college essay about asthma

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Stanford University School of Medicine blog

Breathing: A reflection on living with asthma

We played cards sometimes, my mother and I, during my childhood asthma attacks in the middle of the night. I would creep past the bathroom door and to my parents' bedroom door. Mom , I would whisper. Mom .

That's all I needed to say. She came to the living room, where I waited for her, and stayed up the rest of the night to watch me breathe.

Watching me breathe meant making decisions about whether to call the doctor in the middle of the night or take me into his office in the morning.

Sometimes I put my hands on my head, fingers clasped together because latching them and pressing down on my head created more energy to suck in the next breath. As I grew older, I avoided placing my hands on my head, afraid to tip my mother off about how bad the attack was.

For a long and harrowing attack, she woke my father to drive me out into the night air, which we thought helped with the breathing. We meandered through the neighborhoods bordering the hospitals, looping repeatedly down certain streets, our leisurely pace a sham, because really, he remained close to those hospital entrances in case my breathing worsened, propelling us both into the light and warmth of the busy Emergency Departments.

Sometimes watching me meant making honey, lemon and whiskey toddies, or, if we had no whiskey, just honey and lemon, so the hot liquid could break up the phlegm in my chest. But often, as I sipped on my honey and lemon, my mother rubbed my back and shoulders, which were always hunched down with the effort of breathing. Or pounded between my shoulder blades, another strategy to break up the phlegm.

If the breathing became easier, either on its own or because I'd had some of the medicine stockpiled in our cupboard, and the rattling and wheezing diminished, my mother would pull out the cards. She still needed to watch my progress; neither one of us could rest yet. We would play two-handed Euchre. Or double solitaire.

I don't know how my mother's level of anxiety fluctuated when she watched me breathe through the night, but she never smoked in the house during my asthma attacks. For intense attacks, after waking my father, she might take a break from watching me and go into the backyard with a cigarette to look at the sky. She never fretted in front of me. She remained calm and positive.

During my senior year of high school, after a stressful week of classes, a swine flu shot, and a complicated AP chemistry experiment, I suffered an asthma attack, the worst I'd had in years. My pediatrician instructed the hospital to admit me straight to a floor. Some bureaucratic glitch delayed the delivery of one of those injections I needed to open my airways and help me breathe. My mother, summoned from work, told me to keep going, just a bit longer. Later, I told her, "I think you kept me alive." She told me that she'd never been so worried. She'd thought for sure I was dying.

Years later, when she died, her own breathing remained silent until near the end. Small puffs of sound emerged from her lips, like the snore puffs she'd made on those nights I'd returned from college for a visit and lay awake with the hums and creaks of my childhood home. In the hospital, as she lay dying, her brain stem already dead, I couldn't encourage her as she exhaled her last puffs. I just listened.

"Living is about the breathing," I might have said to my mother on one of those nights I clambered through an attack. We both knew that. But sometimes it helped to hear things aloud.

This piece, originally in  longer form , is part of an ongoing collaboration with Months to Years, a nonprofit quarterly publication that showcases nonfiction, poetry and art exploring mortality and terminal illness.

Dawn Newton, a writer in East Lansing, Michigan, was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in November 2012 and has lived with asthma all her life. Her memoir, Winded: A Memoir in Four Stages, will be published in October by Apprentice House Press at Loyola University Maryland. Her blog is at www.dawnmarienewton.com .

Photo by Alfonso Cerezo  

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Home — Essay Samples — Nursing & Health — Pathophysiology — A Comprehensive Exploration of Asthma

A Comprehensive Exploration of Asthma

• Categories: Pathophysiology

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Words: 1260 |

Published: Feb 13, 2024

Words: 1260 | Pages: 3 | 7 min read

Table of contents

Acute asthma, chronic asthma, impact of gender on pathophysiology, diagnosis and treatment.

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2018). Asthma. Retrieved from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/asthma.htm
• Dodge, R., R., & Burrows, B. (2018). The prevalence and incidence of asthma-like symptoms in a general population sample. Am Rev Respir Dis 2018; 122:567–75.
• Holgate, S., T. (2017). Genetic and environmental interaction in allergy and asthma. J Allergy Clin Immunol 2017; 104: 1139–46
• Lemanske, R., F., & Busse., W., W. (2017). Asthma: Clinical expression and molecular mechanisms. J Allergy Clin Immunol. 2017, 125: S95-102. 10.1016/j.jaci.2009.10.047.
• Mandhane, P., J., Greene, J., M., Cowan, J., O., et al. (2015). Sex differences in factors associated with childhood and adolescent-onset wheeze. Am J Respir Crit Care Med 2015; 172:45–54
• Thomas, A., O., Lemanske, R.., F., & Jackson, D., J. (2014). Infections and their role in childhood asthma inception. Pediatr Allergy Immunol. 2014; 25: 122–128
• Wright, A., L., Stern, D., A., Kauffmann, F., et al. (2016). Factors influencing gender differences in the diagnosis and treatment of asthma in childhood: the Tucson Children' s Respiratory Study. Pediatr Pulmonol 2016; 41:318–25.
• Wright, A., L., Stern, D., A., Kauffmann, F., et al. (2016). Factors influencing gender differences in the diagnosis and treatment of asthma in childhood: the Tucson Children's Respiratory Study. Pediatr Pulmonol 2016; 41:318–25.

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Hello, Asthma, My Old Friend

Growing up in fresno, where there’s no such thing as a good-air day.

by Lauren Alejo | May 2, 2012

I don’t remember learning the word “asthma”–any more than I remember learning the words “pizza” or “dog.” In Fresno, California, where I was born in 1989, all those terms were familiar.

But recess and P.E. were less normal, even if I didn’t notice it at the time. My classmates and I would grab the essentials for playing outdoors: red bouncy balls, jump ropes, and basketballs. And a handful of people would reach for their inhalers. When I asked what the inhalers were, the response I got was “medicine.” For what? I asked. To breathe, was the answer. I left it at that.

Sometimes, my friends with asthma would have to stop for a moment while we were playing tag or soccer, or they would walk when we were supposed to be running laps. Once, during P.E., a girl in my class had an attack. Her face was red and she was crying, saying that she couldn’t breathe. We all crowded around her, and my teacher told us to step back and give her air. Another student ran inside to get her inhaler. After a few hits of her medicine, the girl calmed down and began to breathe normally. That’s when I began to understand that asthma was more than just breathing from a device before going outside for recess.

In Fresno, bad-air days were so common that I feel I’ve always known the term. Those were the days when outdoor physical activity was discouraged by the Environmental Protection Agency. It meant cancelled sports practices, indoor games in place of recess, and inhalers ready at hand. When I was in high school, I’d regularly drive past the Baz Allergy, Asthma & Sinus Center, where on the building wall was an electronic sign that reported the daily air quality. Percentages of pollen or mildew would vary. But the reading for air quality never did: it was always “unhealthy”–except when it was “very unhealthy.” I used to wonder what point there was in having daily updates that never changed.

When I was 17 and a junior in high school, I came down with a bad cough that lingered for weeks after the rest of my cold symptoms were gone. My mom, slightly worried, took me to the doctor. During my appointment I had to blow on a hollow, straw-like device with a small bead inside and hash marks for measurement on the outside. My breath was only strong enough to get the bead to the halfway mark. That was when my doctor told me that I, too, had developed asthma. She said it was probably the result of living with the bad air in Fresno. I got a prescription for an object that I was very familiar with: an inhaler. I was now one more person among the 157,000 with asthma in Fresno County.

Fresno is in a valley, and smog and pollution get trapped inside. Geography is only part of the problem, though. Growing up, I never learned much about the Fresno air. I knew that it was bad, but I didn’t know why. I certainly never learned about things that could be done to improve it. And I never learned how to protect myself from it.

I hope that changes for kids today. I accepted my asthma diagnosis without much agonizing, because so many of my friends had the same problem. Having asthma in Fresno is normal. But it shouldn’t be.

Lauren Alejo is a literary journalism student at the University of California, Irvine and an intern at Zócalo Public Square.

*Photo courtesy of sarahalex4 .

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College Students With Asthma: The Perfect Storm

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As health care costs continue to rise, management of chronic diseases such as asthma becomes paramount. A great deal of attention has been focused on asthma management for children and adolescents, ranging from school-based programming 1 , 2 and community health workers 3 to shared decision making. 4 However, the transition to adulthood goes largely unaddressed. It has been noted that college students with asthma face reduced psychological and academic functioning, 5 reduced social functioning and quality of life, 6 and increased risk taking and depression 7 compared with their healthy counterparts. For these reasons, they represent a vulnerable population.

