significantly less than the $201,000 it received in 2008-2009 (when it requested $199,410), but far more than the $98,189 it received in 2007-2008 (when it requested $131,419.20). Even with the lower contribution, if the GSO contributes the projected $2,000 (which works out to about $0.42 per full-time graduate student, or about 4.3% of what each full-time undergraduate pays), USG will be responsible for 98.6% of the student contribution to the SBVAC budget for 2009-2010 and, assuming a $25,000 contribution from New York State, 84.3% of the total.

Even at this relatively high cost, SBVAC is still clearly an asset to the Stony Brook University community. But that is the entire community, not just undergraduates; and whether the burden of funding it is distributed fairly across that community is another matter, and certainly a debatable one.

Bulldozing a publicly funded classroom at one of the nation’s best public universities to make room for a corporate hotel is another matter entirely.

Salamanders like this one are a part of the living laboratory that will be torn down when construction of the hotel begins.

But in a manner of speaking, that is exactly what is being proposed here at Stony Brook. The “classroom” doesn’t have walls or desks, but the woods by the main entrance of the university do serve as a living laboratory for thousands of students.

Caitlin Fisher-Reid is one of those students. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolution whose dissertation on the evolutionary processes of the terrestrial woodland salamander will be significantly impacted should construction on the property begin before she completes her research in two years.

The 13-acre plot of land appropriated for the hotel is one of Fisher-Reid’s most successful field sites for her research, out of 30 other locations across Suffolk County.

“I consider it one of my high quality sites because every time I go there I find salamanders,” she said.

For two years, from March to mid-November, Fisher-Reid has been taking expeditions into the forest twice a week to find salamanders and take various measurements of environmental factors and the creatures themselves.

The focus of Fisher-Reid’s dissertation, color variations (or morphs) within the same species, makes the site even more valuable. That particular forest is home to one of the best contact zones between two color morphs of the species, she says.

“My project has the potential to generate a lot of long term monitoring of these salamanders and of the environment in general,” said Fisher-Reid.

While Fisher-Reid may be the biggest beneficiary of the forest, its educational significance is felt by many more students and faculty on campus.

“Beyond the scope of my dissertation, the forest is used,” she said. “Once I leave, the forest is still going to be used.”

Catherine Graham, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution, is constantly looking for ways to provide students with real world examples of what is discussed in class, and the forest provides the best window for doing just that.

Sources within and familiar with the Undergraduate Student Government have confirmed that USG Treasurer Matt Anderson will be resigning from his position effective Thursday after the USG Senate passed articles of impeachment. His resignation allows the Senate to confirm a new Treasurer to immediately take over.

“In the last senate meeting [on Tuesday], there was a vote on the resolution to impeach, and it passed unanimously,” said a source familiar with the situation.

Earlier this evening, USG President Jasper Wilson appointed Moiz Khan, currently a USG senator, to the position. If the senate confirms him at tomorrow’s emergency meeting, he will assume the responsibilities of treasurer on Friday.

The seat change is the result of weeks of building frustration with the office of the treasurer. Several student organizations have complained that they have yet to receive any notification about their fall budget revisions in writing, and within USG itself there have been a number of financial matters that have caused controversy.

According to multiple sources who wished to remain anonymous until this process is finalized, important paperwork had been laying around for weeks, club vouchers were not being signed and processed, and student-organized events were threatened with cancellation due to unresolved financial matters within the office of the treasurer.

Perhaps most egregiously, the spring budget process, which was supposed to be adopted by the senate a month ago, has yet to be addressed, and won’t be until the start of next semester, a source within USG has said.

Stay with Think and InTuition for the latest.

The criticism of the hotel centers on its location, not on the idea itself.

When Stony Brook University President Samuel Stanley announced at a university senate meeting on October 5 that plans for an on-campus hotel would be moving forward, he became just the latest champion of an issue that has already outlived two lengthy administrations before his own.

Most of the controversy and complications associated with the hotel can be traced back to the fact that Stony Brook is a public university, and is therefore subject to any number of state regulations and restrictions.

