The Heights - 05/01/2014

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Thursday, May 1, 2014

Vol. XCV, No. 25

Belfast Project tapes may link Sinn Fein leader to McConville case Gerry Adams was arrested Wednesday for questioning on the murder of Jean McConville

BY CONNOR FARLEY News Editor

Editor’s Note: This story is part of an ongoing series about the subpoenas of the Belfast Project.

Sinn Fein party leader Gerry Adams was arrested by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) on Wednesday night in connection to the 1972 murder of Jean McConville.

Adams, who has been president of the Sinn Fein for more than 30 years, was detained for questioning regarding the abduction and

murder of McConville. Developments in the case, which occurred during the conflict in Northern Ireland commonly known as “The Troubles,” have been linked to interviews collected from former paramilitary members as part of Boston College’s Belfast Project.

Having long been the subject of accusations regarding affiliations with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) leadership during the 1970s, Adams has consistently denied ever having been a member of the paramilitary organization. Despite numerous claims asserting that Adams held a position within the IRA, the 65-year-old has continued to refute any involvement in

McConville’s death, per reports from The Boston Globe.

According to a report from USA Today, upon being detained, Adams confirmed his own arrest through a prepared statement describing his questioning as a voluntary interview. A personal statement from Adams released on Sinn Fein’s website reads: “As a republican leader I have never shirked my responsibility to build the peace.

This includes dealing with the difficult issue of victims and their families. Insofar as it is possible I have worked to bring closure to victims and their families who have contacted me.

Even though they may not agree, this includes the family of Jean McConville.”

According to public statements from the

See Adams, A3

PETER MORRISON / AP PHOTO

Interviews of former IRA members conducted through Belfast Project could implicate Adams.

2014-15 UGBC board inaugurated

Fair focuses on promoting conservation

BY JULIE ORENSTEIN

BY NATHAN MCGUIRE

Assoc. News Editor

Asst. News Editor

The Boston College Office of Sustainability welcomed to its annual Sustainability Fair a number of campus groups and outside businesses that are working on initiatives to promote conservation and sustainability.

About 15 clubs, organizations, and businesses set up stations near the College Road entrance to McElroy Commons on Wednesday afternoon to showcase the steps that they each are taking to be more environmentally sustainable.

Varsha Ramesh, a communications and outreach intern in the Office of Sustainability and A&S ’16, said that one of the most pressing issues she sees at BC is a lack of awareness of sustainability. She grew up in California and said that she sees a difference in the way that people on the East Coast think about sustainability. She thinks that small steps like recycling, shutting off lights, and using reusable water bottles can go a long way in the larger sustainability movement.

The University has recently responded to growing student interest in the sustainability movements. It announced in March that the Environmental Studies Program (ESP) will be expanded to include an interdisciplinary major. Student representatives from the department showcased some of their projects at the fair.

Annie Meyer, one of the departmental representatives and A&S ’14, completed a project with some of her peers, investigating the feasibility of installing solar panels on campus buildings. She concluded that it

See Sustainability Fair, A3

of sense.

“But over these past few years, even in those moments when, for instance, I had to file a student for plagiarism … even in those really tough instances, it has nevertheless been a privilege and a blessing to be in this relationship with you.”

Clarke encouraged the audience, in a last challenge as a part of his last lecture, to engage in a “counter-cultural” senior five, finding people who have positively influenced their time at BC, thanking them, and catching up before they leave campus.

As for reverence, Clarke talked about his role as a historian trying to give students an overview of centuries of Asian history in just two semesters, and, as a Jesuit, looking for God in everything.

The Undergraduate Government of Boston College (UGBC) inauguration marked the end of an administration that has faced the challenge of a shifting structure and ushered in a new group of leaders who will be tasked with implementing the organization’s transformed role.

A central focus of Wednesday night’s event was outgoing UGBC president and executive vice president Matt Nacier and Matt Alonsozana, both A&S ’14, reflecting on their experiences working in UGBC, acting as mentees and mentors, and friends and leaders. They each shared advice for the new administration, to be led by incoming president Nanci FioreChettiar and executive vice president Chris Marchese, both A&S ’15, as well as for all UGBC members.

Before Nacier and Alonsozana spoke, however, Dean of Students Paul Chebator addressed the audience of student leaders and shared some observations he has had about UGBC over his 34 years at BC. Chebator, who will retire at the end of this academic year, provided insight on several aspects of past UGBC administrations that he thought were crucial in helping them succeed.

Among these characteristics were having strategic outlooks, focusing on a few important issues, doing their homework and planning, acting within the framework of existing institutions, building strong relationships with administrators, developing realistic goals, and working as a team.

“Something I would say to you is a

See Last Lecture, A3

See UGBC Inaugurations, A3

EMILY FAHEY / HEIGHTS EDITOR

On Wednesday night, Rev. Jeremy Clarke, S.J. spoke to his past and present students, expressing thanks for his 10 semesters at BC.

Clarke delivers his ‘Last Lecture’

BY JULIE ORENSTEIN Assoc. News Editor

The latest installment of the Americans for Informed Democracy’s (AID) “Last Lecture” series provided the setting for Rev. Jeremy Clarke, S.J.’s final curtain call at Boston College.

The assistant professor of history, a Jesuit from Australia, has taught at BC since arriving in 2007 as a visiting instructor, teaching courses in Asian history and on China in particular. On Tuesday night, Clarke stood before a packed Devlin 008 one last time, as students past and present gathered to hear his last lecture before he returns to his home country to work at the Jesuit Mission of Australia.

The “Last Lecture” series features BC professors delivering talks based on Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch’s model lecture

and subsequent book. Pausch, diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2007, decided to address the question, “If you had the chance to give the last lecture of your life, what would you say?”

In this context, Clarke chose to reflect on some of the most important themes in his life as a Jesuit, particularly interweaving anecdotes and memories from his time at BC. What truly motivates him and frames his core identity, he said, is based on the First Principle and Foundation of St. Ignatius of Loyola: the human person is created to praise, revere, and serve God. He expressed praise and gratitude for the students he has gotten to know over 10 semesters teaching at BC, and he gave thanks that his provincial in Australia sent him here.

“An Australian Jesuit, teaching Chinese history, in Boston,” Clarke said, moving across the room as he progressed through each facet of his current role. “It just doesn’t make a lot

BC Dining Services brings ‘Meatball Obsession’ to Corcoran Commons

BY JENN SUH Heights Staff The small, shack-like structure in front of Corcoran Commons has a new look—Beans, Creams, and Dreams has been replaced with Meatball Obsession, which opened on April 21 with success, according to Megan O’Neill, associate director of restaurant operations for Boston College Dining Services (BCDS).

“The best proof of success was we were so busy the first week that we ran out of meatballs, and Meatball Obsession had to get an emergency production run made and shipped to us,” O’Neill said in an email.

“They have been a great group to work with and are really dedicated to providing an excellent product to our customer base.”

Meatball Obsession has two locations on Lower Campus: the shack and Lower Live Dining Hall. Both locations serve beef and turkey meatballs in a cup, with toppings including mini ravioli, five cheeses, vegetable sautes, and mozzarella cheese pearls, according to an announcement from BCDS. The new dining options will be available to students inside Corcorans Commons during lunch or Late Night, but not dinner due to outside operating hours during that time.

Students can check the comment board inside Corcoran Commons for further details about when Meatball Obsession will be available inside the dining hall, O’Neill said.

Meatball Obsession will be open for all seven days during Senior Week from 4 to 7 p.m. for afternoon snack and dinner in response to student comments about the dinner rush between 6 and 7 p.m. It will also be open during the summer from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. when the dining hall is closed for summer activities.

The hours of service for the shack during the academic year depend on the weather, “since [the shack] cannot be open

if there is a chance of lightning, extreme heat, or extreme cold,” O’Neill said.

Fall semester hours of service for the shack have yet to be determined, according to O’Neill.

Founde d by Dan Mancini, Meatball Obsession opened its first location in Greenwich Village in New York City in March 2012. The company offers beef, turkey, chicken, or pork sausage meatballs based on recipes from Mancini’s grandmother. “At Meatball Obses-

sion, it’s all about the meatball,” according to the company’s website. The meatballs are served in a cup with dipping bread and personalized toppings.

Meatball Obsession first reached out to BCDS in January about partnering to create an on-campus location, because “they felt our campus would be interested in a fun, new concept,” O’Neill said. BC is the first university to partner with Meatball Obsession.

See Meatball Obsession, A3

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things to do on campus this week

Indie rapper Hoodie Allen will take over the Mod Lot this afternoon for Boston College’s 2014 Modstock concert. DJ Earworm will open the concert, which is set to begin at 3:30 p.m. and is sponsored by UGBC’s programming department.

Admission is free.

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Thursday, May 1, 2014

Today from 5:30 to 7 p.m., alumni will discuss their experiences with personal finance in a discussion sponsored by the Office of Student Services’ Successful Start program. The discussion, “Money Matters: From Graduation to Vocation,” will be held in Fulton 511.

On Wednesday, May 7 at 5 p.m., the Clough Colloquium will host a panel discussion in Robsham on the topic of how to make Boston stronger, featuring Governor Deval Patrick, former Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, and former police commissioner Edward Davis.

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Live life’s Kalscheur named interim A&S, GA&S dean questions

BY NATHAN MCGUIRE Asst. News Editor

ALEX GAYNOR As a bewildered and timid pre-freshman, I impulsively signed myself up for the PULSE program, and what ensued was a crash course on how to live. My entire world was flipped upside down as I learned about ideas and worlds that I hadn’t even known existed. At the end of the year I was completely overwhelmed with this breadth of new knowledge and found that I had more questions leaving the program than I had when I entered. My professor knew that this would be the case and passed out a quote on the last day of class that I still keep posted in my room wherever I go. In his book of essays Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke discusses this idea of “living the questions now” and states that by living these questions, “someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

I’ve found this sentiment to be completely valid. By searching for concrete answers to larger existential life questions at the moment that we desire their resolution, chances are we cannot understand what is being presented to us because we do not yet possess the experiences to receive and process the knowledge.

Theologian Rev. William Lynch, S.J., refers to this idea when he mentions that humans are constantly “on the way” to understanding the self and the world around them. By journeying through reality in an observant, present, inquisitive, value-driven, and authentic-to-self way, both authors would agree that one is living “the questions” in hopes of receiving some greater insight down the line.

This can either seem like a lot of philosophical fluff or true genius regarding the process of human understanding. My experiences as a freshman in PULSE are inextricably linked to my reasons for studying abroad in the Philippines this past semester, as well as to how I choose to live my life. Leaving the program with so many questions prompted me to throw myself into situations wherein I could gain more insight into the world’s troubles, as well as simply how to live as a functioning human being in society. I wouldn’t have been able to comprehend the complex realities that I’m faced with everyday in this country if it were not for all of the experiences that I’ve had leading up to this semester, which all stemmed from an observant curiosity and desire of knowledge. While it may seem frustrating, sitting with the notion that living and gaining knowledge is a process is actually kind of calming.

I posed a challenge to you all in my first column. I dared everyone, including myself, to become a “capturer of details” by getting out and living in the crazy world that we all inhabit, living life in a creative and non-kitschy way, and becoming present and observant. Perhaps, all of this “living your ways into the answers” business is actually more relatable than one might think. By capturing the details and soaking up life one air particle, cup of tea, hug, or conversation at a time, you’re on the way toward living your way into these answers. Living according to one’s convictions, passions, and questions is accomplished in many ways, but sometimes it’s useful to return to the start and examine the quotidian details that make up the complex functioning of our even more intricately designed world.

Alex Gaynor is a senior staff columnist for The Heights. She can be reached at news@bcheights.com.

The University announced last Thursday that Rev. Gregory Kalscheur, S.J., was named the interim dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, effective June 1.

Kalscheur, a senior associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, will assume the role currently filled by David Quigley, who was named provost and dean of faculties in March.

“I am tremendously grateful to be given the opportunity to serve the University in this role,” said Kalscheur to the Office of News and Public Affairs (ONPA) last week. “Teaching and research in the liberal arts and sciences are at the heart of the University’s Jesuit, Catholic mission, and I look forward to the privilege of working with the outstanding faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences in continuing to advance our commitment to academic excellence, intellectual rigor, and the preparation of our students for full and meaningful lives oriented toward service of the common good.”

Kalscheur, who will lead both the graduate and undergraduate A&S schools until a permanent replacement is found, has been on the faculty of the Boston College Law School since 2003, where he has taught courses on law and religion, constitutional law, and Catholic social thought.

In 2012 he was named the senior associate dean for strategic planning and faculty development in A&S, and has since worked on core curriculum renewal and in assisting Quigley with hiring and promoting.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE OFFICE OF NEWS AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Kalscheur will act as dean until the University finds a permanent replacement. “ I ’v e l o n g a d m i re d G re g Kalscheur’s exceptional commitment to teaching and to his students, and his inspiring seriousness of purpose, first at the Law School and for the last few years in Gasson Hall,” said Quigley in ONPA’s press release. “I’ve come to rely on his wise counsel on nearly all matters in Arts and Sciences, and he’s provided important leadership on the Core Foundations Task Force as well as our mentoring programs across the College.”