The American Academy of Pediatrics reports that the decade-old consensus statement recommending a smooth pediatric-to-adult transition in care for those with chronic health needs has not been fully implemented in clinical practice. 8 Moreover, transition guidelines have not even been addressed on college campuses. A representative survey of United States colleges 9 indicated that fewer than 10% of student health centers actively reach out to an entering student with a medical history of asthma for an initial appointment, and over 40% of schools have no formal system for identifying students with chronic illnesses. The schools that do are more likely to be smaller, private schools. Nevertheless, 83% of student health centers reported that they had the capability to manage asthma on campus.

But can they? In this issue of R espiratory C are , the ability of college student health centers to manage asthma is questioned. Collins et al 10 noted that less than one fourth (23.5%) of their sample offer individual action plans, and only about one third (35%) have emergency action plans, yet most remain satisfied with the asthma services they offer students, with the caveat that affected students largely underutilize their services.

What does this mean for students with asthma entering college for the first time? What about those who will attend a large university, where the chance of being noticed is small? What if the large university is located in a city named as one of the most challenging places to live with asthma, having worse-than-average crude death rates and emergency department visits for asthma? 11 Furthermore, what if the student health center does not embrace best practices, such as asthma action plans? A perfect storm ensues.

Let us consider the options for primary prevention of this perfect storm. First, as Mellinger 12 suggests for college students with diabetes, the student's clinician could arrange for an introductory meeting at the student health center upon the freshman's arrival on campus. Second, the student health center could develop a registry and conduct a deliberate outreach to incoming students with asthma. Third, the student health center could, as a policy, implement state-of-the-art protocols, such as asthma action plans. Finally, the university could implement a vigorous marketing campaign directed to students with chronic diseases to make them feel welcome and engaged. This might have great appeal to parents seeking a college for their child with asthma.

From a public health standpoint, poor asthma control among college students can have dire consequences on physical, academic, and economic well-being. By implementing national guidelines for transition, mandating established standards of care, and taking a proactive stance, the student health center can be a port in the storm.

• Correspondence: Marian Levy DrPH RD, School of Public Health, University of Memphis, 230 Robison Hall, Memphis, TN 38152. E-mail: mlevy{at}memphis.edu .

Dr Levy has disclosed no conflicts of interest.

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• 8. ↵ American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Family Physicians, American College of Physicians, Transitions Clinical Report Authoring Group, Cooley WC, Sagerman PJ . Supporting the health care transition from adolescence to adulthood in the medical home . Pediatrics 2011 ; 128 ( 1 ): 182 – 200 . OpenUrl Abstract / FREE Full Text
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• 11. ↵ Asthma and Allergy Foundation . The most challenging places to live with asthma . 2015 . www.AsthmaCapitals.com . Accessed May 8, 2015 .
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Asthma Management: Asthmatic Adult Patient Essay

Introduction.

After reviewing the patient’s medical records and conducting a physical examination, the diagnosis of ongoing asthma with worsening symptoms is determined. It appears that the patient’s asthma symptoms have intensified due to possible exposure to triggers and an increase in physical activity. The International Classification of Diseases tenth revision (ICD10) classifies asthma as chronic obstructive with acute exacerbation or chronic obstructive asthma with status asthmaticus (“ICD-9-CM to ICD-10-CM conversion”, 2019). The ICD ten provides two types of asthma, of which Cynthia’s case is chronic obstructive.

Pharmacological Measures

To manage symptoms and prevent exacerbations, asthma treatment typically consists of a combination of medications, including bronchodilators and corticosteroids. Prescription medication consists of bronchodilator, such as albuterol, to use as needed to relieve asthma symptoms the dispensation is through inhalation whenever there is experience of an asthma attack (“Asthma medications”, 2019). In addition, a prescription will be made for a long-acting bronchodilator, such as salmeterol, to take on a daily basis to control her asthma. In addition, fluticasone, an inhaled corticosteroid, is prescribed to reduce airway inflammation and prevent asthma exacerbations (Habib et al., 2022). Over-the-counter medication medications that can help the patient include ephedrine, racepinephirine, epinephirine (HealthMatch Staff, 2022). All of these medications are bronchodilators which means that relax the muscle bands responsible for tightening the airways.

Non-Pharmacological Measures

The patient is advised to avoid triggers that exacerbate her asthma symptoms and to regularly monitor her asthma control using a peak flow meter. Additionally, she should adopt a healthy lifestyle, including proper diet and exercise. Overall, with proper care and regular monitoring, patients with asthma can lead a healthy and active lifestyle. The patient is scheduled for follow-up appointments to assess the effectiveness of the management plan and ensure optimal asthma control (Song et al., 2019). The patient is advised to avoid known triggers such as pet dander, dust, and pollen. In addition, she should avoid exercising in cold or dry weather. She should use a peak flow meter to monitor her asthma control and adjust her medication as needed. To promote overall health and prevent aggravations, the patient is also advised to live a healthy lifestyle by eating a balanced diet and engaging in regular exercise.

Health Maintenance and Counseling

During scheduled appointments, the patient’s asthma control is monitored, and medication is adjusted as needed, requiring asthma patients to schedule regular check-ups with their healthcare providers to ensure proper management of their condition (Licari et al., 2020). The healthcare provider will also instruct the patient on proper inhaler use and remind them to refill their prescriptions. It is also recommended to get a flu shot every year to avoid respiratory infections, which can trigger asthma attacks. As a result, regular check-ups and preventative measures are critical to effectively managing asthma.

The individual is taught about asthma management, which includes the importance of using inhalers correctly, tracking symptoms, and avoiding triggers. In addition, the patient is advised to use a peak flow meter and how to adjust medications based on readings. In addition, the individual is taught how to recognize signs of an asthma flare-up and when to seek immediate medical attention. Educating the patient on asthma management, symptom tracking, and recognizing signs of an asthma flare-up is emphasized as a crucial aspect of her care. The importance of adhering to medication schedules and seeking prompt medical assistance when needed is also stressed.

Asthma medications: Know your options . (2022). Mayo Clinic. Web.

Habib, N., Pasha, M. A., & Tang, D. D. (2022). Current understanding of asthma pathogenesis and biomarkers . Cells , 11 (17), 2764. Web.

HealthMatch Staff. (2022). Over the counter medicine for asthma: What you need to know . HealthMatch. Web.

ICD-9-CM to ICD-10-CM conversion . (2019). Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Web.

Licari, A., Votto, M., Brambilla, I., Castagnoli, R., Piccotti, E., Olcese, R., Tosca, M. A., Ciprandi, G., & Marseglia, G. L. (2020). Allergy and asthma in children and adolescents during the COVID outbreak: What we know and how we could prevent allergy and asthma flares . Allergy , 75 (9), 2402-2405. Web.

Song, D. J., Choi, S. H., Song, W., Park, K. H., Jee, Y., Cho, S., & Lim, D. H. (2019). The effects of short-term and very short-term particulate matter exposure on asthma-related hospital visits: National health insurance data. Yonsei Medical Journal , 60 (10), 952.

Ullmann, N., Mirra, V., Di Marco, A., Pavone, M., Porcaro, F., Negro, V., Onofri, A., & Cutrera, R. (2018). Asthma: Differential diagnosis and comorbidities . Frontiers in Pediatrics , 6 (2). Web.

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155 Asthma Essay Topics

🏆 best essay topics on asthma, ✍️ asthma essay topics for college, 👍 good asthma research topics & essay examples, 🎓 most interesting asthma research titles, 💡 simple asthma essay ideas, 📌 easy asthma essay topics, ❓ research questions about asthma.