John H Marburger, Stony Brook University’s president from 1980 to 1994, was the first to suggest a hotel be built within the boundaries of the university.

“I started the whole thing and I worked with the Stony Brook Foundation,” he said. “They established a realty sub-unit to deal with this.”

The establishment of Stony Brook Foundation Realty Inc in 1979 and its activation in 1987 was solely for the purposes of, in the words of the Stony Brook Foundation, “facilitating the development and operation of a conference center/hotel on the Stony Brook University campus.”

Now, almost a quarter century later, plans have been drawn up to construct a five story, 135-bedroom hotel on a 13-acre plot of land by the main entrance of the university, complete with a 5,000 square foot conference center, indoor pool, exercise facility and restaurant. The only point of access to the hotel will be off of Circle Road, across the street from the Administration building parking garage.

The hotel will be operated and managed by a private corporation. Hilton Garden Inn, a subsidiary of Hilton Worldwide, is currently the front-runner in ongoing negotiations, but a final decision has yet to be made.

The construction project has been contracted to Harbor Construction Management, an affiliate of Harbor Financial Management based in nearby Port Jefferson. Its CEO Robert Frey is a research professor at Stony Brook and a trustee of the Stony Brook Foundation, which is footing the bill (through their realty affiliate) for construction of the hotel.

The design of the building and its surroundings has yet to be finalized, but Frey says that it will likely fit in with the campus décor.

“In terms of design, the general target is the Humanities building,” he said, referring to the brick structure nearby.

Marburger is also unconcerned about a corporate building interfering with the aesthetics of a university as large as Stony Brook.

““I’m not too worried about the intrusiveness onto the architecture or the traffic of the campus,” he said.

Harbor Construction Management will ultimately be taking orders from the Foundation, which will have “final authority” according to Frey.

Once the building is completed, Stony Brook Foundation Realty Inc will turn the property over to a private hotel manager and operator. SBFR is in final discussions with Hilton Garden Inn to manage the hotel, according to Hilton Garden Inn spokeswoman Dawn Ray.

Those discussions may take longer than expected because both SBFR and Hilton are in uncharted territory.

According to Ray and Scott Carman, spokesman for Hilton Worldwide, a hotel built within the boundaries of a university would be a rare move for the company.

“I don’t know of any instances,” said Ray, speaking about Hilton managing hotels on college campuses. “None come to mind,” added Carman.

For Stony Brook as well, there is little precedent to look to. No other SUNY school has an on-campus hotel, with the exception of Cornell’s School of Hotel Management, which runs its hotel internally and uses it for educational purposes.

In order for Hilton or any other corporation to be granted access to the campus—which, as a state school, is public property—Stony Brook Foundation Realty Inc had to acquire a ground lease from the State University of New York and New York State, which it did in 1990 using $450,000 provided by the Stony Brook Foundation.

In turn, the operators of the hotel will pay an annual six-figure lease payment with a 3% hike annually to SBFR. The purpose of the hotel, however, is not to make money, says Marburger.

“It probably won’t make money. Let’s hope it breaks even,” he said.

Frey echoed the sentiment, saying that SBFR would probably be saddled with some costs.

“They would probably incur some costs, like inspections,” he said.

But the biggest concerns about the hotel have nothing to do with the financial implications of a private corporation operating at a public university. Instead, students, faculty, community members and even local legislators are concerned about the aesthetic and environmental impact that the hotel could potentially have.

The Stony Brook Environmental Conservancy, an organization with no formal ties to the university, has begun a campaign to dissuade the university from building a hotel—or any other structure—on the land currently allocated for the project.

“Our position is that SBEC supports a genuine campus conference facility with commensurate accommodations; but we are adamantly against the construction of a commercial hotel on state land at the campus entrance,” said SBEC President Malcolm Bowman in a letter sent to supporters. Bowman is a Distinguished Service Professor at the university’s Marine Sciences Research Center.

The SBEC is encouraging its members to look into irregularities in the ground lease, possible conflicts of interest and a lack of a State Environmental Quality Review (SEQR) as grounds for impeding the construction of the hotel.