Before entering the Jesuit order in 1992, Kalscheur received his B.A . in 1985 from Georgetown University, and his J.D. in 1988 from the University of Michigan. While at Michigan, he served on the editorial board

of the Michigan Law Review, and after graduating, he worked as a litigator at Hogan & Hartson, a major Washington, D.C.-based law firm.

Kalscheur began his career in academia as an adjunct professor of political science and assistant to the director of the Center for Values and Service at Loyola College in Maryland. Between 2001 and 2002, he served as an assistant pastor at St. Raphael the Archangel Church in Raleigh, N.C. He holds a master’s of divinity from the Weston Jesuit School of Theology.

In 2006, he was recognized by the BC Law Student Association as an outstanding member of the faculty with the Emil Slizewski Faculty Excellence Award.

He serves on the board of directors of the BC School of Theology and Ministry; on the board of trustees of St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia; and on the board of trustees of the Woodstock Theological Center in Washington, D.C. When Quigley moves into his new position as provost and dean of faculties in June, Kalscheur will begin his new role. Both men have followed similar paths at BC. Quigley came to BC in 1998 first as an assistant professor of history, and then he was promoted as an associate dean for first-year students, before he was named as the dean of A&S in 2009.

During his five years as dean of the University’s largest school, Quigley was instrumental in attracting talented professors, developing new interdisciplinary programs in Islamic civilization and societies and environmental studies, and in the undergraduate core curriculum renewal process. He also played an important role in the design of Stokes Hall and was the founding director of the Institute for the Liberal Arts. Since 2011, Quigley has also served as interim director of the A&S Honors Program. When he takes over in June, Kalscheur will assume the same dual role until a permanent director is found.

In his role as senior associate dean of arts and sciences, Kalscheur has assisted Quigley in reviewing academic programs, in hiring faculty, and in promoting faculty engagement with the University’s intellectual and spiritual mission.

According to the ONPA, Quigley praised Kalscheur as someone well suited to lead A&S while a search process is undertaken. 

Students cycle to fundraise for cancer research

BY CONNOR FARLEY News Editor On Wednesday, April 30, more than 460 Boston College student athletes gathered in the Flynn Recreation Complex to participate in the second annual Cycle for Survival at BC in memory of Lisa Gallup, BC ’09, daughter of Director for Football Operations Barry Gallup, BC ’69, who died at the age of 26. The event generated over $10,000 in fundraising for cancer research.

A graduate of the Connell School of Nursing, Lisa Gallup went on to earn a master’s degree from New York University shortly after finishing her undergraduate studies, and later pursued a career in nursing as an oncology nurse at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

In the fall of 2011—a mere two years after graduating from BC—Lisa was diagnosed with cancer. After enduring a year of chemotherapy and radiation treatment, all while working full-time at

her night nurse position in the medical ICU of New York Presbyterian.

It wasn’t until her time in New York that she began to take a greater interest in an organization called Cycle for Survival, which lasted until her passing in December 2012.

Founded in 2007, the Cycle for Survival promotes indoor teamracing events that raise funds for cancer research, 100 percent of which are donated directly to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the world’s first and largest cancer research center, within six months of the event.

Yesterday, for the second time, students have filled the Plex in honor of Lisa and all those affected by cancer within the BC community.

“It really means a lot to me,” Gallup said in a statement to BC Athletics. “It’s a very draining day, but to see all the teams participate ... I’ll go over to the Plex and see somebody wearing one of the green T-shirts from last year. It was inspiring to see all the student-athletes gather around the cause.” 

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PHOTO COURTESY OF CYCLE FOR SURVIVAL

Students raised over $10,000 at the second annual Cycle for Survival.

What is one thing you have to do before the Who is your favorite BC year Dining employee? school ends?

“Go to a Sox game!”

—Bobby Graff, CSOM ’16

“Go to a spin class.”

—Sam Choi, LSOE ’17

“Go to the roof of Gasson.”

—Maura O’Neill, A&S ’17

“Hand construct a music box that plays Nat King Cole.”

—Issac Holterman, A&S ’17

The Heights

Thursday, May 1, 2014

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Adams arrested in McConville case Adams, from A1 Sinn Fein’s website, Adams agreed last month to conduct a meeting with the PSNI to discuss the case. ‘‘I believe that the killing of Jean McConville and the secret burial of her body was wrong and a grievous injustice to her and her family,’’ Adams said in a statement reported by The Boston Globe. ‘‘Well publicized, malicious allegations have been made against me. I reject these. While I have never disassociated myself from the IRA and I never will, I am innocent of any part in the abduction, killing or burial of Mrs. McConville.’’

Following the questioning of two unnamed, publicly unidentified arrests by the PSNI in April, and the release by BC of subpoenaed audiotapes of former IRA commander Brendan Hughes that alleged Adams had orchestrated the disappearance and death of McConville, Adams’ arrest marks the fourth known arrest related to the case in a period of one month.

In late March, ex-IRA chief of staff Ivor Bell,

77, was arrested and charged for aiding and abetting the murder of McConville, according to BBC Northern Ireland.

Reportedly suspected of being an informant for the British army, McConville, a 37-year-old mother of 10, was taken from her home in west Belfast by a group of about 12 IRA members, and subsequently shot in the back of the head, according to a report by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

McConville’s death and secret burial was not admitted to by IRA members until 1999, and her remains would not be discovered until August 2003 in Shelling Hill Beach, approximately 50 miles from her home, according to The Guardian.

The audiotapes of interviews used for the project were housed in BC’s John J. Burns Library, but a number were later turned over after being subpoenaed by the PSNI. Contracts between interview participants and the project’s organizers originally stipulated that the tapes would be sealed until each individual’s death due to their sensitive nature, but were un-

screened by lawyers, according to a report by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

A U.S. federal judge issued the subpoena that ruled that BC had to turn over all tapes relevant to the death of McConville to the PSNI on the basis of a mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) between the U.S. and the UK that maintains both countries act in full compliance with each other during criminal investigations.

The project was ended in 2011 after the U.S. Department of Justice issued subpoenas on behalf of the PSNI ordering the University to release tapes including those with interviews conducted with Hughes and Dolours Price, two former Northern Irish Republican militants, by interviewer Anthony McIntyre.

“We are not privy to the actions of British law enforcement and have had no involvement in the matter since the U.S. Court issued the order to remand portions of the archived interviews last year,” said University spokesman Jack Dunn in an email. “As a result, we have no comment on this issue.” n

Emily Fahey / Heights Editor

Since its opening on Marathon Monday, Meatball Obsession has seen increased student traffic.

Meatball Obsession hits BC Meatball Obsession, from A1 The company visited the campus in March to present its story and menu to BCDS and host a taste test that “generated rave reviews,” O’Neill said.

BCDS agreed to test the concept with students, faculty, and staff on campus by randomly asking them to taste samples from Meatball Obsession and to state whether they would buy the product.

Students, faculty, and staff were not told where the meatballs came from during the test.

In order to open the shack by Marathon Monday, Meatball Obsession’s CEO, Paul Bartick, and the director of operations, Steve Strandberg, came to BC to help prepare and launch the new shack. They stayed for two more days after the opening of the shack to train and work with the Meatball Obsession team at BC. “The BC Dining management team worked closely and quickly with Meatball Obsession’s senior team to make

[the opening of the shack] happen by Marathon day,” O’Neill said. “The concept has been extremely successful and well received. We have had many positive comments, repeat customers, and sales have remained strong, even during the rainy days.”

Meatball Obsession is the second installment in the shack after Beans, Creams, and Dreams.

“Beans, Creams, and Dreams is a challenging location for a concept, as it is limited in electrical capacity and space. It has served as a grill location that has been open all summer for the last few years.

Meatball Obsession requires a small footprint and limited electrical, so it is great fit for this space,” O’Neill said.

The founder of Meatball Obsession will be in Corcoran Commons today from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. to talk and answer questions about his company, as well as give out free samples of meatballs. There will also be a raffle for students to enter for a chance to win a Meatball Obsession party for 50 people. n

BC promotes going green Sustainability Fair, from A1

Emily sadeghian / Heights Editor

On Wednesday night, the 2014-15 UGBC executive board and senators were inaugurated in a ceremony led by the outgoing leadership.

UGBC inaugurates incoming board UGBC Inaugurations, from A1 warning that you’re looking at Boston College in a four-year timeframe,” Chebator said. “The one thing about change in large institutions is that most of the time, change is glacial. Don’t always expect everything to be completed in a oneyear period. One of the most important things you can do is develop and lay the groundwork, and plant the seeds for the next administration to come on and build on what you’re working on.”

Alonsozana spoke next, acknowledging that much of what UGBC does will not be remembered without means of institutional memory. Despite this, though, his reflections on his time as a student leader have led him to discover the greater benefits he has reaped from his time in UGBC. “The mentoring relationships that you develop in this room and with the people that come before you and after you are the most important things you’ll carry with you during your time at BC and beyond,” Alonsozana said.

As the organization’s future leaders, Alonsozana advised the audience to

“strive not for perfect time, but a full time” in UGBC. Outgoing president Nacier emphasized the importance of conversations and friendships that have shaped his identity not only as a leader, but also as a BC student in general. Everything you give to BC, he said, the University will give back to you 10-fold.

“Thank you for letting me be your president, and thank you for letting me be your friend,” he closed. “I’ve had a wonderful time here, and you’ll have a better one.”

Following their speeches, Fiore-Chettiar was sworn in as UGBC president, and she then announced the vice presidents that would make up the rest of the executive council. Marchese, as executive vice president, is joined by incoming vice president of diversity and inclusion Martin Casiano, A&S ’15; vice president of student initiatives Connor Bourff, A&S ’15; vice president of communications Kavi Bansal, LSOE ’15; vice president of student organizations Dhara Bhatt, CSOM ’15; and vice president of finance Katie Nowak, A&S ’15.

After the entire room of incoming

senators was inaugurated, Fiore-Chettiar and Marchese briefly outlined their plans for next year, emphasizing their commitment to UGBC’s new primary function of advocacy, and they acknowledged that this will require sacrifice. Three primary goals for the incoming administration are ensuring UGBC’s relevance, increasing education outside of the classroom, and increasing student input in University decision-making.

Fiore-Chettiar echoed Nacier in highlighting UGBC leaders’ positions as not only student government representatives, but also students, first and foremost.

“I’m a little tired of hearing that UGBC is not an organization for students, because we are students,” she said. “We go on Appa, and Arrupe, and we participate in 4Boston. We are part of culture clubs, and we play sports, and we’re work-study students. We understand what the BC experience is.

“Next year, we will prove that we not only understand the BC experience and what it means to be a student here, but that we know how to use that experience to make BC a strong community and a better place.” n

would make the most sense to contract a third party to install panels on St. Clement’s Hall, which houses the University’s data center on Brighton Campus.

Her team did a campus-wide search to target the buildings that would benefit most from solar panels.

“I think that our main goal was to offer a realistic way to go about this,” she said of her project, which she hopes the University will one day consider pursuing.

Tom O’Connor, an assistant manager of BC Dining Services, said Dining Services is in the process of moving toward a singlestream waste disposal process.

Currently, Carney dining hall uses a self-sort system—one in which students sort their own waste into trash and recycle bins. At Lower, students load their trash onto a conveyer belt and dining services staff sort the waste into bins designated for trash, plastic, and paper.

With single-stream recycling all plastic, glass, and paper materials can be disposed of in one bin. The material is then sorted at a materials recovery facility. Food waste still must be disposed of in trash bins.

Save That Stuff, a local waste and resource management company, picks up the waste and recycling produced by BC Dining every day.

BC Dining makes all attempts to purchase fresh food from local vendors. They partner with local vendors such as North Coast Seafood, Costa Fruit & Produce, and Sid Wainer & Sons. When they buy local instead of from out-of-state vendors, they cut down on the emissions that would be produced by trucks that would have to transport the food.

“Despite a fairly good recycling rate compared to other colleges and universities, there is still 500 tons of waste, which we need to reduce,” said Michelle Lee Guiney, who manages Waste Management’s Total Recycle Program.

Her table showcased things like coast-

ers that were made from recycled tires and pellets that were made from recycled water bottles. Those pellets can be made into any number of things—ranging from new water bottles to fibers for clothing.

Follett Bookstores, the company that manages the BC Bookstore, has in recent years offered more options for students to purchase clothing produced from these recycled materials. Tina Plotegher, the store manager, said that the bookstore offers about a dozen models of shirts made from recycled materials from brands like Under Armour, Champion, and Alta Gracia.

Like BC Dining, Follett has taken steps to reduce carbon emissions as well. Ben Pinkham, the assistant store manager for the BC Bookstore, said that the bookstore encourages students to rent their books or use digital versions. When students use these alternatives, purchasing Follett is able to cut down on transportation costs and also on the carbon emissions it produces when it has to ship books across the country. The company’s goal is to keep as many rental books as possible on campus between semesters so that they do not need to be shipped.

Plotegher said in recent years an increasing number of students have opted to rent books or use digital versions. Each semester the bookstore rents about 20,000 texts—among the most in the entire company, which manages hundreds of bookstores in colleges and universities across the country. Reusing books also reduces the overall amount of paper used by publishers.

