BASEMENT BATTLE
RIGHT NOW!
HALFTIME
SPORTS
METRO
SCENE & HEARD
BC was victorious in a matchup of ACC’s cellar dwellers, A10
The Somerville concert will raise funds for typhoon relief, promote climate change awareness, B10
With the Super Bowl this Sunday, ‘The Scene’ picks the five best and worst halftime shows, B1
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HEIGHTS
THE
The Independent Student Newspaper of Boston College
established
1919
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Vol. XCV, No. 4
CANDIDATES CONTEND FOR UGBC OFFICE
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BY NATHAN MCGUIRE Asst. News Editor
Nanci Fiore-Chettiar and Chris Marchese, both A&S ’15, hope to use their extensive experience in UGBC to enact change in the organization that they say has a diminished image. Marchese, who is running for executive vice president, sought out Fiore-Chettiar as a running mate in October, and throughout the semester persistently encouraged her to run with him. Fiore-Chettiar, a native of Westerly, R.I., admitted she was not completely comfortable with the idea of running as the presidential candidate at first, but made the decision to run right before she left campus for Winter Break. Both Fiore-Chettiar and Marchese began serving in UGBC as freshmen, and have served as colleagues in the Student Assembly since the fall semester. They cited their experiences with the current UGBC leadership as something that has prompted them to run on a platform of transparency and accountability. “The student body really needs to regain its trust in UGBC,” said Marchese, a double major in history and political science. “And the only way that is going to happen is if the leadership starts to run on promises and then deliver.” Echoing Marchese, Fiore-Chettiar, who is on track to earn her master in social work a year after she graduates next May, described her own disillusionment with the organization. “I felt like I had become very disillusioned with UGBC,” she said. “There was so much more we could be doing, and even this year, I felt like we [went] even more [in] a direction that I wasn’t always comfortable with, so that kind of motivated me to run.” They highlighted concerns with the UGBC website, which doesn’t list senators’ contact information, as one of the things they hope to change in order to make the organization more transparent and responsive to student concerns. Fiore-Chettiar and Marchese said they hope to improve UGBC and its relationship with students and University administrators. In order to do so, they say they will deliver on their promises of increased transparency and accountability.
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BY CONNOR FARLEY
BY JULIE ORENSTEIN
News Editor
Assoc. News Editor
UGBC election candidates Lucas Levine and Vance Vergara, A&S ’15, have not been involved in the undergraduate political sphere at Boston College for very long. In fact, neither has ever been a member of UGBC. They have, however, committed to a number of leadership positions throughout various student organizations on campus, and are now looking to expand their responsibilities to encompass those of the president and executive vice president of UGBC. Levine, an international studies and political science double major with a minor in management and leadership, developed a greater interest in politics upon founding the BC chapter of Syria Deeply—a club devoted to promoting awareness about conflict in Syria—and through his involvement with the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy. Vergara, a mathematics major with a minor in computer science, began taking a more serious interest in representing the views of other students when he joined the Consulting Club of BC, of which he is now the president. Together, Levine and Vergara plan to rely on their outside perspective and leadership experiences independent from UGBC to bring reform to policy and shed light on advocacy issues. “Being an outside team, I feel like we bring a new perspective to UGBC,” Vergara said. “I think that that’s something we want to stay true to—our outside perspective. Something we want to do is make a direct impact on student’s lives.” Referencing last year’s low voter turnout and the recent split between programming and advocacy, Levine also hopes to re-establish the connection with students who may feel UGBC has distanced itself from the matters that are most important to undergraduates. “First and foremost, what we are trying to do with this campaign— and what we would hopefully do when getting into office—is to engage that remaining 70 to 80 percent of the student population,” Levine said. “This is an opportunity for UGBC to rebrand itself.”
The only team looking to serve as UGBC president and executive vice president as juniors is made up of Michael Moazampour and Robert Watt, both A&S ’16. Although neither have previous UGBC experience, they hope to bring fresh ideas to the organization, making it more accessible to the student body. “One of the main reasons we chose to run was that there is no open discussion between UGBC and regular students,” Watt said. “No one knows anything that goes on.” The candidates said that, as freshmen last year, they often felt uninformed with what was going on around campus and with UGBC. They said they will bridge the gap by publishing the minutes from Student Assembly (SA) meetings online and increasing their own visibility on a weekly basis. Moazampour emphasized that the team is aware of the challenge they face as the youngest candidates in the race. “We’re not in this race because it’s easy, we’re in it because it’s a challenge,” Moazampour said. “We aren’t here to represent one particular class year. We’re here for the entirety of undergraduate students at Boston College … we urge students to put aside class affiliations and to look at the issues objectively amongst all candidates.” Among the ideas they say they would pursue if elected include establishing a connection between the student body and notable varsity athletes, holding more online polls regarding school-sponsored concerts, and increasing awareness of the culture surrounding women’s issues on campus. The team also said they would give some of the stipend they would receive as president and executive vice president back as additional funding for UGBC initiatives. “We believe it should be a volunteer job,” Watt said. “If you’re going to be here for the students, taking away that monetary incentive could definitely change the playing field,” Moazampour said. “A lot of people don’t know about that incentive. We will voluntarily give back at least half of our stipend to UGBC and Boston College if elected.”
BC grads raise $15M for WePay
Athletics clarifies aid allocation
BY ANDREW SKARAS
Department reports increasing aid for female athletes at BC
Heights Editor Before he had even matriculated at Boston College, Bill Clerico, CEO of WePay and BC ’07, met his future roommate, business partner, and friend Rich Aberman, vice president of Product of WePay and BC ’07, at Boston Logan International Airport while waiting for a bus to pick them up to take them to BC. Now, their joint venture, WePay, an interface for facilitating payments, has just raised $15 million to fund further growth and development. “We just raised our Series C financing of $15 million,” Clerico said. “This was led by Phil Purcell, former CEO of Morgan Stanley and creator of Discover Card.” The WePay that is on the market now is not the same product that Clerico and Aberman created just a year and a half after graduation. Clerico explained that, when he quit his job in investment banking in August of 2008, it was because he and Aberman wanted to “make it easy for friends to collect money from friends.” “We reached a point where this is what we wanted to do,” Clerico said. “Rich left a full tuition scholarship at NYU, and we started working on the idea. We built
See WePay, A4
BY AUSTIN TEDESCO Heights Editor
Center, an alumni panel, and guest speaker Alesia Latson. Janet Costa Bates, associate director of the BC Career Center, commenced the program with a discussion of on-campus, career-related resources available to students. The Career Center offers services such as workshops and career fairs, career counseling, and self-assessment tools. The newest addition is an online resource called CareerEdge, which informs students of various internship
Of the 336 male and 360 female participants in Boston College athletics during the 2012-13 season, 164 men and 187 women received athletically-related financial aid, according to data provided to The Heights by the BC athletic department. The totals were consistent with the numbers from the 2011-12 season, when 157 male participants and 179 female participants received athletics-related aid. In both years, of the students who received aid from the athletic department, around 53 percent were female and 47 percent were male. A participant is defined as any student who is listed on a varsity roster, receives athletically related student aid, or practices with a varsity team and receives coaching from a varsity coach. “The fact is, the percentage of aid allocated to females has actually increased over the course of the past three years,”
See CWBC, A4
See Athletic Aid, A4
GRAHAM BECK / HEIGHTS SENIOR STAFF
The Council for Women of Boston College offered career advice to female undergraduates in the Cadigan Alumni Center on Tuesday.
Alumnae offer counsel on personal brands BY ARIELLE CEDENO Heights Editor
On Tuesday evening, the Council for Women of Boston College (CWBC) hosted “Preparing for the Journey: What’s Your Brand,” an event aimed at assisting undergraduate students with career development. As an initiative started by CWBC several years ago, “Preparing for the Journey” is an annual program that includes career and networking presentations for undergraduate women. The series features
opportunities for students to network with accomplished alumnae from a variety of career fields. Through panels and discussion, the alumnae provide career advice on interviewing, networking, and future internship and career opportunities, offering knowledge and experience as a resource as a resource for young undergraduates seeking to make connections in various career fields. This year’s program focused on the importance of identifying and establishing a personal brand, and it included counsel from the BC Career
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Thursday, January 30, 2014
A Guide to Your Newspaper
things to do on campus this week
Disarmament Lecture
1
Today Time: 12 p.m. Location: Boisi Center
Sponsored by the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, Joseph Gerson will lecture about the connection between peace and nuclear proliferation. Attendees must RSVP through the center’s website.
Startup Seminar
2
Dance Marathon
Today Time: 7 p.m. Location: Fulton Honors Library
3
Attorneys will discuss the various issues faced by startups, including intellectual property, human resources, and incorporation. Those who wish to compete in the BCVC are encouraged to attend.
Friday Time: 8 p.m. Location: The Rat
The Sophomore Leadership Council is holding a dance marathon to help support the Boston One Fund, which supports victims of the Boston Marathon bombing. BC dance groups will perform throughout the night.
FEATURED EVENT
Event addresses issues with U.S. healthcare system BY CONNOR FARLEY News Editor The U.S. government is running a federal deficit, expenditures on healthcare are increasing, and the cost of health insurance is exceedingly higher than years past, with trends showing little sign of slowing. On Monday night, an event cosponsored by GlobeMed, the AHANA Leadership Council (ALC), and the College Democrats of Boston College titled “A-Z of Obamacare” aimed to address the sources of rising healthcare costs and recent political measures enacted to curb government spending on the healthcare industry. “If we want to do anything about entitlements, we have to tackle the big three, which are social security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” said interim provost and professor of economics Joseph Quinn to a standing room-only Stokes 195S. Quinn, who opened the event with an economic analysis of the federal budget and its growing health-related expenditures, said that the deficit will not only continue, but it will become larger with time according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The CBO also forecasts that 17 percent of the entire U.S. economy will be focused on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, in 2040, and 25 percent by 2080. The federal government currently spends 70 percent of its budget on mandatory payments, or spending on pro-
DREW HOO / HEIGHTS STAFF
Joseph Quinn spoke about the rising cost of healthcare, among other topics, on Monday. grams mandated by law, and 57 percent of mandatory spending is allocated to healthcare costs—resulting in about 25 percent of the entire federal budget being spent on Medicare and other health expenditures. Quinn attributed the rising cost of health care to two primary reasons: an aging population and costs exceeding the rate of inflation. He also noted that the U.S. spends 17.7 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on healthcare—more than any other country in the world—and overall spending is more than double the amount of the average country listed in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Devlopment (OECD).
“We have a health cost problem in this country,” he said. “We have a great medical system in this country—if you have health insurance. There’s no place I would rather be sick than here, but we have an extraordinarily expensive healthcare system.” Following Quinn, economics professor Tracy Regan began her talk with an overview of pivotal transitions in Congress since 1942 that led to the creation of the Affordable Care Act, including the 1965-66 federal initiation of the Medicare and Medicaid programs still in place today. Regan noted that $2.5 trillion of the U.S. budget is devoted to the healthcare indus-
POLICE BLOTTER
1/26/14-1/29/14
Sunday, January 26 1:15 a.m. - A report was filed regarding medical assistance provided to a BC student who was transported to a medical facility from Vanderslice Hall. 1:16 a.m. - A report was filed regarding medical assistance provided to a BC student who was transported to a medical facility by ambulance. 8:12 a.m. - A report was filed regarding a suspicious circumstance in Ignacio Hall.
Monday, January 27 6:00 a.m. - A report was filed regarding medical assistance provided to a BC student who was transported to a medical facility from Voute Hall. 12:20 p.m. - A report was filed regarding medical assistance provided to a BC employee at Cadigan Alumni Center.
6:43 p.m. - A report was filed regarding a suspicious circumstance at BCPD headquarters. 7:37 p.m. - A report was filed regarding medical assistance provided to a BC student who was transported to a medical facility by ambulance. 7:58 p.m. - A report was filed regarding medical assistance provided to a BC student who was transported to a medical facility from Conte Forum. 8:09 p.m. - A report was filed regarding an identity fraud off-campus. 8:23 p.m. - A report was filed regarding assistance provided to another police agency at Voute Hall. 10:14 p.m. - A report was filed regarding a suspicious circumstance at 66 Commonwealth Ave. 10:37 p.m. - A report was filed regarding past larceny at Corcoran Commons.
College Corner NEWS FROM UNIVERSITIES ACROSS THE COUNTRY BY NATHAN MCGUIRE Asst. News Editor The U.S. Department of Education is investigating Penn State for its handling of sexual harassment and sexual assault complaints that were fi led in the years surrounding the Jerry Sandusky child sexual-abuse scandal, according to The Huffington Post. Assistant Secretar y for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon told Penn State President Rodney Erickson that the federal agency would review data on reported cases of sexual offenses as far back as three years. In a statement released by Lhamon, the agency said it had concerns about Penn State’s sexual harassment policy after it saw a spike in reported sexual offenses following the onset of the Sandusky scandal. “Our initial review of Penn State’s sexual harassment policy, compounded by a dramatic increase in the number of forcible sex offenses
try, with the average per capita health expenditure costing $8,000 per year and nearly $1,000 on prescription drugs. She also addressed the U.S. spread of health care coverage: employers cover about 48 percent of Americans; Medicaid covers 16 percent; Medicare covers 14 percent; other public and private forms of insurance cover about 8 percent; and 15 percent of the population remains uninsured. The approximately 48 million Americans without health insurance are what the government and health insurers call the “coverage gap.” “Essentially, these are people that fall in between,” she said. “They aren’t poor enough to qualify for the expansions in Medicaid, and they’re not also benefitting from some credits that the federal government it giving to individuals … so we haven’t really fully covered everyone in spite of the fact that it’s now been determined constitutional that we do have an individual mandate with respect to health insurance [in the U.S.].” Research economist at the Center for Retirement Research at BC Matt Rutledge closed the talk by addressing how the ACA more specifically affects older, retired citizens. “The Affordable Care Act basically had two major goals,” Rutledge said. “One was to increase coverage to people, the 48 million Americans that were uninsured … The other goal was the degree to which the forms associated with Obamacare lead to cost growth being controlled.”
occurring on campus as reported by the university itself, raised legal concerns that compelled us to investigate,” Lhamon said in a statement. The investigation will attempt to determine whether the university mishandled sexual-assault complaints, thus keeping the numbers relatively low. Under the 1990 Clery Act, colleges and universities are required to report campus crimes to the federal government. The Department of Education is charged with monitoring whether universities comply with the statute. Colleges that fail to comply or misreport information are subject to a fine of up to $35,000 per violation. According to data released by the Department of Education, on its main campus at College Park, Penn State reported four forcible sexual offenses in 2010; 24 in 2011; and 56 in 2012. Data for the 2013 academic year has yet to be released.
Tuesday, January 28 1:39 a.m. - A report was filed regarding property found at Corcoran Commons. 10:22 p.m. - A report was filed regarding medical services provided to a BC employee at Corcoran Commons. 10:19 p.m. - A report was filed regarding an elevator entrapment in Gasson Hall.
Wednesday, January 29 6:17 a.m. - A report was filed regarding property found in Devlin Hall.
—Source: The Boston College Police Department
The Heights Boston College – McElroy 113 140 Commonwealth Ave. Chestnut Hill, Mass. 02467 Editor-in-Chief (617) 552-2223 Editorial General (617) 552-2221 Managing Editor (617) 552-4286 News Desk (617) 552-0172 Sports Desk (617) 552-0189 Metro Desk (617) 552-3548 Features Desk (617) 552-3548 Arts Desk (617) 552-0515 Photo (617) 552-1022 Fax (617) 552-4823 Business and Operations General Manager (617) 552-0169 Advertising (617) 552-2220 Business and Circulation (617) 552-0547 Classifieds and Collections (617) 552-0364 Fax (617) 552-1753 EDITORIAL RESOURCES News Tips Have a news tip or a good idea for a story? Call Connor Farley, News Editor, at (617) 552-0172, or email news@bcheights. com. For future events, email a detailed description of the event and contact information to the News Desk. Arts Events The Heights covers a multitude of events both on and off campus – including concerts, movies, theatrical performances, and more. Call John Wiley, Arts and Review Editor, at (617) 552-0515, or email arts@bcheights.com. For future events, email a detailed description of the event and contact information to the Arts Desk. Clarifications / Corrections The Heights strives to provide its readers with complete, accurate, and balanced information. If you believe we have made a reporting error, have information that requires a clarification or correction, or questions about The Heights standards and practices, you may contact Eleanor Hildebrandt, Editor-in-Chief, at (617) 552-2223, or email eic@bcheights.com. CUSTOMER SERVICE Delivery To have The Heights delivered to your home each week or to report distribution problems on campus, contact Marc Francis, General Manager at (617) 552-0547. Advertising The Heights is one of the most effective ways to reach the BC community. To submit a classified, display, or online advertisement, call our advertising office at (617) 552-2220 Monday through Friday. The Heights is produced by BC undergraduates and is published on Mondays and Thursdays during the academic year by The Heights, Inc. (c) 2014. All rights reserved.
CORRECTIONS These corrections are in reference to the issue dated Jan. 27, 2013, Vol. XCV, No. 3.
In the article titled, ‘‘UGBC 2014-15 Candidate Teams Announced by EC,’’ it was misstated that Robert Watt was running for president. Michael Moazampour is running for president, and Watt for vice president. Vice presidential candidate Vance Vergara’s last name was also misspelled. In the article titled “Kelly, Eagles Put Up Strong Showing At Dartmouth Invitational,” it was misstated that Lexi Borr won her match against Brown 6-3. She won 6-3, 6-3. In the column titled “The BC Men’s Hockey Team’s Report Card,” it was misstated that Cam Spiro had graduated.
VOICES FROM THE DUSTBOWL “What New Year’s resolution have you already broken?”
“To be less clumsy. As soon as I landed in Boston, I tripped getting off the plane.” —Cherry Au, A&S ’17
“Taking the stairs to Lower ... I have yet to take them once.” —David Makransky, CSOM ’17
“Not to talk to strangers.” —Danny Davis, CSOM ’17
“Actually do my reading instead of reading Sparknotes.” —Luke Serra, CSOM ’17
The Heights
Thursday, January 30, 2014
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Being Professors honored for contributions to nursing ed present By Carolyn Freeman Heights Staff
Alex Gaynor It’s 5 a.m. Outside my window, the local dogs and roosters are already partaking in their daily brawl to find out who can be the loudest. Street vendors selling foods and beverages are already making their rounds, and the entire community begins to become alive. By this point, I’m usually frustrated, confused, but awake and ready to start my day in the Philippines where I’ll be living for the next four months. In seemingly mundane moments like this, I’ve been able to reflect on the importance of being present and appreciating experiences and events as they come. Being present has been my mantra during my time here thus far, and it will continue to be, so that I can take all of these situations and shape them into something more meaningful and life-giving. On an average day at Boston College, how present are we? A coffee date with a friend at Hillside is not just a coffee date—it’s a Facebook-browsing, Snapchatting, worrying-about-homework distraction. Our generation is challenged with being present in everyday life, and so often, we miss what’s actually significant. I’ve already discussed this in terms of appreciating the details in everyday life, but I think this idea permeates other realms as well. T.S. Eliot said that often, we simply go through the motions and have experiences but miss the meanings. Paying attention sometimes is the hardest thing to do in certain situations. Whether it’s sitting through a lackluster economics lecture, a long practice, or even a conversation, we so readily retreat to what David Foster Wallace refers to as our own “tiny skull sized kingdoms,” wherein we believe that the world revolves solely around us, our choices, and our problems. When we become imprisoned in these mental fortresses, being present to what’s actually happening in the world around us suddenly becomes paralyzing and difficult. By focusing on that less-than-desirable test score, Twitter, a questionable decision, and other trivial ideas, we may miss the experiences that are right in front of us and often hold more weight than what is off in the distance of our own minds. Many service trips and other social justice groups tend to enforce this idea of presence. The idea holds that only when one is fully present in a situation can he or she actively engage in reality and start to comprehend the stories that are below the surface and are only accessible once one is fully in the moment. At my Pulse placement freshman year, I found it easy to resort to thinking about my own problems, commitments, or relationships while I was on site, and for the first semester I wasn’t able to grasp what was truly going on in the lives of the clients and what the underlying social problems were. My professor told me to stop worrying about all of the distracting and insignificant things in life and really listen closely for the true stories that were being told, the ones below the surface. To understand these stories, I would have to be fully present in these truths. Engaging reality seems like an abstract term, but what it breaks down to are the simple notions of being present, attentive, observant, and open. It’s about embracing everyday experiences to illuminate the beautiful and complex below the surface, as well as distancing yourself from your own self-indulgent thoughts. Instead of concentrating on external issues, think about what you’re faced with right now. What are you really hearing? What is someone trying to tell you that may not be obvious? Only then can you begin to realize that the stories that have always been just out of reach below the surface of everyday understanding are more accessible and significant than you may think. So who knows, maybe the loud animals outside my window at 5 a.m. are actually trying to tell me something life-changing. All I have to do is clear my mind, and listen.
Alex Gaynor is a senior staff columnist for The Heights. She can be reached at news@bcheights.com.
Three members of the Connell School of Nursing (CSON) faculty will be honored for their contributions to nursing research and education at the Massachusetts Association of Registered Nurses convention on April 12. Lichuan Ye, an assistant professor in CSON, will be presented with the Excellence in Nursing Research Award for her research concerning sleep disorders. She became interested in sleep apnea and other sleep disorders after completing her residency in a pulmonary care unit. Ye, who is originally from China, received her bachelor of science in nursing and master of science from Sichuan University West China Medical School. She came to the United States in 2004 to earn her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Currently, Ye conducts research at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Four CSON undergraduate research fellows and three graduate students assist her with her
research. Working with students is one exciting part about doing research in Boston, she said. In addition to researching sleep apnea, Ye works to help patients sleep better during their stay at a hospital. She goes to different patient clinics and interviews patients on their sleep experiences in order to see what’s most important for the patients’ sleeping during their hospital stay. “I get to know the patient’s sleep, and I feel like my research is very important to patients,” Ye said. “That’s one big difference to clinical research—you feel like it’s very relevant to real life.” Jean O’Neil, an associate professor emeritus within CSON, will receive the Excellence in Nursing Education award. Her research interests include patient responses and validation of nursing diagnoses. She received her bachelor of science and master of science degrees at Boston College, and her Ed.D. at Boston University. O’Neil, who is a member of the adult health nursing department, taught students from the baccalaureate to the Ph.D. level before her retirement in 2002. She spent
time studying ways to improve testing, which led to individual tutoring and workshops to prepare students for the nursing board exam. She is still active in associations for nursing professionals, like the Massachusetts Association for Registered Nurses, American Nursing Association, NANDA International, and Sigma Theta Tau International. Between the years of 2002 and 2007, O’Neil presented the Jean A. O’Neil Nursing Achievement award to the graduating senior who went beyond expectations in persistence and conscientiousness. Judith Shindul-Rothschild, an associate professor within CSON, will be honored with the Mary A. Manning Mentoring Award. She worked as a psychiatric nurse clinical specialist before she earned her Ph.D. in sociology at BC and started work as a professor in 1991. She entered into the nursing profession as a way to provide for herself and her family. After she earned her bachelor of science at BC, she worked for a year as a psychiatric staff nurse at Lindemann
Mental Health Center and then went on to get her master of science degree at Yale. She returned to school to earn her Ph.D. after several years of working as a psychiatric nurse clinical specialist. “In the classroom, I get to really stimulate everybody’s thinking on a broader scale,” Shindul-Rothschild said. In 1996, Shindul-Rothschild published a study in the American Journal of Nursing about nurses’ views on the health care situation. The study, which was the largest survey of nurses at the time, was called, “Where Have All the Nurses Gone?” She was featured on Good Morning America and quoted in USA Today and Time. She was able to make a big difference in terms of the nurse-to-patient ratio in California, she said. Shindul-Rothschild described it as a highlight of her nursing career and said it launched her research and scholarly careers. The next year, she became the first woman elected by BC graduates to win the Golden Eagle Award. She was chosen for her work in helping the nursing profession gain autonomy and re-
spect. During the 1980s, ShindulRothschild worked with the Massachusetts Nursing Association to take part in strikes and legislative activity to fight the Massachusetts Medical Society, which at the time did not allow nurses to go into advanced practice. Now, Shindul-Rothschild teaches both undergraduate and graduate nursing courses. She also serves on the athletic advisory board, advises all of the nursing student-athletes, and helps them manage their schedules. “I take a great deal of pride in making sure they have a successful undergraduate experience here,” she said. Shindul-Rothschild tells the new graduates she advises that she expects them to be leaders in the profession of nursing. She was deeply honored by the nomination for the award, which came from one of her former mentees, she said. “I think what is most appealing to me about teaching is, frankly, the energy from the students,” she said. “I’m proud of my scholarship in research, but the BC nursing students are exceptional.” n
Bayles releases new book on American image, pop culture By Soo Jung Rhee Heights Staff
Juseub yoon / heights staff
Yale’s Jason Lyall discussed the influence of U.S. aid on violence in Afghanistan.