• Asthma Patient’s History and Physical Examination
• Acute vs. Chronic Asthma and Their Complications
• Asthma in the Modern World
• Asthma: Pharmacology and Medicines Management
• Asthma Case Study: Pathophysiology, Diagnosis, Treatment
• Callista Roy’s Adaptation Model for Asthma Patient
• Exacerbation of Asthma and Nursing Management
• Asthma Management in Children and Education Asthma is a common condition in children. Except for medication, treatment should involve other methods to manage the disease.
• Comprehensive Care Plan For a Patient With Asthma Problem This paper provides a comprehensive care plan for a patient with asthma problem, who was reported to the clinic complaining of a heavy cough, shortness of breath, audible wheezing.
• Pediatric Asthma Readmission: Nursing Study Despite the intentions to improve the quality of life and create the best control and treatment approaches, asthma remains a significant problem in the United States.
• Asthma: Description, Diagnosis and Treatment Options Asthma itself is typically termed as a noncommunicable chronic disease that affects lungs and triggers an inflammation of airways, thus, causing breathing issues.
• Asthma in Children: Evidence-Based Practice This paper discusses asthma and its aspects to provide a background for the project on the role of nurses’ education in the reduction of asthma exacerbations in children.
• A Child With Asthma: Holistic Care Plan An African American girl aged 8 years, was diagnosed with asthma, which in the recent past has been controlled using a rescue inhaler.
• The Mayo Clinic Asthma Website for Consumer Health This study evaluates the Mayo Clinic asthma website using the DISCERN instrument, as it provides guidelines to consumers to help them judge the quality of information.
• Asthma: Definition, Forms and Symptoms Asthma is a disorder that causes the nasal airways to constrict and swell, as well as generate excess mucus. This results in breathing complications.
• Managing Asthma: Diagnostic of Triggers and Treatment The article provides information about asthma diagnostic aspects, especially triggers, which causes it, and some issues of diagnostic and treatment.
• Nonallergic Asthma: Nursing (SOAP) Care Plan The patient has been experiencing frequent asthma attacks for the past two months; she takes theophylline and albuterol to manage this condition.
• The Therapeutic Remedies Among Asthma Patients Asthma mainly affects the respiratory organs of an individual based on the inflammation of the airway, increasing the mucus that block the passage of oxygen and carbon dioxide.
• Outdoor Air Pollution and Uncontrolled Asthma in the San Joaquin Valley, California The study’s purpose was to examine the relationship between air pollution and cases of uncontrolled asthma in the San Joaquin Valley.
• Asthma in African American Children The socioeconomic background of African American children plays a significant role in the development of asthma.
• Factors and the Risk of Asthma Morbidity Asthma is a highly prevalent disease among the U.S. population, especially in the case of school-age children.
• Diagnosis and Management of Asthma The annotation bibliography of the articles investigating issues and topics related to the pathophysiology of asthma.
• Asthma Education Program Asthma is a common childhood disease. Common symptoms are wheezing and cough. Patients also experience shortness of breath.
• Asthma Discharge Plan Overview Asthma remains the most common chronic childhood disease and one of the leading causes of childhood morbidity, school absenteeism, a parent lost workdays.
• The Blue Angel for Asthma Kids and Teledentistry: Health Informatics The Blue Angel for Asthma Kids application is an internet-based highly interactive asthma control program. Teledentistry is a real-time telehealth application.
• Childhood Asthma: Definition, Epidemiology, Diagnosis The purpose of this paper is to discuss the definition, epidemiology, clinical presentation, possible complications, and diagnosis of childhood asthma.
• Asthma: Diagnosis and Treatment Asthma is an allergic respiratory disease where the airways to the lungs swell preventing inflow and outflow of oxygen.
• Beta-Agonist Use and Death From Asthma Relationship The major objective of the study is to establish, according to previous studies, the relationship between beta-agonist uses and death from asthma.
• Prevalence and Death Rates of Asthma in Australia This paper will look at asthma in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians who have a high prevalence rate.
• Asthma: Symptoms, Types, Etiology, and Treatment Asthma is a specific and rather severe condition that is determined by airways swelling, narrowing, and sometimes producing extra mucus.
• Asthma Management in a Forty-Year-Old Patient Asthma is a persistent lung illness that swells the air tubes causing the air passages area to be slender. The enlargement makes the airways to be susceptible to diseases.
• Asthma in Pregnancy and Intervention The goal of this treatment plan is to maintain optimal respiratory function, prevent chronic symptoms, and reduce exacerbation.
• Effects of Acute and Chronic Asthma on Patients and Families This paper aims to understand and explore the perspective of families who deal with patients with chronic asthma, particularly children.
• Asthma: Causes and Treatment Asthma is directly correlated with immune system activation as well as airway hyperresponsiveness (AHR), mucus overproduction, and epithelial cell activation.
• Pediatric Asthma Readmission and the Role of Nurses Asthma among children and adolescents is often underdiagnosed and undertreated. The low levels of the parents’ awareness about the illness contribute to this problem significantly.
• A 12-Year-old Boy With Asthma Exacerbation The second scenario refers to the case of a 12-year-old boy that presents to the emergency department with asthma exacerbation, and it is the third time in the last three months.
• Cold-Induced Bronchial Asthma Description Cold-induced bronchial asthma is a chronic inflammatory disease of the airways, and this chronic inflammation causes bronchial hyper-reactivity.
• Diagnosing Asthma: Treatment and Communication Plans To diagnose asthma and make sure that the child is going to receive rational treatment, the doctors will have to perform several tests.
• Effects of Asthma on Children and Adults An in-depth analysis of both the intrinsic and extrinsic causes of asthma as well as the perturbing yet underlying effects of this chronic respiratory condition.
• Adult Asthma: Symptomps and Treatment Asthma is a condition that is associated with wheezing, breathlessness, chest tightness, and cough due to air hyper-responsiveness.
• Asthma Management in Children: Research Critique The article by Pinto et al. contributes to the study of asthma management in children but is not free of downsides either. Its strength lies in a sample of sufficient size.
• Teaching Sessions for African American Children With Asthma Issue The problem is that African-American children are likely to have this disease twice more compared to other races. These children are at risk regardless of social status and family income.
• Corticosteroids in Asthma Treatment: Literature Review Asthma denotes a chronic inflammatory infection of the airways whose commonest approach to treatment is the use of inhaled corticosteroids.
• Heart Failure, Asthma, and Wheezing Treatment The patient is diagnosed with asthma, and she receives the required treatment. However, the symptoms remain because she takes other medicines.
• The Relationship Between Asthma and Smoking This study explores the relationship between asthma and smoking among adult African Immigrants in California that are a relatively understudied group.
• Asthma and Stepwise Management Asthma is a chronic condition which, despite active research in this field, cannot be prevented. There is a need for approaches that allow managing and controlling this disease.
• Asthma Care Education in African American Children In African American children, will proper education on asthma management compared to no education help reduce the disruption of daily lives over a one-year period?
• Asthma Education and Prevention Program Asthma is a chronic lung disease that expresses itself in airway narrowing and obstruction, leading to breathing issues.
• Asthma Stepwise Management: Goals and Effectiveness Asthma affects many people in the US, so the nurse needs aware of all aspects that can help patients. This work analyzes ways of treating asthma and examines stepwise management.
• The Asthma Risk Factors Among Adult African Immigrants The purpose of this study is to examine the risk factors predicting asthma among adult African immigrants in California. The research design is the quantitative correlation approach.
• Asthma Patients’ Health Education and Promotion The purpose of this paper is to discuss the health education, health promotion information, and strategies that should be used when working with asthma patients.
• Acute and Chronic Bronchial Asthma Comparison The paper compares acute and chronic asthma in such aspects as pathogenesis, interactions with the genetic factor of disease development, diagnosis and treatment methods.
• Asthma Factors Among African Americans in California The purpose of this study was to examine risk factors predicting asthma among adult foreign-born African Americans in California.
• Asthma, Its Nature and Testing Tools Whenever a patient suffers from regular coughing, has wheezing sounds when breathing, and experiences chest tightness, there is a high probability that one has developed asthma.
• Asthma Diagnostics, Care Plan and Patient Education The primary diagnosis of asthma was established based on the results of functional pulmonary tests and the examination of the patient.
• The Link Between Asthma and Immigrant Smoking The purpose of this study is to determine the association between asthma and smoking status among adult African immigrants in California.
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Living With Asthma, Essay Example

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Asthma is a condition that I have had since I was little and it is a “disease” that has caused so many problems throughout my life, living with asthma is one of the worst things that I have ever had to endure. There are things that I hate about having asthma that has made me feel like I’m less than a person and things that I have to experience that only having asthma has done. Living with asthma impacts my daily life in so many ways and one of those ways is that my inhaler has become my constant companion even when I walk and run short distances at a time. Asthma has disabled my ability to be able to run a long distance without my inhaler, I have to practically use my inhaler every time I run every few feet.