The bookstore also participates in a book donation program through the charity Better World Books. The books unwanted books that students place in donation bins at the end of semesters are sent to Better World Books’ warehouse, and then are sold on BetterWorldBooks. com For every book sold the company donates one book to a charity, and books that cannot be sold are immediately donated to Books for Africa. n

After 10 semesters at BC, Clarke leaves students with ‘Last Lecture’ Last Lecture, from A1 “My role as a historian, as an academic, is hopefully to be encouraging you to look at your world and see the goodness and the beauty in it, the possibilities and wonder in it,” he said.

“Even when we look at wars and massacres and famines, and even though we know that the world can also be a not very nice place.

We know that the Mods can be not a very nice place. It’s reverencing and being aware of these things.”

Clarke continued that everyone should be gentle with his or her memories. There is value, he said, in moving on with life and not being held down by obstacles. In this section of his

talk, Clarke took the opportunity to share some of his favorite worst course evaluations. When asked if they would recommend his course, several students wrote an emphatic, “No.” “Father Clarke seems like a nice guy, but give him a microphone and he turns into a d—bag,” Clarke joked as he quoted from one of the evaluations.

When discussing service, Clarke mentioned many BC students’ heavy involvement with volunteer organizations that work to build community. He also pointed to a specific scenario several years ago surrounding C.A.R.E. (Concerned About Rape Education) Week and the men’s rugby team at BC. After hearing a story of a young woman

who was raped at a party, and then seeing destructive language in advertising for an upcoming Barstool Blackout party, Clarke talked to the rugby players about the difference they could make.

“I told them, ‘No, no, no, you need to stand up and actually oppose this, this culture of violence, this culture of [nonconsent], this culture of silence,’” Clarke said.

Not only did the players draft a letter speaking out against violent behavior toward women, but they also went further and presented during C.A.R.E. Week. This example, Clarke said, showed true service and true community building.

Overall, on the topic of service, Clarke

shared a simple piece of advice: “Say yes if you can, and learn to say no.”

In addition to the three elements of St. Ignatius’s principle, Clarke urged students to find something about which they care immensely that can motivate them moving forward, just as the Society of Jesus, being a priest, and studying China have motivated him.

“If I’m teaching anything in this last lecture, it’s ‘What’s your passion?’” Clarke asked the audience. “What are you going to fall in love with? And how will that affect your life and choices?”

Clarke recommended finding and holding on to people in our lives that bring out

those passions.

“Life is too short—find the people, find the stuff that helps make you the best you,” he said.

As he moves on to his new position, Clarke said he has had to reflect on the ways in which he can make the best contributions to the world. His new role will combine his skills and capabilities in a manner that truly excites him, he said, and it will get him out of bed in the morning. Although he is leaving, Clarke emphasized that he will still be connected with those he has met at BC. “Yes, I’m moving on,” he said. “But as Jesuits, that’s what we do. That’s what gives me life.” n

e

THE HEIGHTS

A4

EDITORIALS

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

‘The Heights’ will shift to new online platform The new website will enable The Heights to have a stronger web presence, improve online content

The Heights’ primary website, BCHeights.com, will undergo a full, top-to-bottom redesign this summer. Beginning June 1, our website will switch from its current state to an under-construction notice, which will remain on the page until the first print issue of the fall semester. BCHeights.com will be up and running again on Sept. 4 with a brand new design on a site fully owned and operated by The Heights, Inc. These changes do not mean that our online coverage will be discontinued during the summer.

Sports content can be found on our sports blog at BCHeightsSports. com, and all other new content will be posted on the main blog at BCHeightsBlog.com. As our online archives will need to migrate over to the new version of the website, they will be unavailable during this transition period. To find old Heights stories or issues, readers can visit newspapers.bc.edu, issuu. com/bcheights, or contact our Online Manager at online@bcheights. com with an archive request.

The launch of a new version of the website is a necessary move

for the paper. The current status of the site fails to serve our readers and our staff adequately, and the redesign’s goal is both to fix these issues and facilitate more interesting, engaging, and timely content. While the website has operated with the help of an outside company up until now, it is time to embrace a move to a stronger web presence over which The Heights has complete control.

This move in no way diminishes the importance of our print product, which will continue to be produced twice per week . This semester, the size of the print issue was reduced to 16 pages. Coupled with a continued investment in our website and blogs, this change will ensure that the print product partners effectively with the online product, rather than treating the online product as a mere supplement to, or basic reproduction of, what appears in print. The entire journalism industry is moving to embrace multimedia—The Heights has lagged behind in this endeavor up until now, but this redesign is an important step to rectify that problem.

Cycle charity serves as moving memorial to alum Cycle for Survival fills spin room, meets its fundraising goal for rare cancer research Yesterday, Boston College hosted Cycle for Survival, a charity that raises money for rare cancer research, for the second time in the Flynn Recreation Complex. The event was held in honor of Lisa Gallup, BC ’09, who died from cancer in Dec. 2012 and was involved with Cycle prior to her diagnosis. Her parents—Director of Football Operations Barry Gallup and his wife, Victoria—her brother, Barry Jr., and the field hockey coach, Ainslee Lamb, were instrumental in continuing her legacy and have accomplished a great deal with the staging of both of the events. Coaches, athletes, administrators, and students cycled in the spin studio in intervals from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. to raise money in memory of Lisa.

After working with the foundation in New York, Lisa began work to bring the first Cycle event to Boston, which was held last year, three months after she died. The Gallups

have collaborated with BC’s athletic teams, whose members signed up for blocks of time to ride. This year, they met their goal of raising $10,000.

The opportunity to raise money for rare cancer research is a significant one for members of the BC community.

The opportunity to raise money for rare cancer research is a significant one for members of the BC community. The organizers have done an excellent job coordinating the event, and it is one that they should continue in years to come, as a moving tribute to an alumna who cared deeply about raising money for research.

Fair offers useful insight into BC sustainability

The Sustainability Fair successfully showcased the efforts of BC clubs, organizations, and students The Office of Sustainability organized a Sustainability Fair in McElroy yesterday that showcased approximately 15 different clubs and org ani z ations . Or ig inally scheduled to take place outdoors, it was forced inside by the weather, but still managed to attract strong attendance from students. There were representatives from B C Fossil Free, Real Food BC, the environmental studies department, Boston College Dining, ResLife, and many other organizations. The groups showcased their initiatives, and some environmental stud-

ies majors displayed their senior projects.

With the recent launch of the e nv i ro n m e nt a l s tu d i e s m aj o r, this was a timely opportunity for students to learn more about the sustainability efforts that go on at BC. Much of the University’s work in these areas tends to go unseen.

That is not to say that there is not more that BC can be doing—events like this fair serve well to inform students of ways in which they can learn what the University currently does in relation to sustainability and suggest ways to improve.

HEIGHTS

THE

The Independent Student Newspaper of Boston College Established 1919 ELEANOR HILDEBRANDT, Editor-in-Chief MARC FRANCIS, General Manager JOSEPH CASTLEN, Managing Editor

Thursday, May 1, 2014

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

A word of thanks We have moved forward. Last year, Matt Nacier, our teammates, and I envisioned that our administration would not be a perfect one, but a full one. I accept responsibility for everything that UGBC has done over the past year. Although there have been many challenges and criticisms, it would have been a fool’s errand to attempt to please everyone all the time. We have accomplished our goal—to catalyze a more dynamic student voice.

We did not strive for personal glory, but to support others—in fighting for seats at tables where we had been crowded out, solving problems that had been deemed outside our scope, and including more students in an increasingly dynamic conversation about the future of BC. UGBC is criticized constantly, but people should recognize its members’ oft-unacknowledged successes. Some may have planned a single aspect of a single event. Others may have coordinated groundbreaking policy projects. It has all required time, effort, and sacrifice. Hard work is not exclusive to UGBC, but I am blessed to have seen it in such a high concentration within UGBC. Anyone who has been a UGBC member should be proud.

We are grateful to all the administrators, faculty, and fellow student leaders that continue to work with us. Although “University bureaucrats” have been criticized lately, nothing should diminish the concern and support of the industrious and humble University officials. An entire page could be filled with thanks, but UGBC is particularly indebted

to Vice President of Student Affairs Barb Jones and SPO Director Gus Burkett.

A Heights columnist has recently criticized such partnerships among student leaders and University officials. It is a naive perspective. Relationships across the University are the most important legacies of all leaders. Those coming after us will continue to rely on the atmosphere of trust and dialogue that has been developed. We need to take hard stands, but we also need to actively engaged in dialogue when students must have a say, from building a new student center, to defining closer faculty collaborations, and discerning BC’s 21st century identity. Throwing rocks gets you only so far before people stop talking with you.

If UGBC has succeeded at anything, then it has succeeded in supporting a lively conversation, through events and discussions. Conversations don’t sell as many papers as controversies, but it has been amazing to see discussions take off within the pages of The Heights and around campus.

Getting the discourse started has been an immensely challenging, but also one of the most fulfilling, experiences as an Eagle. And to my fellow Eagles, I have learned so much and have been humbled by serving you over the past year.

Thank you for a full year, and God bless.

MATTHEW ALONSOZANA Executive Vice President of UGBC A&S ’14

The following letter is in response to “University Advances Master Plan” by Mary Rose Fissinger, originally published on 4/28/14:

How BC names its buildings With regard to the fine article on the University’s Master Plan (April 28, pp. A1, A3), I very much appreciate your thorough coverage. I would like to add one further element to the discussion.

The article notes that there are plans for a student center on Lower Campus. It also mentions plans from 1990 for a student center to replace McElroy. What the article does not mention is that, in the 1990s, these plans announced that the new building was to be named Monan Hall, in honor of the longest serving president in the history of Boston College. An architect’s rendering of Monan Hall was published in 1996. In 1998, the Boston College Chronicle reported that, “The proposed new academic building, Monan Hall, would answer a growing need for space on campus by providing 233 offices for faculty and staff in the humanities departments, as well as lecture and seminar rooms, and an auditorium.”

Certainly Monan has done as much for BC as have Revs. McElroy, Gasson, Bapst, and the other Jesuits who built this University. During his 24-year term as presi-

dent, BC went from a commuter school that was nowhere to be found on lists of the “top 50 universities” to one of the best in the country, from a school that was nearly bankrupt to one that now measures its endowment in the hundreds of millions. Students are fond of proclaiming that “We Are BC,” but most do not understand that the BC “we are” today is due largely to the vision and work of Monan.

In this era of the commercialized university, we no longer name buildings after distinguished Jesuits. Instead, we honor those who give millions of dollars to the University. As a result, our new buildings are more likely to be named Maloney or Stokes than Monan Hall.

I am sure that BC through its benefactors and Trustees can somehow find a way to return to those plans from the 1990s and insure that the new student center, or the next major academic building, will be named Monan Hall.

MICHAEL MALEC Associate Professor of Sociology

THE ONLINE BUZZ Printing reader comments from www.bcheights.com, the Online Buzz draws on the online community to contribute to the ongoing discussion.

In response to “Every Man For Himself And BC Against All” by Nate Fisher, which ran on 4/28/14: I’m commenting as both a BC alum (’07) but also as the current Arts Festival director—so it appears that in this case I would be one of the administrators several commenters are referring to. I realize this article is pointing at something larger than just the Arts Festival, but since Nate chose to use the festival as his vehicle to make a point I wanted to address a few things on behalf of the Arts Festival and Arts Council since there seems to be a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about it.

The arts community on BC’s campus is thriving, the main mission of the Arts Council is to support, promote and create events to further the arts on campus which culminates in the annual Arts Festival. We accept and review project proposals for new types of art during the fall semester, we actually encourage BC artists to come to us with their creative work and ideas, and then we curate the festival to present the wide range of creative talent on campus to the best of our abilities.

We are always looking to improve the Arts Festival so if any of you would like to discuss this further please email me at sarah.mcdermott@bc.edu, and we can set up a meeting to discuss and actually make some change. I really appreciate all the suggestions and input from the student community since we work very hard to put on this festival for you. I would love to direct all this passion into making positive improvements.

—SARAH MCDERMOTT BC ’07 I appreciate your sentiments and have a few thoughts that I could save till the next time we chat, but figure I might post them here with the hopes that it could turn into a productive, public discussion. I can understand I think, at least in part, the feeling of frustration you are trying to communicate. Bureaucracy kills creativity, ingenuity, and at times productivity, but I think you are unfair in your critique of Boston College’s system.

I think it is unfair to disregard the contributions and

The Heights welcomes Letters to the Editor not exceeding 400 words and column submissions that do not exceed 700 words for its op/ed pages.

The Heights reserves the right to edit for clarity, brevity, accuracy, and to prevent libel. The Heights also reserves the right to write headlines and choose illustrations to accompany pieces submitted JORDAN PENTALERI, Graphics Editor NICOLE SUOZZO, Blog Editor AUSTIN TEDESCO, Online Manager CORINNE DUFFY, Assoc. Copy Editor EVAN D. GATTI, Asst. Copy Editor JULIE ORENSTEIN, Assoc. News Editor NATHAN MCGUIRE, Asst. News Editor MARLY MORGUS, Assoc. Sports Editor ALEX FAIRCHILD, Asst. Sports Editor SAMANTHA COSTANZO, Asst. Features Editor

efforts of all the students, faculty, and staff that work on Arts Fest and other similar programs or organizations.