“A great university has a responsibility to set an example as a protector of environmental quality,” said Charles Wurster, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences and a founder of the Environmental Defense Fund. “Any more deforestation is too much. Stony Brook must protect in perpetuity its remaining forests.”

“Every effort should be made to preserve the remaining green spaces on this campus,” said Godlind Johnson, the head of the Science & Engineering Library on campus.

For its part, Harbor Construction Management will have an eye on energy efficiency during the construction.

“It will be LEED certified,” said Frey. LEED certification is the industry standard for measuring the environmental friendliness of construction projects.

That guarantee has not quieted calls for the university to find alternative locations to the hotel. In letters penned to President Stanley and local newspapers, community members offer up dozens of other locations on campus, some more feasable than others. One person, Michael Meltzer, even went so far as to suggest that the hotel replace LaValle Stadium, which he describes as “ridiculous, unnecessary [and] overly-lit.”

Steve Fiore-Rosenfeld, who represents Stony Brook University and the surrounding community on the Brookhaven Town Council, suggested a few alternative locations as well in a letter to President Stanley.

On land near the hospital, on land near the South P lot, and north of the Wang Center, near Mendelssohn Quad were just three suggestions put forth by Fiore-Rosenfeld.

Perhaps the most interesting suggestion, however, centers on the Student Union. Fiore-Rosenfeld joins a number of faculty and community members who call for the Student Union building to be replaced entirely with a new multi-story building that would feature a hotel, shops, restaurants and, as now, offices for student organizations.

“This site would be a better fit for both on-campus activity and off-campus concerns,” said Fiore-Rosenfeld.

But Marburger argues that the current location is the only truly viable option.

“There’s a reason for it being where it is. It has to be close to a main road, otherwise you can’t make it work,” he said.

“It would be difficult to get financing for it if you couldn’t more or less guarantee a certain occupancy rate,” he added. Exposure to a main road, in this case Nichols Road, would help offset the fact that the university would likely only be able to provide the hotel with consistent business eight months out of the year, when classes are in session.

Exposure to Nichols Road is the exact thing that other community members fear.

“The university has an obligation to be sensitive to the confines of the property and the aesthetics of the property,” said State Senator John Flanagan, who represents the university and the surrounding community in Albany.

To date, the university has upheld a long-standing commitment with the community to maintain a buffer between Nichols Road and the campus. Members of the community fear that the construction of the hotel within this buffer of trees will violate that commitment.

“The deciduous trees that will be planted will not provide a sufficient screen for six months of the year,” said Muriel Weyl, a Stony Brook community member for 42 years.

“The green strip on both sides of Nichols Road is a very important and irreplaceable aesthetic asset,” said Carl Safina, President of the Blue Ocean Institute and a faculty member in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences. “It would be our shame to violate this lovely campus greenbelt, especially for a commercial building.”

Despite the expressed concerns by community members and lawmakers, the university has shown no signs of slowing down their plans. It will likely take significantly more pressure by students, faculty and community members to derail the proposal.

Pressure may be something Charles Perretti is willing to provide. He is the father of a student in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, and he’s prepared to stop construction on the site at all costs.

“I am even willing to lay my body down in front of the pay loaders,” he said.

Why does it seem as if Stony Brook students are unaffected by measures which so clearly impact them in a direct way?

There are three areas in which our campus is clearly deficient: awareness, community and opportunity. Organizers on campus, though well intentioned, have by-and-large relied on cookie cutter techniques and quantity-based recruitment efforts which have resulted in disappointing event turn-out and a greater deal of stress and responsibility falling on the shoulders of a few, dedicated activists.

Awareness

In the hectic college environment it’s difficult enough to figure out which classes you still need to take in order to graduate, let alone to understand the full ramifications of our campus’ food service contract. Part of the problem is that there exists an information bubble living alongside an information vacuum. Details tend to float around the activist community via word of mouth. Someone from the Press will tell someone from the Dems about something she heard from someone from Think Magazine. That guy at Think Magazine learned about it from a group of kids in SJA who were talking about it with some of the Stony Brook Freethinkers. This is the information bubble. Rarely is the rest of the student body made privy to the information and when they are it is not in the same, meaningful way. This is the information vacuum. And so, we find ourselves engaging in incestuous activism. Certainly there are the occasional tagalongs and recruits but for the most part the people at the rally in front of the SAC are the people you eat lunch with.