This has put me in a position where I cannot perform strenuous activities without using my inhaler, I used to walk to the mall and the neighboring stores in the mall’s vicinity; now I have to use my inhaler when I walk over a mile. I feel like I cannot do or live without my inhaler because my asthma is so bad, I see people walking for long distances all the time and wish that I could too but I can’t. Asthma even impacts my ability to do yard work such as when I cut the grass, I have to stop and use my inhaler when I cut a small portion of the yard because of the freshly cut grass which makes me wheeze heavily; I constantly feel like I have to compete with my body for air to breathe so I don’t feel like my chest is going to collapse. Ironically, asthma even impacts my ability to do smaller tasks as well, if I am going up and down the stairs to the basement; I have to use my inhaler because I get winded going up and down the stairs.

The worst way that asthma has impacted my life on a daily basis is that everything that I say has to be on a time limit lest I run out of breath and have to use my inhaler, it’s like everything that I say, every speech that I give even the explanations I have to give are excruciatingly short. For example, I was set on giving a speech on how to become a world class strategist but because my asthma is so bad, I have to say what I want to say in 30 words or less. I feel like asthma has robbed me of the things that I used to love to do. With asthma, everything that I do is on a time limit.

Incidentally, asthma is the harbinger of doom for those who have to live with it; their lives are never the same. The constant wheezing is particularly annoying because whenever the weather changes, my asthma practically goes into overdrive and it makes using my inhaler more of a need instead of a precaution or as needed. I love playing Dodge Ball and love being active, asthma has impacted me in this aspect that I have to sit out most dodge ball games because people are afraid that I’ll end collapsing or my chest might start me down the path to a heart attack.

Overall, this disease has taken much from me and yet I have to live with it because asthma is not a condition that’s temporary or shows up at random; it is with me forever. Asthma has disabled my ability to enjoy a dodge ball game, walk or run and many more things that I wish I didn’t have to sacrifice in order to live. Every cough that comes from my mouth, is always accompanied by phlegm which I have to go to the sink, trash can or bathroom sink to spit out every time I cough.

It is a waking nightmare to wake up to this every single day and have to figure out what I want to do that’s not too strenuous in order to live, it gets boring playing board games and puzzles; I loved being active which I can no longer be because of asthma.

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Asthma Essay

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: United States , Asthma , Environment , Environmental Issues , Family , Nursing , Medicine , Children

Words: 1700

Published: 11/14/2019

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Introduction

Asthma is one of the common respiration complications which are known to affect a substantial number of people all over the world. It is a chronic inflammatory complication which is known to affect the patient’s air channels within the respiratory chambers. It is usually characterized by diverse symptoms which may be persistence or recurring in nature. According to scientific and other medical researches which have been carried out in a number of developed countries, they have shown that asthma is not linked to any parasitic element emanating from the external environment (WHO. 2008). However, it is a general complication which develops as a consequence of tissue or cell inflammatory responses. Two main factors are known to cause or induce the occurrence of asthma to any individual. They include the environment under which a person has been operating together with the genetic links to parents or family members who had a history of asthma. Consequently, since these causative factors have been in existence since time immemorial, asthma has lived with man for a long period of time. In the ancient Egypt, history of asthma has been identified but proper documentation of asthma was done by Greek philosophers who identified the most prone group to be affected by this condition as tailors and those who worked in metal work industries (Wollan, Bertram & Yawn, 2008, p 67).

Types of asthma

Various types of asthma have been identified and clustered according to the level of their severity, complexity and diversity of symptoms linked to this complication. According to medical reports and practices, the classification of asthma is based on the frequency at which symptoms manifest themselves in any given patient. Another form or platform through which classification of Asthma is based is the client’s forced respiratory volume a process which is usually clinically carried out. This forced respiratory volume is based on a specified period of one second a process which is used to generate or develop the peak expiratory flow rate for that individual patient. Consequently, Asthma can be grouped as either atopic also known as extrinsic or as a non-atopic also termed as intrinsic form of asthma. Such classifications are based on whether the given form or class of asthma under question is based on allergen induction or not. Despite asthma being a chronic obstructive health state, medical researchers have not classified it as a subject of chronic obstructive pulmonary ailment since by subjecting asthma under this group; it literally combines asthma under other irreversible respiratory complications such as bronchiectasis, emphysema and chronic bronchitis among others of which their occurrence in any individual is a permanent irreversible process (Tippets, 2009, p 5).

Nevertheless, some researchers have been opting to include asthma under this group since a prolonged negligence of not attending to asthma condition can result to a subsequent development of a permanent irreversible obstruction of the air channels in a human being. The common types of asthma which have been witnessed in a substantial number of patients in the United States of America include the Brittle asthma which comprised two clusters of asthma. These two forms of asthma are based on vividly manifested severe attacks which recur at a given rate. Brittle asthma type 1 manifests a wide peak in the flow variability despite the administration of considerably sufficient medication. Type 2 of brittle asthma has less of these manifested symptoms hence it is much easily controlled and managed than type 1 of brittle asthma.

Causes of asthma

Asthma is known to be caused by various causative factors which mainly emanate from the environment under which a particular person is living. Apart from environment causative elements, asthma has also been linked to genetic elements or lineage of a person. According to statistical researches which have been carried out in the United States of America, they have shown that approximately sixty percent of asthma complications are caused by environmental factors (Fanta, 2009, p 1007). The remaining forty percent is linked to genetic factors which are linked to family lineages of a person. In addition, studies which have been carried out over asthma related diseases such as eczema and hay fever have vividly and comprehensively revealed some of the crucial risk factors which might induce the occurrence level of asthma in an individual.

All the same, some of the key risk factors for being attacked by asthma include the issue of atopic diseases in one’s life time or even related family members. Atopic diseases are known to substantially boost the occurrence levels of hay fevers by approximately five times as well as the occurrence of asthma by approximately four times. This is based on scientific research studies which have been carried out in the United States of America. These studies have also shown that in children who are out of their tender age and get diagnosed to have a allergies through positive skin tests as well as having an increased levels of immunoglobulin E are more likely to develop asthma complications (Yawn, 2008, p 150). a) Environmental factors: Risk factors emanating from the environment have been Identified and linked to the development of asthma especially in children. One of the risk factors is maternal tobacco smoking which usually occur before the delivery of a child. According a number of conducted surveys, they have shown that this habit increase the development of asthma like symptoms to the born infant. These symptoms include wheezing, unregulated bronchial contraction as well as respiratory infections. Other environmental factors which might expose someone to the development of asthma included traffic pollutions, poor ventilation and increased air pollutants to mention but a few.

b) Genetic factors: asthma has been linked to some chromosomal elements which can be transferred to offspring with a subsequent development of asthma in the children of the affected parents (Schiffman, 2009, p 4).

Signs and symptoms of Asthma

The common signs and symptoms which vividly manifest themselves in an asthma patient include wheezing, chest tightness, shortness of breath and coughing. Apart from these main and common symptoms of asthma, the patient may manifest state of confusion, state of depression and other physical changes which are usually associated with low oxygenated blood in the body. Extreme cases of asthma manifest themselves through rapid and painful contraction of bronchial units in the lungs (Fanta, 2009, p 1014).Due to these rapid painful contractions, the affected person may fall on the ground or seek for support due to poor functioning of the skeletal muscles in the body. The asthma mental effect is associated with burled vision, state of confusion and even loss awareness due to poor oxygenated blood in the brain.

Transmission of asthma

Asthma is a health complication associated with the breathing system of a person. Nevertheless, its transmission from one person to another can only take place through genetic links or chromosomes. A person who emanate from a family lineage which is known to have a persistence history of asthma cases is more likely to develop asthma and asthma related complications (De Lara & Noble, 2007, p 150). This is due to genetic linkage of some chromosomal genes to asthma complications. Consequently, such genes are transferred to offspring who may or may not develop asthma complications.

Prevention and treatment for Asthma

Asthma cases can be treated through administration of drugs such as salbutamol and fluticasone propionate through inhalation. These drugs are known to open the contracted brochial muscles as well as making the lung muscles to relax. Subsequently, the pain associated with asthma is substantially reduced to recommendable levels (Dipiro, 2008, p 525). According to medical practitioners from the US, recent medications which are used in treatment of asthma are clustered in two main groups; quick-relief and long-term control measures. For quick-relief, beta2-adrenoceptor agonists (SABA) the like of salbutamol are used in its treatment while for long term control, glucocorticoids have been highly recommended as the best form of its treatment. Asthma can be prevented through control of external environmental factors such as air pollutants which might induce asthma (Boulet 2009, p 890).