Is it really possible that the venue of Arts Fest allows no genuine creativity or creative expression, and that the other organizations offer no meaningful contributions to BC life? I think that many of those involved participate in earnest and appreciate the opportunity to showcase their art. Could Arts Fest in reality simply be a show of the administration’s stranglehold on power manifest in community-relations nonsense? Take Arts Fest—the censorship and regulations must serve a purpose—they are catering to a donor base, which funds the BC endowment, your group, and much of the creative activity on campus.

That even, is a jaded explanation. Perhaps the reason for the regulations is that this is a time for BC to showcase itself to the community. This includes displaying its mission and purpose, which manifests (perhaps unfortunately) not in unbridled creativity, but in creativity balanced against other values. I know there is a tension there, but isn’t that how it always is and has to be in the play between culture’s status quo and the avant-garde?

I think you take the easy way out by vilifying “the man” without pinpointing real problems or key people. When you condemn “Mr. Bureaucrat,” “Vice Whatever of Somethingorother,” and “the system,” without describing what they do and where they go wrong, your complaints seem unproductive. You do mention the Corcoran Commons worker, but is he the problem or a symptom? Would any progress be made in reforming “the system” if everyone dropped out of SPO, SOFC, NOTH, and Arts Fest? Surely there would be a host of people equally dedicated to the status quo who would be willing to replace them. Wouldn’t a pointed discussion about what can be changed be more productive?

I agree that there are problems and that there are things to be changed, but shaking a fist at “the man” or “the system” feels defeatist. Where can there be plausible practical change and who are the people who can make it happen?

—BEN MIYAMOTO A&S ’15

to the newspaper.

Submissions must be signed and should include the author’s connection to Boston College, address, and phone number. Letters and columns can be submitted online at www.bcheights.com, by email to editor@bcheights.com, in person, or by mail to Editor, The Heights, 113 McElroy Commons, Chestnut Hill, Mass. 02467.

ARIANA IGNERI, Assoc. Arts & Review Editor MICHELLE TOMASSI, Asst. Arts & Review Editor BENNET JOHNSON, Asst. Metro Editor EMILY SADEGHIAN, Asst. Photo Editor JT MINDLIN, Asst. Layout Editor BRECK WILLS, Asst. Graphics Editor ARIELLE CEDENO, Editorial Assistant SARAH MOORE, Executive Assistant

BUSINESS AND OPERATIONS

MUJTABA SYED, Business Manager CHRIS STADTLER, Advertising Manager TRICIA TIEDT, Outreach Coordinator DONNY WANG, Systems Manager PAMELA TAYLOR, National Advertising Manager KATIE O’CONNOR, Account Manager JESSICA TURKMANY, Account Manager CATHERINE DUFFY, Collections Manager RUSSELL PULEO, Project Coordinator

The Heights

Thursday, May 1, 2014

A5

Improving BC event planning

Stephen Sikora End Of Classes - This has not come soon enough.

Great Returns - Michael Matheson, one of the most talented and ginger defensemen the Boston College men’s hockey team has had in years, is returning for his junior season with the Eagles. After a 21-point and plus-18 season, Matheson decided to postpone the start of an NHL career with the Florida Panthers to come back for another year. Returning Matheson is a huge asset for BC next year—it means retaining one of the most experienced and talented defensemen in the Hockey East, and to this, we give a Thumbs Up. Summertime - We plan to sleep eight or nine hours every night this summer. Out of all the fun things we have planned, this is the most exciting to us right now.

This semester, our bed has been wondering if we are cheating on it with another bed, it has seen us so infrequently. No, trusty bed, we have not been, but we look forward to having a long-term monogamous relationship with you this summer.

It will be glorious.

I have been involved in student organizations throughout my time at Boston College, including serving on two different executive boards and being president of the Economics Association this past year. As such, I’ve spent a great deal of time working with the Student Programs Office (SPO) and the Student Organization Funding Committee (SOFC).

After four years of close interaction with both of them, I understand the need for these organizations to be in place. Yet, I also believe that they can be a hindrance to student clubs.

For the Economics Association, our main goal—like the goal for most organizations—is to organize events throughout the year for our members and other interested students on campus. This is where my main issues lie. To identify with my perspective, though, it’s useful to understand the steps of how an event comes to be at BC. I’ll first discuss the process for an event that doesn’t require SOFC funding. Once a club has confirmed the interest of the people who will be conducting the event and has figured out a date that works, the first step an organization must take is to submit a room booking request through BC’s website.

Approval can take up to a week. Next, another submission must be directed to SPO for approval through MyBC. This can take over a week. Finally, once that’s confirmed, clubs can submit flyers to SPO to advertise their events.

For events that don’t require a great deal of funding from SOFC, I believe there are too many submissions for a club to undergo, and I definitely see the possibility of shortening the process. But, the bigger issue is when money is involved.

SOFC is the organization that funds stu-

dent organizations. Each year, every undergrad student pays a student activity fee—$310 last year—that helps fund BC programming such as UGBC, Nights on the Heights, and BC2Boston, in addition to the events put on by Registered Student Organizations.

To acquire funding, clubs submit budgets at the beginning of every semester, with the opportunity to submit additional budgets for other events that come up. Having a budget reviewed and accepted can take anywhere from one to two or even more weeks.

Per BC’s Student Organization Manual, SPO “must give prior approval to any event where the total expenses are predicted to exceed $500.” This means that for nearly every event featuring a guest speaker—some of which range from $5,000 to $20,000 and even higher—prior approval must be granted. Once that’s taken care of, budgets can then be submitted. Only after the budget is approved can a club then begin the room booking/SPO event/flyer approval progression explained earlier.

When SOFC is involved, the whole process can take well over a month—a major problem in its own right—but the bigger issue is that it is not at all conducive for bringing in guest speakers. Speakers are popular and demand high prices for a reason, and often their dates are limited. They or their representatives also like to know whether the event will happen soon after being requested, as their calendars need to be planned far in advance.

Yet, once the initial SPO approval happens, clubs have to wait one to two weeks to know if funding will be approved, and another two to four weeks to book a room and have the event be approved by SPO through MyBC. Most speakers are too busy to sit around for three to four weeks waiting on a student organization to get approval from these various groups. So, this leaves clubs in a precarious state—either they (1) proceed with the speaker and hope that everything will be approved, or (2) risk not organizing the event because they’ve told the speaker it will be a month before the organization knows if the

event will be approved.

Instead of continuing with what I believe is a convoluted system, I would like to propose the following solutions for organizing events. For smaller events, BC should combine the room booking process with SPO approval. Under a new system, if a club sees a date on which a desired room is available, it will submit one request that includes all the event information and a flyer complete with the prospective date. Ideally, the organization will hear back no later than one week from its submission.

Events that require large amounts of funding should have a separate protocol.

I suggest a system in which submitting a written proposal to both an SPO administrator and SOFC is first step. Second, once the request is discussed by both parties, a brief meeting between the organization and SPO will take place. This should take no longer than two weeks following the initial submission. Next, since the event has already been approved in conversation at that point, rather than having the club go through the roombooking/SPO event confirmation process, SPO should be able to approve a room immediately for those big events. This wouldn’t interfere with the smaller events because any rooms that were pending approval would be off limits.

The fact that BC has over 300 student organizations, and that each year thousands of dollars are allocated to fund them, is admirable. But the current event-planning system can often dissuade students from putting on events featuring noteworthy speakers. It’s my hope that, in the future, SPO and SOFC can work better together to encourage students in this area. We have one of the brightest and most hardworking student bodies in the world. Let’s remove the unnecessary barriers for student organizations so that we can achieve even more.

Stephen Sikora is a staff columnist for The Heights. He can be reached at opinions@ bcheights.com.

Do you actually ‘Support Love’?

John Morrison Saying Goodbye - The end of April and beginning of May are rather bittersweet times. Although we are glad to see the semester coming to an end (see above), we are saddened by the many “last” events that accompany it. It is a time of tributes to seniors and saying goodbye to all those who are graduating come May 19. This just gets depressing after a while.

Final Exams - We are reviewing all that we have to study for finals and are left scratching our heads. Did we ever actually learn that? What about that? We could swear the professor never mentioned that in class. This semester is just a blur now, and we are starting to wonder if it really happened.

The Weather - We promise this is this last time we mention the weather until roughly late October, but come on, Mother Nature—it is May already. This is just completely unacceptable. We want to be wearing shorts. We want “Suns Out, Guns Out” tank-top-wearing weather … well, for that last one, in theory more than anything else. We are rather lacking in the “guns” department—there are some people with forearms bigger than our biceps. And, by “some people,” we mean anybody who has worked out even once in his or her life.

Thesis Topic Proposal - This was due yesterday for us, and we are absolutely terrified by it. We submitted a half-baked idea that we have and are fairly certain that what we write in the fall will look nothing like the idea we just proposed.

Looking ahead to the vast amount of research and reading that needs to be done before the topic can be finalized, we predict many caffeinefueled late nights. It’s okay—our bed long ago forgot our name, so it will be used to this.

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I bet you thought that, after buying that Support Love shirt, it meant you understood the plight of gay students at Boston College.

You don’t! Why? That’s because what rarely, if ever, gets talked about in GLBTQ dialogue on campus is the social scene for GLBTQ students. On the surface, BC has undergone what I call a “glitter makeover”—the idea that less progressive college campuses followed national trends in becoming more tolerant and accepting places for alternative lifestyles. Beneath the surface, though, the social scene of BC’s GLBTQ community is rather fractured.

Matthew Murphy, A&S ’14, gives the best description of the gay scene at BC that I’ve heard. According to him, there are four groups of GLBTQ students at BC: (1) the very out and activist students who tend to run GLC; (2) the out students who remain indifferent to the campus’s GLBTQ activism and do their own thing; (3) those students who are not open about their sexuality but are active in the “hook-up” culture of the GLBTQ community; (4) the group of students who are not open and also opt out of the “hook-up” culture because of their identity struggles.

These categories, although slightly restrictive, represent a vast majority of gay experiences at BC. Students fluidly move in between each group dependent upon their own growth and development.

Now, GLBTQ students in any of these categories intermingle somewhat through classes, mutual friends, on-campus organizations, and sometimes even the occasional GLC party.

Regardless of their category, however, students at BC consistently find it difficult to meet other gay students to be friends with, hang out with, and maybe even ask out on a date.

A strong GLBTQ community does not exist, even though the BC student body and, to some extent, the archaic administration are becoming more accepting. The GLBTQ community is still rather small, inaccessible, and disjointed.

Lecture Hall

For GLBTQ students at BC, though, the desire to make connection is not dismissed— students are simply forced to become more innovative. Some use traditional social networks and thrive. “I have become quite comfortable in my short time at BC,” said Isaac Holterman, A&S ’17, describing his experience. “I made lots of friends in and outside the GLBTQ community and have had no problem meeting others through GLC, the Spectrum retreat, and many other functions any student at BC would find interesting whether or not [he or she identifies] as LGBT.” In addition to the Spectrum retreat, a confidential GLBTQ retreat put on by the Office of the Dean of Students, Holterman mentioned the positive influence that adult GLBTQ mentors at BC such as John McDargh have had on his development.

Sadly, I fear Holterman has had an atypical experience. For more than a few gay students, the dominant social script for social activity— and by that I mean the search for community and the search for intimacy—revolves around an app called Grindr.

Grindr is an app that is available for download on a variety of smartphone platforms. It’s relatively simple. Using the embedded GPS in smartphones, Grindr creates an instant messaging platform for gay individuals, and on a campus like BC, it allows for gay students to interact with one another when, otherwise, they might never cross paths. As it turns out, Grindr is very often used to initiate casual sex, and for gays at BC, it is definitely used to fill that very specific need. My guess is Kerry Cronin would be appalled.

Grindr offers a solution to the search for intimate relationships by giving gay students a method of navigating this difficult terrain of college social life. It lets them explore natural human desires while existing in a fractured and, at times, suppressed culture. It provides some gay students a semblance of “community” instead of leaving them in total isolation, and it also allows for those people at BC who are not out or are questioning their sexuality to download and experiment.

Yet, at its core, Grindr is an app based on finding sex. Grindr builds this so-called “community” in a hyper-sexualized way, creating an environment that fuels itself on illicit picture sharing and a redefinition of the word “bored” to mean horny.

Polly Vernon says in The Guardian, “Grindr is reconfiguring the landscape of human relationships.” I could not agree more.

Specifically at BC, I think Grindr is costing many students the ability to find the meaningful connections they innately crave because Grindr replaces meaningful relationships with casual sex.

This difficulty finding meaningful connection is a wider problem at BC that is writ large in the GLBTQ community. It is pretty well established that in the intense and competitive environment of BC, students struggle to develop worthwhile and meaningful relationships. I think that GLBTQ students at BC run a higher risk of not developing these types of relationships because they live in a fractured and historically dismissed community—one that is not well understood by most people on this campus.

The life of GLBTQ students at BC is fraught with complexities that cut straight to the heart of humanity. So, consider this: The next time you put on a Support Love shirt, ask yourself, do you actually support love, or do you put on the shirt because it is the fashionable thing to do? It’s an honest question, and I hope you give it an honest answer. No shirt or bumper sticker or slogan proudly displayed can fully validate the range of emotions a GLBTQ student experiences in his or her years on the Heights. So, take off the shirt, forget about the bumper sticker, and instead go speak with one of your GLBTQ friends and find out the truth about GLBTQ life at BC. My bet is you’ll learn something you never knew before.