There needs to be a concerted effort to reach out to non-active students in a real and engaging way. Handing out an informational flyer may be effective, if the framing is right, the information is succinct and the content is pertinent in the context of the students’ daily life. Addressing entire classes is a more personal and effective method of disseminating information. Awareness raising events, too, can be effective but beware of soap-boxing with a tiny group of supporters. Five people holding signs and shouting about something at the fountain can actually work to marginalize your cause, raising awareness only of the fact that you couldn’t mobilize more people to help out.

Whatever the process, we need to work on bursting the exclusive information bubble.

If done right, a grassroots campaign at a university with over 20,000 students can do a world of good.

Community

Have you set up a Facebook event, invited people en masse, gotten a positive response but been sorely disappointed at the actual turn out? The problem is that we’ve learned to try to reverse engineer the inspiring social action we’ve seen in the past. We see thousands of people flooding our nations capitol and we want to emulate it. The problem lies in the way we attempt to do so.

Quantity-based recruitment efforts have been the priority of recent social movements. Large scale social network soliciting, mailing list sign up and indiscriminate outreach have mostly resulted in one hit wonders, unreliable recruits and most of all: frustration. The reason? A lack of interpersonal responsibility. We are not drawing recruits from a community built on trust and interconnectedness. It costs no social capital to accept an event request and never show up. There is no motive for a faceless recruit to follow through and for that reason we must never expect the person who took two seconds to write down their e-mail address to ever read them, let alone to act upon them.

If our first function as social actors is awareness raising, our other first function is community building. We must facilitate the construction of horizontal connections among students and faculty. One very effective example of this has been the interconnectedness of organizations such as the Stony Brook Press, Think Magazine, the Stony Brook Democrats and the Stony Brook Freethinkers. While there may be no official relation between these entities, the students involved have developed an intricate network through which information is quickly and efficiently disseminated and acted upon.

Another great method of community building is through interactive, non-action based events. The Freethinkers have successfully built a non-religious community by gathering individuals with a common interest and simply asking them to engage in conversation. You may not be filling out petitions or writing letters to your Congressman but you are establishing a personal and emotional foundation which is indispensable.

Resource allocation is something to consider when community building. People arrive if you announce that there’s free food but if you give that food too freely you fail to take advantage of the circumstance. Forcing people to listen to a little speech before getting their food, too, is hardly effective as it’s simply the delivery of information with no personal engagement. There needs to be an element of mutual exchange.

Opportunity

Finally, informed students in the Stony Brook activist community must feel that there is a real ability to effect change. This means retooling our strategy to what is effective rather than what is habitual. Protests are neat exercises in community building but without direct action do very little to actually change the status quo. Even the most apathetic students understand this. Letter writing and petition signing can be effective but is also quite difficult to mobilize considering that they’re, to be honest, boring.

Most of all, though, opportunity entails having a say. Top down “astro-turfing” may be easier for an organization but will lack the fire and effect that grassroots action will have. There needs to be a democratic way in which activists participate in planning.

Over the last few months, the most prevalent issue in the national political discussion has been President Obama’s crusade to reform our broken health care system.  As one of the only developed industrial nations without a universal health care system, the United States ranks shockingly low on many international health rankings.  Whether one is a single parent, a small business owner, or a college student, the fight to provide suitable health care coverage is a salient issue for most Americans.

The Stony Brook University Medical Center is home to the best ideas in medicine, save for one: universal health care. At least not yet.