Some of these conditions associated with asthma can be treated through specific therapeutic techniques as well as control and preventive programs. Someone suffering from asthma can be treated through administration of suitable drugs such as salbutamol or fluticasone propionate basing on the extent and type of asthma in question. Asthma is a chronic inflammatory complication which is known to affect the patient’s air channels within the respiratory chambers. Asthma is usually characterized by diverse symptoms which may be persistence or recurring in nature. According to scientific and other medical researches which have been carried out in a number of developed countries, they have shown that asthma is not linked to any parasitic element emanating from the external environment.

Bibliography

Boulet L.P 2009. "Influence of Comorbid conditions on asthma". Eur Respir Journal 33 (4): 897–906.

Dipiro J.T. et al.2008. Pharmacotherpay. A pathophysiologic approach (7 ed.). pp. 524.

De Lara, C, Noble .A (2007). "Dishing the dirt on asthma: What we can learn from poor hygiene". Biologics 1 (2): 139–150.

Fanta, CH .2009. "Asthma". New England Journal of Medicine 360 (10): 1002–14. doi:10.1056/NEJMra0804579. PMID 19264689.

Schiffman, G. 2009. "Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease". MedicineNet.retrived on 17/5/2011 from http://www.medicinenet.com/chronic_obstructive_pulmonary_disease_copd/article.htm.

Tippets B, G. 2009. "Managing Asthma in Children: Part 1: Making the Diagnosis, Assessing Severity". Consultant for Pediatricians 8 (5).

WHO. 2008. Asthma. Who.int. 2008-06-03. Retrieved on 16/5/2011 from http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs307/en/.

WHO. 2007. Global surveillance, prevention and control of chronic respiratory diseases: a comprehensive approach. Retrieved on 16/5/2011 from http://www.who.int/gard/publications/GARD_Manual/en/index.html.

Wollan, P., Bertram, S., and Yawn, B.P. (2008). Introduction of Asthma APGAR tools improve asthma management in primary care practices. Journal of asthma and allergy .Rochester: Dove Medical Press Ltd.

Yawn, BP 2008. "Factors accounting for asthma variability: achieving optimal symptom control for individual patients". Primary Care Respiratory Journal 17 (3): 138–147.

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In the campus protests over the war in Gaza, language and rhetoric are—as they have always been when it comes to Israel and Palestine—weapons of mass destruction.

By Zadie Smith

A philosophy without a politics is common enough. Aesthetes, ethicists, novelists—all may be easily critiqued and found wanting on this basis. But there is also the danger of a politics without a philosophy. A politics unmoored, unprincipled, which holds as its most fundamental commitment its own perpetuation. A Realpolitik that believes itself too subtle—or too pragmatic—to deal with such ethical platitudes as thou shalt not kill. Or: rape is a crime, everywhere and always. But sometimes ethical philosophy reënters the arena, as is happening right now on college campuses all over America. I understand the ethics underpinning the protests to be based on two widely recognized principles:

There is an ethical duty to express solidarity with the weak in any situation that involves oppressive power.

If the machinery of oppressive power is to be trained on the weak, then there is a duty to stop the gears by any means necessary.

The first principle sometimes takes the “weak” to mean “whoever has the least power,” and sometimes “whoever suffers most,” but most often a combination of both. The second principle, meanwhile, may be used to defend revolutionary violence, although this interpretation has just as often been repudiated by pacifistic radicals, among whom two of the most famous are, of course, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr . In the pacifist’s interpretation, the body that we must place between the gears is not that of our enemy but our own. In doing this, we may pay the ultimate price with our actual bodies, in the non-metaphorical sense. More usually, the risk is to our livelihoods, our reputations, our futures. Before these most recent campus protests began, we had an example of this kind of action in the climate movement. For several years now, many people have been protesting the economic and political machinery that perpetuates climate change, by blocking roads, throwing paint, interrupting plays, and committing many other arrestable offenses that can appear ridiculous to skeptics (or, at the very least, performative), but which in truth represent a level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us.

I experienced this not long ago while participating in an XR climate rally in London. When it came to the point in the proceedings where I was asked by my fellow-protesters whether I’d be willing to commit an arrestable offense—one that would likely lead to a conviction and thus make travelling to the United States difficult or even impossible—I’m ashamed to say that I declined that offer. Turns out, I could not give up my relationship with New York City for the future of the planet. I’d just about managed to stop buying plastic bottles (except when very thirsty) and was trying to fly less. But never to see New York again? What pitiful ethical creatures we are (I am)! Falling at the first hurdle! Anyone who finds themselves rolling their eyes at any young person willing to put their own future into jeopardy for an ethical principle should ask themselves where the limits of their own commitments lie—also whether they’ve bought a plastic bottle or booked a flight recently. A humbling inquiry.

It is difficult to look at the recent Columbia University protests in particular without being reminded of the campus protests of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, some of which happened on the very same lawns. At that time, a cynical political class was forced to observe the spectacle of its own privileged youth standing in solidarity with the weakest historical actors of the moment, a group that included, but was not restricted to, African Americans and the Vietnamese. By placing such people within their ethical zone of interest, young Americans risked both their own academic and personal futures and—in the infamous case of Kent State—their lives. I imagine that the students at Columbia—and protesters on other campuses—fully intend this echo, and, in their unequivocal demand for both a ceasefire and financial divestment from this terrible war, to a certain extent they have achieved it.

But, when I open newspapers and see students dismissing the idea that some of their fellow-students feel, at this particular moment, unsafe on campus, or arguing that such a feeling is simply not worth attending to, given the magnitude of what is occurring in Gaza, I find such sentiments cynical and unworthy of this movement. For it may well be—within the ethical zone of interest that is a campus, which was not so long ago defined as a safe space, delineated by the boundary of a generation’s ethical ideas— it may well be that a Jewish student walking past the tents, who finds herself referred to as a Zionist, and then is warned to keep her distance, is, in that moment, the weakest participant in the zone. If the concept of safety is foundational to these students’ ethical philosophy (as I take it to be), and, if the protests are committed to reinserting ethical principles into a cynical and corrupt politics, it is not right to divest from these same ethics at the very moment they come into conflict with other imperatives. The point of a foundational ethics is that it is not contingent but foundational. That is precisely its challenge to a corrupt politics.

Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands. (Those brave students who—in supporting the ethical necessity of a ceasefire—find themselves at painful odds with family, friends, faith, or community have already made this calculation.) This flexibility can also have the positive long-term political effect of allowing us to comprehend that, although our duty to the weakest is permanent, the role of “the weakest” is not an existential matter independent of time and space but, rather, a contingent situation, continually subject to change. By contrast, there is a dangerous rigidity to be found in the idea that concern for the dreadful situation of the hostages is somehow in opposition to, or incompatible with, the demand for a ceasefire. Surely a ceasefire—as well as being an ethical necessity—is also in the immediate absolute interest of the hostages, a fact that cannot be erased by tearing their posters off walls.

Part of the significance of a student protest is the ways in which it gives young people the opportunity to insist upon an ethical principle while still being, comparatively speaking, a more rational force than the supposed adults in the room, against whose crazed magical thinking they have been forced to define themselves. The equality of all human life was never a self-evident truth in racially segregated America. There was no way to “win” in Vietnam. Hamas will not be “eliminated.” The more than seven million Jewish human beings who live in the gap between the river and the sea will not simply vanish because you think that they should. All of that is just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless. A ceasefire, meanwhile, is both a potential reality and an ethical necessity. The monstrous and brutal mass murder of more than eleven hundred people, the majority of them civilians, dozens of them children, on October 7th, has been followed by the monstrous and brutal mass murder (at the time of writing) of a reported fourteen thousand five hundred children. And many more human beings besides, but it’s impossible not to notice that the sort of people who take at face value phrases like “surgical strikes” and “controlled military operation” sometimes need to look at and/or think about dead children specifically in order to refocus their minds on reality.