John Morrison is a guest 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.

Sainthood today Victoria Mariconti The recent canonizations of popes John XXIII and John Paul II have inspired a number of people to become modern-day Dantes and put the canonized pontiffs in hell. I have been overwhelmed by the negative responses to the Vatican’s decision to confer the highest worldly/divine honor on these two men, even though it was expedited. Individuals with clearly personal vendettas against the Catholic Church have channeled their anger into unjust criticism of two “responsible” figures. I will make my concessions up front and admit that the Church is not a perfect organization.

Some of its decisions were highly questionable, and some actions betrayed its very mission. I suppose this proves that Church leadership is shockingly human, as in mortal and flawed human beings are in charge. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

One opinions columnist in particular from The New York Times inspired my response. Maureen Dowd begins her column with an early reference to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI as John Paul II’s own Rasputin.

The problematic nature of this comparison challenges coherent response. I mean, Benedict was clearly such a crazed and troubled pseudo-mystic, right? The man fed fish in a koi pond while he prayed to the Virgin Mary each morning when he stayed at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo. But, this is not about Benedict. Dowd essentially argues that John Paul II does not deserve sainthood because the “globe-trotting ostrich” failed to respond appropriately to the sexual abuse crisis. The abuse scandal scares me as a columnist, and I dare not touch it with a metaphorical 10-foot pole. I admit this and move on. Dowd’s excessively vindictive argument made me think, however: What makes a man or woman a saint today?

The Catholic Church adheres to a formal process in order to declare someone a saint.

He or she must be declared a “Servant of God” first, and an exhaustive investigation of writings and eyewitness accounts begins. When sufficient information has been amassed, the candidate will be declared “Venerable.” The next step is Beatification. A candidate who is confirmed as “Blessed” is endorsed by the Church as someone thought to have entered heaven. Sainthood demands the verification of at least two miracles wrought through the saint’s intercession after his death.

Typically, there is a five-year waiting period after an individual’s death before the Church can initiate the canonization process, but the pope can waive this requirement. Benedict did this for John Paul II because of the intense demand for his sainthood immediately upon his death (at his funeral the crowds chanted “Santo Subito!” essentially meaning, “Make him a saint right away!”). If you walk around the restaurants and shops near the Vatican, you will undoubtedly see pictures and prayer cards for John Paul II. Although the current pope, Francis, has deservedly ascended the ranks of international popularity, one still wonders if the Italians and Poles know that John Paul II is no longer our pontiff. The people adored John Paul II. He loved and promoted the youth. He opened the Catholic Church to new and more love-based relationships with other faiths. He pardoned and embraced those who tried to kill him.

Our friend Dowd at The New York Times makes only minor swipes at the legitimacy of the canonization process. She does not necessarily take exception to what would advance the cause of John Paul II, but objects on the grounds of what should have prevented him from becoming one. The complex combination of power, responsibility, and truth places John Paul II and all other popes under constant scrutiny, even post-mortem. They occupy the “highest” position on earth—the closest to the divine—and critics like Dowd unfailingly measure their actions and inactions against a standard approximating holy perfection. There was never a perfect saint, though. The beauty of sainthood is its humanity and the hope that it gives the rest of us.

They are not our idols or golden calves—they are not gods. They were very human humans who learned how to embrace their darkness so that it might be made light. They do not answer prayers but intercede on our behalf. There has been a lot of pain caused by the Catholic Church and a lot of suffering inflicted on it. Perhaps what we need is not more criticism or bitterness, but healing.

Perhaps, we could start with a prayer for the intercession of Saint John Paul II.

Victoria Mariconti is a staff columnist for The Heights. She can be reached at opinions@bcheights.com.

THE HEIGHTS

A6

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Q & A WITH MICHAEL MATHESON INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY CONNOR MELLAS | SPORTS EDITOR

B

oston College men’s hockey announced via Twitter on Tuesday that sophomore defenseman Michael Matheson will return to the University for his junior year. Matheson was drafted 23rd overall by the Florida Panthers in the first round of the 2012 NHL Entry Draft. In two seasons at BC, the 6-foot-2, 189-pound defenseman has scored 46 points and logged 74 games on the blue line. On Wednesday, The Heights caught up with Matheson about his decision to return.

The Heights: Why did you decide to come back?

Matheson: I just thought that I’d benefit a lot from being able to spend another year here. I think that being able to come back and mature a little bit and be able to be coached again by Coach York, Coach Brown, Coach Ayers, and Coach McInnis would benefit me a lot. All those aspects with coming together and being able to really focus on my game and try to be in more of a leadership role, hopefully, would just let me mature and process through next year. At the end of the day, I just don’t think that there’s such a thing as leaving too late. Obviously there are extreme examples, but for myself, waiting another year would benefit me more than harm.

The Heights: I know you talked about improving and working with BC’s coaching staff, but were there any particular factors that kind of swayed your decision?

Matheson: Nothing in particular, completely. It was just the overall aspects that I mentioned, that all those together just made it seem like a better decision.

The Heights: Going into this year, it was widely assumed that you would leave after this year, did something change over the course of the year?

Matheson: Not really, I mean, it was a really tough decision. I was close to leaving. There was never a time in the year where I was like “Oh, okay I should be going,” or “No, I’m definitely gonna to stay back.” I was just focusing on the year and trying to get better and trying to focus completely on winning the National Championship. During the year it’s not really a thought in mind, but I just think that being able to come back for another year will benefit me in the long run in my career.

The Heights: Did the Panthers’ coaching uncertainty play a role at all?

Matheson: No, I made the decision before they had decided to fire their interim head coach Peter Horachek.

That wasn’t playing much of a role. I tried to just focus on what would benefit me the most. It’s sometimes hard to kind of think selfishly like that. Hockey is a team game, so you always want to be thinking of what’s the best for the team, so it’s difficult to then turn around and strictly look at what would be best for yourself.

But that’s what I tried to do, and I’m happy it’s decision that I made.

The Heights: How do you anticipate your role changing next year, and what are your goals for next year?

Matheson: Next year, we’re going to have a really, really young team. We had the young team this year, but we still had the older guys like Johnny [Gaudreau], Kevin [Hayes], Bill [Arnold], Pat [Brown], and Isaac [MacLeod]. Those guys just were able to really lead us through things, but next year ... the 10 freshmen will only be sophomores, and we’ll have a number of freshmen as well that will be playing key roles. I think that it will be important to try to set an example for those guys. And I think goals—you asked about goals, and I think for myself, just continuing to get better and work on simplifying my game. And then in the end—so it’s a team goal, obviously—even though we’re going to be young we still have high goals of winning trophies and getting back to the Frozen Four. 

THE HEIGHTS

EDITORS’ EDITORS’PICKS PICKS

Thursday, May 1, 2014 The Week Ahead

Standings

The baseball team has a shot at qualifying for the ACC tournament. Softball takes on Maine today. The women’s lacrosse team takes on BU this weekend. Teams representing 32 nations converge on Brazil for the 2014 World Cup, the 20th edition of the tournament, taking place from June 12 to July 13 to crown the world champion.

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Recap from Last Picks

ALEX FAIRCHILD

34-16

MARLY MORGUS

32-20

CONNOR MELLAS

28-24

HEIGHTS STAFF

28-24

Game of the Week

Women’s lacrosse fell to UNC and was eliminated in the first round of the ACC Tournament. The baseball team completed a three-game sweep over Maryland, and the softball team pulled off the same feat over Virginia. The sweeps were both teams’ first of the season. The Wild beat the Avalanche in game seven last night.

Softball

Boston vs.

College

Guest Editor: Bennet Johnson Asst. Metro Editor

“Because it’s the cup.”

CONNOR MELLAS

This Week’s Games

Sports Editor

MARLY MORGUS Assoc. Sports Editor

ALEX FAIRCHILD

BENNET JOHNSON Asst. Metro Editor

Asst. Sports Editor

Will BC baseball make the ACC tournamenr?

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Softball: BC vs. Maine

BC

BC

BC

BC

Lacrosse: No. 5 BC vs. BU

BC

BC

BC

BC

USA

Ghana

Brazil

Germany

Who will win the World Cup?

Maine

After sweeping Virginia this weekend and continuing the streak with a win over Providence on Tuesday, the Boston College softball team takes on Maine in a regional matchup this afternoon at 4 p.m. Senior Tory Speer and her powerful bat set BC’s home-run record last weekend, and she has the chance to expand on it during the four regular season games that remain this spring. Maine is at an even .500 on the season, with 17 wins and 17 losses, and have won their last two. The Eagles are 29-19, and have won their last four games.

Today, 4 p.m.

Eagles continue hot streak with doubleheader win over URI

BY TOMMY MELORO Heights Staff As New England marched deeper and deeper into the month of April, it seemed like there was a contest of sorts going on.

This contest pitted the underachieving bats of the Boston College baseball team against the fierce, and apparently unending, reign of Old Man Winter. The Eagles were 12-26, floundering near the cellar of the ACC and in danger of falling out of the ACC playoffs for the fourth year in a row. Then, they did something that the weather has yet to do—they heated up.

The Eagles have now improved to 19-27 on the year, including their 7-2 and 4-3 victories over the University of Rhode Island Rams on Tuesday night.

The Eagles’ pitching has been their strong suit this year. The trio of Andrew Chin, John Gorman, and Jeff Burke has combined to go 8-13 with an ERA of 3.98. On Tuesday, however, it was a fresh face leading the Eagles to the win in the nightcap.

Justin Dunn earned his first win as an Eagle, as the freshman allowed three runs on four hits and three walks through four innings. What made Dunn’s outing all the more impressive was the way he recovered his composure.

When the Eagles took a 1-0 lead in the top of the first on a Chris Shaw RBI double, it seemed to signal a continuation of the eighth inning of the first game, in which the Eagles scored five runs to put the game away. Dunn came out in the bottom of the inning and, much like the Eagles’ season, got off to a rocky start. The Rams’ first two hitters reached

base on a single and a walk. Dunn struck out Mike Corin to get the first out for the Eagles, but then faltered. The next batter singled, loading the bases. Dunn, flustered, proceeded to throw a wild pitch, handing the Rams their first run and a tie game. A quick sacrifice fly gave the Rams the lead before Dunn could get out of the inning.

In the second inning, Dunn gave up a third run to the Rams thanks to some solid, fundamental baseball from URI. A leadoff single by sophomore outfielder Ryan Olmo was followed by a successful sacrifice bunt, a single, and a sacrifice fly, giving the Rams a 3-1 lead. For the next two innings, Dunn was lightsout, getting three strikeouts and three groundouts, with a walk in the fourth inning preventing him from getting two straight 1-2-3 innings.

One Eagle who has significantly turned around his form this year and has played a large role in the team’s turnaround, is sophomore right fielder Chris Shaw.

Shaw has a 12-game hitting streak in progress, during which the Eagles have gone 8-4. Shaw has brought his batting average up to .313, and recorded his 32nd RBI in Tuesday’s nightcap. Shaw’s turnaround and the Eagles’ hot form is no mere coincidence. Shaw, BC’s regular cleanup hitter, is the engine that powers the offense. When Shaw got off to a rough start, the offense sputtered. Now that Shaw is hitting, and hitting well, it allows the Eagles around him in the lineup to relax and play looser.

This was on full display in Tuesday night’s game. In the fourth inning, with

the Eagles down two runs, Cronin and Shaw quickly made the first two outs.

Early in the year, that would have all but guaranteed the end of the inning. Instead, BC strung together three straight singles to load the bases, then Johnny Adams hit an RBI double to tie the game.

Rams starter Tyler Barss then threw a wild pitch, giving the Eagles the one-run lead they would hold on to for the rest of the game, until it was called after six innings due to darkness.

The Eagles and Rams were scheduled to play two seven-inning games Tuesday, but of course neither game would cooperate. In game one, it took the Eagles until the eighth inning to break out offensively, scoring five runs in the top of the inning to knock off the Rams.

This led to game two being shortened.

Eric Stevens paced the Eagles in the first game, going six innings and giving up just two runs (one earned), and four hits.

Freshman Bobby Skogsbergh pitched the final two frames for the Eagles, during which he walked two but allowed no runs and no other baserunners.

The Eagles took the lead in the eighth on a bold call from head coach Mike Gambino. With first and third and one out, Gambino called for a squeeze. Michael Strem made Gambino look like a genius, as he laid down a perfect bunt that allowed Butera to score and Strem to get on base safely. From there, it was all Eagles, as they took advantage of URI’s mistakes to build an insurmountable lead.

The Eagles are heating up, and at the right time. Old Man Winter could take a lesson from the team. 

EMILY FAHEY / HEIGHTS EDITOR

BC is 19-27 and 8-16 in conference play, a record that puts it on the ACC Tournament bubble.

Coaches have the freedom to play the game whichever way they see fit From Column, A8

IMAGE COURTESY OF AP PHOTO

When Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho and his team take to the pitch, winning is the only focus.