Lyall talks effects of aid to Afghanistan By Carolyn Freeman Heights Staff
Jason Lyall, associate professor of political science at Yale, spoke to students and faculty in Higgins 300 about the effects of U.S. violence and aid in Afghanistan on Jan. 28. His talk, titled, “Aid, Violence, and Post-2014 Afghanistan,” is part of the Afghanistan After 2014 lecture series. The lecture was divided into four parts: the effects of aid, the effects of violence, the intersection of aid and violence, and possible post-2014 scenarios. Lyall started by saying that much of what is happening in Afghanistan now will continue throughout the next year. When considering Afghanistan, it’s important to look at the whole picture, he said. “One thing the commentators get wrong about Afghanistan is that they look at one or the other,” he said. “To really understand Afghanistan I think you have to understand the intersection of aid and violence.” He then moved on to speak on one failed counter-insurgency theor y. USAID’s theor y that the insurgency is made up of unemployed males resulted in $275 million spent in the last three years on labor projects in Afghanistan to provide jobs. USAID believed that creating jobs for these young men would help to design an Afghan identity and thus keep them out of the Taliban. However, as Lyall explained, this theory was never based in legitimate science and ended up failing. His ultimate conclusion concerning aid was that the U.S.’s approach to aid will inevitably fail because it is given too much money to spend wisely. The aid that comes to Afghanistan is known as the “hard rain problem”: The money hit the country like a hard rain on pavement and went in many different directions. This set up a countrywide scramble for the resources, which increases violence and corruption and de-leg itimati ze s the Afghan government, he said. In addition, aid sent to decrease Taliban recruitment failed because the theories that underlie these packages are often wrong—men don’t join the Taliban due to grievances or lack of a job. The social science theory that says
unemployment leads to violence is probably not correct, Lyall said. “Radicalization often takes place after joining the organization, not before,” he said. Lyall then went on to discuss the effects of airstrikes and shows of force between 2006 and 2011. An airstrike can be multiple bombs dropped in one place, while a show of force consists of a military plane’s flying low over a village to intimidate the Taliban stationed there. While these acts are meant to decrease violence, Lyall explained that the opposite is actually true. “G e n e r a l l y, y o u i n c r e a s e insurgent violence. Every time you drop a bomb on a village you get more violence out of it,” he said. “The aid on the ground is creating incentives for violence, and then you’re airstriking on top of that which is creating incentives for violence. You start seeing the patterns of why we are where we are in Afghanistan.” In addition to problems with aid and violence, the decentralization of the Taliban has further complicated the issue. Due to airstrikes and headhunting efforts, the Taliban lacks central leadership. The overwhelming majority of the group’s senior commanders has been killed or has moved to Pakistan. Their positions have been refilled many times over, Lyall said. This has also led to increased radicalization, as the young Taliban soldiers launch attacks to try to show the new leadership how strong they are. The moderates are mostly dead, and the newly young and radical forces are difficult to negotiate with, Lyall said. In light of these issues, there are three scenarios likely to occur after 2014, Lyall said. First, the most likely scenario is to continue what is happening now: low-level intensity violence against Afghan forces and a decreasing number of bases open. Second, the Taliban is going to continue marching through Afghanistan to carve out an area they can control. Third— and least likely—is the possibility of a negotiated settlement. Lyall does not see this happening. “I don’t know why the Taliban would sign on if they think they’re winning,” he said. “They’re probably right on that. The best way to win a counter-insurgency campaign is never to have had one.” n
A cultural critic in numerous p u b l i c at i o n s a n d a f a c u l t y member of the Arts and Sciences Honors Program, Martha Bayles recently published her fourth book, Through a Screen Darkly: Popular Culture, Public Diplomacy, and America’s Image Abroad. In her book, Bayles expands her arguments about the decadent image of American pop culture and the lack of a general sense of constructive criticism against it. “It’s about the way American popular culture is shaping the perceptions of people around the world and of life in the United States ,” Bayles said. “[American popular culture] seems to have become the main influence in how people see America, and it’s good in some ways, but in other ways it’s not so good.” After travelling to 11 different countries and interviewing many experts in various fields, Bayles compile d what she learne d from the process into a 340page book in which she applied her critical lens to cer tain misleading images created by popular culture. “Our pop culture flooded into the rest of the world at a time when the U.S. government was no longer really tr ying to communicate what’s good about the country,” she said. “That takes you to looking at pop culture, and what does it say about America.” Although she b egan her writing career as a great admirer and defender of popular culture against c ynical critics who would dismiss it as a mere commercial product, she started to develop her doubt about
America’s reputation in the world following Sept. 11. “ I w o u l d d e fe n d w h at I thought was good stuff and that was my main purpose in writing about pop culture, to sort of defend it, particularly music,” she said. “That was my starting point but then came 9/11, and it turned out that a lot of the world really doesn’t love America or naturally gravitate toward America.” While she expressed her grief over the overly optimistic and
“I would like to see some awareness on the part of the entertainment industry of some of the messages they’re sending out there, and I would like to see more criticism of it.” - Martha Bayles author and professor, Arts & Sciences Honors Program naive outlook on the cultural character of America in the world, she recognized certain aspects of it as worthwhile to be widely spread in the global popular culture market. “I call that the American ethos, and I would describe that as a kind of hope for peoples’ ability to flourish and thrive under conditions of political liberty in a free society with
democratic institutions, but combined with a kind of caution and prudence about human nature and the limits of how w o n d e r f u l y o u c a n exp e c t people to be,” she said. Using The Wolf of Wall Street as an example, she pointed out that American popular culture has become a distorted image of Americans, which exaggerates the faults in U.S. society and creates it simply as a source of entertainment and laughter. The problem, she states, is that many parts of the world may take a mere “funhouse mirror image” as the reality facing America and misunderstand the playful portrayal of social phenomena in America. “I would like to see some awareness on the part of the entertainment industry of some of the messages they’re sending out there, and I would like to see more criticism of it,” she said. “I think we need to offset those images with something that … gives them an accurate picture.” B ay l e s a l s o a rg u e d th at mending the U.S. image abroad could not be more appropriate in the current state of the world w h e n s av v y, au t h o r i t a r i a n regimes still suffocate citizens with little or no political rights and nominal cultural freedom. “I think the one thing that America should stand for in the current world is notions o f p e o p l e h av i n g p o l i t i c a l freedoms and rights there that the government cannot tap on,” Bayles said. “And that’s just not true in a lot of countries. We talk about it, but then we project all these images that say ‘Well, you know, America’s really not that different from all these other countries,’ so it is extremely pertinent to today’s world. That’s why I wrote it.” n
The Heights
A4
Thursday, January 30, 2013
BC grads funded $15 million for money-sharing startup WePay, from A1
Graham beck / heights senior staff
The Boston College Athletic Department released additional financial information on scholarship distribution among student-athletes.
Athletics reports increasing aid for females Athletic Aid, from A1 said Athletic Director Brad Bates in an email. Bates was responding to a report in The Heights earlier this month in which information from the University’s Equity in Athletics report showed that male student-athletes, on average, received about $27,000 in athletics-related aid last year, while females received around $20,500. During the 2011-12 season, male studentathletes at BC received $5,000 more than females on average, while the difference was about $1,700 in favor of males in 2010-11. “Some scholarship dollars for female student-athletes are distributed differently than for the men to provide greater participation opportunities,” Bates said.
“We sponsor more women’s sports than men’s, creating more opportunities for female student-athletes.” BC sponsors 13 varsity sports for males and 16 varsity sports for females. While 187 females received athletics-related aid last year, the amount of countable aid for females was reported to be around 122. Countable aid takes includes the monetary amount of the scholarship in the total. So, for instance, two partial scholarships covering half the amount of a full scholarship would count as two scholarships for the total students receiving count, but would account for one scholarship in the countable total. For the 164 total males receiving athletics-related aid last year, the countable aid was listed at around 134. Two years ago, the countable aid for females was
listed as about 119 for the 179 females who received aid, and the countable aid for male athletes was listed at around 132 for the 157 males who received aid. These discrepancies, according to Assistant Athletic Director of Business Operation Chris Iacoi, can typically be attributed to the way in which scholarships are distributed in each individual sport. “In addition to the variances in the way the scholarships are allocated, expenses may vary due to summer school participation, housing and other factors,” Bates said. The financial aid total for student-athletes includes factors such as the dorms in which the student-athletes live, which vary in price. A student’s scholarship, as well as the amount, also transfers over to summer school if the student-athlete attends. n
an early prototype ourselves.” Later on, Clerico said that they hired a couple of students from MIT to work on the project part-time and connected with Peter Bell, a trustee of BC, who served as an early mentor. After being accepted into Y Combinator, an incubator program based out of Silicon Valley that fosters, advises, and offers seed funding to startups, they moved the company out west and set up in San Jose. He said that their next project was to get users and funding. “We raised some money—$1.7 million—led by August Capital and Max Levchin, the co-founder and CTO of Paypal in November of 2009,” Clerico said. When they were looking to raise money for their Series A funding, they did not go very far, turning to Bell and, through him, Highland Capital Partners, with whom they raised $7 million. By 2012, when WePay raised $10 million as its Series B round of financing, Clerico said that they were starting to change their product. “We started a transition,” Clerico said. “We moved away from group payments, person-to-person payments. Instead of helping individuals raise money, we are trying to build for platform businesses— marketplaces and crowd funding. We are working with big partners who leverage our product.” Now, Clerico said they are trying to make a shift again, albeit a different kind of one.
“I think the last series was about that transition,” Clerico said. “The Series C is about scale—it’s about scaling that strategy. There are two key initiatives. One is international expansion—a lot of the large companies want to be able to work cross-borders. The second is more flexibility … further invest in our product.” In choosing to leave investment banking to start up WePay, Clerico cited several influential experiences that he had while attending BC. “I took a couple of classes with professor John Gallagher—management info systems, TechTrek West, and that was for me a pivotal moment in sparking my interest in start-ups,” Clerico said. “It was the first time I set foot in Silicon Valley. It awoke a passion in me [for] business technology.” Another influential experience he had was his first venture, also with Aberman—a business that sold taxi advertisements but was ultimately unsuccessful. What was successful, however, was the BC Venture Competition (BCVC), which he started his senior year with a couple other BC students. “On the leadership side, I think of my time working with the American Red Cross in Boston,” Clerico said. “I volunteered on the Disasters Response Team. I became a Disasters Services Team Leader … it taught me a lot about being a team leader.” In addition to Clerico and Aberman, WePay now has BC grads in sales, support, and risk management, including one of Clerico’s classmates from TechTrek. n
Boston-area fraternity chapters seek to expand Greek life to BC By Mary Rose Fissinger Special Projects Editor Boston College brochures , tour guides, and admissions officers boast of the endless extracurricular opportunities for undergraduates at BC, citing the various a capella groups, volunteer organizations, and clubs, from the social justice-oriented to the recreational to the eccentric. When compared with similar lists at many other American universities, however, BC’s is conspicuously missing one element: Greek life. While many BC students do not mind the lack of fraternities and sororities, and some even chose BC in part because of their absence, several undergraduates have sought out opportunities to align themselves with Greek letters. The Massachusetts Iota chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon (Sig Ep) is a fraternity chapter comprised exclusively of BC students, though it is not affiliated with BC. Matt Freedman, a graduate student at BC who completed his undergraduate study at Texas Christian University, founded the chapter in 2009. He had been a member of TCU’s Sig Ep chapter, and felt that the culture at BC was ripe for Greek life. He contacted Sig Ep’s national headquarters, which sent representatives to BC in order to gauge interest among the undergraduate men. The interest proved substantial enough, and the chapter was started.
Sig Ep now has over forty members, all of whom attend BC. Not all BC students who have pledged a fraternity during their time here are in Sig Ep, however. The Ma ssachusett s B eta-Alpha Chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) is open to any student in the Boston area who attends a school that does not have an SAE chapter. Comprised mainly of students from BC, Boston University, and Northeastern University, the chapter also has some students from the Wentworth Institute of Technology. According to current member Henry Millette, A&S ’15, the Massachusetts Beta-Alpha chapter of SAE was founded in 2007 after the BU chapter was closed due to poor behavior. “We rose out of that as a drug-free, hazing-free alternative,” he said. Former president of SAE Casey Linehan, A&S ’14, spoke of SAE’s desire to separate themselves from the stereotypical fraternity. Under his tenure last year, their chapter won the national award for best health and safety among all SAE chapters in the country. “That’s particularly important in that that’s the kind of thing that gives fraternities their bad rep,” Linehan said. “You hear about kids making bad decisions and not being the best person they can be and hazing and drinking themselves into a stupor, and we’ve been very good about not making those decisions.”
Ryan Nick, former president of Sig Ep and A&S ’14, expressed similar sentiments in regard to Sig Ep’s mission as a fraternity, stressing that it was about community and not about partying. “That’s not what we’re about, we’re not animal house,” Nick said. “We’re trying to take freshman guys and give them this mentorship.” The mission within Sig Ep, according to Nick, is to be constantly improving themselves as individuals and as a collective chapter. To illustrate, he referenced something he was once told as a mantra for the recruitment period: “Recruit guys so that in four years, you couldn’t get into that chapter.” Similarly, Linehan decided to pledge SAE in large part because he felt the brothers were the type of people who would help him become a better man. “I’m very value-driven,” Linehan said. “I came to college not specifically for technical training but because I wanted the whole liberal arts education that encompasses bettering yourself as a person, and I met some of the seniors [in SAE] at the time [I was pledging] who I believed could push me to be better.” SAE’s values are summed up in the term “True Gentleman,” which Linehan said is “very much in line with what it means to be Catholic, not necessarily in faith but in terms of action and value.” Sig Ep also has a national fraternitywide value system. Theirs is known as the “Balanced Man Program,” which
“strives to mold deserving members into gentlemen, leaders, scholars, and athletes,” according to president of the chapter Tom Campbell, CSOM ’15. Despite Campbell and Nick’s belief that this value system closely parallels BC’s mottos of “Men and women for others” and “cura personalis,” the chapter’s relationship with University officials has been rather adversarial in the past, though Nick remarked that current sentiments are not so heated. In Sig Ep’s early months, they explored the possibility of becoming officially recognized by the University, but the University required that Sig Ep drop their Greek letters and become co-ed if they wished to be an official student organization. Unwilling to do this, the charter remains only affiliated with BC by virtue of the fact that every member is enrolled there. Consequently, all dealings between Sig Ep and the University are essentially conducted with the understanding that Sig Ep is an external organization. SAE, by nature of the fact that it draws members from four separate institutions, deals less with the University than Sig Ep. Both fraternities, however, spoke of the obstacles that not being affiliated with a university pose to recruitment. They are not able to host information sessions or recruitment events on campus, which leads to the majority of
recruitment being done informally, by word of mouth or flyer handouts. While Millette discovered SAE by researching fraternities available to him in the Boston area, most others happened accidentally upon the opportunity to pledge. Linehan first heard of SAE when his friend invited him to tag along to a rush event. Campbell and Nick both learned of Sig Ep by seeing the table they set up on College Road at the beginning of each semester. All four of them said that people’s responses to hearing that they are in a fraternity at BC vary greatly from person to person. Campbell remarks that reactions range from “disgust to intrigue,” and Nick calls it an “uphill battle” toward convincing people that it his involvement in a fraternity is a worthwhile and formative experience. Nick also remarked that the culture among males at BC, which is often called “fratty” despite the lack of Greek life, may make certain people nervous about the presence of fraternities because they worry that it could quickly spiral out of control. For several reasons, Linehan and Nick agreed that it will be a long time, perhaps forever, before the administration allows Greek life to become officially a part of BC. “Where the future of fraternities lies in the student body population depends on whether or not students want to get involved in it,” Linehan said. n
CWBC offers advice on leadership, careers to female undergraduates CWBC, from A1 and career opportunities. “The entire process of developing a career plan is hard work, and the Career Center is here to prepare students for that process,” Bates said. “In addition to the Career Center, there are numerous resources and programs, such as this one, available to students—it is important to utilize the faculty, administrators, and alumni.” The panel featured four alumnae who spoke on the transition between graduation and entering the job market, with specific focus on the importance of networking. The panelists included Erin Barrett, CSON ’11; Melanie Toner, A&S ’11; Minela Gacanovic, CSOM ’11; and Amy Calhoun, A&S ’10. Barrett, after deciding to pursue medicine and transferring from A&S to CSON, currently works at Massachusetts General Hospital in the Cardiac Arrhythmia Stepdown Unit. Toner, a communications major with a pre-law focus, is completing her third year of study at Suffolk Law School, while also interning at the Attorney General’s Office in the consumer protection division. Gacanovic, a finance and marketing major, recently left her job in foreign exchange trading at Barclays to work in foreign exchange trading at Bank of America
Merrill Lynch. Calhoun, with a degree in chemistry, currently works for Novartis, specializing in the area of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. The featured speaker, Alesia Latson, discussed the importance of maintaining and managing a personal brand. Latson received her M.A. in training and development from Lesley University, and she has previously held management and organizational development roles in financial services organizations, healt care, and government. As an expert in leadership and organizational development, Latson works with organizations to help expand their management and leadership effectiveness, using concepts and strategies such as personal branding. Latson spoke on the importance of conscious personal branding in business and in the marketplace. “The concept of personal branding is simple—it’s your operative reputation,” Latson said. “Strong brands are managed well, with intentional outcomes.” According to Latson, in any career field, personal distinction can be achieved through attentiveness to personal branding. “This notion of personal branding is a strategy, and the end goal is a heightened sense of self-awareness and self-ownership, with intentionality in every interaction,” she said. “Successful
personal branding is achieved through persona, product, packaging, promotion, and permission.” “It is important, especially in the work environment, that one seeks to create partnerships with your colleagues, so that working relationships are healthy and productive,” Latson said. “Branding is about cultivating a genuine interest in others and being aware of other’s emotional responses.” Latson’s message of self-assuredness in the workplace was especially relevant for the audience of future young professionals. “For women, oftentimes we are hesitant to grant ourselves legitimacy—we are preoccupied with this concept of inadequacy,” she said. “It is important to believe in one’s own capability and competence in order to validate one’s rightful position in the work environment.” Beyond the panelists, numerous other alumnae and members of the Council of Women were in attendance. The alumnae spoke and networked personally with the undergraduate students following the program. “BC alumni are a phenomenal resource to the students,” Bates said. “I have never seen a group of people so willing to engage with their undergraduates and give back, and this program is proof of that.” n
Graham beck / heights senior staff
Featured speaker Alesia Watson spoke to students about developing leadership roles.
CLASSIFIEDS Thursday, January 30, 2014
The Heights The Heights
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Directions: The Sudoku is played over a 9x9 grid. In each row there are 9 slots, some of which are empty and need to be filled. Each row, column and 3x3 box should contain the numbers 1 to 9. You must follow these rules: 路 Number can appear only once in each row 路 Number can appear only once in each column 路 Number can appear only once in each 3x3 box
A5 A5
The Heights
A6
Thursday, January 30, 2014
CWBC offers much to BC female undergrads
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.
Council has done important work in connecting students and alums, hosting alum panels
Letters to the Editor
The Council for Women of Boston College (CWBC)—an alumnae organization committed to engaging the women of BC’s community and expanding upon involvement and leadership options available to women at BC—held an event on Tuesday night, “Preparing for the Journey: What’s Your Brand,” with the aim of helping female undergraduates shape a plan for career development. A panel of recent graduates spoke on the transition between college and the workplace, specifically addressing the challenges that women face in building and maintaining self-confidence in the professional world. The “Preparing for the Journey” series is only one of the valuable resources that the CWBC has offered since its inception in 2002. The council endeavors to maintain contact with recent alumnae, hosting “Beginning the Journey,” “Continuing the Journey,” and “Refining the Journey” events, each aimed at
female graduates in different stages of their careers, and held in various cities across the country. This network is beneficial for women in transition post-graduation, providing a support system that many alumnae might otherwise lack. Especially in the face of recent concerns about declining female self-confidence in college, and at BC in particular, CWBC events on campus fulfill an important role by providing the opportunity for students to hear personal testimonies from successful BC alumnae and to network w ith them. Students should draw upon CWBC’s resources—alongside the Connections Mentoring program, which matches undergraduate women with alumnae who serve as personal and professional mentors, these programs have the potential both to expand the role of women at BC and to better prepare female undergraduates for their future careers.