To send the police in to arrest young people peacefully insisting upon a ceasefire represents a moral injury to us all. To do it with violence is a scandal. How could they do less than protest, in this moment? They are putting their own bodies into the machine. They deserve our support and praise. As to which postwar political arrangement any of these students may favor, and on what basis they favor it—that is all an argument for the day after a ceasefire. One state, two states, river to the sea—in my view, their views have no real weight in this particular moment, or very little weight next to the significance of their collective action, which (if I understand it correctly) is focussed on stopping the flow of money that is funding bloody murder, and calling for a ceasefire, the political euphemism that we use to mark the end of bloody murder. After a ceasefire, the criminal events of the past seven months should be tried and judged, and the infinitely difficult business of creating just, humane, and habitable political structures in the region must begin anew. Right now: ceasefire. And, as we make this demand, we might remind ourselves that a ceasefire is not, primarily, a political demand. Primarily, it is an ethical one.

But it is in the nature of the political that we cannot even attend to such ethical imperatives unless we first know the political position of whoever is speaking. (“Where do you stand on Israel/Palestine?”) In these constructed narratives, there are always a series of shibboleths, that is, phrases that can’t be said, or, conversely, phrases that must be said. Once these words or phrases have been spoken ( river to the sea, existential threat, right to defend, one state, two states, Zionist, colonialist, imperialist, terrorist ) and one’s positionality established, then and only then will the ethics of the question be attended to (or absolutely ignored). The objection may be raised at this point that I am behaving like a novelist, expressing a philosophy without a politics, or making some rarefied point about language and rhetoric while people commit bloody murder. This would normally be my own view, but, in the case of Israel/Palestine, language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction.

It is in fact perhaps the most acute example in the world of the use of words to justify bloody murder, to flatten and erase unbelievably labyrinthine histories, and to deliver the atavistic pleasure of violent simplicity to the many people who seem to believe that merely by saying something they make it so. It is no doubt a great relief to say the word “Hamas” as if it purely and solely described a terrorist entity. A great relief to say “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people” as they stand in front of you. A great relief to say “Zionist colonialist state” and accept those three words as a full and unimpeachable definition of the state of Israel, not only under the disastrous leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu but at every stage of its long and complex history, and also to hear them as a perfectly sufficient description of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived in Israel or happened to find themselves born within it. It is perhaps because we know these simplifications to be impossible that we insist upon them so passionately. They are shibboleths; they describe a people, by defining them against other people—but the people being described are ourselves. The person who says “We must eliminate Hamas” says this not necessarily because she thinks this is a possible outcome on this earth but because this sentence is the shibboleth that marks her membership in the community that says that. The person who uses the word “Zionist” as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith, meaning exactly the same thing in 2024 and 1948 as it meant in 1890 or 1901 or 1920—that person does not so much bring definitive clarity to the entangled history of Jews and Palestinians as they successfully and soothingly draw a line to mark their own zone of interest and where it ends. And while we all talk, carefully curating our shibboleths, presenting them to others and waiting for them to reveal themselves as with us or against us—while we do all that, bloody murder.

And now here we are, almost at the end of this little stream of words. We’ve arrived at the point at which I must state clearly “where I stand on the issue,” that is, which particular political settlement should, in my own, personal view, occur on the other side of a ceasefire. This is the point wherein—by my stating of a position—you are at once liberated into the simple pleasure of placing me firmly on one side or the other, putting me over there with those who lisp or those who don’t, with the Ephraimites, or with the people of Gilead. Yes, this is the point at which I stake my rhetorical flag in that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place—built with words—where rapes are minimized as needs be, and the definition of genocide quibbled over, where the killing of babies is denied, and the precision of drones glorified, where histories are reconsidered or rewritten or analogized or simply ignored, and “Jew” and “colonialist” are synonymous, and “Palestinian” and “terrorist” are synonymous, and language is your accomplice and alibi in all of it. Language euphemized, instrumentalized, and abused, put to work for your cause and only for your cause, so that it does exactly and only what you want it to do. Let me make it easy for you. Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward. It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead. ♦

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Using AI to predict grade point average from college application essays

by PNAS Nexus

Jonah Berger and Olivier Toubia used natural language processing to understand what drives academic success. The authors analyzed over 20,000 college application essays from a large public university that attracts students from a range of racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds and found that the semantic volume of the writing, or how much ground an application essay covered predicted college performance, as measured by grade point average.

They published their findings in PNAS Nexus .

Essays that covered more semantic ground predicted higher grades. Similarly, essays with smaller conceptual jumps between successive parts of its discourse predicted higher grades.

These trends held even when researchers controlled for factors including SAT score, parents' education, gender, ethnicity, college major, essay topics, and essay length. Some of these factors, such as parents' education and the student's SAT scores, encode information about family background , suggesting that the linguistic features of semantic volume and speed are not determined solely by socioeconomic status.

According to the authors, the results demonstrate that the topography of thought, or the way people express and organize their ideas, can provide insight into their likely future success.

Journal information: PNAS Nexus

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America’s Colleges Are Reaping What They Sowed

Universities spent years saying that activism is not just welcome but encouraged on their campuses. Students took them at their word.

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N ick Wilson, a sophomore at Cornell University, came to Ithaca, New York, to refine his skills as an activist. Attracted by both Cornell’s labor-relations school and the university’s history of campus radicalism, he wrote his application essay about his involvement with a Democratic Socialists of America campaign to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act . When he arrived on campus, he witnessed any number of signs that Cornell shared his commitment to not just activism but also militant protest, taking note of a plaque commemorating the armed occupation of Willard Straight Hall in 1969.

Cornell positively romanticizes that event: The university library has published a “ Willard Straight Hall Occupation Study Guide ,” and the office of the dean of students once co-sponsored a panel on the protest. The school has repeatedly screened a documentary about the occupation, Agents of Change . The school’s official newspaper, published by the university media-relations office, ran a series of articles honoring the 40th anniversary, in 2009, and in 2019, Cornell held a yearlong celebration for the 50th, complete with a commemorative walk, a dedication ceremony, and a public conversation with some of the occupiers. “ Occupation Anniversary Inspires Continued Progress ,” the Cornell Chronicle headline read.

As Wilson has discovered firsthand, however, the school’s hagiographical odes to prior protests have not prevented it from cracking down on pro-Palestine protests in the present. Now that he has been suspended for the very thing he told Cornell he came there to learn how to do—radical political organizing—he is left reflecting on the school’s hypocrisies. That the theme of this school year at Cornell is “Freedom of Expression” adds a layer of grim humor to the affair.

Evan Mandery: University of hypocrisy

University leaders are in a bind. “These protests are really dynamic situations that can change from minute to minute,” Stephen Solomon, who teaches First Amendment law and is the director of NYU’s First Amendment Watch—an organization devoted to free speech—told me. “But the obligation of universities is to make the distinction between speech protected by the First Amendment and speech that is not.” Some of the speech and tactics protesters are employing may not be protected under the First Amendment, while much of it plainly is. The challenge universities are confronting is not just the law but also their own rhetoric. Many universities at the center of the ongoing police crackdowns have long sought to portray themselves as bastions of activism and free thought. Cornell is one of many universities that champion their legacy of student activism when convenient, only to bring the hammer down on present-day activists when it’s not. The same colleges that appeal to students such as Wilson by promoting opportunities for engagement and activism are now suspending them. And they’re calling the cops.

The police activity we are seeing universities level against their own students does not just scuff the carefully cultivated progressive reputations of elite private universities such as Columbia, Emory University, and NYU, or the equally manicured free-speech bona fides of red-state public schools such as Indiana University and the University of Texas at Austin. It also exposes what these universities have become in the 21st century. Administrators have spent much of the recent past recruiting social-justice-minded students and faculty to their campuses under the implicit, and often explicit, promise that activism is not just welcome but encouraged. Now the leaders of those universities are shocked to find that their charges and employees believed them. And rather than try to understand their role in cultivating this morass, the Ivory Tower’s bigwigs have decided to apply their boot heels to the throats of those under their care.

I spoke with 30 students, professors, and administrators from eight schools—a mix of public and private institutions across the United States—to get a sense of the disconnect between these institutions’ marketing of activism and their treatment of protesters. A number of people asked to remain anonymous. Some were untenured faculty or administrators concerned about repercussions from, or for, their institutions. Others were directly involved in organizing protests and were wary of being harassed. Several incoming students I spoke with were worried about being punished by their school before they even arrived. Despite a variety of ideological commitments and often conflicting views on the protests, many of those I interviewed were “shocked but not surprised”—a phrase that came up time and again—by the hypocrisy exhibited by the universities with which they were affiliated. (I reached out to Columbia, NYU, Cornell, and Emory for comment on the disconnect between their championing of past protests and their crackdowns on the current protesters. Representatives from Columbia, Cornell, and Emory pointed me to previous public statements. NYU did not respond.)

