As classes resume, stay engaged
Rice’s campus was lucky to be largely unharmed due to Hurricane Harvey. Thanks to the administration’s careful planning, students were safe and well-fed despite the storm. The crisis management team’s updates provided a constant flow of information and Housing and Dining supplied on-campus students with plenty of food. Facilities and Engineering made sure buildings were safe before reopening them and fixed any problems they found.
As we know, however, the rest of the city was not so lucky. Thousands of people are displaced. The death toll at time of print is over 60 and rising. While members of the Rice community escaped serious injury, many lost their homes. Others have family or friends who were severely affected.
The stories of students volunteering cannot end with the beginning of classes. The Thresher encourages students to continue to volunteer through the Rice Harvey Action Team or other organizations. It will be easy in the coming weeks and months to get caught up in classes and day-to-day activities while victims of the storm are still rebuilding their lives, but we cannot forget our neighbors.
More from The Rice Thresher
Do more to make campus bird-friendly
April is the month of many things: Beer Bike, a solar eclipse, the last day of classes and, perhaps lesser known, Earth Month. As Rice launches a series of Earth Month events, I would like to address our potential as a campus community to be more environmentally conscious, particularly in an effort to make this campus more friendly to birds.
Take time for yourself during the summer
The academic year’s close means this issue will be our last until the fall semester, which gave us some time to reflect on what our editorial for our last issue should look like.
Student activism is working – and fear-mongering cannot hold us back
S.RES 02, titled “Student Association Boycott and Divestment from Corporations Complicit in the Ongoing Genocide in Gaza,” was presented to the Student Association on March 25. This resolution proposes the creation of an Ethical Spending Advisory Board designed to ensure that Blanket Tax funds are not dedicated to corporations that are complicit in Israeli colonial violence and apartheid based on guidelines created by the BDS movement.
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