Development discussion should be more inclusive Walsh should not waste opportunity to follow through on proposed BRA reforms At a public hearing hosted by a working group focused on arts and culture in the transition committee of Mayor Martin J. Walsh, WCAS ’09, members of the Boston arts community cited real estate as one of their most prominent concerns, and some expressed the opinion that the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) has made decisions in the past that were contrary to their interests. For example, the Fort Point Arts Community Inc. (FPAC), a non-profit organization formed to promote local artists, has been vocal about its difficulties with the BRA in the past. While the BRA recently disbursed $100,000 to FPAC as part of the community benefits agreement for the Channel Center development, the problems that FPAC and other arts advocacy groups face cannot be remedied simply through increased funding. Moreover, the issues
Over the course of the 20-year Menino administration, the arts community is just one of many Boston constituencies that has become disgruntled with the way the BRA has functioned. Along with other area universities, BC has faced difficulties in working with the BRA, which has typically been both opaque and reticent to approve new building projects. of planning, zoning, and city development—and how they affect the arts community—are not as far removed from the everyday life of the average Boston College student as they might initially appear. While BC students are often critiqued for staying inside the “BC Bubble,” those who do venture downtown often do so in order to take advantage of the city’s cultural offerings—whether that be through a trip to the MFA or an excursion to see a play, comedy show, or another performance at one
of the many venues downtown. Many students thus interact with the artistic community of Boston vis-a-vis their public output. BC students who choose to stay and work in Boston after graduation are also affected by the city’s policies regarding zoning for housing. BC students are affected by the growth policies of Boston in more immediate ways, as well. Over the course of the 20-year Menino administration, the arts community is just one of many Boston constituencies that has become disgruntled with the way the BRA has functioned. Along with other area universities, BC has faced difficulties in working with the BRA, which has typically been both opaque and reticent to approve new building projects. For example, the recent effort to obtain approval from the BRA for the construction of a new dorm on the site of the current More Hall was fraught with political wrangling. Members of the Allston-Brighton community exerted their influence through their Boston City Council representative in order to delay the BRA’s approval of BC’s building plans until after the University agreed to an extensive benefits package for the community, despite the fact that the development is set to be on the University’s own land and is a fair distance from the affected community. While campaigning for mayoral office, Walsh offered a new vision for development in Boston. He said that he planned to overhaul the BRA soon after entering office and replace it with a new, more transparent institution— what he called the Boston Economic Development Authority. This was a bold plan, given the vested interest in continuing business as usual. In the past few months, Walsh has hinted that he might not move so quickly to replace the BRA. As he has just entered office and has experience working directly with the BRA as a representative of a buildings trade union, Walsh has an unprecedented opportunity to offer the Boston community a fresh commitment to independent development. The chance to reform such a powerful and wide-reaching government institution, one with a significant and immediate impact on the city of Boston and its surrounding environs, should not be wasted. If and when Walsh moves forward to reform the BRA, he should include those previously underrepresented parties who have significant stakes in construction, including university administrators and members of the local arts community.
Heights
The
The Independent Student Newspaper of Boston College Established 1919 Eleanor Hildebrandt, Editor-in-Chief Marc Francis, General Manager Joseph Castlen, Managing Editor
Editorial
Kayla Famolare, Copy Editor Connor Farley, News Editor Connor Mellas, Sports Editor Kendra Kumor, Features Editor John Wiley, Arts & Review Editor Ryan Towey, Metro Editor Andrew Skaras, Opinions Editor Mary Rose Fissinger, Special Projects Editor Emily Fahey, Photo Editor Maggie Powers, Layout Editor
QUOTE OF THE DAY -Richard Feynman (1918-1988), American physicist and Nobel Prize in Physics recipient
The following letter is in response to “University weighs Campus School move” by Mary Rose Fissinger, originally published on 1/23/14:
What the Campus School move really is Question: who’s got the tougher job—Justin Bieber’s parole officer or Jack Dunn’s fact checker? As I read the story on the Campus School [Heights, January 23], my stomach getting tighter with each paragraph, I hoped for something I never hoped for in my life—that The Heights was misquoting the administration; that Jack Dunn had never really said the things he was quoted as saying. Here’s the spokesman for a Jesuit University, a university committed to the ideal of men and women for others, for the faith that does justice, sounding like a slimy mob lawyer, sowing just enough confusion to get a hung jury. Dunn tells The Heights: this is just an affiliation, a merger, an opportunity to meld all that’s best in the Campus School with the superior amenities of KDS. Who could be against it? Just some closedminded parents who for some reason don’t trust a university administration that’s willing to trash them—these heroic people—to make its case to the campus newspaper! Even some mob lawyers wouldn’t stoop that low. Let’s be honest. What’s planned is NOT a merger, NOT a partnership of two schools working together. BC’s plan means the elimination of the Campus School and the dispersal of its students— some to KDS, others to God knows where. Dunn even says he wants to foster the spirit of the Campus School at KDS; so BC will provide a van for student volunteers to visit the facility. But the spirit of the Campus School is the constant
human interaction, the hubbub, the life communicated to these kids from the volunteers, the staff, the steady stream of buddies. I worked at the Campus School as an undergrad, and that spirit flows in two directions. I may have given them something. But they gave me more. I think everyone who’s worked at the Campus School would say the same. That’s why, when Dunn talks about fostering the spirit of the Campus School by running vans of volunteers to KDS for occasional visits, he shows that he knows nothing at all about that spirit and has no real interest in fostering it. But Jack Dunn isn’t really the problem. He’s just a mouthpiece. He’d never be able to spin and talk trash if Fr. Leahy weren’t behind him. And that’s why the Campus School will close. The Jesuit President wants that space for some Big Plan. The kids are in the way. And so the kids must go. It’s that simple. In a few years, when the Big Plan is completed, there’ll probably be a grand opening, specially catered. And three miles away, in a nicely renovated facility, there’ll be some lonely kids, who used to feel the loving chaos that was the spirit of the Campus School, sitting in their wheelchairs, waiting for the van to come. Shame on you, Boston College. Shame on you. Adam DeMuro BC ’97
Three trends that UGBC policy leaders must address There is a gripping election in the works on the Heights. A previously uncontested election has heated up, and the annual campaign energy has started to course through campus. The candidates will have several platform points—some more serious than others. They should be paying close attention to three trends that will shape both the immediate and long-term prospects of this University. The hybridization of the sciences and humanities, the diversification of the student body, and the execution of the [Institutional] Master Plan will affect every Boston College student and Eagles to come. The student body and its representatives must have a say in these matters that will profoundly shape BC. As a Jesuit university, the hybridization of the humanities and the sciences speaks to the heart of what it means to have a holistic, liberal arts education. No one will dispute that fostering both of these broad academic categories is necessary. The issue is how best to pursue the integration of the greatest aspects of time-tested humanities in a climate that demands graduates be more exposed to STEM fields. We have seen massive investments into STEM and a higher-level focus on attracting more researchers and award-winning scientists that bring BC both prestige and grants. Strengthening our STEM resources is a step in the right direction. Where student policymakers must be involved, however, is to become more outspoken on how STEM can strengthen and not replace our history of liberal arts education. Rather than only competing against other schools directly on the strength of our STEM departments at the expense of the humanities, does not BC have much to gain from offering an innovative hybridization of the two? I certainly think so, and more students should be outspoken regarding the fate of their ultimate gift from BC—their education. Our education is strengthened through conversations—conversations that are taking place with ever more diverse peers from different walks of life around the world. Our student body has more women, AHANA, international, and socioeconomically diverse students than it has ever had in its history. This trend will continue as our world becomes more globalized and so long as we maintain our commitment to financial aid. All this being said, student leaders can play a large part in
fostering an environment that is both inclusive and allows for discussion. Cliques are the easy way out. Earlier and more intensive outreach to all students to get them involved reaps substantial long-term benefits. Strengthening our mental health resources for a diverse student patient population is another step, and informing students of just how diverse the Heights has become should be seen as a source of community pride and progress. Of course, there are few things as visible as new buildings when it comes to progress. Student leaders should be prepared for more sightings and sounds of cranes, masonry, and heavy machinery. The election and inauguration of alum Marty Walsh only adds to BC’s list of illustrious graduates. The policies supported by our new mayor and his signals so far would indicate greater political and local support for BC to move forward with its campus building plan. The elements of this plan have been set long ago, and elements of its completion will take years. And yet, student leaders must take the long-view when advocating on matters related to construction. The quality, cost, and inclusion of resources that have been supported by every UGBC administration since the plan’s unveiling must not only be continuously lobbied for but even more vigorously campaigned. If our school is to be radically altered physically, from the building of new structures and the demolition of old ones from the Plex, Edmonds, and areas bordering Campanella Way, then our student leaders must be bullish in ensuring that student positions are not only heard but actively taken into consideration. No matter what campaign students consider— be it the classic insider, outsider, and dark horse tickets—they should make a decision based off how well each team can address these trends, at least in part. Success in this election will be determined by each team’s success in messaging complex and nuanced solutions to the student body. Admittedly, UGBC does this poorly. We need a team that has gripped not only the ideas but how to rouse the entire student body to action for the next year and those to come. Matthew Alonsozana UGBC Executive Vice President A&S ’14
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The Heights
Thursday, January 30, 2014
A7
Bridging the gap
Jovani Hernandez Deporting Justin Bieber - Apparently, a petition has been going around in an attempt to deport Justin Bieber. Recently, Bieber has been involved in several legal entanglements, one in Florida over an alleged drunk driving incident, and another in California regarding a possible felony egging in his Calabasas neighborhood. The petition claims that he is a poor representation of pop culture, as well as being reckless and a bad example. It seems unlikely that either of these cases will be cause for deportation, but another argument is being circulated by a Washington Post writer that he should be deported based on the visa that he has—one for those with “extraordinary ability in the arts.” Now, that case sounds pretty reasonable to us. Loose-Leaf Tea - On a cold winter’s day, there is nothing that warms the soul quite as much as a nice cup of tea. While most people who consume that wonderful ambrosia of the gods use tea bags to prepare their beverages, some venturous souls—such as we at TU/TD—venture out into the great, uncharted territory that is the land of looseleaf tea. It is a mystical place, where establishments such as Teavana go to stock up their vast stores of loose-leaf tea, and it has more different varieties than there are types of Beanie Babies. There are types that sound like an alien species—such as Oolong. So go get a cup of hot water, find a strainer, and indulge in the wonders of loose-leaf tea. You won’t regret it.
Chestnut Hill, Mass. is 195 miles away from the Bronx, N.Y., but every time I return home for a break, the two locations seem to get farther apart from one another. Prior to coming to Boston College for the third orientation as an incoming freshman, I had never visited the Jesuit institution. In fact, I had no intention of enrolling at BC. Instead, my plan was to attend Syracuse University and study journalism. My decision to attend ‘Cuse was based off a visit I made during my junior year of high school. Although the weather impeded my group’s tour of the campus that day, the rain allowed us to spend more time in one of the dining halls. After piling up greasy food on my tray, a group of guys offered my fellow high-schoolers and me space at a table and effortlessly sparked up a conversation with us. One of the students was also from the Bronx, so we knew some of the same people, lived in similar neighborhoods, and shared interests. I felt right at home. The college-preparatory program I was a part of throughout high school had a long-standing affiliation with ‘Cuse, meaning my chance of getting accepted was high. As I had heard before (and the group of guys attested to), ‘Cuse wasn’t difficult, its parties resembled what was depicted in Project X, and its female students would have your eyes popping out of their sockets and jaw on the ground. Maybe some things were exaggerated, but the consensus I gathered from alumni and Google searches was that ‘Cuse’s social scene was top-notch among all colleges in the country. Since I was soon to be a first-generation college student, my idea of what college would be like came from American Pie, How High, and Accepted. Now, as a sophomore at BC, I realize that my vision of what college would be like was skewed (though I’m still waiting to hear from the South
Rogue Ice Patches - They are dirty rotten scoundrels, those black ice patches. You are just walking along, minding your own business, when BOOM, all of a sudden, you’re flat on your back and you don’t know why. It’s all because of those sneaky, hidden patches of black ice. They are better hidden than the art stolen by the Nazis during World War II and sneakier than a CIA operative trying to assassinate Fidel Castro. Those dastardly entities are impossible to spot until it is too late and you are halfway to becoming intimately connected with the sidewalk.
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tions I’ve had with friends who attend ‘Cuse and several NY state schools, one of their main talking points is always the social scene. To be quite frank, I’m not a fan of the party scene at BC. Perhaps I’m not hanging out with the right people or hanging out in the right places, but that’s beside the point. In comparison, friends who attend the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, and Georgetown University always bring up that there aren’t many of us at these schools. Through my personal experiences as a firstgeneration Latino male at BC and with social science classes at BC, I have been exposed to injustice, inequality, and struggle that have targeted and continue to target marginalized groups. A lot of the required literature in the sociology courses offered at BC speaks to experiences that those who identify with me and I have lived. Therefore, I find it necessary to become a voice for those with no opportunity to speak. At BC, I am living out this newfound duty, but I oftentimes feel as though my work is going unnoticed and unappreciated by those whom I’m trying to help. People in my community commonly perish in the same under-resourced, poverty-stricken, crime-ridden neighborhoods in which they are born and bred. The highbrow conversations I’m part of here are not ones I partake in back home, because my peers and relatives are not educated in the same fashion. I constantly travel between the world that exists back home and the one that exists at one of the top 40 universities in the country. My dilemma may seem rooted in issues of race and class, but the struggle to create a link between two or more things is fundamental to the human experience. It is our job, however, as learned individuals to spread the message we are taught at BC in order to raise the quality of life. Although the task of bringing St. Ignatius’ flame back to one of the poorest congressional districts in the USA is daunting, I’m confident that I will make our founder, those rooting for me, and myself proud.
Jovani Hernandez is a staff columnist for The Heights. He can be reached at opinions@bcheights.com.
Now fear this!
Patrick Angiolillo
Sochi Security 2014 - Right now, we are less than a week away from the beginning of the 2014 Winter Olympics, but things are not looking good. Although the days of the Olympics acting as the battle grounds for a proxy Cold War between the USSR and the U.S. are long behind us, things seem to be quite icy in the days leading up to this year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. There have been numerous allegations of corruption, nepotism, favoritism, and even one death threat to a Russian whistleblower. A former deputy director of the CIA has called into question Russia’s cooperation with the U.S. government’s attempts to ensure the safety of U.S. athletes and spectators, and some members of Congress have echoed this sentiment. This is rather disappointing given the tendency of the Olympics to bring even antagonistic nations together in the pursuit of sport. If Russia and America are going to butt heads, it should at least be in the hockey rink, where we can watch them check each other with abandon. Now, that would be a show worth watching.
Harmon Institute of Technology). As the deadline for my final decision as to which college I’d attend drew nearer, ‘Cuse was removed from the last round of options because the school’s population was too large, I didn’t like journalism that much (ironic, huh?), and I was willing to sacrifice the parties for the academics. Plus, the very thing that drew me to ‘Cuse in the first place is what eventually turned me away—I envisioned ‘Cuse to be a continuation of high school because many of my friends would be enrolled there and because it had a fair representation of students with backgrounds similar to mine. Syracuse University is most likely a perfect fit for me, but I wanted to experience opposition throughout my college career in order to step out side of my comfort zone and I felt that ‘Cuse would not be adequate in this department. Although at the time attending BC seemed like a challenge solely because I only knew two people out of 9,100 undergraduates, obstacles pertaining to socio-economic status, race, and educational background have been at the crux of my struggles—but I wasn’t able to fathom these difficulties until experiencing three semesters at this University. Had I gone to ‘Cuse, I suspect things would be different than they are now, but more like how they were in high school—I would have been reserved, so I (most likely) wouldn’t have gotten into performing spoken word, been involved with culture clubs, volunteer and service programs, or writing what you’re reading. Even though I’m still faintly aloof, BC has challenged me to overcome (or at least combat) certain limitations that held me back in high school—I’ve been unsettled into action against certain aspects of myself that I believe would have persisted had I gone to ‘Cuse. My thoughts on the person I’d be had I chosen orange over maroon and gold largely derive from what I’m told by and see in my friends who do attend ‘Cuse. Don’t get me wrong—my friends are great, intelligent people who will be better off than others because they’ve attended a reputable four-year college, but I can’t help but feel as though they’ve become conformist—members of the utopic fifth party school, according to The Huffington Post. In conversa-
I have a policy about spiders. Some might disagree with me. PETA would probably be outraged—guessing by their reaction to the president killing a fly some time ago. Others, though, might concur. My policy runs thus: All spiders, by virtue of their being, ought not to be. Yes, I kill spiders. Because I despise them. Because they frighten me. My disdain for these eight-legged monsters is not a new phenomenon in my life. When I was in middle school, I distinctly recall a moment in Ms. Cotter’s sixth grade English class when the most hellish albino spider I can think of had chosen the wrong day to creep across my desk in the back of the room. No sooner had the little bugger found his way to the top of my desk than I had prepared myself for retaliation. In a flash of what can only be described as blind furry, I had crushed the little beasty, flipping my chair backwards and my desk over forwards. The battle was won quickly, but not without frightening Ms. Cotter and the rest of the class. I still think they did not fully appreciate the valiant nature of my quick action! Flash forward several years and I was digging on an excavation in Ashkelon, Israel. We were uncovering some monumental Roman architecture when a stir ran through the grid. A very large, very mean, very dangerous-looking spider had made a home in the vomitorium (which is actually just an entranceway in Roman-theater-speak, and nothing more). I, the resident anti-spiderfaction leader and something of an American vigilante in Israel, took it upon myself to deal with the pest. I charged the beast with trowel and patiche in hand! The tiny fellow hopped and lept, ever narrowly escaping the heavy ends of my tools. After landing on and cracking part of the vomitorium’s archway, I gave in. The beast had won the battle—but
Lecture Hall
not the war! I would be ready should he show his creepy face again. Luckily, he went his way and never returned. Fear is a peculiar phenomenon, though not inexplicable. Along with several other emotions like joy, sadness, and anger, fear is one of our foundational emotions. More than this, it is a necessary part of our biological selves. The question of whether animals in general feel fear is not a simple one. In fact, it has been debated for some time, with some arguing that (at least certain) animals do possess consciousness and fear, and others proposing a stimulus-response sort of dynamic that can explain what may appear as fear. To be certain, though, we humans possess the cognitive ability to feel fear, and it has helped us along in our evolutionary progress. As early as a few months, babies show signs of fear. They react to unfamiliar environments and unexpected changes. Separation and stranger-anxiety appear in the child rather early, as well. When they can begin recalling past events, they will remember that Mommy was just with them, but now she is not—this anxiety can lead to crying and fearful facial expressions. Although these fears or emotions are not equivalent to the more complex cognitive emotions and thought processes that adolescents or adults undergo, they are insights into the development of human fear at our earliest stages of life. But this kind of development of fear is a necessary, biological development. The sensory cortex in the brain processes what our senses might tell us are threats or dangers. These are stored in the memory and later brought to the forefront in different circumstances. We might engage the fightor-flight response to a threatening stimulus, or we might become fearful or anxious about another. Either way, this natural process enables us to survive, to react to our environments in appropriate, life-preserving ways. Then there are phobias. Much like my description above, phobias are anxieties about objects or situations disproportionate to the real threat posed. They are often categorized popularly as irrational fears. My fear of spiders, while explicable to a degree, is somewhat irrational when it leads to scream-
ing, flipping desks, or breaking monumental architecture. These sorts of phobias are often treated with behavioral or psychological therapies. In some cases, dealing with a phobia can be a real challenge for the sufferer. In others, it can be more manageable. I make light of my arachnophobia, but truly debilitating fears can overcome people. What, then, should we make of fear in general? Obviously, fear is not something we should let conquer us. In all cases, whether the fear is generated from a real or imagined threat, it is not good for us to be drowned in it. But neither is it good for us to be wholly absent of fear. Flagrant disregard for fear might make someone bolder and more daring, but it can also make someone “stupider,” as Dr. Kelly McGonigal claims in her article “Why We Need a Little Fear,” posted on Psychology Today in 2010. She explains that fear, though disliked at times, is a necessary part of making good, self-controlling decisions. It can help us manage our behavior, our relationships, our finances, and much more. To fear, then, is to be wise … at least that is part of it. We might be tempted to cling to pithy quotes like “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” (President Franklin Roosevelt) or “Even though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil” (Psalm 23), and to curse or spurn our fears. But we should not underestimate the value of fear. It is a humbling thought to know that fear is necessary and would be missed should it disappear. It is equally humbling to know that it can overwhelm someone beyond the point of recovery. It is hard to say “control your fears, son!” and have that be it. There is no secret trick to having the “right amount” of fear. It just is. But I think we can call for respect. As Benjamin Disraeli put it: “Fear makes us feel our humanity.” Simply recalling that we ought to be neither invincibly bold nor crushingly timid might help us remember our humanity.
Patrick Angiolillo is a staff columnist for The Heights. He can be reached at opinions@bcheights.com.
BY PAT HUGHES
The opinions and commentaries of the staff columnists and cartoonists appearing on this page represent the views of the author or artist of that particular piece, and not necessarily the views of The Heights. Any of the columnists and artists for the Opinions section of The Heights can be reached at opinions@bcheights.com.
Finding the right balance Emma Vitale Classes are in full swing with another semester’s worth of readings, exams, and papers. Clubs have started to pick up again, with the Spring Involvement Fair reminding you of all the opportunities you should be taking advantage of, making you question how you’re spending your time at Boston College. A pesky thing called student debt is perpetually weighing on your mind. There are relationships here to cultivate and solidify, and relationships at home to maintain. Everyone is asking what your plans are for the summer, and if you don’t already have some fancy internship in Boston, New York, or D.C. lined up, you’d better figure something out, and fast. Not to mention this polar vortex hitting the nation that is unquestionably related to the frighteningly increasing rate of global warming, and the wars in Syria and other parts of the world claiming thousands of lives every day. Plus, the lions are dying. (Really—they’re almost extinct in Western Africa). What’s a person to do? There’s a well-known joke for college students that says that out of the choices of sleep, grades, and a social life, you can pick two. It’s funny and relatively accurate, but we have so much more going on than just those three categories. And I don’t mean to sound all “woe is me” (or rather, “woe is us”), because obviously we are some of the most privileged individuals out there to be able to attend an elite four-year university like BC. Our struggles don’t even begin to compare to the more global issues other populaces face, some of which I mentioned. But that’s part of what I’m trying to say. How can we begin to confront the “big” issues in the world when we can’t even confront the pressures of our own life on the Heights? With the advent of 2014, one of my resolutions was to take things one at a time. I’m a stresser, and I seem to be always worrying about so many things at once—even those I have no control over. But this year will be different, I told myself—I’m going to relax and just see where the year takes me. Such is the idealism of winter break. Then comes the return to school and the return to reality (albeit BC bubble reality). All of a sudden, within a week, I’m feeling more overwhelmed by all that’s before me than I remember ever feeling before. The pressure to succeed, coupled with the pressure to impress while still enjoying college life is overwhelming at best and nauseating at worst. I can find no possible way to focus on one class when there are four others waiting to consume my time, or to focus on one relationship when there are 12 others I want to develop. And there are still the dying lions to think about. So that resolution went out the window rather quickly. Another goal for 2014 was to take advantage of more opportunities, the old “just say ‘yes’” mantra. Keeping busy actually tends to help focus and productivity, and it doesn’t sound too difficult at the outset—just say “yes.” So you do. You say “yes” to this class, and that club, and this intramural team, and that internship fair, and very quickly these formerly welcomed opportunities become the source of the stress, and the heart of the problem. Taking on too much when the norm is already too much is a recipe for destruction—or at the very least, for unnecessary stress and unhappiness. Wanting to do everything is a classic weakness of high achievers, and BC is full of high achievers. It seems that everywhere you look on campus there are people who are achieving “better” than you. The president of this club was also an OL last summer and is an Appalachia trip leader and is in 4Boston and is a spin instructor and is overloading on classes and has time to go out on weeknights—the list goes on. But this illusion of the perfectly chaotic life is just that—an illusion. Sure, many people like keeping busy and are involved in a lot of activities, but there is a limit to how much one person can take on. When you overextend yourself, you run the risk of losing not only sleep but also the cliched but truly necessary “me” time or, if we’re being dramatic, your sanity. So what is the solution, the best way to deal with all that we have going on? Drop some commitments? It might help, but you risk regret and feeling unfulfilled. Plus, some commitments you can’t avoid, like the need to solidify summer jobs or internships. Ignore everything and take a nap? Gratifying, but probably not wise. Ignore all but the most essential task at hand? Efficient, but it still leaves the other commitments waiting on the sidelines for the perfect moment to overwhelm the mind. I don’t have the answer—I’m still trying to figure it out myself and likely will be for a while. I don’t know how to achieve everything I want to without sacrificing too much of who I am and what I can handle, and beyond that I don’t know how to fulfill my duties at BC without feeling guilty for not having the time or wherewithal to help with global causes I care about. What I do know is that I want to create a life for myself in which I don’t have to choose between grades, sleep, a social life, saving the lions, or any other goal.