The sense that Columbia trades on the legacy of the Vietnam protests that rocked campus in 1968 was widespread among the students I spoke with. Indeed, the university honors its activist past both directly and indirectly, through library archives , an online exhibit , an official “Columbia 1968” X account , no shortage of anniversary articles in Columbia Magazine , and a current course titled simply “Columbia 1968.” The university is sometimes referred to by alumni and aspirants as the “Protest Ivy.” One incoming student told me that he applied to the school in part because of an admissions page that prominently listed community organizers and activists among its “distinguished alumni.”

Joseph Slaughter, an English professor and the executive director of Columbia’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, talked with his class about the 1968 protests after the recent arrests at the school. He said his students felt that the university had actively marketed its history to them. “Many, many, many of them said they were sold the story of 1968 as part of coming to Columbia,” he told me. “They talked about it as what the university presents to them as the long history and tradition of student activism. They described it as part of the brand.”

This message reaches students before they take their first college class. As pro-Palestine demonstrations began to raise tensions on campus last month, administrators were keen to cast these protests as part of Columbia’s proud culture of student activism. The aforementioned high-school senior who had been impressed by Columbia’s activist alumni attended the university’s admitted-students weekend just days before the April 18 NYPD roundup. During the event, the student said, an admissions official warned attendees that they may experience “disruptions” during their visit, but boasted that these were simply part of the school’s “long and robust history of student protest.”

Remarkably, after more than 100 students were arrested on the order of Columbia President Minouche Shafik—in which she overruled a unanimous vote by the university senate’s executive committee not to bring the NYPD to campus —university administrators were still pushing this message to new students and parents. An email sent on April 19 informed incoming students that “demonstration, political activism, and deep respect for freedom of expression have long been part of the fabric of our campus.” Another email sent on April 20 again promoted Columbia’s tradition of activism, protest, and support of free speech. “This can sometimes create moments of tension,” the email read, “but the rich dialogue and debate that accompany this tradition is central to our educational experience.”

Evelyn Douek and Genevieve Lakier: The hypocrisy underlying the campus-speech controversy

Another student who attended a different event for admitted students, this one on April 21, said that every administrator she heard speak paid lip service to the school’s long history of protest. Her own feelings about the pro-Palestine protests were mixed—she said she believes that a genocide is happening in Gaza and also that some elements of the protest are plainly anti-Semitic—but her feelings about Columbia’s decision to involve the police were unambiguous. “It’s reprehensible but exactly what an Ivy League institution would do in this situation. I don’t know why everyone is shocked,” she said, adding: “It makes me terrified to go there.”

Beth Massey, a veteran activist who participated in the 1968 protests, told me with a laugh, “They might want to tell us they’re progressive, but they’re doing the business of the ruling class.” She was not surprised by the harsh response to the current student encampment or by the fact that it lit the fuse on a nationwide protest movement. Massey had been drawn to the radical reputation of Columbia’s sister school, Barnard College, as an open-minded teenager from the segregated South: “I actually wanted to go to Barnard because they had a history of progressive struggle that had happened going all the way back into the ’40s.” And the barn-burning history that appealed to Massey in the late 1960s has continued to attract contemporary students, albeit with one key difference: Today, that radical history has become part of the way that Barnard and Columbia sell their $60,000-plus annual tuition.

Of course, Columbia is not alone. The same trends have also prevailed at NYU, which likes to crow about its own radical history and promises contemporary students “ a world of activism opportunities .” An article published on the university’s website in March—titled “Make a Difference Through Activism at NYU”—promises students “myriad chances to put your activism into action.” The article points to campus institutions that “provide students with resources and opportunities to spark activism and change both on campus and beyond.” The six years I spent as a graduate student at NYU gave me plenty of reasons to be cynical about the university and taught me to view all of this empty activism prattle as white noise. But even I was astounded to see a video of students and faculty set upon by the NYPD, arrested at the behest of President Linda Mills.

“Across the board, there is a heightened awareness of hypocrisy,” Mohamad Bazzi, a journalism professor at NYU, told me, noting that faculty were acutely conscious of the gap between the institution’s intensive commitment to DEI and the police crackdown. The university has recently made several “cluster hires”—centered on activism-oriented themes such as anti-racism, social justice, and indigeneity—that helped diversify the faculty. Some of those recent hires were among the people who spent a night zip-tied in a jail cell, arrested for the exact kind of activism that had made them attractive to NYU in the first place. And it wasn’t just faculty. The law students I spoke with were especially acerbic. After honing her activism skills at her undergraduate institution—another university that recently saw a violent police response to pro-Palestine protests—one law student said she came to NYU because she was drawn to its progressive reputation and its high percentage of prison-abolitionist faculty. This irony was not lost on her as the police descended on the encampment.

After Columbia students were arrested on April 18, students at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study decided to cancel a planned art festival and instead use the time to make sandwiches as jail support for their detained uptown peers. The school took photos of the students layering cold cuts on bread and posted it to Gallatin’s official Instagram. These posts not only failed to mention that the students were working in support of the pro-Palestine protesters; the caption—“making sandwiches for those in need”—implied that the undergrads might be preparing meals for, say, the homeless.

The contradictions on display at Cornell, Columbia, and NYU are not limited to the state of New York. The police response at Emory, another university that brags about its tradition of student protest, was among the most disturbing I have seen. Faculty members I spoke with at the Atlanta school, including two who had been arrested—the philosophy professor Noëlle McAfee and the English and Indigenous-studies professor Emil’ Keme—recounted harrowing scenes: a student being knocked down, an elderly woman struggling to breathe after tear-gas exposure, a colleague with welts from rubber bullets. These images sharply contrast with the university’s progressive mythmaking, a process that was in place even before 2020’s “summer of racial reckoning” sent universities scrambling to shore up their activist credentials.

In 2018, Emory’s Campus Life office partnered with students and a design studio to begin work on an exhibit celebrating the university’s history of identity-based activism. Then, not long after George Floyd’s murder, the university’s library released a series of blog posts focusing on topics including “Black Student Activism at Emory,” “Protests and Movements,” “Voting Rights and Public Policy,” and “Authors and Artists as Activists.” That same year, the university announced its new Arts and Social Justice Fellows initiative, a program that “brings Atlanta artists into Emory classrooms to help students translate their learning into creative activism in the name of social justice.” In 2021, the university put on an exhibit celebrating its 1969 protests , in which “Black students marched, demonstrated, picketed, and ‘rapped’ on those institutions affecting the lives of workers and students at Emory.” Like Cornell’s and Columbia’s, Emory’s protests seem to age like fine wine: It takes half a century before the institution begins enjoying them.

N early every person I talked with believed that their universities’ responses were driven by donors, alumni, politicians, or some combination thereof. They did not believe that they were grounded in serious or reasonable concerns about the physical safety of students; in fact, most felt strongly that introducing police into the equation had made things far more dangerous for both pro-Palestine protesters and pro-Israel counterprotesters. Jeremi Suri, a historian at UT Austin—who told me he is not politically aligned with the protesters—recalls pleading with both the dean of students and the mounted state troopers to call off the charge. “It was like the Russian army had come onto campus,” Suri mused. “I was out there for 45 minutes to an hour. I’m very sensitive to anti-Semitism. Nothing anti-Semitic was said.” He added: “There was no reason not to let them shout until their voices went out.”

From the May 1930 issue: Hypocrisy–a defense

As one experienced senior administrator at a major research university told me, the conflagration we are witnessing shows how little many university presidents understand either their campus communities or the young people who populate them. “When I saw what Columbia was doing, my immediate thought was: They have not thought about day two ,” he said, laughing. “If you confront an 18-year-old activist, they don’t back down. They double down.” That’s what happened in 1968, and it’s happening again now. Early Tuesday morning, Columbia students occupied Hamilton Hall—the site of the 1968 occupation, which they rechristened Hind’s Hall in honor of a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza—in response to the university’s draconian handling of the protests. They explicitly tied these events to the university’s past, calling out its hypocrisy on Instagram: “This escalation is in line with the historical student movements of 1968 … which Columbia repressed then and celebrates today.” The university, for its part, responded now as it did then: Late on Tuesday, the NYPD swarmed the campus in an overnight raid that led to the arrest of dozens of students.

