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Sunday, July 06, 2025

Opinion | Columns

Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  COLUMNS

Graduate students should be rewarded for dedication to UF

This past Friday, President Bernie Machen declared that UF needs to transform itself in order to become one of the nation's top public universities. Machen said that the plan is to "focus more on graduate education and research." As co-president of Graduate Assistants United (GAU), our graduate employee labor union, I welcome the president's new vision if - and only if - his focus on graduate education includes support for all departments, students and graduate assistants. Indeed, graduate assistants need additional help and focus these days, especially in this difficult economic climate.


Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  COLUMNS

Machen needs to switch focus

UF President Bernie Machen's recent statements concerning a desire to focus mostly on graduate education is troubling. In itself, setting a goal to become the best research university in the nation isn't a bad thing, but only focusing on the programs that attract the most grant money forecasts a dire picture of UF's future.


Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  COLUMNS

Progress makes progress

I was dismayed to read the misrepresentation and misinformation in Kyle Robisch's Friday column. Representing the Fall 2007 Progress Party as pompous and not distinguishing it from the new Progress Party is intellectually dishonest. And certainly, Robisch must have noticed in the past year or so the partisan bickering between Orange & Blue and Gator, now Unite. The butting of heads was clearly displayed during Wednesday's presidential concluding remarks, Sunday's debate and many other times.


Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  COLUMNS

Unite Party benefits from discriminatory power system

Even as a naïve freshman, I have already been exposed to far more Student Government politics than anyone would ever want to know. Ever since the "green means go" scandal in which several members of the Gator Party were implicated for fixing interviews so that only individuals with select organizational affiliations would be selected, I have been interested in discovering what really goes on in SG elections.


Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  COLUMNS

Put aside apathy, vote in SG elections

The final days of the pamphlet-pushing party loyalists haranguing me on Turlington Plaza to vote for their candidate in the impending Student Government election are upon us. They do a marvelous job, those pamphlet pushers, because once again I'm devoting another 500 words to their collective cause.


Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  COLUMNS

Venezuela’s Chavez blusters to top

On Sunday, the "iron man" of Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, won an electoral coup and passed a referendum removing term limits. He will now run the country until he is defeated in an election - which, if his thuggish manner is any indication, could be a very long time.


Florida Alligator
OPINION  |  COLUMNS

Obama needs to convert platform to policy

The first 100 days of a new presidency are supposedly a telling period, a unique window of time in which a president can enact big change. It's a completely arbitrary deadline, devoid of any real significance, but it has become conventional wisdom nonetheless. Why do we accept this absurd notion that only in the shell-shocked aftermath of an election can meaningful policy be shoved through our cantankerous political system?



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