Fortunately, legislation has recently been proposed in Congress to remedy this problem.  Although not perfect, the proposed health care bill recently put forth by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nevada) would expand coverage to 94% of all Americans, and would simultaneously reduce the federal budget deficit.   Rather than fit the stereotype of an intrusive liberal program, this bill allows those Americans who are happy with their coverage to keep it as is. This bill will clearly be a boon for our federal government, for many Americans struggling to provide their families with proper health insurance, and not least of all for businesses weighed down by the overwhelming costs of providing their employees with health coverage.  Here at Think, we wonder whether these expected positive results will also translate to college campuses.

Many of the uninsured are college students or recent college graduates.  Currently, college students are usually covered by their parent’s health plans, but upon graduating they are left to fend for themselves.  The proposed health care bill would extend the aforementioned privilege to include young adults as old as twenty-six.  This would ease the burden on college graduates, who are one of the most susceptible demographics to health care problems.  Already saddled with student loans and the pressure of finding gainful employment, the news that health care will be provided for college graduates is a good sign that the Obama administration has remembered that even college graduates need assistance at times.

While it is true that many young Americans do choose not to purchase health insurance, believing themselves to be invincible, this is not as widespread a phenomenon as the opponents of universal health care would like the public to believe.  To hear conservatives tell it, the vast majority of the uninsured are arrogant young people in their twenties who distort national statistics by refusing to purchase coverage that they could easily afford.  In fact, a majority of the uninsured truly are those who cannot afford it, including a great number of college graduates who do not possess the financial means to insure themselves.  Furthermore, there are an unknown, but substantial, number of college students who are electing to intentionally delay their graduation in the hopes of remaining on their parent’s insurance.  The resulting glut of college students has had a negative effect on the college experience, most palpably felt by students who are now struggling to find housing on campus.  Many of these older students have conditions that can only be treated using the health care available to them as college students.

I recently spoke with Dr. Raymond Goldstein to discuss the Baucus health care bill and its prospective effects on college students, and on the country as a whole. The following are a summation of his thoughts on the issue, prompted by three overarching questions I asked him during my interview with him.

What effects, if any, will the proposed health care bill have on college students?

The health care bill as it stands right now will not do enough to remedy the current situation.  Rather than excise the harmful inclusion of insurance companies in our health car system, the Baucus bill will be a windfall for these same companies who have so badly harmed our nation.

In regards to college students, Dr. Goldstein’s prognosis is hardly more promising.  Although he predicts that the stipulation in the bill that young adults can remain on their parent’s coverage until the age of 26 may result in short term improvements for our demographic, he believes that this is only on the margins of our age group, and that this part of the bill will also help the companies.  The lack of regulation in the bill will allow insurance companies to charge higher premiums for the young adults remaining on their parent’s plans.

Dr. Goldstein believes that real reform would be a boon to college students, but that any bill without a strong public option included will do nothing to alleviate any current or potential suffering that we experience.  Without a public option, or at least clear regulations on predatory practices by insurance companies, this bill may exacerbate current problems in our system, rather than cure them.

Does the University Medical Center have an official position on the proposed legislation?

The University has not officially weighed in on the issue, although the individuals in the medical center obviously have their own strong opinions.  Dr. Goldstein referred to Dr. David Brown as being a strong proponent of a single payer system, although he assured me that most doctors on campus are opponents of any progressive health reform.

Are there any common myths and misconceptions about health care that you would like to dispel?

It is important to stress that Americans should look to Western European health care systems for guidance, rather than demonizing them for simply being “un-American”.   Dr. Goldstein thinks that our pervasive ideology of what he calls “rugged individualism” has harmed us in this area, and that this mode of thinking is responsible for the insurance companies being able to maximize their profits at the expense of public welfare.  In an interesting side note, he also submitted that the current state of our health care system in relation to Western Europe’s is a definite contributing factor in the continuing weakness of the US dollar compared to the Euro.

Think Magazine sat down with former university president and science advisor to George W. Bush, John H Marburger.

Think Magazine scored an exclusive, hour-long interview with former Stony Brook University President and former science advisor to President George W. Bush John H. Marburger.

In Think’s office, he discussed a wide range of topics, from the planned hotel to his time in the Bush White House. Watch the videos here, only with Think.

