Wasting Time at the Kiosk

This has been a week for kiosks and basic morality, morality grand and misjudged and morality small but significant. First, the latest from the Out of Town News kiosk: Religion has been in forefront of coverage in both Massachusetts and New York without much good reason. New York mayor Rudy "It's not art if I can do it" Guiliani has withdrawn funding from the Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibit "Sensation" because he's offended by a portrait of the Virgin Mary stained with elephant dung and surrounded by a collage of fragments from porn magazines. The First Amendment isn't as important as the Mayor's attempts to impress Catholic voters and dictate what art ought to look like.

Closer to home, former Harvard General Counsel and current Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Associate Justice Margaret Marshall is under fire for her pro-choice beliefs. First, Cardinal Bernard Law '53, Archbishop of Boston, accused her of anti-Catholic bias for enforcing a Harvard regulation that professors not use University stationery to put forth personal political opinions. And now that the Cardinal has publicly withdrawn his opposition, Massachusetts' largest pro-life organization, Citizens for Life, is protesting Marshall's nomination on the grounds that she once sat on the board of Crittenton Hastings House, a home for unwed mothers that provides abortions. Marshall's position on abortion shouldn't be an issue (nevermind that abortion is still legal in this country); her ability to judge cases fairly should be. And by all accounts, her judicial record is unblemished, even stellar. Its an instance of a false mountain made out of an imaginary molehill. She should be confirmed.

It's troubling that a political leader should mix religion with the question of public funding for an art exhibit and equally worrisome that a religious leader should accuse a nominee of anti-Catholicism on non-existent evidence, prompting the invention of likewise trivial controversy. These efforts, however passionate, are clearly mistaken. Perhaps the Mayor and the Cardinal could put their time to better use by coming to campus and regulating what could be called Godless Harvard's most central belief system: electronic mail.

Of course, Harvard has students of many faiths and backgrounds, but we are all unified by the pursuit of one passion and force: our Pine accounts. The administration has kindly acknowledged this fervor by establishing lots of so-called kiosks all over campus, most notably in the Science Center but also tucked away in such convenient locales as the second floor of Sever, the first floor of Boylston and the basement of Emerson. It's gotten so easy to check e-mail on campus that a group of students shopping in Boston this summer were distraught when they couldn't find a Unix pew at which to secularly kneel.

But with this added convenience, of course, has come the need for some regulation, a code of conduct, some controlling authority which is sorely lacking. There's nothing worse than the crush of students in line at kiosks between classes in the Science Center or at Boylston, where the line snakes so hellishly far out of the hallway that it blocks the stairs. It's impossible to prevent this kind of traffic jam, but common courtesy would help alleviate it. By standards much less severe than those of Mayor Guiliani, the typical e-mail check at a kiosk should be brief, a cursory glance at an inbox's contents for emergency messages and crucial information or a quickly sent e-mail, nothing more. But all of us at one time or another have committed the sin of selfishness by mistaking a kiosk for our home computer, settling in for the long haul of reading detailed messages, writing novel-length responses and taking ample time to pause and sip our coffee between keystrokes.

The current, frequent misuse of the terminals causes not only long lines but also creates anger in the hearts of those who only stand and wait. Apart from a spontaneous and collective conversion to new behavior, we may need an on-screen reminder to help us out, a guardian angel, if you will, telling us when we've exceeded our fair share of time and pointing out the line growing behind us. Surely someone in CS50 could write such a program.

More polite and thus more efficient use of the kiosks would create a true sensation. And then we'd all have more time to reflect on the future of the First Amendment and the role of personal beliefs in judicial confirmations.

Susannah B. Tobin '00 is a classics concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.