Unified Emory deserves more than apathy Students for a Unified Emory held a meeting Sunday night to update interested students on the progress of their cause. For nearly an hour, Emory student leaders involved in the cause explained why blackface is wrong, why administration inactivity on the subject is wrong and why the Kappa Alpha Order is wrong.

The points made were valid and sincere; correct and heartfelt. But will anyone listen?

Energizing a campus full of students determined to remain neutral or apathetic on pertinent student issues is damn near impossible.

So what will it take? Why is this issue different from the others that pass without an afterthought through the minds of disinterested students?

It is important because Emory has a race problem. The fact that blackface appears in an Emory yearbook justifies supports that notion.

The picture of blackface and the administration's failure to speak out aggressively against it reveals that Emory's problems with race are largely a result of ignorance. Even after four years of supposed higher education, some students (and seemingly some administrators) at Emory still do not understand how blackface is offensive or how the Confederate Battle flag is degrading to their peers.

That can only change with education. Those lessons can only be codified in Emory's academic canon by administrative action.

The next several weeks will determine if there exists such a willingness to take an important, but needed, step toward eradicating an obvious deformity in our academic pedigree.

Change must be pushed along by the administration but it must be supported by students as well. Is this the time to shed our apathy? I hope so.

Eric DeSobe, editorials editor, is a junior from Houston.