BASEBALL

scoreboard

BC URI

KINGSTON, RI 4/29 7 2

BASEBALL BC URI

SOFTBALL

DUNN 4 K BC CAPUTO 2 H UVA

SPEER 4 RBI MILLER 2 H, 2 RBI

BC UMD

CORTEZ 1 HR, 3 RBI HARRIS 1 H, 1 RBI

BC UVA

Alex Fairchild is the Asst. Sports Editor for The Heights. He can be reached at sports@bcheights.com

M. TENNIS

5 2

SHAW 2 H, 2 RBI DROSSNER 7 K

BC 0 CLEM 4

CHESTNUT HILL, MA 4/26

W. TENNIS

5 1

COOLEY 2 H, 1 RBI HUGHES 1 R

CHESTNUT HILL, MA 4/27 SOFTBALL 4 1

him, Christian can stick that up onto the “Identity Board” he talked about upon his introduction a few weeks ago, and applaud it.

If anything that is done is against the rules, we have referees.

I’d also like to see Ed Kelly enforce a more direct style of play with the men’s soccer team. Giuliano Frano and Nick Butler might not be the most physical midfielders in the college soccer, but if you have to park the bus and spread the ball to the wings where Nana Boateng and Isaac Normesinu can counter with Zeiko Lewis in front of them, why not?

Steve Addazio introduced a prolific power-run game to Alumni Stadium last fall, and few have complained about the classic style of smashmouth football the Eagles are playing.

For those who want to be entertained by something that most would label “beautiful,” Arts Fest was last weekend. I heard good things about DOBC and Juice. You might want to check that out.

For all those coaches out there playing ugly, keep doing you—unless you lose a lot, then your fate comes down to a bunch of suits. I’ll tell those elderly folks in Brueggers the same.

You don’t have to make it pretty, as long as you win.

CHESTNUT HILL, MA 4/27

PROVIDENCE, RI 4/29 BASEBALL

SOFTBALL

12 SHAW 1 RBI BC WESSEL 4 K PROV 2

KINGSTON, RI 4/29 4 3

time.

But if you looked to social media, there was little praise for Mourinho, unless you follow @heightsalex. Some comments were made in the heat of the moment, but others went back to pronounce Mourinho a hypocrite, because he denounced West Ham for playing “19th century” football in January. Probably as a result of Mourinho’s mind games, “The Special One,” knows how to get it done.

While anybody can park a bus in front of a goal—ask Tony Pulis, he’s been doing it since, err … the 19th century—nobody does it better than the Portuguese. Mourinho established himself as the smartest mind in the game over the weekend and was thrown to the dogs for it. He will do anything to win—not to mention use time-wasting tactics, which is something every soccer player has done in his or her career.

So for all the morons out there who blasted the master, you should be tied up, tossed into a closet, blindfolded, and have headphones taped onto your head when a sporting event comes on.

No fan has the right to criticize the tactics of a coach if they work.

The same goes for bitter Boston Celtics fans who hate on the Bad Boy Piston team. My mom does that pretty openly, by the way.

Sports are more than entertainment.

My high school yearbook quote was

from former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly: “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”

Is that extreme? No. There is a genius behind technical sports like football, basketball, and soccer—among others—that should be honored and respected. Some coaches and players are brilliant, others aren’t.

So why trash a guy who most likely instructed his players to throw the ball down the line throughout the game to keep Liverpool from taking possession in the middle of the pitch and starting a steaming counterattack? Mourinho had every detail down and should be applauded for that.

If you want to go on Twitter or Facebook and rip Donahue’s offensive shape and defensive coaching to shreds, then be my guest. If a team wastes time and gets its ass kicked, call for the manager or head coach to be sacked.

It doesn’t matter how a team plays.

It only matters if it wins. That is the business and the purpose of sports.

Heck, I would love to see Jim Christian set the Eagles up to get a lot of touches in the post come the fall. If KC Caudill gets into the paint and at least tries to knock an opponent out by elbowing him on a rebound, I wouldn’t mind it. If Garland Owens gets into a scrap with someone after a play and Patrick Heckmann comes in to help

BC ND

CARY, 4/24 Boston, MaNC11/11 NELSON 2 L JOHNSON 2 W

Newton, MANC11/09 CARY, 4/24 0 4

WACNIK 1 L SANDERS 1 W

SPORTS

A8

THURSDAY, MAY 1, 2014

It’s results that matter, not tactics

Q

BC MEN’S HOCKEY DEFENSEMAN

On vacations and breaks, I spend a lot of time talking to elderly people in Brueggers’ Bagels. Sometimes it’s about politics, other times it’s about the riveting, yet nonexistent social and or love life of an assistant sports editor.

Over Easter, I ran into a father of a Boston College graduate at the chain’s location in Malden, Mass. Somehow, we got to talking about BC’s athletic department. When I told him my affinity for all things basketball, the “do you think Steve Donahue should have been fired” topic came up. He went on to tell me that Director of Athletics Brad Bates was right to fire Donahue, because his teams never crashed the boards and took too many 3-pointers.

The numbers back him up.

Donahue’s 8-24 team came in 343rd in rebounds per game, while shooting an average of 22 3-pointers, which tied for 29th in the nation with 19 other squads—including Michigan.

John Beilein plays a similar style to that of Donahue, which may explain why the first person Donahue’s Twitter account follows is the Maze & Blue’s head coach. While Beilein’s team went out of the NCAA Tournament in the Elite Eight to a shot as large as Aaron Harrison’s stones, Michigan had a similar season to BC on the boards too, coming in 303rd in rebounds per game.

Michigan’s shooting was better than the Eagles, though—much, much better.

While that was just one of the many differences between the two squads, the body of work saw the Wolverines make the Elite Eight, while the Eagles won eight games. Donahue’s tactics failed for the majority of the season, excluding the win over then-No. 1 Syracuse, and the Eagles still lost to every ACC team except Virginia Tech and Wake Forest.

With everyone on the “Boy, Michigan is a fun team to watch,” bandwagon, Donahue was public enemy No. 1 in Chestnut Hill, and rightfully so.

Coaches are often criticized. One in particular was chewed apart over the weekend, after a little clash between Chelsea and Liverpool in England. Tactical mastermind Jose Mourinho played a B-team against an Anfield squad run by his apprentice, Brendan Rodgers.

The genius won the day by parking what Rodgers labeled as “two busses.”

For those estranged from the world of soccer tactics, parking the bus occurs when a manager deploys his outfield players behind the ball to absorb attacks and combat attacks. Mourinho did the same to stall Atletico Madrid in the Champions League in a midweek fixture, and in 2010 to beat Barcelona, as the coach of Inter Milan.

There was speculation before the match that he had thrown in the towel by putting out a starting lineup of second stringers. While the Portuguese does mind games too—he conceded the league to Liverpool in a press conference—only an idiot would think he would give up. In the final minutes of the clash, NBC Sports commentator Lee Dixon said, “The man’s never conceded anything in his life. He sure wasn’t going to concede this game.”

Mourinho set up his side to play a direct style of soccer with a packed defense. His rearguard, which was protected by a double pivot, was packed like the Comm. Ave. bus on senior night. He had his side lend Liverpool the ball, but with good reason. With all 11 of his players behind the ball at different times on Sunday, Mourinho forced a non-possession team that needs momentum from counter-attacks to become Barcelona for 90minutes. The Reds fell into Mourinho’s hands and failed to adapt, which might cost them their first Premier League title in 24 years in under two weeks’

A

The Heights spoke with the blueliner about his decision not to sign with the Florida Panthers and to remain in Chestnut Hill for another season.

MICHAEL MATHESON IS RETURNING FOR HIS JUNIOR YEAR

ALEX FAIRCHILD

&

SEE A6

THE HIGHS AND LOWS 2

7 6

9

8

BC ATHLETICS 2013-14

5

10

4

3 1

JORDAN PENTALERI / HEIGHTS GRAPHIC

1

The Super Line:

Johnny Gaudreau, Bill Arnold, and Kevin Hayes combined for 134 points as the most dangerous line in college hockey this season. All three were top-five scorers in NCAA DI hockey, with Gaudreau and Hayes coming in first and second. The same went for assists, with Gaudreau in first, Arnold tied for second, and Hayes in fourth.

6

Series sweeping:

The Eagles, who were 14-27 going into a three-game series with Maryland, took all three games from the Terps for their first series sweep since 2012.

Led by Chris Shaw, who was six for 11 at the plate, and Andrew Chin, John Gorman, and Jeff Burke on the mound, the Eagles outscored the Terps 17-7, finishing the series with the Wounded Warrior game.

2

Luck of the Eagles:

Isaac Normesinu slalomed through Notre Dame’s defense to open the scoring with a stunning individual effort from more than 18 yards out. While Harrison Shipp, who now plies his trade for the Chicago Fire, struck back seconds later, Ed Kelly’s team held on to tie the then-No. 2 team and eventual College Cup winners, 1-1.

7

#andre44heisman:

Andre Williams started all 13 games for Boston College, grinding out 2,177 yards on 355 carries, the fifth most single-season rushing yards in NCAA history. He recorded a game-high, conference-record 339 yards against NC State, won the Doak Walker Award for the nation’s best running back, and finished in fourth as a Heisman finalist.

3

Upstate upset:

No. 1 Syracuse was 25-0 coming into its matchup with an Eagles team grieving the loss of Dick Kelley that had lost five straight games. While Boston College had fallen to the Orange one month earlier, the Eagles came back after being down in the second half. The win was a bright spot for a squad that won just eight games.

8

Philly freeze-out:

The Eagles, after beating UMass Lowell in the Northeast Regional, advanced to Philadelphia and the Frozen Four only to be stopped in their tracks by eventual champion Union. The 5-4 loss was a fight to the finish, with three goals scored in the last two minutes of play, but the Eagles were unable to complete their comeback.

Donahue’s demise:

4

Under Steve Donahue, the men’s basketball team lost 24 games in 2013-14, the largest single-season loss total in program history. With the teams’ season concluding after a crushing overtime loss at the hands of Georgia Tech, the athletic department made the decision to fire Donahue less than one week after the defeat.

9

Slammin’ Speer:

Tory Speer has led the softball team in its first winning season since 2008 through her play in the batter’s box and behind the plate. The senior captain set a new program record for career home runs, when she tallied her 38th in the team’s first sweep of the season against Virginia.

Speer’s captaincy has spurred BC to a 29-19 mark so far.

5

Golden Girl:

McKenzie Meehan hit teams for 20 goals in 23 games for the BC women’s soccer team, before netting six goals at the CONCACAF Women’s Under-20 Championships.

BC was helped to the NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight by the play of the sophomore striker, while the Americans won the gold medal and qualified for The World Cup.

10

Shreveport blues:

After becoming bowl eligible to end a two-year absence from postseason play, the football team traveled to the Advocare V100 Independence Bowl.

Pitted up against Ka’Deem Carey and the Arizona Wildcats, the Eagles struggled to get anything going offensively.

Steve Addazio’s first season in charge ended in a 42-19 loss with a 7-6 record.

See Column, A7

I NSIDE SPORTS THIS ISSUE

Baseball: Eagles stay scorching hot vs. Rams

The Boston College baseball team has won five straight, with its last two victories coming in Rhode Island on Tuesday night........................A7

Scoreboard...........................................................................................................A7 Editors’ Picks.........................................................................................................A7

COLUMN

Curmudgeon, Be Gone

A LOOK BACK AT THE CRITICAL DEALINGS OF THE NEFARIOUS COLUMNIST, PAGE B4 COLUMN

COLUMN

HOW THE ROBES AND TASSLES CONNECT STUDENTS TO BC’S TRADITIONS, PAGE B3

UGBC’S PROBLEM WITH PUBLICITY IN THE INTERNET ERA, B2

Graduating in Style

Yik Yak vs. Modstock THURSDAY, MAY 1, 2014

THE

Terry Peng [Beneath the shades]

taff s s t h | Heig d w Do Ryan

When Terry Peng, A&S ’14, emerged victorious from last weekend’s singer-songwriter competition, it was the culmination of four years journeying through Boston College’s art scene.

It might have ended with Arts Fest 2014, but Peng’s work in the arts has run the course of the last four years, as he worked with BC bOp! throughout his undergraduate career, and has been recording as a solo artist since his junior year. As Peng admits, however, full-fledged support for on-campus acts has

yet to arrive.

Peng arrived on campus with a jazz background, and while he was at first hesitant to jump right back into jazz, he eventually joined BC bOp! Jazz ensemble, playing the trombone. He had fiddled with songwriting before college, and although it was an experience he expected he might return to, it wasn’t an immediate goal.

“I wrote a bunch of sh—ty songs in high school,” Peng said.

“None of them are things I would play anymore. At that point, I was still doing a straight up acoustic singer-songwriter, trying-to-be-John-Mayer thing. Kudos to anyone who can make that work, but I don’t think it was working for me.”

During the first semester of his junior year, Peng discovered a way to blend his jazz background with his songwriting eclec-

See Peng, B2 JORDAN PENTALERI / HEIGHTS PHOTO ILLUSTRATION

THE HEIGHTS

B2

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Peng discusses state of independent music at BC

From Peng, B1

JOHN WILEY / HEIGHTS EDITOR

Peng won last Thursday’s singer-songwriter competition after performing solo for two years.