The 2009 elections offered up mixed results for progressives.

While some would claim otherwise, the 2009 elections were hardly a landslide for either party. Both Congressional races were won by Democrats — one in a district that hasn’t elected a Democrat in a lifetime — while both gubernatorial races, in states won last year by Obama, went to Republicans. A rich Democratic incumbent lost a governorship, but a rich independent incumbent right across the river kept the mayoralty of a city more populous than most states. Voters in one state rejected same-sex marriage but reaffirmed their approval of medical marijuana, while those in another seem likely to have approved “marriage-like” unions for same-sex couples, but only barely. And as much as Republicans would like it to be the case, the successful Republicans don’t seem to owe their wins to anti-Obama sentiment; on the other hand, neither did the “Obama factor” help the Democrats he campaigned for in high-profile, high-stakes races, even in the most Democratic part of the country.

But that doesn’t mean there are no greater implications for the races that took place yesterday. There’s something to learn from every election. And wonks like me just love analyzing elections. So let’s take a look at some of this year’s big ones:

Republicans Take Governorships in New Jersey and Virginia

The gubernatorial contests in New Jersey and Virginia were undoubtedly the most talked-about races across the nation yesterday. And here, the news for Democrats was terrible: Republicans won both races in states whose governorships had been held by Democrats for eight years, and which President Obama won last year.

Both races had some things in common: lackluster Democratic candidates and Republicans who stayed away from hot-button, culture-war social issues and crafted campaigns carefully designed to win independents. But the two losing Democrats were as different as the two states.

Virginia is a state that would vote solidly Republican were it not for urban and suburban voters in the state’s north, part of the Washington, DC metropolitan area. Essentially, northern Virginia is the northeast, while the rest of the state is the south. Northern Virginians propelled Obama to victory in the state last year, but most couldn’t get enthused about “country lawyer” Creigh Deeds, a conservative Democrat from the ultra-rural west of the state whose down-home style would mostly have appealed to conservative rural voters who would never vote for a Democrat anyway. Meanwhile, Republican Bob McDonnell, who grew up in northern Virginia, campaigned largely on economic issues, casting himself as a moderate and staying away from social issues that would alienate independents. The result: McDonnell won some of the northern Virginian counties that had been the state’s Democratic strongholds in recent years, and came away from the race with a commanding win over Deeds, garnering 58.7% of the vote to Deeds’ 41.3%.

Like McDonnell, New Jersey’s Governor-Elect Chris Christie tried his best not to touch social issues, focusing instead on the economy, taxes and corruption. In liberal, highly urban and suburban New Jersey, strongly articulated conservative stances on issues like abortion and gay rights would have alienated even more voters than in Virginia, at least part of which is still in the conservative south. But his opponent, Governor Jon Corzine, was very different from Creigh Deeds. Despite his origins in small-town Illinois, the one-time Goldman Sachs chairman certainly lacked Deeds’ “country bumpkin” image. Unfortunately, Corzine came off as distant and uninspiring. The terrible state of the economy and New Jersey’s chronic problems of astronomical taxes and rampant corruption combined with Corzine’s lack of personal likability to make him a very easy target for voters’ anger about the terrible state of the state, and his attempts to portray Christie as a dangerous ideologue with close ties to George W. Bush seemed not to stick. (This was a typically dirty New Jersey campaign, with allegations flying that Corzine’s campaign even made fun of the weight of his corpulent opponent.) Even the very public support of President Obama in this reliably Democratic state could not save the incumbent, whose campaign seemed to consist of, “I’m not doing as bad a job as you think — really! And that other guy will be even worse!” It was still a close race, Christie taking 48.8% of the vote to Corzine’s 44.5% and independent Chris Daggett’s 5.8%, but ultimately New Jersey voters decided to axe an incumbent seen by many as disconnected, ineffective and even duplicitous in favor of someone who at least might do better.

Republicans, of course, would like to portray these races as manifestations of a backlash against President Obama, but polls show that voters were largely focused on local issues and that for most President was not a major factor in their decisions. What they do show is that Republicans can still win, at least on a state level, if they stay away from controversial social issues and stick to economics, where their message still resonates with many.

