Brown and White Vol. 132 no. 15

              The Brown and White Vol. 132 No. 15
Tuesday, April 4, 2017 ‘All the Lehigh News First’
More money, more problems
Lehigh’s tuition rises 50% over course of 10 years
‘Marital laws are intertwined with power dynamics’
By EMILY WARD
News Editor
In 2006, Lehigh’s tuition was
$33,470.
Fast forward 10 years, and that
cost has risen by 50 percent.
On March 23, Pat Johnson, the
vice president of finance and admin-istration,
sent an email to students
and parents informing them of a 5
percent rise in tuition for the next
academic year, from $47,920 to
$50,320.
Johnson said the $2,400 increase
will go toward funding several activ-ities,
including hiring new faculty,
improving academic buildings and
classrooms and expanding new pro-grams
like the Data X initiative. She
said some of that money will also go
into the financial aid budget.
Johnson said the cost of operation
increased as a result of new labor
laws and regulations related to com-pliance.
The Affordable Care Act,
enacted in 2010, defines a full-time
employee as anyone who works more
than 30 hours a week. Johnson said
this increased the number of staff
who receive health benefits from the
university. She said a portion of the
tuition money will go to providing
these benefits to faculty and staff.
Johnson said the money will not
go toward the Path to Prominence
expansion plan because it’s too early
in the planning process to start allo-cating
funds to the initiative.
Five percent is the university’s
largest tuition increase since 2008.
Last year, tuition increased by 4.5
percent, and before that, it increased
at a rate of approximately 3 percent
for seven years.
Johnson said tuition increases
were kept moderately low from 2013
to 2015 because trustees wanted to
experiment to see whether the price
attracted more applicants from mid-dle-
class families. Johnson said their
plan didn’t work.
“When we were doing 3 percent
increases, other schools were doing
four and five,” Johnson said. “Now
we’re kind of catching up a little bit.”
Johnson said parents have contact-ed
her to express their disapproval of
By MEG KELLY
Deputy News Editor
Spinster. Thornback. Witch. None
of these words are particularly pleas-ant,
but historically they have all
been used to describe the same thing:
single, unmarried women.
Author Rebecca Traister discussed
these and other words in her talk
Thursday night in Whitaker audi-torium.
A self-proclaimed “feminist jour-nalist”
and a writer-at-large for New
York Magazine, Traister said she
became aware of the societal tradi-tions
and expectations surrounding
marriage when she got engaged in
her thirties.
The lecture was held as part of the
university’s Friends of the Library
Speaker Series and was originally
scheduled in February before it was
canceled due to a snowstorm.
Traister said although she was
older than what she described as a
“typical” bride, her friends insisted
on throwing her a bachelorette party
and giving her gifts that would be
more practical for a younger person.
“At our wedding, they’re giving
us plates,” Traister said. “We’re in
our thirties, we already have plates.
The gift should be paying someone to
come and take away all these plates!”
Through her own experiences as
a bride, Traister became interested
in learning more about what mar-riage
meant in the past and how it
has evolved as a practice throughout
history.
Initially Traister said she planned
to have her book be more about
the present day, with a heavy focus
on politics. However, as she began
researching she was drawn to the
way marriage has shaped the course
of American history.
“Marital laws are intertwined with
power dynamics,” Traister said.
Traister led her audience through
an unconventional look at America
over the centuries, showing how
marriage impacted major events and
initiated cultural shifts.
She said marriage has varied by
region, such as in the Southern colo-nies
in the eighteenth century, where
having considerably fewer women
led to girls being married as young
Author Rebecca Traister visited Lehigh to
discuss society’s perception of single women
Maxim Beard/B&W Staff
Rebecca Traister, author of “All the Single
Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise
of an Independent Nation,” addresses her
audience Thursday in Whitaker Auditorium.
Traister spoke about the role of single
See TRAISTER Page 4 women throughout history.
See TUITION Page 3
Anna Simoneau/B&W Staff