-tics, straying from his old-time Mayer antics. Peng reworked his sound to a jazzy Ben Folds—mixing guitar, keyboard, and ensemble with introspective lyrics. He tells the story of this transformation as a pivotal moment in his evolution as a musician.

“I remember I was sitting in my friend Chris Daley’s (BC ’13) car and he put on this track called “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” by D’Angelo,” Peng said.

“I was like, wait a minute—R&B is cool.

Let’s take a shot at that.”

After a trip on Kairos, Peng began writing music for his Juicebox EP, which was released the summer before his senior year, on August 11, 2013.

“Last spring I finally started to find a sound I liked,” Peng said. “I really wanted to get some studio time, because I had never recorded in a studio before, and I wanted to give that a shot.

So I talked to some people back home.

I was really fortunate to be working with them.”

Peng gathered a group of slightly older musicians he knew back in New Jersey, and the crew churned up a fivetrack EP. During his senior year, Peng appeared at many of the campus’s open mic events while continuing his work as a BC bOp! musician—this stint as a singer-songwriter drew to a close last Thursday after competing in the singer-songwriter competition. He’s already started his next project, a 13- to

14-track album tentatively titled Water on Mars. He recorded the first half back in January and is set to record the second in late May. Peng has relied more heavily on self-recording with Water on Mars, after a somewhat disappointing first studio experience working on the Juicebox EP. “The Arts Fest is one of the few times throughout the year where I feel like—because it’s right there, you can’t miss it—that people are really supportive of the arts,” Peng said.

When it comes up in conversation that he’s working on an album, instead of interning at an accounting firm, Peng again sees some support.

“So it’s kind of a weird dichotomy, because people are really into that and receptive to and supportive of it when you talk to them, but then, I think it’s a little bit of a scramble to try to get them to come out to an open mic,” Peng said.

Peng points out that singular events like Arts Fest and the large-scale dance shows draw bigger audiences than the more local, live music events.

“Dancing with bOp!, at Arts Fest— that always fills out if only because there’s so many people involved in terms of all the dance groups,” Peng said. “There’s everyone in the jazz groups. And as many of their friends try to come, and by sheer numbers and volume, it ends up filling out. But with the open mics, if you have 15 performers and each of them can only get two friends to come for their set only, then

[the venue] doesn’t really fill out.”

As the winner of Arts Fest’s singersong writer competition, Peng has been granted the opportunity to make a professionally mixed EP, which he hopes to pass off to his friend and fellow musician Lucas Allen, A&S ’16, to continue working on Water on Mars.

Opportunities for student musicians such as this, however, are rare to come by, especially with the support of the BC administration. In addition, for smaller campus music organizations like Chorduroy and the Music Guild, there’s an irony of the administration financing huge concerts like Modstock, but then barring student musicians from staging smaller, self-financed concerts at smaller venues.

“This year they tried to get that going with the Mod concerts, but as soon as it got attention from the RD’s, they got shut down.” Peng said. “I thought that was fun.”

Peng, as well as BC rapper William Bolton, CSOM ’16, performed smaller concerts in the Mods earlier this semester. When music organization Chorduroy tried to host a similar concert with BC bands Seaver’s Express and Bobnoxious this month, however, the proposal was turned down by the BC administration.

“I feel like there should be more support for live music.” Peng said. “I don’t mean that from a philosophical perspective like ‘you guys should really support the arts.’ But it seems like when people come to those things, they really enjoy it.” 

Some interruption: Yik Yak, UGBC, and the Modstock 2014 publicity debacle

JOHN WILEY There is literally a host of deadly tornados headed to Boston College, the storm arriving just in time for Modstock 2014. Granted, the winds will have dissipated significantly by the time the storm get to New England, but given some other circumstances of Thursday’s concert, the imagery of the host of tornados still seems quite appropriate. Event publicists were off to a bad start in late March when Hoodie Allen, headliner of the concert, confirmed his upcoming appearance at BC via Twitter—two weeks before the formal announcement. If it were solely the 25-year-old rapper’s gaffe, perhaps future crises could have been averted.

Allen, however, was only responding to tweets about the concert. The news had leaked internally from the

Undergraduate Government of Boston College (UGBC), and, responding to a series of tweets about Modstock, he had assumed his appearance was confirmed.

The unconfirmed news was left to precipitate the next two weeks on social media—withholding the big news until mid-April, the officers of UGBC seemed to be the only ones who didn’t know who they’d signed for Modstock. When it finally arrived, the official announcement appeared to be everything UGBC needed to subvert early tensions. The Facebook event for Modstock 2014 was supplemented with the sort of A-list graphics undergraduates have come to expect from their government. Also paired with the announcement was a video produced by student media group Exposure Productions, compiling clips of Allen’s work with original footage of the Mods. This official release had a clear message: UGBC was still in control.

And then, the “herd” moved in.

Anonymous bulletin app Yik Yak opened the floodgates for a host of

unnamed critics to begin attacking the concert choice via smartphone. A viral campaign had been brewing for weeks to discredit UGBC’s choice. This series of “Yaks” ranged in intensity, some sarcastically blaming UGBC for everyday inconveniences, others proposing alternative acts for the show. UGBC was once again placed in a position of powerlessness.

It’s still unclear if this dissent was in any way representative of the opinions of most students, but to be fair to the Yak herd, neither was UGBC’s artist selection process. The animosity toward Allen could easily be astroturf, an initiative started by a few questionably motivated individuals, and made to appear as a grassroots effort. With over 6,000 BC undergraduates on the app, however, the backlash on Yik Yak is perhaps the closest thing to a student referendum on UGBC’s decision.

Once as simple as a well-designed poster, controlling the announcement of large-scale events like Modstock has grown into a Sisyphean task for UGBC. Even the concept of a student government itself is called into ques-

tion in the era of social media. Last November, two joke candidates won Harvard’s Undergraduate Council elections, promising students the cafeterias would start serving tomatobased ravioli soup everyday and the university would stock thicker toilet paper if they were elected. The two victors resigned immediately, leaving the Cambridge university uncertain as to the role their student government would play going forward Only numbers will tell just what effect the social media firestorm had on Modstock 2014 and more broadly, what UGBC will accomplish going forward. Anecdotally, however, it speaks to the problematic nature of calling an organization that plans concerts a “government.” With the exception of an artist like Macklemore, no Modstock act would be representative of the tastes of the majority of undergraduates. While the Harvard campaign was a joke, the fact that “outsiders” who promise things like cafeteria choices and toilet paper appeal to most students speaks to how fickle the functions of a purely “representative”

student government would be. Even if it does carry over most of UGBC’s programming branch’s bureaucratic structure, at least the new programming board—slated to take over most of UGBC’s event planning activities next semester—will be unbound to maintaining the illusion.

What’s ironic is that Chorduroy, a small music organization on campus, hosted a lecture with rapper-producer Ryan Leslie the night before Modstock 2014. While the Hoodie Allen concert will almost certainly be better attended, Chorduroy seemed to encounter none of the red tape and public outcry UGBC did. Arguably, a greater “programming” function is served when the University hosts an artist on campus that will mean a lot to a little, rather than choose an artist that’s supposed to mean a little to a lot.

Because at the end of the day, all most students want is thicker toilet paper.

John Wiley is the Arts & Review Editor for The Heights. He can be reached at arts@bcheights.com.

THE HEIGHTS

Thursday, May 1, 2014

B3

The Town: the new heroes of Boston’s film tradition AMY CHAPPELHOW Colin Sullivan stares adoringly at the Massachusetts State House as he sits in Boston Common. Its golden globe shimmers in the sun—this building represents all of his aspirations. His friend tells him, “Forget it, your father was a janitor and his son’s only a cop.” Just a few scenes later however, Colin buys an apartment overlooking this monument, proving that a working class boy can make it in Boston (if he’s willing to lie, kill, and steal). Martin Scorsese’s 2006 film The Departed put Boston firmly in the spotlight as the movie won four Academy Awards and worked its way up many a film buff ’s top 10. I’m not ashamed to admit that it was this movie that convinced me to come to Boston on my year abroad, even if the majority of the movie was shot in New York.

Outside his work in The Departed, Matt Damon has consistently represented a fictional version of Boston in movies, as has his childhood friend Ben Affleck.

Together, the pair reveals a Boston that might not do great things for the city’s tourist trade, but certainly does fantastically at the box office. New York is often at the center of East Coast Hollywood movies, so shouldn’t this interest in Boston be celebrated more often?

One could say it all started with Good Will Hunting (1997). Although relatively unknown at the time, Damon and Affleck, both natives of Boston, placed the city at the center of their screenplay.

With homages to moments like Carlton Fisk’s home run in the 1975 World Se-

ries, this was a film made for Bostonians.

It wasn’t until the 2000s, however, that Boston really hit the movie map. In the years 2006, 2007, and 2010, Damon and Affleck ensured that Boston dominated movie theaters. By examining the relationship between the Irish mob and the police, Scorsese moved the story of The Departed—originally set in Hong Kong with Infernal Affairs—to the streets of Boston. Even though the majority of The Departed was filmed in New York, Scorsese used famous landmarks like the State House, Boston Common, and Charlestown’s waterfront so audiences could identify the beloved city. Even if The Departed focused on the seedier sides of the city, the fantastic script and performances ensured that this is a movie Boston can be proud of.

In many ways, Gone Baby Gone was Ben Affleck’s comeback movie, so it is no surprise that he relied on his native Boston for his directorial debut. Affleck shared responsibility for this movie with his younger brother, Casey Affleck, and together they create an emotionally nuanced and challenging movie.

Certainly, the city takes a backseat as Dennis Lehane’s haunting story demands so much from its actors. Affleck’s rewrite of Lehane’s novel, however, uses Boston to imbue the film with authenticity. The city’s shadows cast even more gloom on this tragic story.

Affleck returned to Boston for his second attempt at directing. While filming The Town, Jon Hamm allegedly said that walking around Boston with Affleck was comparable to walking around with the mayor. This suggests the impact that Affleck has had on the city in recent

OUTSIDE THE LINES

How Arts Fest can shape a BC experience

MICHELLE TOMASSI

PHOTO COURTESY OF WARNER BROS. PICTURES

Actor Ben Affleck stays true to his Boston roots in ‘The Town’ and ‘Gone Baby Gone.’ years and vice versa. Once again, the movie focuses on crime in Boston, but this time, it is confined to Charlestown with the movie’s opening quote alleging that the one blue-collar Boston neighborhood “produces more bank robbers and armored car thieves than anywhere in the world”: Charlestown. This damning statement, as well as Boston itself, is integral to the movie’s story of redemption.

The authenticity that lies behind these movies is what makes them a celebration of this city. In The Town, non-Bostonians Jeremy Renner and Blake Lively spent time in Charlestown with locals, and Gone Baby Gone was filled with many Massachusetts locals as extras. Mark Wahlberg even based his

performance in The Departed on the numerous police officers who arrested him when he was growing up in Dorchester.

Damon’s decision to spend time with a Boston police unit and Scorsese’s choice to use a real Boston newscaster in The Departed also shows the commitment these filmmakers have to Beantown. The Town’s premiere even took place at Fenway Park, exemplifying the commitment of these young Boston filmmakers to the city. Affleck frequently attends games at the stadium. It’s a way of keeping close to his home city—to know it, to be it.

Amy Chappelhow is a columnist for The Heights. She can be reached at arts@ bcheights.com.

FASHION FORWARD

Dressing up in a Boston College tradition

The mortarboards and robes attach seniors to the BC story

THERESE TULLY They call it a mortarboard, that square academic hat that we are all so familiar with.

Rumor has it, it is so named because of its resemblance to the tool bricklayers use to hold mortar. It’s a nice idea, actually. Your head, after four years of Boston College education, is now a flat surface upon which a sturdy foundation can be built—a structure of your choosing. At graduation, we will slap on the mortar, and send you off into the world letting you build as you like. We have flattened your head with an education, so you can balance large volumes of books on it. It’s like finishing school in some ways, and I should know, I was forced to wear a floor length white gown to my all-girls high school graduation and carry a bouquet of a dozen red roses.

But if you take away the normalcy, our familiarity with this piece of academic regalia, it’s a really funny looking hat. Yet, we

don it without dissent. We don’t think too hard about it. We just put it on and try to convince ourselves that our hair still looks okay. The wearing of graduation regalia was adopted from medieval Europe and it is a tradition that has spread and stuck in America. Some kindergartners even wear little caps and gowns. Somehow an ugly nylon robe, an ill-fitting dress, really, has the power to cause so many different reactions—fear, sadness, joy, anxiety, distress, pride, a sense of accomplishment. These robes are awash in a variety of sentiments.

For some, our graduation caps and gowns are a sense of pride. They say to the world, we did it. We made it through these four years of education, and we have come out the other side. We deserve to wear these, we have earned the right. We were lucky enough to be offered a higher education and we took the chance, and took it seriously enough that we completed the task. For others, the end means a sense of loss. It is time to enter the supposed “real world,” where we will leave the safety of our beautifully manicured college campus behind. They symbolize the end of a journey. But why do we even really wear them?