Emma Vitale is a staff columnist for The Heights. She can be reached at opinions@bcheights.com.
The Heights
A8
Thursday, January 30, 2014
BC vs. Virginia Tech Basketball, from A10
defense is most vulnerable. The sequence was momentary, but it allowed Anderson to get to the rack twice. After Johnson’s initial zone experiment proved unsuccessful, the Hokies switched back to the man, but the players looked confused. Orange shirts were littered around the paint. The visitors were lost. They were forgetting to cover their men and allowing BC to get open looks. Again, the Eagles took advantage.
Possession after possession, BC exploited Virginia Tech. After Johnson’s switch, Dragicevich nailed a three to give the Eagles a 23-12 advantage and the rout was on. “One of the things was less dribbling, more passes,” Rahon said. “So, yeah, we spread the floor. If you have a lane you dribble, you drive, you penetrate, draw somebody, you kick. If that guy doesn’t have a shot and makes an extra pass and you kind of just play from there, and you just play loose, free basketball.” The Eagles were moving the ball very
Emily Fahey / Heights Editor
Joe Rahon led the Eagles’ scoring effort, amassing 20 points, including five 3-pointers.
well and shredding the Virginia Tech defense again and again. “I think that had a lot to do with Boston College,” Johnson said. “I think they dribbled, drove, even against the zone. They drove the lane. We had to help and once you’ve got the help on the ball and don’t contain the ball with this man on the zone, now your defense is in scramble situation and they put us in scramble situation way too many times tonight.” Donahue’s offense was firing on all cylinders. The ball moved with ease around the perimeter and when BC drove, it was easy for the man with the ball to kick it out to the open man. “The ball always seems to go in more if it’s whipped around the perimeter—three or four passes, no dribbles,” Rahon said. “It always seems that that guy’s shooting, that ball’s always going to go in. Today we were able to get a lot of open looks and we knocked them out.” The easy shots kept coming for Rahon, who finished with 20 points, 15 of which came from 3-pointers. In the first half, Rahon got his hands dirty on the defensive end as well. In addition to laying out, he defended on the arc. Just before his hustle play, Rahon picked off a pass from Will Johnston and ran the floor, curling his way to the bucket for an easy layup to put BC up 28-19 with 7:23 left in the first half. With that effort, BC was off and running. Donahue’s team held a commanding 13point, 46-33 lead heading into the break. The team’s lead came without the help of Olivier Hanlan. Taking just one shot in the first half, he was quiet. He put up five points and all of them came from the stripe. To start the second half, the sophomore guard hit consecutive triples to give the Eagles a 21-point lead. Once Hanlan got going, though, he picked up a technical foul, which brought him up to four personals on the night. It forced Donahue to bench his leading scorer, putting pressure on the rest of the team. Hanlan’s teammates were able to rise to the occasion. Rahon was able to drain two
Emily Fahey / Heights Editor
Patrick Heckmann scored 14 points off the bench to aid the Eagles’ effort in a 76-52 win. more from behind the arc, and Heckmann added a pair of his own in the second half, while Anderson dominated the paint. Dragicevich’s second half triple gave the Eagles a 30-point advantage less than seven minutes from the end of regulation time. Without its leading scorer, the Eagles were able to finish off their vulnerable opposition and will look to use the win to reboot their season once again. “I want to really talk about excellence
and trying to be really good about what we can be good at,” Donahue said. “Everything I do is about erasing the past.” It’s going to be difficult to forget a dreadful run in non-conference play and a poor start to an ACC schedule, though. Those games are reflected in BC’s record, and it will be impossible for this team to ignore those blemishes, regardless of Donahue’s plans. n
Men’s Basketball Notebook
Donahue’s rotations find a rhythm against shaky Virginia Tech team By Tom Meloro For The Heights
Rotation, Rotation, Rotation While facing ACC basement-dwellers Virginia Tech, head coach Steve Donahue continued to utilize the familiar players in his arsenal in a number of different combinations. Along with cornerstone players Ryan Anderson, Joe Rahon, and Olivier Hanlan, Donahue gave big minutes to players such as Patrick Heckmann and Alex Dragicevich, using Garland Owens, Will Magarity, and KC Caudill to spell players as needed. Eight players received minutes in the double digits against VT, with just KC Caudill, Will Magarity, and the reserves getting six minutes or less. Donahue has received criticism this season for the rotations he uses, seemingly inserting or removing players without rhyme or reason. On Wednesday, however, it seemed like Donahue had the magic touch—every lineup combination had it going on from one end of the floor or the other. If not, Donahue immediately remedied it. Perhaps the only puzzling decisions by Donahue came during the first half when he removed his key players several times while the game was
still relatively close. These lineups contained heavy doses of Rahon, Eddie Odio, Dragicevich, and Heckmann. Donahue was effusive in his praise of Dragicevich after the game. “I thought Alex Dragicevich gave us great minutes tonight, I thought he was relaxed out there,” Donahue said. “He’s a good basketball player and he just hasn’t shown how good he can play. I think he’s close to figuring that out.” Dragicevich wasn’t particularly good offensively, going just 2-3, all from beyond the arc, but he was active all over the court, with four rebounds, two assists, and two steals. Heckmann finished behind only Rahon for the most 3-pointers in the game, going 4-9 and finishing with 14 points overall. He was particularly key during the second half. Just over two minutes into the half, Hanlan picked up his third personal foul. Unhappy, he expressed his frustration and in return was given a technical foul, his fourth foul of the game. Virginia Tech smelled blood, as it was clear Hanlan would have to sit for a significant amount of time. Up 18, Heckmann drilled a 3-pointer. On VT’s next possession, Lonnie Jackson came up with the steal and Heckmann drained another to put Boston College up 24 and kill any hope VT may have had. On a night when Hanlan only went 2-5 from
the floor (all from three) and scored 11 points total in 22 minutes, the rotational players were more important than ever, and they came through in spades. Dragicevich and Heckmann showed that Steve Donahue and his rotations do have the potential to make BC a potent team. Ryan Anderson While Heckmann and Rahon were bringing down the house draining three after three, Anderson was having a much quieter night by comparison, but one no less deserving of praise. Anderson was the driving force inside on the offensive end and the rock in the middle of the defense. Donahue constantly praised BC’s ball movement on the offensive end, particularly the way it was able to force VT’s defense to collapse and kick it out, giving BC easy looks at threes. Anderson, who also managed to go a quiet 6-8 from the floor and total 18 points, facilitated most of that offense. Eight rebounds, including three on the offensive glass gave BC a presence inside that it had been lacking in recent games without Dennis Clifford in the middle. Combined with five blocks—a career high for him—Anderson had perhaps his most complete game this season.
Pay would taint the college game
Quiet and humble doesn’t have to define all athletes Sherman, from A10
Column, from A10 Maybe I’m a sucker for a BCS-buster, but even with that era over, I see a huge issue with allowing colleges to offer salaries that will keep the top players going to the programs that can offer the best pay. The top schools have enough recruiting pull as it is with their legacies alone—what college football doesn’t need is to polarize the recruiting pool even more as the top programs, which would almost inevitably have the most to spend on salaries, pull in every recruit due to a sheer number that they are willing and able to pay. I don’t want to see every player, not just the select few who are playing for draft stock, start putting their interests above the team’s in search of a higher salary, be that at their current program or in the event of a transfer—or would it be a trade? I don’t want to see those trades happen based on what a school may or may not be able to offer an athlete for the next season.
On his performance, Anderson said, “I was just trying to play a lot harder than I have been, and like I said when you play hard, plays just seem to go your way.” Overall, BC’s defensive performance was much improved over some of the recent samples. Guys hustled to loose balls—BC had eight steals and forced 12 turnovers. While there were still some series in which Virginia Tech was able to generate several second-chance opportunities, in general nothing easy was given, particularly down low. Twice in the game, BC was able to force VT into shot clock violations. After the game, Anderson commended his team’s performance on defense and offense, citing its ability to capitalize on both ends of the court. “Anytime you can get a stop, that’s great, but when they can’t even get a shot off, that really can be a game changer, and anytime we’re knocking down shots like we are, that’s a game changer as well, but when they happen at the same time, that’s a big momentum swing for us.” As one of the leaders of the team, Ryan Anderson will help to set the tone in every game of the season, and if he continues to play like he did against Virginia Tech, he could prove to be a huge boost for a team in desperate need of one. n
Graham Beck / Heights senior staff
There are elements of the college game that would disappear if athletes were paid. I don’t want to see a gap form between the top players on a team and the less-celebrated because of resentment over pay scale. I don’t want college football to lose its magic of the unexpected—the trick plays, the one-in-a-million field goal attempt returns, and the all-or-nothing urgency that keeps me enthralled—to a conservative game in which players have contracts or salaries on their minds.
We don’t need another NFL. I’m all for protecting players and their right to be represented as far as their wellbeing is concerned, but going beyond that would destroy what makes college football great.
Marly Morgus is the Assoc. Sports Editor for The Heights. She can be reached at sports@bcheights.com.
Carolina State last November, Williams snapped Mike Cloud’s single-season rushing record in just 10 games. He then walked out onto the field a few yards after being beckoned by the PA announcer and the crowd. Williams—the embodiment of BC’s humble, quiet, and thoughtful ideal student-athlete in every other instance—conceded one helmetless bow with an appreciative smile shining across his long face. It was a great moment, but also one that is too rare, because at BC boring is best. Any attempts to not be boring bring unnecessary risk—the same kind of dumb risk Sherman can create by being a human being with real emotions and personality quirks. Williams didn’t do anything wrong. The running back consistently carried himself with a quiet confidence and thoughtfulness that came off as firmly genuine, even when the fame got a little crazy. But he shouldn’t have to be the model for everyone here. The mission of athletics at BC is to supplement the student-athlete’s education in the classroom with lessons that can only be taught on the field, court, or ice. One of those lessons is off, though.
There’s nothing wrong with having some fun and showing it. Sports are supposed to be fun and entertaining. Every ounce of bravado or showmanship isn’t inherently awful. There’s nothing wrong with a student-athlete speaking his or her mind and being, at least occasionally, blunt. Being genuinely interesting shouldn’t be sacrificed for the simple benefit of being safe. There’s nothing wrong with cracking deadpan jokes. Some of the athletes here are legitimately hilarious, and they shouldn’t have to curb that aspect of their personality because it’d be easier on their coaches if that humor didn’t show on the field or in front of the media. There’s nothing wrong with BC’s student-athletes just being themselves a little more often. They can be like Williams, quiet, humble, and thoughtful, or they can be something else entirely. They can be boisterous or funny or charismatic if that’s who they are. The thought that allowing that kind of behavior hurts the team or the department or the athlete is asinine, and more than anything else, it’s just boring.
Austin Tedesco is an editor for The Heights. He can be reached at sports@bcheights.com.
THE HEIGHTS
EDITORS’ EDITORS’PICKS PICKS
Thursday, January 30, 2014 The Week Ahead
Standings
The women’s basketball team will look to snap its three-game losing streak when it travels to Pittsburgh tonight. Providence will host men’s hockey on Friday evening before women’s hockey challenges Providence at home on Saturday. Seattle is set to face Denver in Super Bowl XLVIII.
A9
Game of the Week
Recap from Last Week
ALEX FAIRCHILD
7-1
CONNOR MELLAS
6-2
MARLY MORGUS
6-2
HEIGHTS STAFF
6-2
No. 23 NC State defeated women’s basketball in Raleigh. Men’s hockey ground out a victory away at Penn State to maintain its status as the country’s No. 2. Women’s hockey completed a weekend sweep of New Hampshire. Wichita State beat Drake and Loyola (IL) to remain undefeated at 22-0.
Women’s Hockey
Boston vs. Providence College
Guest Editor: Julie Orenstein Assoc. News Editor
“I’m just a puddle of girl.” CONNOR MELLAS
This Week’s Games
Sports Editor
MARLY MORGUS Assoc. Sports Editor
ALEX FAIRCHILD JULIE ORENSTEIN Asst. Sports Editor
Assoc. News Editor
Women’s Basketball: BC vs. Pittsburgh
BC
Pitt
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BC
Men’s Hockey: No. 2 BC vs. No. 7 Providence
BC
Providence
BC
BC
Women’s Hockey: No. 7 BC vs. Providence
BC
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Denver
Denver
Seattle
Denver
Super Bowl XLVIII: Seattle vs. Denver
On Saturday afternoon, the Boston College women’s hockey team will take on Providence College. The Eagles are currently the top team in Hockey East with an overall record of 18-4-3 and only one conference loss. The Friars are not fairing as well in Hockey East with a conference record of 6-8. Their most recent result is a 1-0 win over Connecticut, before which they lost two straight. The two teams have met twice before this season, the first game a high-scoring triumph for the Eagles with a final score of 8-6, the second a closely fought battle in which BC scraped through with a 2-1 overtime win.
Saturday, 2 p.m.
POINT COUNTERPOINT
WILL GAUDREAU WIN THE HOBEY BAKER? Gaudreauby Baker is near-certainty BY MIKE HOFF For The Heights
Boston College junior winger Johnny Gaudreau will most likely win the Hobey Baker Award primarily because he should. Drew LeBlanc, the player to whom Gaudreau finished as runner-up in last season’s vote, had 50 points the entire season. Rylan Schwartz led the country that year with 53 points. If Gaudreau racks up as many points against Providence Friday night as he did in the last matchup against the Friars—four—he will have passed last season’s leading scorer before the Beanpot. Perhaps most impressive about Gaudreau’s gaudy numbers are the circumstances in which he has produced. Besides linemate Bill Arnold, there were not many proven weapons for BC heading into the season. The Eagles are the youngest team in Division I, and Kevin Hayes was not a certainty coming off an injury that he said could have ended his career. Teams knew coming into the season that to stop BC, they had to stop No. 13, and none of them have been able to do it. Gaudreau is obviously not big, but any team that has tried to rough him up has failed. The teams that haven’t taken that strategy have also failed, and that is due to Gaudreau’s consistency—he has had at least a point in 24 of his last 25 games, and in each of his last 20—and he shows continuous improvement. “He’s at the very top of his game,” said head coach Jerry York after that first Providence game on Jan. 10, in which Gaudreau struggled at times yet still managed two goals and two assists. “He’s improved every year ... You know, people were saying last year, what more can Johnny do? [But] John wants to get better in every facet of his game. I think he’s stronger on the puck, he’s better defensively, he’s shooting the puck better. It’s an awful lot of fun for us to watch him play.” That game highlighted another argument that furthers Gaudreau’s case: his competition. Excluding BC, Hockey East has seven of the top 22 teams in the pairwise rankings (Providence, Northeastern, UMass-Lowell, Notre Dame, Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire). BC has played eight games against those teams, and Gaudreau has eight goals and 17 points in those games. Hockey East also boasts the best collection of goalies the country has to offer, but Gaudreau has made fellow Hobey Baker candidates Jon Gillies, Clay Witt, and Martin Ouelette look as helpless as anyone else. The only possible holes in the New Jersey native’s candidacy are the quality of his current linemates and that, well, stats aren’t everything. Besides that, Gaudreau tore up opposing defenses with freshman Austin Cangelosi on his right wing before Hayes replaced the freshman. BC still does as its best player does: it’s 15-0-1 in games he’s scored a goal. Gaudreau’s statistics and offensive highlights stand for themselves, but while Gaudreau may resemble the NCAA version of Patrick Kane in the offensive zone at times, he does not in the other two. Gaudreau has even been a regular fixture on college hockey’s best penalty kill all season. Gaudreau will garner votes for other rea-
sons. For one, his name is possibly the most recognizable of any player in the sport. A runnerup last season for the award, he was an integral part of BC’s 2012 national championship team as a freshman, and his memorable highlights will resonate in a sport in which live coverage is not always easy to find. Plus, voters can vote for Gaudreau without thinking that they are voting for the same player as last year because of his improvement on the stat sheet and the more subtle areas York mentioned. Finally, no other candidates on top teams will jump off the ballot. The only other comparable name or compelling story that could compete may be Witt, a redshirt junior who played one game last year and now is holding Northeastern with a .943 save percentage in the top 10 despite his team’s getting chronically outshot in front of him. Witt probably will regress, though, and so will Northeastern as a result. Gaudreau’s play has separated him from everyone else on the ice all season, and the rest of the Hobey Baker field will probably feel similarly on April 11.
scoreboard
BY CONNOR MELLAS Sports Editor
Right now Johnny Gaudreau is the best forward in Division I college hockey. Through 25 games filled with hair-pin passes, defensemanshedding breakaways, goalie-dismantling dekes, and lethal finishing, Gaudreau has put up 22 goals and 28 assists for 50 points and averaged a clean 2.0 points per game. At this point in the season, statistically and otherwise, it’s difficult to argue that anyone is more deserving of the Hobey Baker Award than Johnny Hockey. Come April 11, though, that may not be the story. Gaudreau’s biggest challenger isn’t one of his opponents on the ice. It isn’t Northeastern’s Clay Witt and his .943 save percentage, St. Lawrence assist-machine Greg Carey, or the current leader in the fan vote, Ryan Faragher of St. Cloud State. Rather, Gaudreau’s greatest threat to winning the Hobey stems from one of his greatest allies and a fellow Eagle—his linemate Kevin Hayes. The 2012-13 season was a disappointment
EMILY FAHEY / HEIGHTS EDITOR
Kevin Hayes has already surpassed his 2012-13 season totals with 19 goals and 26 assists through 25 games played.
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doherty 12 pts 5 reb BC hamby 21 pts 16 reb UNH
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for everyone expecting Hayes to live up to his first-round pick potential. His junior-year effort yielded six goals and 19 assists for 25 points in 27 games—respectable numbers, but not for a 24th-overall pick by the Chicago Blackhawks. Then, in the blink of an eye—following a three-game suspension for violating team rules—Hayes’ career was nearly over. In a matter of hours, nonchalance spiraled into DEFCON 1 as Hayes went from charlie-horsed to hospitalized. Four emergency surgeries left him with a massive scar but saved his career—and his leg. “I think after the (quadriceps) injury last year—it was real close to being a career-ending injury,” Hayes told ESPNChicago.com in early January. “I was about 10 hours away from them amputating my leg off. I think it kind of made me wake up a little bit and value the game a little more.” At the start of this season, Hayes returned to the Eagles as a different player. Finally embracing his strength and size, Hayes has become the power forward scouts projected him to be in 2010. Despite having played two fewer games than he did as a junior, Hayes already has 19 goals and 26 assists for 45 points—just five points short of Gaudreau and the national lead. As the season has progressed and Hayes has adjusted to his new role—and moved onto the Gaudreau-Bill Arnold line—he’s continued to improve. Through the first 13 games of the season, Hayes scored six goals and provided 12 assists for 18 points. Over the past 12 games, the forward has netted 13 goals and 14 assists for 27 points, three goals and one point more than Gaudreau over the same timeframe—Hayes is getting better with age. Entering trophy season, Hayes seems poised to continue his renewed affinity for point scoring, and the Dorchester native will benefit hugely from one key fact: His first name isn’t “Johnny,” and his last name isn’t “Gaudreau.” To say Gaudreau is going to stop scoring would be idiotic. Yet, as arguably the most recognizable and widely-known player in college hockey, Gaudreau is the guy that teams are going to continue building their game plans around, and when BC meets opponents with better defensemen and higher quality goalies in the trophy hunt, it’ll be harder for Gaudreau to escape the increased attention. More and more defensemen focused on stonewalling Gaudreau means more and more openings for Hayes. Stopping Johnny Hockey should be every team’s objective, and Hayes only stands to benefit. Hayes has the sellable story—the life-altering moment followed by the realization of potential. He has the stats—a five-point differential is nothing for players of Gaudreau’s and Hayes’ caliber. If Gaudreau hits a rough patch and begins struggling in a game or two, Hayes could catch up in the blink of an eye. With Gaudreau as opposing defenses’ main focus, he’ll get the opportunities, too. Finally, Hayes has momentum. His numbers are continuing to increase—the forward has six goals and four assists for 10 points in his past three games, the same point total as Gaudreau. No matter who the finalists are for the Hobey Baker, it’s likely going to be a tight sprint for first place. In the end, there’s a great chance that the race could be decided by who performs better in Conte Forum.
charlottesville, va 1/26
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SPORTS The Heights
A8
A10
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Union talks bring up bigger issues
STARTING FROM
Marly Morgus
BC athlete sticks to when they’re on the record, especially after games. It’s humble, nondescript, and boring. They don’t share much, and when they do it’s often cliched maxims full of empty team concepts. “It was just a good team win … I’ll do whatever the coaches ask … This was only one game … I don’t pay attention to that stuff.” Putting the team first is a good thing, but the consistency and degree to which the team is automatically deferred makes some of the comments absurd and meaningless. That same mentality shows up in games too. It’s so rare to see any sort of even minor boastfulness or playful trash-talking in Conte or on Alumni. As Andre Williams, maybe the most popular BC athlete in the last few years, overpowered his way into the record books and the Heisman race last fall, he only allowed himself one moment of on-field indulgence. In the fourth quarter against North
About a week ago, I was having a conversation with a friend in which I tried to explain why I think that college football is the greatest sport. It didn’t come easily. I grasped at straws, saying that maybe it was because I grew up on it in a state where we didn’t have any professional sports. I don’t think that it comes down to the nurture aspect of college football, though, because even now as I have spent the last six years exposed to one of the greatest professional sports towns with the Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins, and Patriots—and lacking a truly competitive NCAA team to feed my love for the sport—I still feel a stronger inclination toward the amateur level. After stumbling around for a while, trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for my feelings, I came up with the word “purity.” It may be a naive viewing, but I love sitting down on a Saturday afternoon and watching a game in which the athletes don’t have any bigger source of motivation than winning, maybe for their schools, maybe for their teammates, and maybe even for themselves. It’s the pure competition, which I believe makes college football more engaging and exciting, that I love. On the highest level, every single game counts—one loss and your season could be over—and those games can come down to a single play. Everything has to be tight, and the focus has to be on the field. They’re not playing for bigger contracts or bonuses, or trying to raise their stock as free agency approaches. Sure, there are exceptions—some players are improving their draft stock or vying for an individual award, but that accounts for a tiny percentage of players: according to a study by Businessinsider.com, only about 1.7 percent of college football players go on to play professionally. So why am I writing this column now? The season is long over, the NFL draft is still a long way off, and I just pretty much admitted that I don’t think that event really influences much of the college football season. On Tuesday, ESPN’s Outside the Lines broke a story about a group of Northwestern student-athletes, led by quarterback Kain Colter—who is being advised by Ramogi Huma, the president of the National College Players Association— that recently filed initial paperwork with the National Labor Relations Board to take the first steps toward unionization. “This is about finally giving college athletes a seat at the table,” Huma told ESPN. “Athletes deserve an equal voice when it comes to their physical, academic, and financial protections.” When you hear this news, it is nearly impossible not to jump to the debate that has been going on for years—whether college athletes should be paid. While the College Athletes Players Association, as the union would be called, says that pay would not be its first initiative, according to ESPN, Huma didn’t completely rule out the possibility of that pursuit in the future. Part of me thinks that all of this makes sense. They work hard, so pay them. These players are the primary contributors to an enormous revenue stream for their universities, while often confronting significant risks. Football players especially face the risk of long-term injury, so why should they be treated like amateurs? I can’t completely buy into this school of thought, though. I can’t get it out of my head that athletes already reap enough benefits to be considered properly compensated for their services—between tuition, room and board, book fees, tutoring services, and other perks such as clothing and an exclusive gym, I have a hard time thinking of athletes as a Germinale-esque exploited working class in need of unionization. That’s a lingering thought in my head that I could probably be talked out of. What I can’t be talked out of, though, is the fact that I don’t want to see college football turn into a bidding war.