Bloomberg Wins in NYC — Barely

For many (certainly, for me) the surprise of the night was the slimness of the margin by which Mike Bloomberg won his third term as Mayor of New York City. In an election with low turnout, Bloomberg took only 50.6% of the vote to Comptroller Bill Thompson’s 46%.

Given the dynamics of the campaign, Thompson did better than anyone could have reasonably expected. The billionaire Bloomberg had essentially unlimited resources, and did not hesitate to use them, setting spending records. Against the huge financial resources and impressive organization of the Bloomberg campaign, Thompson, an earnest but bland candidate who largely criticized Bloomberg rather than advancing his own agenda, and who seemed to have little coherent vision for how the city should change, should have fared terribly. But no small number of voters were angry with Bloomberg for getting the City Council to overturn term limit laws that the voters themselves had enacted in referenda, and the enormous amounts of his personal wealth left a bitter taste with many as well. According to exit polls, those for whom these two factors had an effect went overwhelmingly for Thompson, perhaps helping to account for his surprisingly good performance. But while a substantial minority did care about these issues, most New Yorkers did not — and those voters by and large went for Bloomberg.

That said, it may perplex many that New York, a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a huge margin, will not have had a Democratic mayor in two decades by the time Bloomberg’s third term expires in 2014. Bloomberg is an independent now, but he ran on the Republican ballot line and was formerly a Republican (and, to be fair, a Democrat before that). But while most voters who considered Bloomberg a Republican voted for Thompson, the largest number of voters considered him an independent, and that group broke overwhelmingly for Bloomberg.

Ultimately, the main reason that Bloomberg won is that most New Yorkers are fairly satisfied with him. An astounding 70% of voters polled said they approved of the job Bloomberg was doing, even though 25% of those voters went for Thompson. Thompson won voters whose biggest issue was housing, but Bloomberg won on the three issues the largest numbers of voters identified as most important to them: the economy, education and crime. The economy in New York, as with most everywhere, is not good (and most voters said so), but it seems voters didn’t blame Bloomberg, and had little confidence that Thompson could do better or even as well. And Bloomberg won big on education and especially crime (though a small majority of parents of public-school students went for Thompson).

But perhaps most importantly of all, those who said they voted in favor of a candidate for mayor mostly voted for Bloomberg. Those who said they voted against the other candidate went overwhelmingly for Thompson. Thompson, perhaps, was unable to win because he didn’t convince New Yorkers why he should be mayor, and while his relatively strong performance indicates that many are not happy with Bloomberg, that discontent simply did not run deep enough for New Yorkers to jump ship en masse to a candidate who did not give them enough reasons to favor him.

NY-23: Conservatives Reach Too Far

Parts of New York’s 23rd Congressional District, in the very rural far north of the state, haven’t elected a Democrat since 1851. (No, that’s not a typo; the district’s largest city, Watertown, hasn’t been represented by a Democrat for 158 years. The Republican Party didn’t even exist in 1851; back then, the Democrats were opposed by the Whigs!) But the Republican nominee for this seat’s special election, Dede Scozzafava, chosen by New York Republicans for her broad appeal, was deemed by many national Republicans to be “too liberal.” Enough national Republicans, lead by Sarah Palin, endorsed Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman and attacked Scozzafava that the Republican dropped out of the race, allowing the Democrat, Bill Owens, to win what should have been a very safe Republican seat.

The lesson here is pretty simple: those who demand absolute ideological purity should be prepared to lose often. Imagine if the Republican candidates for governor in Virginia and New Jersey ran explicitly ideological, hard-right campaigns….

