“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” tells us that man assumes he is the most intel­li­gent being on the planet because he has built and achieved so much, whilst dol­phins did lit­tle more than frolic in the oceans enjoy­ing life.

Dolphins, how­ever, tend to think the exact oppo­site of humans for the same reasons.

Much like the dol­phins in “The Guide,” I will be leav­ing Ferris and all of you fine stu­dents and fac­ulty mem­bers behind. This will be my last opin­ion col­umn in the Ferris State Torch. (more…)

I will begin this sim­ply. There is no excuse for the actions that took place in Doctor (if you can even call him that) Gosnell’s “Women’s Medical Society.” The heinous acts of mur­der, neg­li­gence and greed will offend any­one and prove to show that this prob­lem is not about abor­tion, it is about the lack­adaisi­cal func­tion­ing and over­sight of a bureau­cracy run amok.

While pro-lifers will use this inci­dent as a ral­ly­ing cry to gar­ner sup­port for their cause, the true under­pin­nings of the crimes that occurred on 3801 Lancaster Street in Philadelphia will be soon for­got­ten due to the polit­i­cal tur­moil sur­round­ing abor­tion in the United States. We need to set aside the dif­fer­ences in this case and look directly at the cause, not the out­come. (more…)

Let’s think back to the begin­ning of the semester.

Play back the mem­o­ries you had either as an incom­ing fresh­man or out­go­ing senior. A very dif­fer­ent mind­set now exists for both of these classes of peo­ple. Game on! If you are a senior and grad­u­at­ing, this is the most excit­ing time of your life. You could care less about the prob­lems around you and only that win­ning a diploma is finally in sight.

Can you believe your col­lege career is almost over? Read between the lines—that means you now have to enter the real world. This quandary of job search­ing for many is a stren­u­ous task, only exac­er­bated by the dreaded unpaid intern­ship. Comment on the lack of pay to a poten­tial employer and you might as well fill out your wel­fare paper­work now. (more…)

This will be the third opin­ion arti­cle about this topic, which gen­er­ally proves to show that if it gets no response, it’s not some­thing our read­ers care about.

So, why, out of all of the other things hap­pen­ing on cam­pus and in the world, would I beat a dead horse and have a third arti­cle about apa­thy published?

Probably because it’s about apa­thy and the lack of response just shows how accu­rate I have been in the past pub­lish­ing arti­cles about the lack of sup­port and care­less­ness exhib­ited by Ferris stu­dents and, to an extent, fac­ulty and staff. We need to care. (more…)

It’s 1992. I’m in kinder­garten, being teased mer­ci­lessly for my over-sized, falling off my nose, gaudy pink glasses that make my eyes look like saucers and put the kid from “Simon Birch” to shame.

Those glasses were a part of me; they were my iden­tity until I was in mid­dle school when my fam­ily finally had the money and insur­ance to get me a pair of wire-frame glasses and even­tu­ally con­tacts. (more…)

Friday held a deci­sion that was not wel­comed by the Ferris Faculty Association (FFA), as the Board of Trustees shot down a pro­posal that would extend their con­tracts for another five years and cir­cum­vent the new Right to Work that was recently passed in a lame-duck ses­sion in the Michigan congress.

In a mem­o­ran­dum from Ferris President David Eisler, he states that the FFA and the Board of Trustees have been in nego­ti­a­tions since December of last year. The polar­iz­ing polit­i­cal atmos­phere lead to the even­tual dis­in­te­gra­tion of the bar­gain­ing all together due to pres­sure put on the uni­ver­sity at the state level by con­gress threat­en­ing to cut fund­ing to uni­ver­si­ties that rat­i­fied con­tracts that would delay Right to Work effects. (more…)

Anthony Zerbe is an award-winning multi-faceted actor who came to Big Rapids to present an acted ren­di­tion of a com­pi­la­tion of poems writ­ten by E.E. Cummings.

To fully under­stand Zerbe’s per­for­mance, an under­stand­ing of E.E. Cummings is nec­es­sary as well.

Cummings was a remark­able poet of the 21st cen­tury with most of his works writ­ten within the tra­di­tional bounds of poetry with sev­eral mod­ern twists, such as lower-case let­ters, all cap­i­tal let­ters and fre­quent use of paren­the­ses to denote and high­light thought. Cummings used gram­mar along with lan­guage to capit­u­late the reader into his world where the pur­pose was “being” instead of try­ing to be some­thing. (more…)

Social media expan­sion has led to an Internet explo­sion and the coin­ing of a new term we as a soci­ety are inti­mately being famil­iar­ized with: The troll.

Historically, a troll is a myth­i­cal homi­noid beast that lays in wait under bridges and stops billy goats in their quests to tra­verse a body of water. They live in dark, dank places and only come up to cause trouble.

Internet trolls are much the same way. They lay in wait, look­ing for an arti­cle, Facebook, Live Journal, or Reddit post and then find their tar­get and attack, aim­ing at get­ting an emo­tional response. Simply put, they’re bul­lies who get-off on the suf­fer­ing of oth­ers. (more…)

It’s Sunday night. I’m in front of the com­puter, star­ing at the same screen I’ve been in front of for six hours today, try­ing to remem­ber how to divide frac­tions and what eight times three equals.

I work on the prob­lem pre­sented to me for 20 min­utes, type the answer into ALEKS (the com­puter pro­gram used for some classes) and sit back and watch it process it as wrong. I begin again, frus­trated, defeated and demor­al­ized; I really have no idea what I’m doing wrong. I scream at the com­puter because it’s the only defense mech­a­nism I have.

I let this con­tinue for another hour before my brain goes into over­load, real­iz­ing that all the sec­tions are due tonight at mid­night and I am never going to fin­ish. My stom­ach wretches, my head throbs, my pulse has­tens and my innards move slowly into my esoph­a­gus. My body starts to con­vulse, and I begin to cry. Big, sob­bing, heavy, wet tears. I puke. I dry heave. I am hav­ing a panic attack. (more…)

When I was invited by friend and fel­low his­tory enthu­si­ast Ashley Phillips, mem­ber of Phi Alpha Theta (National History Honor Society) to help archive and orga­nize the small museum in Big Rapids I jumped up and down in excite­ment. I love this kind of stuff.

My love for his­tory began a long time ago when I was young. I got swept away into a time pas­sage to find out that the land I was liv­ing on had been lived on for thou­sands of years before me. Something in my head snapped hear­ing tales of the French Voyageurs who came from Canada to Sault St. Marie in search of furs and pelts for trad­ing– I was hooked, hooked on the real-life adven­tures that chron­i­cled the mak­ing of Michigan and the city of Big Rapids.

The Mecosta County Historical Museum is a small house com­pletely ded­i­cated to the his­tory and events that hap­pened in Mecosta County Michigan. There were so many fun things to look at and see I didn’t k now where to begin and kept click­ing my cam­era away like an over-zealous paparazzo who had found a money shot. (more…)