See Sherman, A8
See Column, A8
THE BOTTOM
“Everything I do is about erasing the past.” -Steve Donahue Emily Fahey / Heights Editor
Alex Fairchild | Asst. Sports Editor Rahon and the Eagles step up effort and hustle to trample Hokies at home
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fter Alex Dragicevich stole the ball in the paint and found Olivier Hanlan, Christian Beyer picked the sophomore’s pocket. The junior forward looked for teammate Devin Wilson, but the freshman was hesitant. As the ball skipped under the freshman’s hands to center court, Joe Rahon got on the floor. He dove on the hardwood, and like a goalkeeper tipping the ball around his post, the sophomore guard’s hand pushed the ball away from Jarell Eddie and into the hands of Patrick Heckmann. The junior forward pushed up the floor and found Ryan Anderson down low. Anderson drew a foul and went to the line. Hitting one of his two free throws, the junior gave BC a 10-point lead more than halfway into the first half. That sequence was the spark the Eagles needed. If BC is to finish the season strong, after a miserable first half, it is going to have to be scrappy and aggressive. The men’s basketball team has been without intensity all year, but against Virginia Tech, it finally found its way, winning 76-52. “I thought we came out and really played with great alertness and intensity
on the defensive end,” said BC head coach Steve Donahue. The Eagles played with passion on both ends of the floor and were able to breakdown their opponents’ defense. James Johnson’s squad played a man-to-man defense to start the night, but its marking was sloppy at best, as it has been all season. The Eagles found it easy to split the visitors with their ball movement in Donahue’s spread offense. Just moments into the game, it started to rain threes in Conte Forum. Rahon was hot early on and he finished the first half with three from behind the arc, while Heckmann got in on the act along with Dragicevich. BC opened up an enormous advantage over a vulnerable Virginia Tech defense. After starting out in their sloppy man defense, which caused bodies to clash all over the floor, the Hokies switched to a 2-3 zone. The Eagles have faced multiple zone defenses this season, including ones by Philadelphia, Georgia Tech, and the formidable 2-3 zone of Syracuse, but tonight was different. The Hokies were condensed and out of shape. To fight the zone, Anderson went into the high post and was joined by KC Caudill. Donahue put the junior center into the lineup to throw another body into the area where the zone
See Basketball, A8
Emily Fahey / Heights Editor
There’s nothing wrong with showing some personality Austin Tedesco “…But he went to Stanford.” That’s the irresponsible and painfully easy argument plenty of people have used in defense of Richard Sherman the last two weeks. The All-Pro safety for the Seattle Seahawks called out 49ers wideout Michael Crabtree in an excited and mildly aggressive post-game interview on Fox after the NFC Championship game—an interview that occurred minutes after he earned a trip to this weekend’s Super Bowl by making a game-saving deflection in the end zone. He was called a monkey and a thug and worse. Fans and media members said he needed to show more class or better sportsmanship. They were full of crap, and they missed the point. Unfor-
tunately, though, it didn’t stop there. But he went to Stanford, some people cried in Sherman’s defense. He can’t be a thug, because Stanford men aren’t thugs. The interview and the trash talk must have been an act, because four years of a Stanford education doesn’t allow for such behavior without reason. We should give him a pass, they said, because the Stanford degree allows us to give him one. The fact that Sherman played football at one of the “academic institutions” gives him some sort of societally approved excuse to act out occasionally. You could swap out Stanford for Boston College, and you’d have almost the same dumb argument, but it’s nearly impossible to find a former or current BC athlete who, even in brief moments, displays the same entertaining emotion as Sherman. They’re systemically trained not to, and maybe it’s not such a good thing. The most interesting thing I’ve ever heard a BC athlete say in a press conference came from Chase Rettig
i nside S ports this issue
Notebook:
near the end of the 2012 football season. Alex Amidon had just broken the BC single-season receiving record that night against Notre Dame, and Rettig was asked what he thought of Amidon’s performance throughout the season. Rettig had just been pummeled to the ground by the Irish in BC’s eighth loss of a miserable year. While his No. 1 target received praise for his breakout year, Rettig was constantly criticized for his decision-making and his inability to get the ball to different receivers, whether they were open or not. “I think he has a good quarterback,” Rettig deadpanned expressionlessly, staring ahead. There were a few soft chuckles in the room, most of which came from media members, but besides that the comment mainly elicited an awkward silence. Rettig had just gone off script. Sensing the unease, he shifted his remarks to credit Amidon, but it felt more out of formal necessity than anything else, when it wasn’t really necessary at all. There’s a simple formula nearly every
Men’s
Basketball
With timely rotations, the bench came to life in BC’s 76-52 win over Virgina Tech.......A8
Point-Counterpoint: Hobey Baker Will DI hockey’s lead scorer Johnny Gaudreau win the prestigious award?........A9
Editors’ Picks........................A9 Scoreboard.........................A9
THE HEIGHTS
A2
OUTSIDE THE LINES
Thursday, January 17, 2013
HOLOCAUST ART
THE CONTROVERSY OF INTERPRETING TRAGEDY THROUGH ART, PAGE B2 ALBUM REVIEW
ABOVE AND BEYOND
BRITISH DANCE TRIO GOES ACOUSTIC ON NEW ALBUM, PAGE B4
SCENE STYLE
OPAL’S CATHARSIS
SOPHOMORE CINDY CHEN TALKS DESIGN, MAKEUP ARTISTRY, AND PHOTOGRAPHY ON HER PERSONAL BLOG, B5
SCENE THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 2014
THE
HALFTIME HAL
:
The Best and worst of super bowl acts Over the past 25 years, halftime at the Super Bowl has transformed from being America’s favorite synchronized toilet break into a mecca of the entertainment industry. The Super Bowl has become, far and away, the most popular broadcast in the United States, with the 2012 Super Bowl holding the record at 166.8 million viewers. Halftime musical acts have grown from marching band-style performances into massive spectacles, drawing slightly stronger ratings than the Super Bowl itself in recent years and featuring music’s biggest names. Inflated budgets and bigger egos have led these performances to vary drastically by the year. The Scene remembers the five best and five worst acts in the history of the Super Bowl.
SEE Wins and Losses, B3 JORDAN PENTALERI / HEIGHTS PHOTO ILLUSTRATION
THE HEIGHTS
B2
OUTSIDE THE LINES
Six million lives: Holocaust art
Thursday, January 30, 2014
SCENE AND HEARD
BY: ABBY FARR
MICHELLE TOMASSI Six million. The number six is easy enough to comprehend—I can count to six on my fingers. A million—not so easy to imagine, and yet we toss the word around every day. “I have a million things to do.” There are a million books I want to read.” Not in a million years.” It’s a word that loses significance quite easily, becoming a general term that is used when we refuse to or simply cannot quantify something. But add a number in front of that word—six million, for example—and suddenly everything changes. You’re imposing countability on an immeasurable quantity, and the mind is pulled in two different directions. On the one hand, six million is just a really big number. On the other, it forces you to consider exactly what that number means. Rabbi Phil Chernofsky, educational director of the OU Israel Center, recently published a book called And Every Single One Was Someone. The book weighs 7.3 pounds, contains 1,250 pages, and uses a 5.5-sized font. It only contains a single word, printed six million times: Jew. In a recent New York Times article, “Holocaust Told in One Word, Six Million Times,” Chernofsky is quoted describing the motivations for printing such a book: “When you look at this at a distance, you can’t tell whether it’s upside down or right-side up, you can’t tell what’s here; it looks like a pattern. That’s how the Nazis viewed their victims: These are not individuals, these are not people, these are just a mass we have to exterminate.” The book, described as “more art than literature” by the author of the same article, appears to be a reminder of the six million Jews who were killed during the Holocaust, asking us to confront the idea of “six million” and what that means when it comes to human lives. Chernofsky also has a goal to print six million copies of the book, further emphasizing the symbolic value of his art. Such a book may have educational value, or serve as a thought-provoking piece of art, but some Jewish leaders have responded with doubt and negativity. As the article goes on to explain, Holocaust memorials and museums, such as Yad Vashem in Israel, have dedicated efforts to recovering the names and personal details of the victims, but this book could instead appear to disregard the personal identities of the Jews. They are not even afforded names, as expected of characters in a book. The title of the book suggests that this was not the intention, but I can’t help but wonder what exactly someone would think when sitting down to “read” Chernofsky’s book. I say “read” because I imagine that one would not actually be reading the words and processing them—if you know what the next word is going to be, the experience is reduced to flipping through pages, as blurs of small text pass through your fingers. Would this seemingly never-ending book create an emotional response, or have a numbing effect? Even though there are six million “Jews” in the textual sense, can we really imagine each of those tiny words as a human being? Does this make it any easier to imagine the magnitude of such a tragedy, or does it further complicate our understanding? I can’t answer any of these questions, mainly because each human being will have a different reaction to such a piece of art. I personally struggle with visualization, so I can’t speak definitely of how I would respond to Chernofsky’s book unless I were holding it in my hands, and looking at the words with my own eyes. The point of such a book is not just to make a statement—it’s to keep people talking. It’s a reason why we continue to memorialize the victims, and why remembrance is not something restricted to history lessons. Holocaust art—whether in literature, film, or exhibits—is not just a means to keep us from forgetting. It allows us to understand why we’re remembering in the first place, and how we can connect beyond a religious or cultural standpoint—as human beings. Six million. Six million people, six million words, six million deaths. We’ll never remember all of their names, or all of their stories. But we can keep them in our minds, and in our hearts, and keep finding ways to join the individual members of the six million into our collective conscience— and truly live the practice of re-membering.
Michelle Tomassi is the Assistant Arts & Review Editor for The Heights. She can be reached at arts@bcheights.com.
1. ‘I’LL NEVER LET GO, JONAH’
2. BONNIE AND CLYDE
Leonardo DiCaprio made a surprise appearance on SNL this weekend. Host Jonah Hill fielded audience questions in his opening monologue that somehow all related back to what it’s like to work with Leonardo DiCaprio. As Hill answered the questions like a big shot, DiCaprio emerged from backstage, scolded him for showing off, and then reenacted the famous scene from Titanic.
Beyonce opened the Grammy Awards Sunday night singing “Drunk In Love,” which features her husband, Jay-Z. According to many, music’s first couple brought down the house, and Beyonce’s reaffirmed the fact that she’s the only person who should be twerking—sorry, Miley. Fun Fact: Beyonce and Jay-Z are tied, with 17 Grammy awards each. Can you say power couple?
4. I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU?
Heidi Klum split with her bodyguard boyfriend Martin Kirsten. This week it was revealed that the couple has been separated for a month. She and Kirsten have ended their professional relationship as well. For this bodyguard, Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” doesn’t seem quite so relevant.
3. ‘BYE BYE BIEBER’
5. ‘ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR’
Justin Bieber has fled to Panama following his DUI arrest in Miami after being pulled over for drag racing. He’s been seen enjoying the sun and the sand, unfazed by his legal problems. Bieber is due back in the U.S. for his arraignment, and unfortunately for the beliebers out there, it’s on Valentine’s Day, most likely meaning there won’t be “one less lonely girl” this time around.
Sherlock Holmes made his triumphant return to American televisions earlier this month in the British television crime drama Sherlock, airing on PBS. If you haven’t seen it, don’t worry about catching up—the show is now two episodes deep into its third season, but only eight episodes have aired thus far on American television. Episodes run 90-minutes in length.
THE CRITICAL CURMUDGEON
‘Dazed and Confused’: Red Hot Chili Peppers at halftime MATT MAZZARI
Everybody, get excited! No, not just because this weekend is the much-anticipated Super-Sportsball Sunday, wherein the Seattle Seahawks and the Denver Broncos will compete to see whose foam-finger is larger in this dire annual battle for the Championship Hat. May the best man do the seventh-inning stretch! No blowing kisses below the belt! Go sports! No, the reason I’m so excited for this weekend is that Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers either just pulled the best prank on the music media since Vanessa Hudgens’ pop career or blatantly announced that 100 million American football fans are about to be subjected to the most hilariously unenjoyable Halftime Show of all time. For those who don’t know, Bruno Mars is headlining this year’s Halftime Show, and he asked the Chili Peppers to open. It seemed like an odd choice for Mars, but they accepted. Here’s where it gets awesome: when Smith was asked last Monday by Artisan News what the band is going to perform, the drummer responded (completely deadpan): “We’re gonna play Led Zeppelin’s live
version of ‘Dazed and Confused.’” Since he said that, practically every music news source has quoted him. Halftime Show set lists are usually kept secret until game day, so everyone was eager to report the tip. It’s basically common knowledge now that the Chili Peppers will be preceding Bruno Mars with a Led Zeppelin Tribute. What does not seem to be common knowledge, however, is the fact that Led Zeppelin’s live version of “Dazed and Confused” is a famously 30-45 minute-long odyssey through some of the most soul-jarring, psychedelic devil-noise anyone has ever dropped acid just to sit through. This feverdream of a music piece—as it was recorded, perhaps most recognizably, on How the West was Won—contains a whopping eight minutes of bow-solo paired intermittently with Robert Plant’s inhuman wailing. The traditional live version is an epic-scale track so preening, heavy, and outrageous that at one point in the video accompaniment to the Song Remains the Same concert, the picture literally cuts away from the band’s playing for five minutes of external footage, wherein we see Jimmy Page scaling a mountain, meeting a wizard, transforming into a fetus, aging rapidly, and finally becoming
said wizard all while the music continues to play. Seriously, that happens. And, honestly, at that point in the song, it seems to make perfect sense. Are the Red Hot Chili Peppers actually going to attempt a revival of one of the most notoriously avant-garde rock performances ever? Almost certainly not. For one thing, Anthony Kiedis does not have the vocal range to cover that piece: Plant spends half of the song drawing out notes at least an octave higher than anything Kiedis has ever hit in his life. It’s also doubtful that Josh Klinghoffer, John Frusciante’s friend and replacement in the band since 2009, could muster up enough lead-guitar chops to freestyle anything close to what Page managed to do. Besides, despite the fact that some insufferable Classic Rock radio DJs have been trying to wedge RHCP songs alongside ’60s and ’70s icons lately, the fact of the matter is that Led Zeppelin and the Chili Peppers do not belong in the same genre. One is a heavy-blues jam band, and the other is a funk-rap/rock group, popular mostly in the ’90s. Both bands produced some high quality music in their day, but it really isn’t fair to compare them at all. That’s why I think Smith was joking.
Anyone who is halfway rock ’n’ roll-literate knows what a “live version of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Dazed and Confused’” consists of, and it is the opposite of being Halftime Show-appropriate. It’d be like a Top 40 radio station suddenly playing The Wall in its entirety. The Red Hot Chili Peppers have been known to have a wacky sense of humor: directly after the announcement that they would be joining Mars, their bassist, 51-year-old Michael “Flea” Balzary, tweeted “Anyone wanna see my c–k at the Super Bowl?” to the general public’s dismay. Knowing Flea, that might actually happen. If I’m wrong, then surely Red Hot Chili Peppers will be playing a watered-down version of a Led Zeppelin song. Perhaps Smith meant to say that the band would be doing its own live version of the “Dazed and Confused” studio recording, which is a mere six and a half minutes. Or perhaps he was serious, and this Halftime Show is going to be a beautiful disaster. Either way, this is the first time in years that I’ve been excited for Super Bowl Sunday.
Matt Mazzari is a staff columnist for The Heights. He can be reached at arts@bcheights.com.
THIS WEEKEND in arts
BY: ARIANA IGNERI | ASSOCIATE ARTS & REVIEW EDITOR
THE CAMPUS SCHOOL KICKOFF A CAPELLA CONCERT (THURSDAY 1/30, 7:30 P.M.)
PANIC! AT THE DISCO CONCERT (THURSDAY 1/30, 7:00 P.M.)
The American punk rock group Panic! at the Disco is headlining at the House of Blues on Thursday night. Tickets for the event have sold out.
BC a cappella groups—the Bostonians, Sharps, Acoustics, Shaan, B.E.A.T.S., Dynamics, Voices of Imani, and Against the Current—are performing in the Rat to raise money for the Campus School. Admission is free. There will be a bake sale and an opportunity to donate to the Campus School at the event.
REIGN (THURSDAY 1/30 TO SATURDAY 2/1, 7:30 P.M.)
The Dance Organization of Boston College is presenting its showcase Reign this weekend. The event will feature Latin dance group Fuego del Corazon in the performance. Tickets are $10 through the Robsham box office, with a portion of the proceeds benefiting Relay for Life.
THE INFINITE SPACE OF THE POSSIBLE (THROUGH SUNDAY, 2/2)
The Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts is hosting a collaborative, seven-artist exhibit focusing on artistic boundaries and personal potential. Admission to the gallery is free.
LADY ANTEBELLUM CONCERT (FRIDAY 1/31, 7 P.M.)
Known for its hit single “Need You Now,” the American country pop group Lady Antebellum is performing at TD Garden. Tickets start at $55.65, including fees, through Ticketmaster.
PHOTO COURTESY OF NICK REED ENT.
OSCAR NOMINATED COOLIDGE SHORTS (FRIDAY, 1/31 OPENING)
The Coolidge Corner Theatre is screening a collection of 2014’s best short films nominated for the Oscars in the documentary category. Showtimes are available at http://www.coolidge.org.
VENUS IN FUR (THROUGH SUNDAY 2/2)
Staged by the Huntington Theatre Company, the sexy Broadway comedy Venus in Fur is closing this weekend at the BU Theatre. The play, set in modern New York City, is about the relationship between a desperate actress and a director. Tickets and showtimes are available at http://www.huntingtontheatre.org.
THE HEIGHTS
Thursday, January 30, 2014
B3
WINS AND LOSSES BEST
THE BEST AND WORST OF HALFTIME BY JOHN WILEY, ARTS & REVIEW EDITOR ARIANA IGNERI, ASSOC. ARTS & REVIEW EDITOR MICHELLE TOMASSI, ASST. ARTS & REVIEW EDITOR
BEST Michael Jackson
Elvis Presto
1
1993 Not many people can stand motionless on a stage for almost a solid two minutes and get away with it, but Michael Jackson did just that to commence his Super Bowl performance in 1993. MJ’s halftime show was probably one of the last times we truly got to see the King of Pop in all his glory before his personal life took a turn for the worse. Jackson gave viewers a taste of classics like “Billy Jean” and “Black or White,” but the heart of the show came with his performance of “Heal the World.” About 3,000 children flooded the arena, while people in the stands held up drawings that children of Los Angeles had made. A giant globe ascended from the stage, and the cameras captured the smiling and waving children—ending the performance with a warmer message of love and international unity. -M.T.
1989 Throw together some crude 3D special effects, a group of South Florida dancers, and an Elvis impersonator/magician—and Presto!—you’ve got the 1989 Super Bowl halftime show. Wearing a heavily sequined costume and a shining black wig, the then 33-year-old actor Alex Cole played Elvis Presley for the concert, laughably titled, “Be Bop Bamboozled in 3-D.” He sang not a single Elvis song, believe it or not, but performed what came to be known as the “world’s biggest [read “least impressive”] card trick” ever. It’s bad enough that an Elvis impersonator was trying to do magic, but it’s even worse that he got the trick wrong. With that said, it’s fair to say the XXIII Super Bowl performance is one most of us wish could just disappear. -A.I.
The Black Eyed Peas
Prince
2
2007 And Prince said, “Let there be rain,” and there was rain. Okay, maybe it didn’t happen exactly like that, but there’s no denying the epic rainy adventure that was Prince’s 2007 halftime show. He started off with a rendition of Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” moved into some of his own songs, such as “Let’s Get Crazy,” and added in some surprising, yet brilliant covers—Foo Fighters’ “Best of You” was especially unexpected. Even with a neon-clad marching band, purple guitar, and glowing stage, Prince still managed to amp up the drama—by finishing off with his signature hit “Purple Rain” amid a downpour. Mother Nature certainly did rain on the parade—in the best way possible. -M.T.
Beyonce
2013 Destiny’s Child reunited on stage during the 2013 Super Bowl halftime show, and Beyonce was so damn fabulous on her own that no one especially cared, or remembered that segment of the show. Director Hamish Hamilton went big with the 2013 show, going so far as to insert six CGI Beyonces onto the stage during the Houston pop star’s performance of “Crazy In Love.” The performance was heavily charged with feminist motifs, with the stage for the show actually being the faces of two women. Additionally, every single performer at the halftime show was a woman, from the dancers to the band. Beyond that, Beyonce’s halftime show celebrated her extensive career, starting with her work with Destiny’s Child, and continuing to recent successes like “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” and “Halo.” -J.W.
3 4
2004 Ten years ago, at Super Bowl XXXVIII, the world was introduced to the “wardrobe malfunction”—and to Janet Jackson’s right nipple. Jackson fired through the beginning of the show with a medley of songs including, “All For You,” “Rhythm Nation,” and “The Knowledge,” but it was her controversial duet with Justin Timberlake that shocked audiences everywhere. As Timberlake crooned, “I’m gonna have you naked by the end of this song,” from the closing lines of his single “Rock Your Body,” he tore off part of Jackson’s costume, revealing her breast. Fines, Supreme Court action, and stricter censorship laws followed the scandal, making it more than just an accidental fashion mishap, and rather a formative event in pop culture history. -A.I.