Maine Voters Like Pot Better than Gays; Washington Voters Seem to Have Approved “Marriage-Like” Partnerships

I like Maine. Or at least I used to. It’s got a nice coastline, produces some really nice boats and mail-order clothing, and McDonald’s sells lobster there, which is at least good for a laugh. Unfortunately, 52.8% of Maine’s voters decided their gay and lesbian neighbors just don’t deserve the same rights as everyone else, which is no laughing matter and doesn’t leave me with very warm feelings toward the state. This continues same-sex marriage’s unbroken record of being rejected every time it has come up for a popular referendum — now in 31 states. Worse, this scourge has now entered the northeast, the region hitherto most friendly to same-sex marriage, and for the first time, voters have overturned their elected legislators’ decision to grant equality. (On the other hand, unlike the other 30 referenda, Maine’s didn’t take the form of a constitutional amendment. But that is not much consolation.)

On the other hand, 58.7% of Maine voters did decide to expand the legal usage of medical marijuana. That’s nice; maybe I can get some to make me feel less depressed about the bigotry of the majority of Maine voters and its absurd political system that makes the rights of minorities subject to the whims of the majority.

Meanwhile, voters in the State of Washington appear to have likely approved, by a slim margin, a measure establishing domestic partnerships that would be like marriages, except not. Right now it’s still too close to call, but while I hope the measure does pass, the fact that the voting is so close (currently 51.6% in favor), and that if it does pass, it will still create a “separate and unequal” status for same-sex couples means that still wouldn’t be much of an occasion for celebration.

Long Island: No Real Winners

And at last, we turn to the dull but important business of local Long Island politics. Or this year, maybe not so dull.

Long Island, where high taxes and corruption are chronic problems, looks very similar politically to that other home of NYC’s inner suburbs, New Jersey, but its voters don’t have an entire state government to play with. Instead, similar politics play out on a local level. (New York’s Westchester County, where most of the remaining inner suburbs are located, has similar problems and politics to those of Long Island and New Jersey, and Republicans made big gains there this year.)

Nearly every office in Nassau County was up for election this year, and here voters seemed evenly split on who they want to run the county — or at least those who cared enough to vote, with low turnout signaling a general feeling of apathetic discontent. In spite of, or perhaps because of this low turnout, Election 2009 has turned out to be quite a spectacle in Nassau: more than 24 hours after polls closed, Democratic County Executive Tom Suozzi still doesn’t know whether he’ll keep his job! Right now he appears to have defeated Republican challenger Ed Mangano by an astonishing 237 votes out of more than 245,000, but it could be weeks before a winner is declared. It’s Bush-Gore, Long Island Edition.

It’s not just Suozzi on whom voters were evenly divided; Democratic Comptroller Howard Weitzman lost to Republican challenger George Maragos by 576 votes out of over 230,000 cast. And the County Legislature has been re-taken by Republicans, raising the prospect of governmental gridlock with the Executive and Legislature constantly at odds. Yet District Attorney Kathleen Rice, a Democrat, won by a respectable margin; so did County Clerk Maureen O’Connell, a Republican. Town and city races were mostly won by incumbents of both parties. If anything, Nassau voters don’t seem to care, and those who do are divided astonishingly evenly in what was, when I was growing up there (and my parents before me!), an impenetrable Republican fortress.

Things in Suffolk County were not so edge-of-the-seat exciting. There were no contested county-wide offices; the incumbent District Attorney and Sheriff (Democrats) and Treasurer (a Republican) all ran uncontested. Democrats will keep control of the County Legislature. But town elections show that, like their neighbors in Nassau, Suffolk’s voters are mostly apathetic, and those who aren’t are divided. In the largest town, Brookhaven (home of Stony Brook), Democratic incumbent Mark Lesko, who in March won a special election to replace fellow Democrat and now State Senator Brian Foley, won his first full term as Town Supervisor. But every incumbent on the Town Council will remain, giving Republicans a majority that will continue to encumber Lesko’s ability to carry out his agenda. In other towns the picture is much the same with, as in Nassau County, incumbents largely winning in this low-turnout election, though Democrats picked up the position of Town Supervisor in Southampton, and lost it to Republicans in East Hampton and Riverhead.

So the picture on Long Island is pretty glum: Democrats’ headway in taking over this one-time Republican stronghold seems to have ended in a stalemate with many residents just sitting on the sidelines.

Maybe off-year elections aren’t that boring after all.