By Trent Serwetz
Ever had sexual relations with an underclassman, or someone who is your subordinate in a Duke Club hierarchy? Under the university’s new sexual misconduct policy, you are likely guilty of sexual misconduct.
The university’s new policy, adopted in summer 2009, destroys the importance of context clues and nonsensically broadens Duke’s adjudication of sexual harassment to indict students who are clearly innocent of any sexual misconduct1. As such, the policy is both antithetical to the proper enforcement of sexual misconduct on campus, as well as lethally dangerous for students.
On March …

By Christina Sun
You know there is a problem with the tax system when the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury fails to file his taxes correctly.
Whether or not Timothy Geithner knowingly evaded his taxes, the discrepancy shows how complex our current tax system really is.
If you’ve ever filed taxes, images of inscrutable tax policies and forms are probably ingrained in your recent memory – studies agree.  A Tax Foundation survey in April 2007 found that 83 percent of people surveyed said the federal income tax is “very complex” or somewhat “complex.” The …

By Kevin Kauffman
Fees, unions, directed choice, two-million dollar deficit: these are the buzzwords that have framed the dining debate in recent months. While the issues of creating a self supporting dining program and providing the campus with diverse foods both receive much attention, other pertinent issues in Duke Dining are less broadly discussed. Of these issues, the most troubling is the lack of healthy options available to low income students on a small dining budget.
It is a well-known that Duke students tend to be wealthier than their counterparts at many …

By Lingfeng Li
As we look forward to the 2010 elections, The Gothic Guardian sat down with BJ Lawson, a Republican candidate for the United States Congress representing North Carolina, for an interview.Our interview with Frank Roche, Lawson’s opponent in the Republican primary, can be found here.

“I’m not trying to fit into anyone’s box, in terms of labels,” William “BJ” Lawson says.
At age 36, Lawson, a Republican Congressional candidate for North Carolina’s fourth district, has already fit and outgrown many labels. He has been an engineer, a doctor, …

By The Gothic Guardian staff
The executive board of The Gothic Guardian met on April 22 to elect Trent Serwetz the publication’s new Editor-in-Chief. The 2009-2010 editor, Lingfeng Li, stepped down in accordance with the Guardian‘s new one-year term limit for editors-in-chief.
Serwetz served as the magazine’s Production Editor this year and was the editor of his high school newspaper. He has also worked at Duke’s Multimedia Project Studio as a media consultant specializing in InDesign and Photoshop for the past three years.
During his tenure as editor, Serwetz hopes to expand the …

By Vikram Srinivasan
For all the controversy over University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow’s decision to feature in a pro-life ad aired during the Super Bowl, there was at least one positive outcome.
It made the radically pro-choice left look indisputably silly. The hyperbolic nature of the episode revealed the deep frustration of the pro-choice lobby at the direction of the nation’s abortion debate.
What was noteworthy about the ad, which was made by conservative group Focus on the Family and showed Tebow playfully tackling his mother as she spoke vaguely about the …

By Sabrina McCutchan
When American President Woodrow Wilson initiated the League of Nations in 1919, his aim was to create an organization that would unite national governments in the pursuit of a global agenda: peace. Criticism of the move, however, flowed thick and fast, with perhaps the most lasting objection being that America should not serve as the “world’s policeman.”
There is little doubt that the United States could fill such a role, especially after the end of the Cold War and the political decline of the only major contender for international …

By Isaac Wang
One image that is permanently embedded in my selective memory of Duke’s campus is the pile of barf that missed an overflowing trash can two feet away. It not only looks disgusting and smells putrid, but its rancid presence is there for criminally long periods of neglect.
Hardly a figment of your imagination, the misplaced vomit assaults your senses like a canker sore in your cognizance, because it is the first thing you see (and smell) on Saturday morning and Sunday morning and Monday morning as you are recovering …

By Christina Sun
Bribery, corruption, cronyism, you name it. Obama’s new appointees have participated in them all.
These policy “czars,” as they are often called by the media and the Obama administration, are high level White House officials appointed sans Senate confirmation. Historically, presidential administrations have used czars to rise above the usual Washington fray and help various bureaucracies work together. However, the Obama administration has run amok with the appointments.
According to the White House Report to Congress on White House Staff, the czars are among the highest paid staffers in the …

By Chalette Lambert
I want a lot of things – a good career, happy family, nice house, health care, limited government, etc. I expect that I will have to work and sacrifice to attain those ideals. However, it seems that on a larger scale, Americans have forgotten this simple principle. We expect government to achieve our interests without any sacrifices – we want health care but don’t want to pay higher taxes, climate change as long as the change doesn’t involve us, and action on unemployment without increasing the deficit.
We expect …