2012 Gladiators, cheerleaders, and Madonna—one of these things is definitely not like the others. But we’ll forget about that for 2012’s halftime show, when Madonna decided to unite the worlds of ancient Rome and high school in her woefully overdone performance. Performing songs such as “Vogue” and “Music” while unsuccessfully attempting to keep up with the acrobatic dancers around her, Madonna just couldn’t settle on one theme, and the show became more about the spectacle than the music itself. LMFAO joined in with “Party Rock Anthem,” M.I.A. flipped the bird for all of America, and Cee Lo Green gave the people what they wanted by dressing in a marching band uniform. Thankfully, Madonna ditched the gladiator getup for her final performance of “Like a Prayer,” which was one of the few redeeming parts of her show. Even Cee Lo sparkled—in a black sequined choir robe, that is. -M.T.
The Who
U2
It had been only five months after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 when Irish rockers U2 took the stage to play at Super Bowl XXVI. Viewers nationwide were brought together as the band opened with its hit “Beautiful Day,” but they were truly united when it performed “Where The Streets Have No Name,” dedicating the song to the victims of the tragedy. As Bono sang out earnestly, running around an illuminated heart-shaped stage, the names of those lost on Sept. 11 scrolled up on a projected backdrop. The performance was both poignant and passionate. At the end of the set, Bono stared out at the crowd and opened his jacket to reveal the red, white, and blue stars and stripes of an American flag printed into its lining. -A.I.
The Black Eyed Peas’ 2003 hit, “Where Is The Love?” opens with a very big question. “What’s wrong with the world, mama?” asks rapper will.i.am at the beginning of the song. Although there’s a simple answer to will.i.am’s question, the Black Eyed Peas’ 2011 Super Bowl halftime show is a very good place to start. The massive performance began with the hip-hop group descending into Cowboys Stadium on glowing discs, wearing light-up Tron: Legacy jumpsuits (yes, the entire show was themed after the Disney movie) and related headgear. Musically, however, the Black Eyed Peas did far less to shine, and if anything, made a strong argument for Super Bowl executives to seriously consider lip-synching as a healthy alternative to whatever in God’s name happened in that stadium. Unfortunately for the Black Eyed Peas, auto-tune only works with a ballpark estimate of what the song should sound like. -J.W.
Madonna
Bruce Springsteen did something radical in the recent institutional memory of the Super Bowl halftime show: he just performed. No one descended down to the stage on cables, and there were no costumes to speak of. Excluding a rather extensive firework display, which was integrated into the performance, there was little spectacle to The Boss’ show. He did, however, touch on four of his greatest hits: “Tenth Avenue Freezer,” “Born to Run,” “Working on a Dream,” and “Glory Days.” An especially gratifying moment of the performance came in the beginning when Springsteen ordered audiences to “step back from the guacamole dip, and put the chicken fingers down.” Could this be a metaphor for the performance to come? Probably not, but it was great to see Springsteen having this kind of fun performing for television’s biggest audience. -J.W.
2002
2011
Janet Jackson +Justin Timberlake
Bruce Springsteen
2009
WORST
5
2010 While committed admirers of The Who expressed absolute praise after the band’s performance at Super Bowl XLIV, other halftime show viewers were left more or less unfazed. The 1960s rockers played through a collection of longtime fan-favorites—“Pinball Wizard,” “Baba O’Riley,” “Who Are You,” “See Me, Feel Me,” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Their efforts to appear dynamic on stage are worth commending, but there’s no denying that Roger Daltry and his crew showed some signs of wear and tear, with obvious reason—The Who is often remembered as the loudest band in history, and its members have suffered significant hearing loss. Much of the concert’s energy, then, was due not to the band, but to the intense, LED “Captain America”-themed stage they sang on. Ultimately, 2010’s show left little to be remembered. -A.I.
THE HEIGHTS
B4
Thursday, January 30, 2014
British dance group goes ‘Above and Beyond’ on new LP BY RYAN DOWD Heights Staff
British dance group Above and Beyond traded its techno gismos for a golden harp, a cello, and a band of merry orchestra men to craft one of the most refreshing and delightful albums of the year so far. With Acoustic, the trio of Jono Grant, Tony McGuinness, and Paavo Siljamaki took its popular club hits and gave them an acoustic spin with a 15-piece orchestra to back the sound—which is apparently as acoustic as the band can get. What’s remarkable is how cohesive the album comes off. The album is essentially a batch of remixes—serious remixes. Above and Beyond took tracks from all across its works and molded them into an album that, for those unfamiliar with the band’s dance background, feels simply original. The record gives a sense that Above and Beyond could have been making this sort of album for years. The members of Above and Beyond—musicians themselves—receive help from a talented vocal trio. The band is joined by frequent vocal contributor Zoe Johnston and relative newcomers Annie Drury and Alex Vargas on Acoustic. The album is made largely though the partnership of these two trios.
The album kicks off with the wispy lullaby, “Miracle.” Drury’s vocals take center stage. Her voice carries a certain softness that carries the rolling arrangement well. By the end, one can’t help but wonder if it was ever really a dance song in the first place. The next two tracks carry the same sort of lullaby, and by the end of “Satellite,” the album’s third track, the trend has gotten repetitive, lulling, if you will. The arrangement still has an enchanting smoothness, but the shtick is getting a tad familiar. Vargas, the sole male vocalist, joins Drury at the end of “Satellite” to give the track a needed spark. Vargas takes the next two out of the next three tracks and gives the album the edge it needs. “Thing Called Love” and “Sun and Moon” are two highlights of the well-rounded album. “Thing Called Love” might be the album’s most dance-like arrangement. Vargas’s voice rises and growls “You live your life just once / So don’t forget about a thing called love.” He gives an edge to what was becoming a monotonous album. Not that Johnston and Drury are not delightful, but Above and Beyond was clever to manage the flow here. Acoustic and remix albums have a tendency to feel disjointed with each track doing its each work, but Above and Beyond does well to mold a whole new album of scattered remixes.
TOP SINGLES
1 Dark Horse Katy Perry feat. Juicy J 2 Timber Pitbull feat. Ke$ha 3 Counting Stars OneRepublic 4 Say Something A Great Big World & Christina Aguilera 5 Monster Eminem feat. Rihanna 6 Talk Dirty Jason Derulo feat. 2 Chainz 7 Let Her Go Passenger 8 Team Lorde
ACOUSTIC ABOVE AND BEYOND PRODUCED BY ULTRA RECORDS, LLC RELEASED JAN. 28, 2014 OUR RATING
PHOTO COURTESY OF ULTRA RECORDS, LLC
Above and Beyond convincingly trades in its usual techno dance style for a stripped-down one on ‘Acoustic.’ The moment many fans were waiting for came in the middle of the album, when the band’s most popular song, “Sun and Moon,” finally makes a showing on the project, with Vargas again supplying the vocals. What’s telling in “Sun and Moon”—and the album in general—is how Grant, McGuinness, and Siljamaki take a step back and allow soft arrangements and soaring vocals to rule the album. The band certainly took the idea of an acoustic to heart, one
which softens and slows the song to focus on the vocals and lyrics. This is exemplified in “Sun and Moon.” The acoustic version does not rise and fall like the original version but tumbles in a delightful fashion. The original is a song you simply can’t get out of your head, and the new version is much the same in its appeal, but decidedly different in execution. The latter half of the album carries much of the same rhythm as the first. Johnston belts out a classic in
“Good For Me” and Drury somehow reemerges with an edge to match her softness in “On a Good Day.” It’s again surprising how the album feels so self-contained as it deals mainly with falling in and out of love. There’s a sense that Above and Beyond’s Acoustic is meant as a validation of the band itself. Can a techno dance group make a traditional album? Yes. Can they make a great traditional album? A resounding yes.
Rapper Cities Aviv builds on ‘Yeezus’ aesthetics in debut BY JOHN WILEY
Arts & Review Editor In 2013, two roads diverged in the rap industry. Hip-hop veteran Jay Z turned the path toward heavy corporate sponsorship, selling one million copies of his record Magna Carta … Holy Grail directly through a Samsung mobile app. While the album was interestingly promoted, however, there was nothing unique in the album’s anthemic sound. Kanye West—former producer to Jay Z—took the road less traveled by. His 2013 record Yeezus
was an unusual amalgamation of EDM and the electro-pop vibes he first explored in 2008 with 808s and Heartbreaks. Memphis rapper Cities Aviv is among the first in generation of younger artists to enter popular airwaves down the path paved by Yeezus. Aviv’s debut LP Come To Life is an exploratory record, seemingly recorded in the context of Yeezus’ success, but developing with it some exciting prospects for the rap genre. Aviv is hardly a conventional rap
lyricist, or at least not a good one. If Kendrick Lamar is the lyrical king of the east and west coasts (a claim he made this summer in a verse of Big Sean’s “Control”), Aviv is hardly even a prince of Middle America. Come To Life is arguably more of a dance than a rap album, with the verses themselves blending well into, and often being overshadowed by, the record’s extensively layered samples and bouncy synth beats. Aviv’s verses simply aren’t gratifying in the way of popular rap. Aviv’s thoughts often feel discon-
COME TO LIFE CITIES AVIV PRODUCED BY YOUNG ONE RECORDS RELEASED JAN. 28, 2014 OUR RATING
PHOTO COURTESY OF YOUNG ONE RECORDS
Cities Aviv’s debut album ‘Come to Life’ pays tribute to Kanye West, while exploring new possibilities in the rap genre.
nected, incomplete, and somewhat irrelevant to the musical narrative of the album. These fleeting passages of verse are drowned in the soundscape. They feel rare—and rare is a dangerous adjective for any artist to hold onto. It’s an adjective used by critics that can mean anything from genius to misguided. “Rare” and “experimental” are words too often used to describe a work that doesn’t clearly mean anything. Come To Life is produced by Brooklyn label Young One Records, and indeed, it’s difficult imagining this type record happening anywhere other than Brooklyn. (For those unsure as to what makes Brooklyn such a special place in music, feel free to run a search on Macaulay Culkin’s “Pizza Underground.”) The charm of Come To Life is, well, more or less missing. It’s an unpleasant, abrasive record that seldom shows any polish. For extended periods, Aviv will keep the listener into mindless stream of looping samples and unintelligible verses. The first true rap lyric of the album—following a buzz saw synth introductions with a cryptic mix of phrase—comes on the second track “Fool” (“Come to terms with this image you decide to burn”). Destruction is a unifying theme of the album, and in “Dissolve,” Aviv builds it into postapocalyptic terms, exploding into a sweeping chorus that’s one of the most powerful moments on the record
(“We turn into dust / We turn back to dust / Wake up and the world is yours / Wake up and the world is gone.”) Aviv comes from the former Memphis band COPWATCH, with his roots in hardcore rock and punk rather than hip-hop. While Come To Life isn’t entirely removed from hiphop culture, it’s reasonably distant from it. The marriage of hip-hop and rap, built around the predominate role of the emcee in hip-hop performance, has become an exacerbated relationship, with many rap acts now growing out of alternative venues. Projects like Come To Life represent a willingness of younger artists to interbreed rap with other genres, and with this, there’s a notion that genre is becoming a misleading parameter in music. Come To Life brings music’s great many into one, and it’s not exactly the compelling cocktail one might expect. Aviv works with this very raw, unruly sound, creating a record that’s more a rambling of the imagination than a coherent, musical vision, and while it’s a tempting avenue for the artist, it’s a wasteland for the listener, albeit a beautiful one. Veteran producer Rick Rubin made Yeezus an instructive walk through the bizarre, and when taking the road less traveled in music, it’s comforting to know the artist isn’t mindlessly headed toward an oblivion of mixed samples and sounds. With Aviv, this isn’t so clear—and there’s a rare accomplishment in that.
The danger in judging too quickly: a case for Taylor Swift KAYLA FAMOLARE The icebreaker in my first globalization class went as follows: name, hometown, least favorite celebrity. My eyebrows rose as a classmate responded, “I really hate Taylor Swift.” I shouldn’t have been surprised—Swift receives more backlash for her dating patterns than just about any other celebrity, and her reoccurring songs about boys do not help her cause. It was not the fact that this student did not like the blonde, bubbly mega-star that warranted my public outrage in the middle of class. Rather, it was her explanation: “She is an immature, boy-crazy 23-year-old who needs to grow up.” In an effort to be somewhat credible, I’ll start by stating I am not Swift’s biggest fan. I could’t tell you her favorite color or how many awards she has won for her four albums. What I can tell you, however, is that Swift’s greatest accomplishment is her ability to connect with and be an outlet for her audience. To write this column, I did what I usually do when confronting a difficult task—played Swift’s album Fearless. This is not the first time I’ve felt like I needed Swift. There were
countless times in my life when her songs liberated and inspired me to overcome the hardships I was facing. When I felt like I had exhausted my friends’ open ears, Swift was always there. Whether it was blasting “Fifteen” on my way into my freshman year of high school, or “Tim McGraw” after breaking up with my first love, Swift knew exactly what I was feeling—the heart-wrenching pain of recalling fond memories that would never again occur or the butterflies of beginning a new adventure. Swift felt it all as if she were there with you. Swift lets her listeners know they are not alone by empathetically sharing her own stories of sorrow and joy. I do not entirely disagree with my classmate’s claim of Swift’s lack of originality. It seems that every No. 1 hit she produces involves the all-too familiar theme of heartbreak, which constitutes the public’s criticism of her boy obsession. There are, however, greater messages beyond the concept of loving and hating a particular boy, as the heartbreak extends far beyond—whether it is a fight with friends, or trouble with family. If one wants to argue Swift’s immaturity, she would be hard-pressed to find someone who has not, on
CHART TOPPERS
some level, experienced the heartbreak that Swift describes in her songs time and time again. Swift is a representation of the ways countless people feel every single day, at any given moment. It’s unfortunate that her fame gives way to this criticism, seeing as her feelings are shared by so many. It’s hard to call Swift immature when she simply expresses what all of us feel on some level or another. If Swift is immature for having these feelings, does that mean I am also immature? Or is it her ability to share and confide her emotions with her listeners that creates her maturity? If Swift is crazy, we all must be crazy. Swift proved her maturity this past Sunday, as she head-banged through a mid-show Grammy performance. She could have performed “22” and bounced around the stage in an elaborate spectacle in the pop star fashion people expect from her. With her reputation in mind, Swift choose to perform “All Too Well” off her Red album—arguably her most honest and genuine song, about a relationship she is painfully reminded of each day. Lines like, “I’d like to be my old self again, but I’m still trying to find it” and “I’m a crumpled up piece of paper lying here because I remember it
all too well,” allow Swift to be honest with the audience, showing her fragility and sensitivity to a love so strong. By performing this most real and awe-inspiring song, she proved to everyone that she can be mature and honest by fearlessly expressing these emotions. With a simple stage, performing with only a piano and with a great sense of power in her voice, Swift showed her audience “this is who I am and this is what I feel.” It may have been another song about heartbreak, but again, Swift proved to me that I am not alone in my feelings of weakness in difficult circumstances and that there is strength in accepting oneself.
I was terrified to take on this column, out of fear of being judged as just another over-zealous teenage girl, sticking up for a seemingly naive pop singer. I stressed, I wrote multiple drafts, I cried. It was Taylor Swift who allowed me to persevere and to fight for what I believe in. This is who I am, this is what I’m passionate about, and I will defend my stance without fear of judgment. This is what it means to grow up, to be mature, to be fearless.
Kayla Famolare is an editor for The Heights. She can be reached at arts@bcheights.com.
TOP ALBUMS
1 Frozen Soundtrack Various Artists 2 2014 Grammy Nominees Various Artists 3 Beyonce Beyonce 4 Is Anybody Out There A Great Big World Source: Billboard.com
MUSIC VIDEO OF THE WEEK BY ARIANA IGNERI
“F FOR YOU”
DISCLOSURE FEAT. MARY J. BLIGE
Vocal powerhouse Mary J. Blige joins Euro pop duo Disclosure on its second music video for “F For You,” off its Grammy-nominated debut album Settle. After rerecording the original track with Blige, the group chose to release a new, revamped video for it, too. Visually, it looks something like a mix between an iTunes gift card—neon-colored backgrounds and black dancing silhouettes—and a hipster’s notebook, with white sketches of faces and hand-drawn lyrics all over everything. Half-animated and half live-action, “F For You” features Blige breaking out disco moves, while graphics of the Disclosure brothers, Guy and Howard Lawrence, cut in and out of the scenes. Lines from the song, in quirky-cool fonts, flash in each frame. The result is trendy and energetic. It’s artistic, fun. Like the music video, the remix of the song is also a step up from its first version. Blige’s soulful sound adds a retro vibe to Disclosure’s generally EDM-based style, making the track seem fuller, warmer, and more layered. The R&B diva’s voice empowers “F For You”—it pumps it with passion and transforms even its stock club sound bites into something of an anthem. Disclosure performed the song with Blige in New York last week, exciting fans about the surprised collaboration. And now that the video is officially out, there’s little denying that this decision to work together was a good one.
MATT SAYLES / AP PHOTO
SINGLE REVIEWS BY ARIANA IGNERI HUNTER HAYES “Invisible”
KARMIN “I Want It All” Debuted live this week at the Grammy Awards, Hunter Hayes’ country-pop ballad, “Invisible,” is a poignant and personal song about “anyone who just dares to be different.” The piano-driven single is similar to his hit, “Wanted,” with its soft verses and swelling choruses, but it taps into emotional depths not fully realized in his previous work.
AUSTINE MAHONE FEAT. PITBULL “Mmm Yeah” Funk-inspired and disco-infused, Karmin’s “I Want It All” is a smooth and trumpeting follow up single to “A Cappella,” previewing the band’s upcoming spring album Pulses. Amy Renee Heidemann, the lead vocalist of the pop duo, uses the song as an opportunity to show off her singing rather than her rapping, for which she’s most well known.
There are few things more annoying than Justin Bieber, except maybe a song by a teenage Bieber-wannabe and—wait for it—Pitbull. With such a duo, the track may have been doomed from the start, but the fact that Mahone’s single is over-synthesized, sonically disjointed, and irritatingly repetitive just makes it so much worse.
The Heights
Thursday, January 30, 2014
B5
Wiley’s Follies
Scene Style ‘Turn Turn Turn’: Sophomore Cindy Chen uses art to ‘achieve catharsis’ the life and dying of Pete Seeger
John Wiley
photo courtesy of Arlo perez
photo courtesy of Nv photography
photo courtesy of Cindy Chen
Chen serves as a model herself in two images, ‘Bestia Dentro’ (left) and ‘Crystallization’ (top right), and model Claudine Rodriguez appears in ‘Fall Angel’ (bottom right). By Michelle Tomassi
Asst. Arts & Review Editor If you had to give yourself a new name, what would it be? For Cindy Chen—makeup artist, graphic designer, and A&S ’16—this question played a role in her identity as an artist, as she took the time to consider what pen name would capture her personality. She finally decided on “Opal” and used the name in creating her blog, Opal’s Catharsis. “The name Opal’s Catharsis comes from my pen name Opal, and catharsis as my way of conveying emotions and inner feelings about art and life through the lens of a creative mind,” Chen said. “Opal is a gemstone, and it’s a color. It’s something ambiguous, something interesting—and I like that.” Chen started her blog to document and share her talents in makeup artistry, which all began with a project in her senior year of high school. She was challenged to create something completely out of the ordinary, so she decided to take up a face-painting project. After watching YouTube video tutorials of artistic makeup, Chen was inspired to explore possibilities beyond her class project and now uses makeup in conjunction with photography to tell a story. Chen often adds graphic elements and uses post-production processing techniques in order to add to the imagery of her pictures. She taught herself graphic
designing during her freshman year of high school, and currently utilizes her skills as the creative director in the Office of Press Secretary for UGBC, designing posters and fliers for big events such as the Annual Ball. Chen is inspired by traditional artists—too many to name, she said—and especially by optical illusions that are integrated into the picture. Most importantly, Chen explained, she wants to ensure that all types of beauty are conveyed through her work. “A picture tells a story, but the story can be interpreted in so many different ways,” she said. “[I like] showing beauty through a different lens because I believe makeup should be worn to enhance a human’s beauty, rather than to mask it.” The storytelling aspect is essential to Chen’s photography—she often adds narratives or social messages along with her photos. Most recently, she wrapped up the final stage of the “Heartbreak Series,” a semester-long project that was suggested by a friend. The photo collection aims to portray the stages of heartbreak—something Chen believes most people connect with. The “Heartbreak Series” starts with anger, the first of these images showing a model wearing a bird-like mask punctured with red feathers and accentuated with red and black makeup. “I’ve seen very explicit anger being expressed and I’ve seen the quiet ver-
sions,” Chen wrote on her blog. “My girl wears her pain with a mask … The mask brings a mystery. She plays the role of a naive bird, timidly but sensually watching you from afar.” The final stage, in which Chen herself was a model, captures the “crystallization of experience,” and she conveyed this with crystals and pearl beads adorning her face, creating striking contrast with black lips and dark eye shadows. These narratives add another dimension to Chen’s artistry—her photos take on a lyrical significance. The Heartbreak Series, along with her other posts, are still very personal, but Chen recognizes that the blog has gained exposure beyond its initial following. “I didn’t expect my blog to have as much popularity as it did, across BC especially,” she said. “I didn’t know that many people would be interested in that sort of stuff—it was just me showing my friends at home what I was doing.” Chen grew up in the Philippines and attended an international school in Manila, and hence her former classmates live all over the world. She has contacted some of these friends to take photos of students on their campuses and hopes to feature them in her upcoming fashion section, expanding the scope of the blog to feature more than just makeup artists. Chen’s draws her inspiration across various mediums of art—Alexander McQueen, for example, influenced her
in an unexpected way, as she attempted to translate the styles of his clothing into her makeup designs. The popular Humans of New York page encouraged Chen to expand her blog. She plans to launch a new section called “The Witty College Lookbook,” highlighting students on college campuses who break the norm of conventional style. Although she claims that people call her a “weirdo” who wears mismatched clothes, it’s clear that she knows her fashion—her room is full of magazine clips and inspiration boards, and she occasionally blogs about different styles. “When I wake up, the first thing I want to see is fashion,” she said. Chen describes her own aesthetic as “chickrocker,” incorporating blacks, leather, and eye-catching statement pieces such as studs, necklaces, or printed pants. “My secret passion is to go into fashion grad school,” she added, hoping to pursue the advertising, marketing, and business aspects of the fashion industry. While there’s potential to monetize her work, Chen continues to pursue passion before commercialization. She encourages other aspiring artists to stick to what they love, regardless the field. “If you like photography, go ahead, girl!” Chen said. “Do what makes you happy. If you don’t, that’s fine. Whatever it is, just pursue it. If it’s what you like to do, even if it’s not your major, just do it.” n
Fashion Forward
Diesel connects fashion with a cause in latest campaign Fashion blogger Jillian Mercado models with her wheelchair and redefines beauty for Diesel ad
Therese Tully Although this column is entitled “Fashion Forward,” I feel like I am often compelled to write about the ways in which the fashion industry is backward. I sigh and type away, wishing that the fashion industry could move forward not only in its designs, but in its outlook on the world and the people who inhabit it. This week I am excited to be able to take a more hopeful glance at an industry that I love, but am often very critical of. Fashion is learning, slowly but surely, to embrace all women, one step at a time. The ad reads, “WE ARE CONNECTED #DIESELREBOOT”—it’s for Diesel’s Spring/Summer 2014 campaign. What is different about this ad is that it features Jillian Mercado, prominent fashion blogger, owner of the site Manufactured 1987, and the executive editorial assistant for We The Urban. But she is not alone. The ad includes with Mercado a pretty fabulous accessory: her electric wheelchair. Mercado was diagnosed with spastic muscular dystrophy and needs the wheelchair included in the ad to get around. The chair is not hidden, disguised, photoshopped, or shot around. The chair is not treated as an embarrassment or blemish. Rather, it is quietly present. Nicola Formichetti, Diesel’s artistic director, said he was looking for “a
rebellious attitude, which is closely tied to denim,” when discussing his model choice for this campaign. These were qualities he found in Mercado, who shares her story on her blog, Manufactured 1987. Mercado is a strikingly beautiful girl with unusual features that begged to be looked at over and over again. She takes risks in her fashion choices and even appeared on a Pix11 news segment with purple hair. She is a risk taker and knowledgeable fashionista who isn’t afraid to share this persona. Her disease may have put her in a wheelchair, but she hardly lets it define her lifestyle. She chooses stylish pieces and is often on the brink of what’s happening and chic in fashion, all from her seat. It is easy to forget that the chair is even there. Redefining beauty standards in our society does not only need to entail race and weight, which are often hot button topics in the fashion world. Our conversation of beauty can be one that encompasses all women no matter how they look or how they must travel through this world. The beauty of this ad is that while it does not focus solely on the wheelchair—which surely does not define Mercado—it also does not get rid of it. It makes a statement and the statement is that it’s there. That’s all. Some people are in wheelchairs, and they can be fashionable in the same ways as those who aren’t are. What these ads also say is that anyone can wear Diesel clothing. It is not meant only for lanky runway models, or young girls, or any other strange subgroup, but rather it is welcoming to all sorts of people. In an industry that makes its bread and butter on cultivating looks and being obsessed with appearances, it is amazing to see a brand as
prominent as Diesel reaching out to women who may not fall into generally advertised demographics. Shocking and fabulous, just as fashion should be. Hopefully this will be a call to action for other major brands to consider including people of many different body types, lifestyles, shapes, sizes, colors, creeds, etc. into ad campaigns. Making different kinds of beauty visible is the first step to widespread body acceptance within the fashion industry and our everyday lives. For women whose bodies do not fit the narrow ideal showcased by most major fashion brands, it can be hard to imagine what clothes will look like on their different frames. Diesel is not only addressing this problem, but also celebrating beauty. Haute couture will always be haute couture, and it will be slow to change, but it is so wonderful to see our measures of beauty and our
depictions of it start to encompass more and more women. And honestly, this whole campaign inspires me to go look at Diesel’s website and see what the Italian brand is peddling these days. I can get behind a brand that shares my concerns and my idea of what beautiful means. By standing up in such a way, Diesel has made me believe in its line and ultimately want to support it in this mission. Fashion for a cause, or fashion with a purpose, or fashion that you really know about and really care about, is the best way to guide your purchasing power. Look into what you wear. A great pair of heels looks best when paired with strong convictions about where they come from.
