After President Levin's open forum on the 22nd, I left feeling thoroughly incensed, not by President Levin's lack of preparation, or even because President Levin abruptly ended the forum at 9:20, but by President Levin's complete insensitivity towards the struggles of financial aid students. At the forum, President Levin asked us to choose our higher priority: reduction of either the family or self-help contribution of the financial aid package. But paying tuition is not a matter of my mother writing out a $40,000 check. Neither is it solely my decision to work a certain number of hours or borrow a certain amount in loans. Instead, it is a conversation between my mother and me. How many hours a week can she work to support us? How much of my own time and savings can I sacrifice to help? How does a family whose combined assets are a fraction of a year's tuition overcome fear of debt to take out large loans, Levin's wholesale answer to all financial aid worries? Decreasing only one number ignores the fact that in my family and many others, education is a joint venture.

Yet most shocking was Levin's dismissal of students who are dramatically affected by financial aid. Apparently, since people who work over 10 hours per week number only “one or two hundred,” they shouldn't factor into financial aid reform. Apparently, struggling students don't fill out aid applications correctly, or don't take out enough loans. Apparently, it is fair for students to have drastically different college experiences because one group is restricted by Yale's financial aid policy. Apparently, one to two hundred students just don't count. And as a student who is ­ admittedly and unashamedly in that highest range of need-based grants, I am devastated that President Levin thinks this is the case.

Now, in response to the News' View in Friday's Yale Daily News, it strikes me that, just like President Levin at last week's Open Forum, the YDN seems to have misinterpreted the situation at hand. First of all, the comment was made that the UOC may have “lost its consensus" among Yale students by staging a sit-in and rally. However, if the editor had done some simple math, they might have realized that with up to 150 student protesters and 15 students in the Admissions building itself, there was no way that this could be a UOC-only event. In fact, the students who planned and organized the event, and were captured on video and in photographs on Thursday by the AP, the New York Times, and local Connecticut broadcasting stations, represented a wide range of campus groups and individual views. Many didn't even know what "UOC" stood for until the day of the rally. So by automatically grouping everyone at the protest under some imagined UOC umbrella, the YDN itself not only alienates a large number of Yale students, but underestimates their capacity to make an informed decision to support a cause.

Unfortunately, it seems that the YDN would prefer that Yale students continue to live in the "great middle," something which I've experienced far more often as oblivion and apathy than true compromise or moderation. And so, if it takes a sit-in, a rally, and a "loud enough megaphone" to encourage Yale students to become aware of and involved in the world around them, and to take a stand on the issues that directly concern them -- whether it be in favor of the sit-in or against financial aid reform -- then I don't think anything whatsoever has been "lost."