Last week’s panel on program houses, which was sponsored by The Sun and the aptly titled STUC, held the promise of reinvigorating our stale debates. Did it succeed?

In some ways, yes. The event allowed minority representatives to publicly articulate their concerns. Zach Murray ’11 noted the academic and social difficulties he faced as a freshman from a “90 percent black” neighborhood. As one of the few minorities in his dorm, he was not made aware of academic services or diversity resources. Ujamaa, he said, provided him with the support system, indeed the family, that would guide his undergraduate experience.

As we, college seniors, begin the process of alternately facing and cowering from the world after Cornell, the one question looming over me more than others is this: Do we have responsibilities to that world?

If there are other Americans who would accuse Cornell and its students of elitism and privilege, then questions of obligation become increasingly important. In large part, this is because most Americans need a lot of things that we as future leaders can provide. Yet, what we need to change, I think, is the way we talk about these needs.

Some have recently expressed, in the pages of this newspaper, a feeling of marginalization. Specifically, I, and the group that I represent, the Cornell Israel Public Affairs Committee, have been accused of acting to marginalize a Palestinian point of view. However, I firmly believe that this is not the case; instead, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be engaged — both in the microcosm of Cornell and on the world stage — by each party listening to the perspectives, needs and interests of each other.

To the Editor:

Re: “Race, Empire and Palestine: A World View,” Opinion, Oct. 22

I was deeply offended by this column. The author’s claims of Israel’s imperialism and racist policies simply do not bear out in practice.

The author appeals to the discredited notion that Zionism is racism in order to support his claim of Israeli apartheid. He also confuses Judaism as a religion with Jews as an ethnic group. Zionism is the belief in an ethnic Jewish right to self-determination in the historical Jewish homeland, the type of right the author surely supports for Palestinians.

The relationship between The Sun and its readers should be a two-way street. The paper’s coverage, obviously, is a gateway through which the campus community can stay informed. But the paper is ultimately beholden to its readers, and reader feedback must be one element to guide The Sun’s decision-makers in their overall vision for the paper.

Kirk Cameron is headed towards a college campus near you.

Cameron, the one-time star of television’s Growing Pains, has planned a rather unique commemoration of the upcoming 150th anniversary of the printing of Darwin’s The Origin of the Species. Along with of a cadre of volunteers, Cameron plans to distribute 50,000 copies of a “special edition” of the Origin on the campuses of the “top 50 universities.” Its “specialness” is due to its introduction, that details, among other things, “Adolf Hitler’s undeniable connection to the theory” and Darwin’s “racism,” “disdain for women” and “thoughts on the existence of God.”

As self-proclaimed “moderns,” we often immediately brand the claims attempting to “debunk” evolution as sheer lunacy, the work of fundamentalists whose world view is entirely incommensurable with our own.

To the Editor:

Re: “After Gaza Protests, Groups Attempt Dialogue,” News, Sept. 29

In the wake of international accusations over Iran’s nuclear program, I want to return to a column last week by staff columnist Navid Farnia ’10, which was a critique of the panel presented by the Cornell International Affairs Review on the Iranian Election.

I should make it clear that I’m not speaking for the Review here; in fact, I became involved with the publication to challenge many of the problems I saw in contemporary college International Relations discussions, many of which Farnia points out, including a tendency to unquestioningly adopt a “solidarity” with specific peoples of the world to strategic ends in the often-pernicious American game of international politics.

Arguments often take two distinct forms: ones that have strong merits, reasoning and evidence, and others that are arguments for the sake of having an argument. Defending the former to the death typically works, but defending the latter to the death often digs a person into an even bigger hole.

Back in my debating days, I took on an Arab opponent in one round who would not back off his argument. He did so even as the flaws I pointed out would force him to advocate racial profiling while I, a white person, took a stand against discrimination. Needless to say, it was an easy call for any judge to make, much less the elderly black women that was judging the round.

People put a lot of weight on last words.

So I’m going to do it too, running the incredible risk of doing something that’s been done before — something that a columnist must never under any sane circumstances do — because I’m in an altered state of mind. Altered, mind you, because of words. I watched the sunrise through the blinds and I have yet to go to sleep and it is all words’ fault.

Under sane circumstances, I myself am fascinated by the idea — what are the last, and I mean the Last, words I want to spend my ultimate breath on? The ones that will just hang there, in the air, until someone opens a window or maybe writes them down and they live on, for a little longer at least?