Therese Tully is a senior staff columnist for The Heights. She can be reached at arts@bcheights.com.
photo courtesy of diesel
Diesel’s new campaign ad signifies the fashion industry taking steps to be more inclusive.
He was a tall, gangly old man, waiting in line at a fruit stand set up for the festival. No older than 12 at the time, I had little opinion on this figure. My mother eagerly introduced my older brother to this strange man in a woolen cap—it was an afternoon in the early summer. Embarrassed, I shied away from the scene—recognizing his name as little more than a friend my aunt referred to in passing. Watching the encounter from a distance, the man struck me as simple, just another face in the crowd at the Strawberry Festival. A moment or two passed, and then I moved on, to play along the banks of the Hudson. For a long while, I never thought much of this encounter. The man’s name was Pete Seeger. He was an American folk singer and a founder of Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, Inc.—an organization my aunt was for some time a part of—which led several environmental initiatives surrounding the Hudson River, one of which was the Strawberry Festival I had attended. The most notable of the group’s efforts was the construction and preservation of a sloop named the Clearwater, first launched in the spring of 1969. At the time, the idea of comfortably sailing the Hudson was pipe dream. Between the years of 1947 and 1977, General Electric dumped by some estimates over a million pounds of the polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which has since been recognized as a carcinogen, into the Hudson River. In 1976, all fishing was banned on the Hudson, based on what was deemed to be an extreme contamination of the river ecosystem. Seeger and the Clearwater initiative were critical in pressing the EPA to force General Electric and several other companies actively polluting the Hudson to begin cleanup. In 1979, largely through Seeger’s active storytelling of the pollution of the Hudson, the United States Congress banned PCB production. On Monday, Seeger died at the age of 94, and for all purposes, I was just another observer of his life. I remember Seeger still as that mysterious figure, waiting in line like anyone else. It’s only in recent years that I’ve begun to think how unusual that afternoon was. Here was this man, one of the most prominent figures in folk music history, a mentor to Bob Dylan and great influence to artists like Bruce Springsteen, and yet in that moment, he was just another face, and a fragilelooking one at that. How are we to remember Seeger, who made his career largely out of a body of songs he inherited? While Seeger wrote several extraordinarily influential folk songs, including “Turn! Turn! Turn!” and “If I Had A Hammer (The Hammer Song),” he’s perhaps remembered best for popularizing the Civil Rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,” a song he didn’t actually write. Folk music differs from other genres in that it is formed from a collection of songs and stories passed down through a culture. It lives more in church music and American fables than it does in the work of any single artists. For this reason, an anonymous face in a crowd seems a very appropriate memory of Seeger. His approach to music wasn’t much different than his love of the Hudson—it was something he inherited, and hence nurtured. Seeger’s legacy was in protecting and growing these streams, so that others might enjoy them. Of course, there’s clear danger in reducing a man’s life to a metaphor, but his story is all the more compelling to me when I remember him as a stranger along the Hudson. There he was, standing in line, waited his turn like anyone else. When I think of Seeger, I think of all the other extraordinary lives potentially disguised in the calm in front of me, and how at the end of Seeger’s life, he was able to quietly enjoy the river he built a life around, with confidence that it would be cared for, surely knowing he’d soon be gone.
John Wiley is the Arts & Review Editor for The Heights. He can be reached at arts@bcheights.com.
B6
THE HEIGHTS
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Would you rather have $46,000 or a whooooole lotta take-out? Cook your own dinner instead of ordering in. $9 saved a day x 5 days a week x 10 years x 6% interest = $46,694. That could be money in your pocket. Small changes today. Big bucks tomorrow. Go to feedthepig.org for free savings tips.
THE HEIGHTS
Thursday, January 30, 2014
B7
THIS WEEK IN... BY AMANDA ADAMS | FOR THE HEIGHTS
POLITICS
MUSIC
On Tuesday, Jan. 28, President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address hosted two special guests. Jeff Bauman, Boston Marathon bombing victim, and Carlos Arredondo, rescuer and now friend, attended the address with the First Lady. Bauman, 27, was waiting for his friends and his girlfriend at the finish line of the marathon when the bombs went off last April. Since he was in such close proximity to the detonation, Bauman was severely injured and had to undergo a double leg amputation. While lying on the ground injured, Bauman was picked up by Arredondo, who created a tourniquet and transported Bauman to an ambulance. “We’re here to represent the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the city of Boston, and many other people,” Arredondo said in a telephone interview Tuesday with Boston.com.
After two successful festivals within the past year, organizers of the Boston Calling Music Festival announced their plans for a third festival to be held this May. Planning to shock the city once again with a mix of famous bands and talented, obscure performers, the organizers have revealed plans to host Jack Johnson, Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie, Phosphorescent, the Head and the Heart, Tegan and Sara, Kurt Vile and the Violators, and Jenny Lewis. In addition to this collection of performances, a secret act has yet to be announced. The festival will also feature local bands Magic Man and Tigerman WOAH!, holding to its tradition of promoting Boston artists. Tickets for the weekend festival went on sale yesterday, and multiple-day passes will be released tomorrow.
SPORTS
POLAR VORTEX
TECH
Red Sox and baseball fans everywhere can rejoice. The beloved Boston Red Sox announcer Jerry Remy has resumed his work as the team’s best-known informer and advocate. After his son’s murder trial, Remy took an indefinite leave of absence. Jared Remy’s fairly public trial left his iconic father confused about how to address his fans. Remy’s absence lasted approximately four months. Encouraged by family and friends, Remy decided to make his return to his longtime home, the Red Sox broadcasting booth, on Monday. Remy continuously expresses his sympathy to the family of his son’s late girlfriend and murder victim. Distraught and in upheval, the Remy family is beginning to piece their lives back together after the arrest and trial of Jerry’s son. “I’ve never been a quitter and I don’t intend to be one now,” Remy told The Boston Globe regarding his return.
Since early Janu a r y, t h e U n i t e d States, particularly the Northeast, has been experiencing abnormally cold temperatures. With wind chills far below zero, the harsh conditions have created an array of problems and posed a variety of health threats in the state of Massachusetts and around the country. It is estimated that the United States economy has taken approximately a $5 billion hit as a result of the freezing trend. Included in this figure is a $1.4 billion deficit from flight cancellations. The s emi- p er manent cold system lingered far longer than expected and, according to meteorologists, remained on “lock.” The prolonged deep-freeze has approached its end and will release the nation from its grip just in time for Super Bowl XLVIII. The football game, scheduled for Feb. 2, will likely be free of the inhibitions of the freezing weather.
“Google Glass,” a revolutionary product with photography, Internet, navigational, and messaging capabilities, has recently become even more innovative—and expensive. Responding to customers, Google released its prescription edition of the product on Monday. Now available for an additional $225, Google Glass can be comfortably used by those who typically wear glasses. Google also released an array of frame colors and tint shades, allowing customers to personalize their Glass wearing experience. Still relatively new, the product is priced at $1,500 with additional costs for tint and prescription. Potential buyers would be fitted for their Google Glass the same way that they would be fitted for normal prescription glasses, and lenses can easily be removed with a glass kit. Unfortunately, Google Glass is limited in its range and cannot be fitted for prescriptions above +4.00 or below -4.00.
BOSTON FOODIE
BOSTON POLICE BLOTTER January 20
New restaurant Merchant to open in Downtown Crossing
Breaking & Entering Residence Faulty Lock Leads to Break In - At about 5:27 p.m., officers received a radio call to 89 Chester Street for a breaking & entering report. Victims reported that on Jan. 18, unknown persons entered their apartment possibly through a side kitchen door and removed jewelry, laptops, gift cards, a check book, U.S. currency, and Taiwanese currency. January 22 Attempted Breaking & Entering Business Pry Marks Left on Door, Suspect Unable to Gain Access - About 11:06 a.m. officers received a radio call to 354 Chestnut Hill Ave, Fin’s Restaurant, for an attempted breaking and entering. Victim stated that unknown persons damaged doors to the restaurant and ripped out the outdoor speaker wires. No entry was made. January 23 Assault by Means of Dangerous Weapon Drunken Female Throws Bottle at Bartender and Claimed to Have had a Gun - About 10:41 p.m. officers received a radio call to 252 Western Ave. for an assault with a dangerous weapon. Victim stated an intoxicated female and male entered the bar and demanded to be served. The bartender refused. The female suspect became enraged and started yelling at the victim and the patrons. Suspect stated she was a “cop” and put her hand in her coat and stated she had a “gun.” The suspect then threw a beer bottle at the victim and left the bar. No firearm was shown.
Source – The Boston Police Department
HOUSE AD
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE MERCHANT
Co-owner Shane Smyth converts old retail store into bar and restaurant B Y Z ACHARY C OHEN For the Heights
Downtown Crossing is about to see the rise of a new restaurant for which the public has high expectations. A former retail store at 60 Franklin St. will now be the home to The Merchant, an American brasserie-style restaurant that aims to be a staple within the local community. Shane Smyth, co-owner of The Merchant, is also co-owner of Sycamore in Newton. The Merchant will likely have a vibe similar to Sycamore, which serves, according to its website, a “seasonally inspired menu” and features local beers. Unlike the smaller Sycamore, however, The Merchant will feature a much larger dining room that will be able to accommodate up to 200 guests. For more private events, The Merchant will feature two private dining rooms that will seat up to 30 guests each. The Merchant will strive to provide fresh, high quality food, using as much locally grown produce as possible. The Merchant will also feature a large, 40-foot bar that will have at least 36 types of beer on tap with an even larger bottle selection. Like the produce, many of the beers and liquors will be also come from local companies. The Merchant will serve lunch, dinner, and late night food at its initial opening. Smyth expects to operate seven days a week with later hours on the weekend and hopes to eventually begin serving brunch and breakfast. Smyth said that many of The Merchant’s signature dishes would be seafood-based, featuring an impressive raw bar. Oysters and crab will be a big part of the experience that the restaurant provides, and scallops and lobster bisque promise to be big sellers as well. The
Merchant’s Americano feel will be evident in their large selection of burgers. The executive chef will be Matthew Foley, who started his career in Providence as a sous chef at Cragie on Main, where he worked for four years. Most recently, he has worked at Sycamore. The Merchant’s former occupant was a retail store that was located in the space for over 100 years. The conversion process has proved to be the biggest challenge. An architect was hired to give the space a more contemporary styling. Although the owners wanted to keep some of the building’s original construction to save some of its history, the building mostly had to be gutted and converted to include the basic necessities of a restaurant.
LOCATION: 60 Franklin St. CUISINE: American SIGNATURE DISH: Shellfish The construction has gone on for over two years in order to prepare the restaurant for opening day. The Merchant has been forced to delay its opening a few months past the original date, but the partners expect to open in late February or early March. The Merchant is trying to get its name out in various ways, mostly through the Internet. The restaurant has appeared in multiple food blogs and are active in the social media scene. The Merchant has created quite a bit of hype within the city of Boston, and the dining community will decide whether or not the new restaurant lives up to that hype.
The Heights
B8
Bennet’s Banter
Boston’s winter tradition Bennet Johnson
Where I come from, hockey is everything. Back home in Minnesota, people eat, sleep, and breathe hockey all year long. As a Minnesotan, I believe that the greatest amateur hockey tournament in the U.S. is the Minnesota State High School Championship. But I’ve found that others are just as passionate about the Beanpot Tournament – the championship of Boston. As a non-Bostonian, the Beanpot Tournament was foreign to me. I didn’t fully comprehend the rich history of the Beanpot, or its unique ability to ignite rivalries while crowning a champion of Boston’s top hockey team. Former Boston University star and 1980 U.S. Olympic gold medal winner Dave Silk gave his tournament perspective at the 1993 Beanpot luncheon: “What the Beanpot means to me?” he said. “Quite simply, there are two words that come to mind: tradition and emotion. Anyone who has a pulse around here knows about the tradition of the Beanpot. I started coming to the Beanpot about the same time I started playing hockey.” Since the Beanpot first debuted in 1952, the four-team tournament has grown exponentially. Nobody could have predicted its success during its early stages. The tournament was originally the first two nights after Christmas in 1952, designed as a way to help the arena gain revenue on off nights. It wasn’t until 1960 that the schedule shifted to the first two Mondays in February. The first sellout occurred in 1961 with 13,909 people attending the championship game between Boston College and Harvard. Ever since, the Beanpot has continuously sold out. To give you a perspective of the Beanpot in the 1960s, the game was very different. Nobody wore facemasks, not even the goalies. Players were even prohibited from checking in the offensive zone. Although the game itself has shifted, the tradition and history of the Beanpot remains the same. The same four teams have participated in the Beanpot since the beginning of its existence. BC, Northeastern, Harvard, and BU have all fought over the years for Boston’s hockey bragging rights. With the tournament growing larger each year, it has become difficult for many fans to get tickets as prices soar year after year. Former players and alumni from the four schools dominate the ticket sales, as members continuously return to watch their alma maters each year. “Playing in the Beanpot was an unbelieveable feeling,” said former BC captain Mike Spalla, BC ’94. “Our whole focus was on winning those two high-intensity games. The tournamnet carries a lot of pride, and being crowned the best team in Boston is something I’ll never forget.” Mike’s father, Denny, is also a regular Beanpot viewer, who appreciates the history of the tournament. “Boston is a really small town when it comes to traditional rivalries, and the BC nation is very close and enriching,” he said. The Beanpot champions have been relatively consistent since its beginning. BC dominated the early days of the Beanpot, winning eight titles in the first 13 years, while Harvard took four, and BU just one. But since 1966, BU has been a powerhouse, winning 28 championships in 47 years. Recently, however, BC and BU continue to meet in the final game. Lately, there have been other schools that have tried to replicate their own version of the Beanpot. The Great Lakes Invitational held in Michigan invites the same three teams, Michigan, Michigan Tech, and Michigan State, each year, with an alternating fourth team. The North Star College Cup in Minnesota also began this year with a rotating group of five in-state programs, with hopes of gaining popularity in the years to come. The tournament held last weekend included Minnesota, Minnesota State, Minnesota-Duluth, and St. Cloud State. Although these new tournaments may be very successful, they fall to the Beanpot in one key area: location. Harvard, BU, BC, and Northeastern are all within a five-mile radius of each other. This rivalry makes the Beanpot the most unique tournament of its kind. This year marks the 62nd Beanpot tournament. BC has won four straight championships, and it is seeking its fifth trophy on Feb. 10. As a Bostonian, I’m looking forward to participating in this historic winter tradition.
Bennet Johnson is the Asst. Metro Editor for The Heights. He can be reached at metro@bcheights.com.
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Boston Public Market approved to open downtown The new market will revive an old tradition for the city By Clara Lee For The Heights After nine months of waiting, the proposal for the Boston Public Market has been approved. The new farmers’ market will be located in Parcel 7, between North Station and the Financial District. It will provide direct access to Haymarket Station, which provides a direct connection to both the Green and Orange lines on the MBTA. The Boston Public Market will be the first permanent year-round farmers’ market in the Boston area. The Boston Public Market will also be the first public market in the area to focus on locally-grown foods. Currently Boston is one of the few large cities in the United States that has yet to establish a local farmers’ market. The prospective market will feature items from local fishermen, farmers, ranchers, and wine makers from the New England area. It will provide residents in the area with food that is not only fresh, but also local. By providing this direct connection between the consumers and the vendors, the Boston Public Market aims to improve the lifestyle of the community around it as well as educate people about healthy eating and food sources. “We seek to establish a civic institution in Boston that will support the local economy while providing fresh, healthy food options and educational opportunities to the community,” said Megan Gibbons, the seasonal markets manager of the Boston Public Market Association.
Photo Courtesy of The Boston Public Market Association
A computerized rendering depicts how the future Boston Public Market will look when it is constructed near Haymarket Station. The project was not only inspired by the potential benefits for the community but also by the history of Boston itself. In constructing the new public market, the Boston Public Market Association hopes to revive the more traditional functions of Faneuil Hall from earlier in the city’s history. There have already been multiple delays in construction due to logistical issues. The designated location of the Boston Public Market was originally designed to be a vent stack for the I-93 tunnel. There are also many renovations waiting for approval, such as covering up exposed pipes and wires in the ceiling where the
market will be established, smoothing out the building’s uneven floor, and installing new water and electrical systems for the vendors. Despite these issues, many people have continued to voice their support of the project. Governor Deval Patrick’s administration has already committed $4 million to the project, and the Henry P. Kendall Foundation in Boston has donated $1 million. Many local farmers are also encouraged by the recent development in the project. “I am more confident now than I was a few years ago,” Glenn Stillman, owner of Stillman’s Farm, told The Boston Globe.
