TO THE EDITOR:
The odds of writing four successive columns, each worse than the previous, is 1/16, or 6.25 percent. With his most recent column, “Crazy crowds change to crazy cops,” (Nov. 5) Hinson Neville has accomplished this statistically remarkable feat. Neville’s intellectual laziness has astounding breadth — whether writing about Greek organizations, bikers, the American South or Halloween, Neville refuses to acknowledge, never mind understand, that there might exist an opposing point of view to his own or a nuance to an apparent fact.
Discovering complexities in his chosen topics would not take much research. If Neville read the newspaper that he writes for, he would know that the Town of Chapel Hill does not want a Halloween “college event” due to the hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage caused in the past. If Neville paid attention in his high school U.S. History class, he would know the history and culture of the South is much more complex than country music and fried chicken. If Neville had bothered to interview a member of a Greek organization, he would have learned that fraternity dues pay for a lot, but not for friends. Finally, I doubt that all “bikers have their lives together.”
The wonderful irony in all of this is that Hinson’s column is titled “The Freshman Perspective.” I hope that not all of the Class of 2014 is as blindly and blissfully ignorant; class year is no excuse for not thinking critically.
David Alexandre
Senior
History and Economics