The students, professors, and administrators I’ve spoken with in recent days have made clear that this hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed and that the crackdown isn’t working, but making things worse. The campus resistance has expanded to include faculty and students who were originally more ambivalent about the protests and, in a number of cases, who support Israel. They are disturbed by what they rightly see as violations of free expression, the erosion of faculty governance, and the overreach of administrators. Above all, they’re fed up with the incandescent hypocrisy of institutions, hoisted with their own progressive petards, as the unstoppable force of years’ worth of self-righteous rhetoric and pseudo-radical posturing meets the immovable object of students who took them at their word.

In another video published by The Cornell Daily Sun , recorded only hours after he was suspended, Nick Wilson explained to a crowd of student protesters what had brought him to the school. “In high school, I discovered my passion, which was community organizing for a better world. I told Cornell University that’s why I wanted to be here,” he said, referencing his college essay. Then he paused for emphasis, looking around as his peers began to cheer. “And those fuckers admitted me.”

Home News Highlights Best of the Week AP offers all-formats look at the affirmative action ruling’s impact on college essays

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AP offers all-formats look at the affirmative action ruling’s impact on college essays

Hillary Amofa listens to others member of the Lincoln Park High School step team after school, March 8, 2024, in Chicago. When she started writing her college essay, Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. She wrote about being the daughter of immigrants from Ghana, about growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. She described hardship and struggle. Then she deleted it all. “I would just find myself kind of trauma-dumping,” said the 18 year-old senior, “And I'm just like, this doesn't really say anything about me as a person.” AP PHOTO / CHARLES REX ARBOGAST

By COLLIN BINKLEY, ANNIE MA AND NOREEN NASIR

The Supreme Court ruling that ended affirmative action left the college essay as one of the few places where race can play a role in admissions decisions. To capture the impact on the ruling for students applying to college, Collin Binkley, Annie Ma and Noreen Nasir interviewed several students who spoke of how much was riding on the writing assignment.

Some changed their essays to emphasize race even if other experiences felt more central to their lives, and some described feeling pressure to exploit their hardships. Most powerfully, the students read their final essays on camera. In video shot and produced by Nasir, they shared intimate details about their relationship with their natural hair or the feeling of finding solidarity in a leadership group of students that look like them.

The story ran on front pages of newspapers in Decatur, Ill.; Mattoon, Ill.; Westerly, R.I.; and Chattanooga, Tenn., and AP member newsrooms accessed the story over 500 times.

Visit AP.org to request a trial subscription to AP’s video, photo and text services. For breaking news, visit apnews.com .

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By The Associated Press

APRIL 5, 2024

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Are E.V.s Too Quiet and ‘Boring’?

More from our inbox:, living with roommates in college, tech in the classroom, ‘unpleasant truths’ about russia, water and politics.

To the Editor:

Re “ Electric Cars Are Boring ,” by Ezra Dyer (Opinion guest essay, April 13):

If E.V.s are boring, I guess I am OK with being bored. As an E.V. owner, I no longer have to stop at the gas station to fill up in all kinds of (Chicago) weather. No more oil changes, no more antifreeze concerns, no muffler or fuel pump problems. Boring is good.

No key or fob to carry, and I can preheat or precool my E.V. in various types of inclement weather.

Now for full disclosure. I bought my first E.V. 10 years ago when I was 73. I am now at the age where simpler (boring) is better. I still drive my grandson’s stick shift from time to time, but find it requires too much effort.

I was wondering if Mr. Dyer would like to go back to the horse and buggy. Just think of the road noise and the sound of real horses.

Ron Thomas Glencoe, Ill.

The slowdown in E.V. sales is not because they are boring. It’s because they are 1) too expensive; 2) take too long to charge; 3) don’t go far enough on a single charge.

I will happily buy a medium-size S.U.V. E.V. when it goes 500 miles on a five-minute charge and costs about the same as the hybrid version. Until then I will settle for the Toyota RAV4 hybrid.

John Aitken Salt Lake City

Sitting on the back deck of my house, I can hear the faint roar of traffic from the town center, about a mile away. I console myself that when more people are driving E.V.s, quiet and the sweet cacophony of bird song will prevail.

Now, Ezra Dyer tells us that E.V. manufacturers are designing speaker systems that will mimic the sound of “loud exhaust” because E.V.s are too boring.

What’s next, E.V.s equipped to spew the nostalgia-inducing “not entirely unpleasant” smell of gas, oil and diesel?

The genius of human invention never fails to amaze and horrify.

Janet Buchwald Sudbury, Mass.

What an unexpected and incredibly refreshing surprise to see the essay on electric cars by Ezra Dyer, a Car and Driver columnist. As a longtime Car and Driver subscriber and past and present owner of three Alfa Romeos, I agree wholeheartedly with his observations.

And given the fact that the Porsche 911 GT3 is one of the most coveted cars by my 25-year-old son, there is hope for the next generation. We just need the car manufacturers to listen to the roar.

Allan M. Tepper Philadelphia

Re “ Living With a Stranger Is Hard. College Students Should Try It ,” by Pamela Paul (column, April 23):

I had the unique privilege of having roommates for my first two years of college who were radically different from me. I learned an awful lot because of the experience. But there was plenty I wish I hadn’t too.

The move to college is hard enough — academically, socially, mentally — that sharing that with another person places a needless burden on new students.

Ms. Paul is quite right that students benefit from learning from those around them, and schools should emphasize this in the classroom. But if there’s one place that ought to be sacred and free from the trials of starting college, it should be one’s room.

James J. Bernstein New York

When I arrived at the University of Alaska Fairbanks as a freshman in 1972 as a Jewish New Yorker in a distant land, I met my new roommate, a Muslim from the Philippines. Two people could not have been more different. And it worked out magically.

While we have lost touch over the years, I still remember his glowing smile and warmth and am glad we were selected as roommates. It helped me to grow and appreciate people from vastly different backgrounds.

Randomness in roommate selection can generate growth and learning, which is what I always thought college is supposed to do.

Paul Neuman New York

Re “ Tech in Schools Needs ‘a Hard Reset,’ ” by Jessica Grose (Opinion, April 28):

Over the past 15 years of having school-age kids, I have been deeply frustrated by how our schools have adopted technology without enough scrutiny. It is depressing to realize how many hours my kids are required to spend in front of the computer screen daily — and all without any body of evidence pointing to its positive effect on learning.

How I dreamed about running the iPad over with my van after four years of my high schooler reading everything — even novels! — on his device.

Though I’ve heard noble rationales for tech in the classrooms — “It will save the trees!” — I agree with Ms. Grose that schools need to re-evaluate what tech companies decide the schools need.

Not only are standardized tests at every level revealing faltering learning outcomes, but the human-to-human interaction is also clearly suffering the most. Out with Google Slides; in with teaching!

Amanda Bonagura Floral Park, N.Y.

Re “ How Do I Talk to My Son About a War I Don’t Understand? ,” by Sasha Vasilyuk (Opinion guest essay, April 28):

The war in Ukraine is not “Russia’s betrayal,” as Ms. Vasilyuk writes, but Russia’s business as usual. For generations, Moscow has violently suppressed the freedoms of surrounding nations.

Rather than withhold unpleasant truths, Russian parents must teach their children what Ukrainian, Polish or Latvian children learn from theirs: Historically Russia is an aggressor.

Russia’s imperialism relies on the unquestioned belief among countless ordinary Russians that their state has a virtuous right to dominate its neighbors. Without much hard work by parents and teachers, Russia’s noxious record will continue unchallenged.

John Connelly Kensington, Calif. The writer is a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley.

Re “ Democrats See Water as Issue to Win Over Rural Arizona Voters ” (news article, April 24):

This article points out the difficulty that Democrats face in winning over conservative voters. For these desert communities, water is a life and death issue. But even though they admit that Republican policies hurt them and Democratic policies help them, these people will vote for Donald Trump.

And it’s not as if they don’t realize which side is which. They may agree that on this crucial issue the Democrats are right and are helping them, and the Republicans are wrong and are hurting them, but it doesn’t matter. They will still vote for Mr. Trump. There could be no clearer example of people voting directly against their own interests.

If nothing else, this discouraging story shows how much stronger is the fear of migrants, of change, of big government — all abstract fears really — than the drastic reality staring these people in the face.

Tim Shaw Cambridge, Mass.