Having a public market in the heart of Boston will not only facilitate sales for these local farmers but also boost publicity throughout the general public. Because the Boston Public Market Association is a non-profit company, it plans to raise the necessary funds before beginning construction. It intends to start construction this summer and finish the project by next spring. During that time, the association hopes to continue to operate different seasonal markets throughout the area. This spring, they plan to open a new seasonal market in front of the prospective home of the Boston Public Market. n
Organization hosts annual Harvest Dinner at shelter Friends, from B10 the Berklee College of Music’s Bob Marley Ensemble, directed by assistant professor of piano Matt Jenson. Tickets for the evening are priced at $125 and will contribute to funding for programs supported by the Friends of Boston’s Homeless. O’Neal O’Loughlin and the rest of the Friends of Boston’s Homeless staff are expecting around 750 attendees, hopefully including newly sworn-in Mayor Marty Walsh and Governor Deval Patrick, who were personally invited by the nonprofit. “We want to get the people of Boston talking,” O’Neal O’Loughlin said regarding the Beyond Shelter Gala. Along with the annual gala, Friends of Boston’s Homeless hosts a Harvest Dinner each fall at the Boston area’s largest homeless shelter located on Long Island, Mass. The most unique aspect of this dinner, however, is not that the food is cooked by some of the city’s best chefs, but that it comes from the neighboring Farm at Long Island, a four-acre certified organic and environmentally sustainable farm that grows vegetables, herbs, and fruit. The Farm at Long Island works with Friends of Boston’s Homeless by providing hands-on job training, culinary arts education, and workreadiness skills to the homeless. The farm also sends about 70 percent of its produce back to Boston-area shelters. According to O’Neal O’Loughlin, this not only allows Boston’s “most vul-
Photo Courtesy of Friends of Boston’s Homeless
Friends of Boston’s Homeless hosts the annual Beyond Shelter Gala to raise funds in support of their effort to build stable lives for the poor. nerable population to get first quality food,” but it also provides the chance for individuals working on the farm to see and be proud of the work they have accomplished. Although the events hosted to raise funds and public awareness are unique and innovative, Friends of Boston’s Homeless is most concerned with how the efforts from such events are able to help the city’s impoverished. Instead of just filtering money into shelters, Friends of Boston’s Home-
less takes special initiative to support programs that will allow those affected by homelessness to live healthy, stable, and independent lives. Working with Homeless Services of the Boston Public Health Commission, the non-profit finds solutions through literacy education, job training, and housing efforts. Friends of Boston’s Homeless also encourages a full continuum of care for the underprivileged, including resources for free GED classes, AA meetings, and
career-skills programs in which heads of companies are able to give lectures via Skype in order to share practical career advice. O’Neal O’Loughlin said that she began working for Friends of Boston’s Homeless after a lengthy career as a banker, when she decided that she “wanted to do something more.” She said that every event planned or fundraised initiated by the nonprofit is “above all, always for the homeless.” n
Benefit concert will feature Bearstronaut, DJ Kon Right Now, from B10 for the Perfect Beat, in 2002. Idealizing the themes of peace, unity, and love which characterize the electronic dance movement, Forest Hoeckel was able to find similarities in ideals of her own, including her passion for climate change awareness and Buddhism, which she has been studying for over 10 years. “I decided to turn my day job into my passion, which was to bring all of these things together into one stream,” Forest Hoeckel said. Despite a few years spent in more commercial jobs as the company started up, Forest Hoeckel came to the conclusion that a large-scale music festival revolving around climate change was a perfect outlet for her ideas. “I thought, ‘how can we plug music into the cause of climate change, how can we make that effective?’” she said. “When you look at big concerts of the past—they all did a lot of good, raised a lot of money—but didn’t have the full experience I was looking for.” Living in a Buddhist residential community in Cambridge at a distance from traditional entertainment centers, Forest Hoeckel looked toward the academic arena to complete the experience she had in mind. “When the typhoon happened, we decided that this would be a really great op-
portunity to test some of the ideas and try to bring all of the pieces together around one event,” she said, and the Right Now! benefit was conceived as part one of her hopes for music festival success. Over the past few months, Forest Hoeckel and her team took special care to invite the area’s most popular electronic musicians as well as the most informed climatologists to build a lineup and panel that she hopes can spark a conversation on climate change: “Music creates a certain type of energy, and climate change is a hard topic to address—it is huge and overwhelming—but any time you bring people together around joy like music or art, it creates a different kind of reference for it,” she said. Forest Hoeckel hopes Right Now! will work as an intermediary between those who are experts on the current climate situation and the public who can do something about it, and she has called on a few big names to address the subject. To build an intellectual reference for her event, Forest Hoeckel collaborated with Peter Harrington, a graduate candidate of public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, to invite 25 to 30 speakers to represent climate science. Michael Mann, American climatologist and geophysicist; Jack Healy, human rights activist; and Cameron Wake, regional climate change expert,
will lead the panel in discussion on climate change and its implications. Bill McKibben, called “the nation’s leading environmentalist” by The Boston Globe, has also worked with We Are Music to create a special video message to be screened at Right Now! in hopes of creating an intellectual, yet accessible conversation on climate change. Much of the discussion at Right Now! will highlight climatological work in New England and its impact at the local level. “This happens to be the large issue of our time,” Forest Hoeckel said. “There always is one, but when people come together in a certain kind of way, they begin to see how their life could be if they engage.” One of the most unique panelists set to address climate change is Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, president of the Buddhist Association of the United States. Forest Hoeckel said that any spiritual leader commenting on climate change would bring a universal element to the discussion, and, for her, having a leader in the Buddhist community makes the event even more personal. “[Bhikkhu Bodji] provides a powerful voice helping to explain that what is happening right now is important,” Forest Hoeckel said. The lineup of electronic musicians who will perform at Right Now! on Saturday is as varied as the list of panelists. Boston electronic pop quartet Bearstronaut will accompany ESCORT and DJ Kon to highlight
the electronic disco genre Forest Hoeckel is so passionate about. “We are able to plug into this global mouthpiece and use it to be effective in the world, not only as a creative source but as one that can shape a movement,” Forest Hoeckel said about the recent global surge in popularity of electronic music. “I am as passionate about music as I am about helping the world,” said Forest Hoeckel on her decision to send 100 percent of the proceeds to typhoon relief in the Philippines. “The good that we can do, the impact we could have both for the Philippines and climate change education, what to do with the money was never really part of the question,” she said. Hoeckel is hoping to sell out the concert’s venue on Saturday. Because of the support the event has been receiving from the community, Forest Hoeckel said that she thinks the success of the benefit is inevitable. Companies ranging from PopChips to Island Creek Oysters have agreed to sponsor the event that will be held in at Somerville indoor climbing facility, Brooklyn Boulders. “It was just easy for everyone to get on board,” Forest Hoeckel said. “Right from the beginning everything has been geared toward doing good, and there is kind of an amazing synchronization happening there.” n
THE HEIGHTS
Thursday, January 30, 2014
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Governor’s budget focuses on schools and employment Patrick, from B10 incorporate gambling revenue from the state’s 2011 casino law for the first time. Patrick said much of the new spending in his budget is directed toward education, including $204.9 million in increased education funding allocated to providing a higher level of education from the earliest ages to college. Within the education budget, Patrick proposes a record $100 million increase in Chapter 70 local education aid. This will bring Chapter 70 spending to $4.4 billion, the highest in the state’s history. This is guaranteed to increase spending by $25 per each individual student in the Boston school district. Patrick also plans to invest an additional $15 million in early education
programs in an effort to help close the achievement gap between minority students and their white peers. The governor’s FY15 plan includes investments that will also increase employment opportunities across the state, connecting job seekers to firms growing in Massachusetts. For example, Patrick recognizes the need for a reliable transportation system in Boston. The FY15 budget increases funding for the MassDot and MBTA by $141 million in the hopes of improving the transportation systems in order to create room to build better roads, rails, and bridges across the Commonwealth. Patrick’s administration also plans to provide $25 million in funds for the Mass Life Sciences Center to provide research grants and loans in the area of life and natural sciences.
Along with that spending throughout the year, Patrick hopes to gain revenue from the citizens of Massachusetts by proposing about $97 million in additional taxes in the FY15 budget. Patrick is proposing $57 million in new revenue by applying the state’s sales tax to candy and soda. This plan will affect schools and public vending machines statewide. Although this proposal has been rejected in the past, Patrick is arguing in favor of the tax, saying that the money earned from the tax will go toward supporting public health and infrastructure projects. “I am proud of the progress we have made by working together and governing for the long term over the past seven years,” Patrick said in a statement. “Let’s continue this work,
inspired by our shared commitment to leave to others a better Commonwealth than we found.” On Jan. 28, Patrick gave his final State of the Commonwealth address, where he was able to highlight some of his budget’s goals. The governor argued that he is leaving Massachusetts in better shape than when he took office in 2007. Throughout his address, Patrick discussed the state’s success in education and innovation. He echoed the phrase, “Let’s keep going.” Patrick’s FY15 plan now heads to the House and Senate, where members will discuss and propose their own versions of the spending plan for the year and deliver a compromise to the governor before the end of the fiscal year in June.
Arts community concerned with real estate, education Transition Team, from B10 what policies the city already has that should be kept, what policies can be implemented in the near future with little action by the state legislature, and a last category that he called “dream,” which the Boston arts community wants for the future. Walsh has said that he intends to include a Cabinet-level commissioner dedicated to arts and culture in his administration. It will become clear next week whether or not he holds up this promise, as The Boston Globe reported that details regarding his Cabinet may be released next week. Arts education was emphasized at the public hearing. Several speakers implored the transition team to advise Walsh that the city’s commitment to arts education needs to be maintained. Elementary music teacher Angela Mantie detailed the benefit of an artistic education in the lives of her students and called for the administration to maintain the work done by the Boston Public Schools Expansion Initiative, which was launched in 2009 to help bring the arts to the city’s students. Others were concerned about the lack of real estate dedicated to the arts community, referencing much-needed rehearsal and studio space. Some blamed the Boston Redevelopment Au-
thority (BRA) in part for their woes, arguing that the powerful agency makes decisions that are not in tune with the needs of the arts community. While Walsh said that he would move to restructure the BRA, he later backtracked as mayor-elect, saying that he would take some time to reform the agency. The Fort Point Arts Community Inc., for example, a non-profit dedicated to the promotion of the arts community in the Fort Point neighborhood, says on its official website that artists in the neighborhood struggle to find affordable housing because the BRA favors developers that reduce the amount of space available to their community. D oug l a s Ruu sk a , a memb er of the Brickbottom Artists Association and outreach coordinator of Figment Boston, was critical of the amount of industrial space that went to high-end housing instead of the arts community. Heidi Burbidge of Jamaica Plain asserted that real estate is the biggest issue facing Boston’s artists and that more members of the arts community should be “at the table” for neighborhood planning. “I’m most interested in support for buildings with artist space like workonly studios and performance space, both of which have operating budgets that are difficult to break even, and
affordable housing that allows artists to stay in Boston,” Burbidge later said in an SMS message. “I think leadership at the City’s office of planning and economic development that recognizes the importance of these types of uses in neighborhoods of Boston could help sustain the local assets of Boston’s arts and cultural community.” In addition to critiques of the city’s allocation of real estate, those who spoke at Saturday’s public hearing felt that Boston’s permitting process was complex, unfair, and prevented them from effectively bringing their creativity to fruition. Mina Kim, the assistant director at The Fenway Alliance, called for a more “streamlined and equitable permitting process.” She was echoed by Don Carlson of Jazz Boston, who was critical of the city’s entertainment licensing process. “What is the city afraid of?” Carlson asked. He shared an extensive list of the licenses an establishment had already attained, only to reveal that the establishment still had to reapply in order to allow disc jokeying . “Please fix these absurd rules,” he said. “It’ll save money, too.” Attendees at the public hearing had less technical concerns as well—many had ideas about how Boston could grow into a stronger cultural center. Several speakers looked to New York City as
a model for how the city should work with its arts community. Executive Director of JazzBoston Pauline Bilsky, for example, asked that the city move to rename some city streets after local jazz legends, as New York did with Miles Davis. Similarly, Don Packer, who founded the film editorial house Engine Room Edit, said that Boston needed a film office similar to that already in New York. By promoting film in Boston, he argued, the city would attract tourism. Others felt that Boston also needed to do more to support local music, arguing that the city is now importing its musical identity from out of state because there is insufficient space for underground bands to share their work. Architect and sculptor Bill Turville felt that the city did not allocate enough “permanent space for temporary art.” He cited Charlesgate Park as one place that could benefit from the attention of the arts community. Joyce Kulhawik, a renowned broadcaster in New England’s cultural landscape, was concerned primarily with Boston’s outreach effort. She felt that the city needed to make a greater attempt to draw people into the city to appreciate the work of its artists, and she said that the city’s message should be clear: “Boston’s got it, come here.”
COLLEGIATE ROUND-UP BY MAGGIE MARETZ | HEIGHTS STAFF
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Rakesh Khurana named new dean at university This past Wednesday, Harvard College announced that Rakesh Khurana would be named as the school’s new dean. Khurana is a longstanding member of the Harvard community. He is currently the Marvin Bower professor of leadership development at Harvard Business School, a professor of sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), and co-master of the Cabot House. He earned his Ph.D. through a joint program between Harvard Business School and Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1998. He has done extensive research on the processes by which elites and leaders are selected, and he has also written about the CEO labor market and business education. FAS Dean and John H. Finley Jr. Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences Michael D. Smith, who was responsible for alerting the community to Khurana’s
BOSTON UNIV. This week, Boston University unveiled a new program that will offer its students the opportunity to obtain both Doctor of Medicine (MD) and Juris Doctor of Law (JD) degrees in a six-year period. The launch of this program will make BU only the second university to offer this type of dual-degree program, following the lead of Yale University. Students will spend the first three years of the program pursuing a medical curriculum including surgery, pediatrics, and internal medicine. The following two years will be dedicated to the first two years of law school and will also involve some medical clinical experiences in order to maintain students’ skills. The final year will be a mixture of medical and law elective classes that will be focused on an area of their choice. The program will be highly selective, and it will require that each participant is accepted to both the School of Medicine and the School of Law.
appointment, looks forward to what Khurana will bring to the plate as dean. “He brings to the deanship an intimate understanding of the Harvard College experience, a profound commitment to the values of a liberal-arts education, and a warm and compassionate personality that accompanies his belief in the importance of community and an inclusive approach to decision-making,” Smith said, according to Harvard’s official website. Khurana will be the replacement for former dean Evelynn M. Hammonds, the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz professor of the history of science, who resigned her position last June after the expiration of her five-year term. Currently filling the position of interim dean is Donald Pfister, the Asa Gray professor of systematic botany, who will serve until July 1 when Khurana takes over.
MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have recently devised a new brain-scanning technique that will allow scientists to see where the brain processes visual information. The technique combines two existing technologies, and it will provide a level of accuracy in mapping the flow of visual information from an individual’s eyes through the human brain that has never before been possible. With this new method, researchers will be able to identify both the location and the timing of human brain activity. Researchers who analyzed images taken with the new technology were able to pinpoint within a millisecond when the brain recognizes and categorizes an object, as well as the location in which these processes occur. A complete paper describing the findings of the study can be found in the Jan. 26 issue of Nature Neuroscience. Lead author of the paper Radoslaw Cichy is a post-doctorate candidate at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKIPEDIA
NORTHEASTERN Earlier this month, the University of Indonesia released its fourth annual GreenMetric Ranking of World Universities, which evaluates universities around the world based on their campus sustainability and environmentally-friendly university management. Northeastern University’s long-standing commitment to sustainability garnered it the title of No. 1 greenest university in the U.S., and third place among 301 universities from all over the world. The rankings were determined based on selfreported data in six different categories: energy and climate change, setting and infrastructure, waste management, transportation, education, and water usage. Northeastern has consistently been in the top four on the list since its debut in 2010, when only 95 institutions of higher education were evaluated. Northeastern President Joseph E. Aoun expressed his excitement about the news via Twitter, writing, “Green. Green. Green. Northeastern is black, red, and green.”
THE HEART OF THE CITY
Lessons from across the tray MAGGIE POWERS A quippy little piece of wisdom popped up, as quippy little pieces of wisdom often do, on my Pinterest homepage the other morning. “A person who is nice to you but is not nice to the waitress is not a nice person.” About a week ago I was out to dinner on Newbury St. It was relatively early—all the tables were not yet filled and I had a clear sightline across the candlelit tables. A sweet, but somewhat timid, waitress crossed the floor arriving in front of two polished, middle-aged women who only offered cold smiles in exchange for their plates. The moment the waitress walked away I knew she was in for it. “How hard is it to cook a steak?” one of the women uttered, loudly enough that I could hear it about three tables away. Before the waitress could get the “how is” from her chipper “how is everything?” out of her mouth, the woman snapped. “Is the kitchen having a hard day or something?” she screeched in a shrill tone about two or three notches too high. “The soup was warm at best, cold actually. And now, when I asked for medium you give me a steak so rare it is practically mooing.” The poor waitress was berated for about two minutes, but it felt like a half an hour. Anything she said seemingly aggravated the situation. By this point the awful woman had orchestrated such dramatics the entire top floor of the restaurant was hushed to the point you could only hear the occasional rattle. When the waitress turned, just for a second, we caught eyes. They were filled with tears. I have been on the other side of that tray, biting my lip so I don’t cry while I’m still on the floor. The moment I was old enough to get a work permit—age 14 in Massachusetts—my parents insisted I march myself around town, in the hopes that some local business would provide me with the valuable life experience one can only learn from your first crappy job. What began as a simple job as a busgirl and waitress defined my high school and college summers. Of course I have taken away the cliche lessons like patience, respect, and work ethic. But, most importantly, it has changed my outlook on people. Probably 80 percent of customers are truly very nice people, or at the very least, will give you the bare minimum of politeness that society requires. But the 20 percent that are bad? They’re really bad. I’ve had every complaint under the sun, from the slices in the lemons that garnish glasses not being deep enough (ridiculous, yes, but something I do technically have control over) to being yelled at, just like this waitress on Newbury St., for how the food was cooked (something a waitress has absolutely no control over). Whatever the complaints are, the actual problem is irrelevant, always. I promise. Yes, you are a customer and yes, you are probably paying good money for your meal and for service, but that girl serving you? Yeah, she’s a human too. Every single waitress deserves the human decency to be spoken kindly. Next time you’re out to eat, consider that the girl on the other side of the tray is working just as hard as you have all day. She’s probably tired, just like you are. A simple act of kindness, an actual conversation or a genuine smile, can make her shift go just a little faster. When your steak is cooked incorrectly, just tell her nicely. It’s really not a problem to fix it, but yelling at her shows a lack of understanding to what she does and a lack of respect to her as a human. Oh, the other dining companion of this woman? I saw her leave a few extra dollars on the table, a silent apology for her friend. It softened the incident I witnessed to see that she not only was nice to the waitress, but a shining example of a nice person.
Maggie Powers is an editor for The Heights. She can be reached at metro@ bcheights.com.
metro The Heights
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Thursday, January 30, 2014
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Edge of Town
Mapping out history Ryan Towey When I was a little kid, I used to draw maps of places that I would invent for myself, and any fantasy novels that incorporated a map instantly piqued my interest. I enjoyed being able to trace the paths of the main characters. Being able to follow a map as I read a story made it feel all the more real. Although maps are meant to display a literal representation of what lies within certain borders, there is something about the creation and visual of a map that I find intensely creative, as if the land—or at least one’s understanding of it—did not exist before it was put down on paper. My childhood propensity has followed me into adulthood, as I still appreciate the tangibility of a map. Now, I am fascinated by the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library. Created in 2004, the Map Center is a non-profit organization that houses a collection of 200,000 maps, 5,000 atlases, and a website that includes more than 5,500 digitized maps. Currently, the center is presenting an exhibition called Made in Boston that will run through March 10. According to the Map Center’s official website, the “exhibition affords a unique perspective on the ambitions, anxieties and sense of identity that animated colonial Bostonians.” I find the Map Center’s assertion that a city’s identity can be found in maps both intriguing and truthful. While the center’s current exhibition focuses on maps from before the American Revolution, one type of map that I feel touches upon a key part of Boston’s identity is any map that traces how Boston has grown over time. Much of Boston’s land mass was created by filling in waters surrounding the formerly narrow strip of land. The Back Bay, for example, which is now one of Boston’s most recognizable neighborhoods, was not converted into inhabitable land until the 1880s. Once that land was filled, the task did not grow any easier. Take, for example, the construction of Trinity Church in the Back Bay. The church is supported by some 4,500 wooden piles that are driven down 30 feet beneath the ground. The piles are constantly immersed in the water table of the Back Bay—if they were not, they would rapidly rot when exposed to air. When one looks at a map that depicts Boston’s expanding borders over time, one should not underestimate the sheer human ingenuity required to produce such a transformation. When I think of the industriousness, brilliance, and intensive planning that must have gone into constructing a city quite literally out of the water, I am more amazed by Boston’s history than when I think of almost anything else. I reflect now on the maps I would create as a child—I would take a pencil and draw whatever my mind imagined on a page. One may look at this as childish, but I was exercising a very human impulse. Boston, with its expanded borders, serves as living proof of the notion that mankind can work together to create absolute wonders. Unlike my childhood self, Boston’s mapmakers did not likely consider drawing space for dragons or giant fortresses in the mountains, but I digress. But just as drew maps as a child to tell imagined stories, the maps created to designate Boston’s new land tell stories that came true. Now, you can stop by the Map Center to “read” how that story unfolded. To those who say looking at maps is a boring waste of time, I say that those maps are the very ground on which you are walking. Remember that the next time you are in Boston—the streets upon which you are walking are the product of the imagination and ingenuity of those who came before you. Don’t take it for granted.
Ryan Towey is the Metro Editor for The Heights. He can be reached at metro@bcheights.com.
We Are Music to present benefit concert in Somerville Right Now! strives to raise climate change awareness and will fundraise for typhoon relief By Sarah Moore Heights Editor Summer Forest Hoeckel is bringing electronic music, climate change education, and Philippines typhoon relief together under one Boston-area roof this Saturday in Somerville. The Right Now! climate change awareness and Philippines benefit event presented by Forest Hoeckel’s company, We Are Music, is planning to educate and entertain Bostonians on Feb. 1. A lineup of
both locally and globally popular electronic musicians as well as experts on climate change and human rights is set to take the stage at Right Now!, creating a unique environment in which Forest Hoeckel hopes to spark a movement. Forest Hoeckel, who has worked in the media and entertainment industry for 15 years, published a graphic history of the influence of the American underground electronic dance music scene, Searching
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Photo Courtesy of We Are Music
Bhikkhu Bodhi, a Buddhist, will speak on climate change at Right Now! this weekend.
THE YEAR AHEAD
Steven Senne / ap photo
Governor Deval Patrick delivered his last State of the Commonwealth address on Tuesday. He will not seek re-election this year, having served since 2007.
Patrick releases his next budget for the state, delivers State of the Commonwealth By Bennet Johnson Asst. Metro Editor
Although Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick delivered his State of the Commonwealth address on Jan. 28, some of the state’s most crucial information—the fiscal year budget—was revealed before the speech, when Patrick filed his Fiscal Year 2015 (FY15) budget plan for the upcoming year on Jan.22. The plan
displays the governor’s commitment to creating opportunities for the residents of the state while still maintaining the state’s fiscal health. The budget promises to expand education opportunities for the children of Massachusetts, and supports the governor’s four main priorities—growing jobs, closing schools’ achievement gap, ensuring affordable health care, and confronting youth and urban
violence. As of now, the budget is estimated at $36.374 billon, which is a 4.9 percent increase from the last fiscal year, according to the governor’s website. “This budget is a balanced, responsible budget that supports our growth strategy of investing in education, innovation, and infrastructure to create jobs and opportunity in the near term and strengthen our Commonwealth in the long term,” Patrick said in
a statement. Patrick chose not to follow the plan from last year’s budget, which proposed an increase in the state’s income tax from 5.25 percent to 6.25 percent. Instead, lawmakers chose a 3 cent-pergallon increase in gas prices, along with a $1 per-pack cigarette tax increase. This year, the budget will
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Nonprofit assists poor through benefits, events Friends of Boston’s Homeless will host annual fundraising gala B y S arah M oore Heights Editor A local nonprofit is looking beyond shelters to help find a solution for the homeless, and also to raise awareness about homelessness in Boston through public outreach. Founded in 1987, Friends of Boston’s Homeless is an organization that supports innovative efforts to establish independence for the city’s less fortunate. Although it supports Boston’s emergency shelters, the group focuses primarily on programs that help over 400 homeless men and women each year move successfully back into the community and maintain a stable lifestyle. “It is a much-needed hand up instead of a hand out,” said Jamie O’Neal O’Loughlin, the development coordinator and special events director for Friends of Boston’s Homeless. Friends of Boston’s Homeless aims
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to bring public funding to the needs of the city’s less fortunate. The group has been able to find success in this role by moving beyond traditional fundraisers to host special events that allow businesses, foundations, and citizens to become a part of the solution for homelessness. “[The events] give a number of people the opportunity to support a charity and have fun doing it,” said O’Neal O’Loughlin, who will have worked with Friends of Boston’s Homeless for 10 years this April. As the nonprofit’s special events director, she oversees the group’s efforts to continuously bring homelessness awareness to different settings, one of which is the Beyond Shelter Gala, which has been held annually since Friends of Boston’s Homeless was founded. This year’s gala, the 27th, falls on April 10, and will be held from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. at the House of Blues. Along with raffles and silent auctions, more than 25 of Boston’s premiere chefs have agreed to create a gourmet tastingmenu specifically for the evening. Two bands will perform as well, including
Collegiate Round-up
See Friends, B8
Ryan Towey / Metro Editor
Audience members at the BPL’s public hearing were given two minutes to voice their concerns.
Walsh transition team focuses on arts community B y R yan T owey Metro Editor
The Rabb Lecture Hall of the Boston Public Library was packed on Saturday morning, where diverse members of the Boston arts community waited for a chance to speak at a microphone for a strict two minutes—their chance to indirectly tell Mayor Martin J. Walsh, WCAS ’09, their opinions on the future of the city’s arts and culture scene. As part of a continued effort to successfully launch his new tenure, Walsh appointed an extensive transition team with several groups designed to focus
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on the city’s different concerns. Walsh appointed Gary Dunning, executive director of Celebrity Series of Boston, and Cuong Hoang, director of programs at Mott Philanthropic, to lead a working group dedicated to arts and culture. Before inviting attendees to speak at the microphone at the public hearing on Saturday morning, Dunning outlined the purpose of the gathering, which he said was to meet Walsh’s goal of making Boston “a municipal arts leader” by examining three categories of policy—
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Boston Foodie: The Merchant...............................................................................B7 This Week In...........................................................................................................B7