As ugly as they are, these robes unite us. We all came from many different places, dozens of countries around the world, cities,

states, we are interested in different things, we took different paths, different chances, different classes. We will graduate from our respective colleges with a spectrum of GPAs. Our resumes are as unique as we are. But for just a few moments, we are all one. We are all the graduating Class of 2014, whether we started here freshman year, or we transferred. We are men and women for others, charged with the task of setting the world aflame. Though our journeys were different and we will inevitably scatter, we all ended up in the same place for just a minute. In our common uniform, m, with our symbolic hats and tassels, we will be reminded of this in just a few short days.

As a society, we love to use fashion as a marker. To help us discern the most important moments in our lives. Fashion can act as a visual cue, alerting us that something important is happening. It makes us stop and think during some of the landmarks of a life. Baptisms, graduations, weddings, funerals, first jobs. We have an outfit for each event. Something special that helps our bodies and minds get on the same page—“this is important,” it screams. I dressed specifically for this day, it’s unlike any other.

For some of us, this will be the last time we wear academic regalia. For others,

there will be future degrees and future graduation ceremonies. Before we scatter out into the world, we get to be connected one last time. It all began with a Superfan shirt at orientation, and it will end in an equally unflattering nylon robe on graduation day. Though we have each made this BC experience our own, we are all part of the same legacy, the same University. BC existed before us, and it will exist after us. Our robes link us to BC in a beautiful way, forming a network of peers all around the world. So even though the hats are silly looking and unattractive on most if not all hair types, and the robes will likely be hot and itchy at the same time, revel in your final fashion statement at BC. We all are going out together. Wear it with pride for the school that you attended and for the years that you made all of your own.

Congratulations to the Class of 2014.

Therese Tully is a senior staff columnist for The Heights. She can be reached at arts@bcheights.com.

THIS WEEKEND in arts

BY: ARIANA IGNERI | ASSOCIATE ARTS & REVIEW EDITOR

LIFEFORCE ENERGY: YOGA CLASS (SUNDAY 5/4, 10 A.M.)

BC CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY (THURSDAY 5/1, 6 P.M. & 7:30 P.M.)

Director Sandra Herbert and students involved with the Boston College Chamber Music Society are presenting two back-to-back concerts on Thursday evening in Gasson 100. Admission is free.

Fusing art and exercise, the Boston Center for the Arts and Coolidge Corner Yoga are hosting a 90-minute yoga session in which guests will be able to practice and meditate surrounded by Jordan Eagles’ new exhibit at the BCA Mills Gallery. Tickets are $25.

FIGURES & FASHION (THURSDAY 5/1, 6 P.M.)

The Copley Society of Art and designer Cynthia Rowley invite guests to come and sketch at the Newbury St. Gallery. Live models will be wearing Rowley’s spring couture pieces for the event. Wine and cheese will be served. Admission is $15, and reservations are required through info@copleysociety.org.

FROST BEAT (FRIDAY 5/2, 5 P.M.)

Ice sculptor Sarah Cohen and percussionist Maria Finkelmeier are collaborating at the Frost Ice Bar to present a multisensory experience of sight, sound, and touch. The event is 21-plus on Friday, but open to minors Saturday 5/3, at noon. Tickets are $20.

MAYFAIR IN HARVARD SQUARE (SUNDAY 5/4, 12 P.M.)

ALEX GAYNOR / HEIGHTS SENIOR STAFF

HOODIE ALLEN CONCERT (THURSDAY 5/1, 3:30 P.M.)

Best known for his song “No Interruption,” the American rapper Hoodie Allen is headlining Modstock on Thursday afternoon. This year’s winner of BC’s Battle of the Bands competition, Juice, and DJ Earworm will also be performing.

Admission is free.

Local musicians, artisans, and food vendors are all coming together for this weekend’s 31st annual Mayfair celebration in Cambridge, featuring dancing, games, street art, and beer, among other fun festivities. The event is free.

‘THE AMAZING SPIDERMAN 2’ (ONGOING)

Andrew Garfield is swinging back around and reprising his role in The Amazing Spiderman sequel—an action flick following the story of Peter Parker as well as his continuing battle with the mysterious company Oscorp.

The movie opens on Friday.

April 2007: the first time I walked onto Boston College’s campus. I was a high school freshman coincidentally visiting BC during the best time of the year, which I didn’t realize at the time: Arts Fest weekend. I was confused by the white tents, the music, and the sidewalk chalk, wondering if this was a thing that happened often. I was only on the tour because my older brother was looking at schools, so in reality I wasn’t paying much attention to what our tour guide was saying. I was just along for the ride, knowing that I had three more years before I had to decide on my own college.

April 2012: my first Arts Fest as an official BC student. I remember walking down to O’Neill Plaza on a glorious Saturday afternoon with friends from my building and our RA, ready to figure out what this Arts Fest hype was all about.

I saw everything from Fuego dancers to student photography and everything in between, and I still remember spelling out on a Velcro board the name of a song beloved by some former Arts editors— Diplo’s “Express Yourself.” It made me realize how much talent is really present on this campus, and it prompted me to make a promise to myself that I would see as many performances and exhibits the next year as I possibly could.

April 2013: I had that confidence (dare I say, swagger) that only comes when you’re a sophomore in college and you think you’ve grown so much wiser within a single year. I had been to many more events that semester—a cappella cafes, Showdown, Sexual Chocolate’s Valentine’s Day show, you name it. I walked into Arts Fest knowing who was who, when to see my favorite groups, and how to make the most of the weekend’s festivities. Not only was I starting to get a sense of the campus celebs in terms of performance art, but I also was able to see my good friends taking the stage. I remember feeling so proud of my current roommate during her first swing dance performance, and seeing a classmate of mine working a hilarious puppet during Avenue Q. Arts Fest had become a space for both new talents to gain exposure and seasoned artists to enhance their skills—all available for my entertainment.

April 2014: the penultimate Arts Fest of my undergraduate career. I did not see nearly as many performances as I wanted to, which I do regret, but it just encouraged me to renew the promise I made to myself after freshman year. Even though the Heightsmen performed a song I have heard them sing countless times—“Come Fly With Me”—I realized that it was also the last time I would hear that rendition with some of the group’s most notable seniors. It’s the same realization I came to after seeing Showdown this year, as I tried to imagine my favorite dance groups without those familiar faces next year.

And it’s the same fear that surfaces every time I hear the words “senior year”—the fact that soon enough, I will no longer be surrounded by the same faces, and the things that used to be so familiar to me will cease to be part of my everyday life.

Arts Fest, you really know how to slap me in the face with reality.

The festival itself has become a strange parallel to my own life at BC—beginning with uncertainty, followed by security, and ending with insecurity once more upon realizing that with graduation comes the loss of familiarity and comfort.

The fact that the event coincides with the end of each academic year serves as a perfect opportunity for self reflection—as I watch various groups, who have worked together all year and grown in familiarity with each other and their audiences, I also consider the people and activities I was acquainted with my freshmen year, and how they have transformed into the things I love the most.

Arts Fest is, obviously, about art. But I think it goes beyond the mere display of artistic ability. The four-day annual event is an opportunity for students to see the work that their classmates have been preparing for all year, and how each group—whether dance, a cappella, theater, or comedy—has grown together throughout the past few years, just like every other student has with his or her respective groups. Not only does each group develop as its own entity, but we also grow along with them, engaging in a system of loyalty and mutual support by attending their shows and cheering them on. Arts Fest keeps us connected, to our immediate networks and the larger community around us, and reminds us of what keeps our students going: hard work, dedication, love, and fun.

Michelle Tomassi is the Asst. Arts & Review Editor for The Heights. She can be reached at arts@bcheights.com.

THE HEIGHTS

B4

Thursday, May 1, 2014

THE CRITICAL CURMUDGEON

CHART TOPPERS

An open letter: The music industry denounces ‘Scene’ columnist

TOP SINGLES

1 Happy Pharrell Williams 2 All of Me John Legend 3 Dark Horse Katy Perry feat. Juicy J 4 Talk Dirty Jason Derulo feat. 2 Chainz 5 Turn Down For What DJ Snake and Lil Jon 6 Let It Go Idina Menzel 7 Fancy Iggy Azalea feat. Charli XCX

TOP ALBUMS

PHOTOS COURTESY OF GOOGLE IMAGES

The Criticical Curmudgeon says farewell to ‘The Scene’ after several years of writing columns about young Disney stars, Superbowl halftime shows, and the ’80s, among other things.

MATT MAZZARI A Letter to The Scene editors: It’s really difficult for all of us to type at the same time, so we’ll cut to the chase: We’re writing to voice our extreme displeasure with your long-term columnist, Matthew Mazzari, known in The Heights as “The Critical Curmudgeon.” For three years, The Curmudgeon has proven to be a fan of essentially no one: he is a writer who enjoys nothing more than to be bitter for bitterness’ sake.

We have had enough of the ridicule, the wisecracks, and the flagrant misrepresentations. And now that he’s graduating, we want to collectively urge you to fill his position with someone who can, at the very least, make it through a column without asking Cee-Lo Green to “fight him IRL.” Cee-Lo Green is a very busy man! We are making a case for open-mindedness, a quality that the Critical Curmudgeon lacks profoundly.

Every one of us has a reason to

feel slighted by his criticism, and now we’re bringing our grievances to you.

We understand that subjectivity in music exists and that everyone can have his/her own opinion.

We just aren’t sure the Curmudgeon understands this. Over the course of his vitriolic career as a columnist, the Curmudgeon has viciously (and tactlessly!) criticized the Grammys, Rolling Stone Magazine, televised music talent shows, rocker biographies, MTV music news, the 1980s, Glee covers, Disney pop stars, the Spotify “Year in Review” compilation albums, and basically any artist who had the nerve to not die 40 years ago.

Is there anything this guy likes?

Who has to play at the Super Bowl halftime show before he will be satisfied with the integrity of the performance? Igor Stravinski?

Frankly, we’re rather surprised you let it go on for as long as you did. Look, no one understands more than we do that entertainment has a price of upkeep, and it can be hard to find decent writers on a deadline. But the Critical

Curmudgeon is consistently over the top! For instance, do you remember earlier this year when he referred to Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” video as “an exercise in how unsubtle you can make a phallic symbol before the world implodes”? Or when he speculated that Nicki Minaj’s day-to-day routine revolves around the acquisition of “shiny baubles”? Or when he questioned in his review of the country single “Trouble with Girls” whether Scott McCreery had “ever seen a woman”? Or when he called Chris Brown’s Grammy-winning album F.A.M.E a series of “piggish rants with lyrics so insubstantial that they threaten to reverse the listener’s gravitational pull”? Or when he suggested that musicians should be “legally forbidden” to have social networking accounts lest they “further embarrass the human race with their insipid postings”? Let’s see you try to maintain a Twitter account without saying something to offend the feminist community, Mr. Mazzari! It’s not as easy as it looks!

The Curmudgeon is a preten-

tious, spiteful, pedantic misanthrope with a tin ear and an inexplicable personal grudge against Thom Yorke. His understanding of the nuances of Dubstep is woefully poor, his opinions surrounding the pop country movement seem almost deliberately ignorant, and his frothing-at-the-mouth obsession with condemning artists who do covers of Beatles songs seems downright unhealthy.

The Curmudgeon lives up to his namesake way too thoroughly.

Seriously, who doesn’t like David Guetta? His discography is literally engineered by pop music scientists to be dance-tastic. Scientists! By not enjoying “Sexy Chick,” the Curmudgeon might as well be spitting in the face of scientific process. What is wrong with this man? It’s been made excruciatingly evident that Mr. Mazzari (quite literally) does not enjoy Fun. How does somebody that jaded even function in reality?

Don’t get us wrong: we are quite sure that Mr. Mazzari has enjoyed his time as a columnist—this is altogether too clear.

There’s an almost gleeful quality

to the Curmudgeon’s sarcasm that only makes his superior air more intolerable. We could almost ignore the wanton abandon with which the Curmudgeon critiques if mocking us didn’t seem to make this miserable husk of a human being so damn happy.

The artist-formerly-knownas-Curmudgeon, we assume, will within the year be pursuing a lucrative career in yelling angrily at pigeons in the park, and so his space in your newspaper will be open. May we suggest you find a less abrasive character to take his place?

We can only stand so much!

Sincerely, The Music Industry (A Curmudgeonly P.S.—Thanks so much to everyone who read and/or enjoyed my column for all this time.

I had a blast, and I hope that you did too.)

Matt Mazzari is a staff columnist for The Heights. He can be reached at arts@bcheights.com.

LaMontagne’s folk album ‘Supernova’ outshines past work

BY CAMERON HARDING For The Heights Supernova is a solid blending of blues, folk, psychedelic, and rock, a concoction of old school sounds mixed with an almost childlike freedom. The record is the fifth from 40-year-old singer-songwriter Ray LaMontagne. The 10-track record is a follow up to the 2010 album God Willin’ & the Creek Don’t Rise,

by LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs, which won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

Despite the newfound recognition from his previous project, the indie artist later revealed to Rolling Stone that he was actually considering leaving his career in music, depressed from his own self-doubt. Fortunately, LaMontagne has clearly bounced back with a vivacious record that contains some of his most upbeat and explorative songs to date.

Dan Auerbach–renowned guitarist of The Black Keys—produced the record.

The opening track, “Lavender,” perfectly captures a floating springtime haze and sets an excellent precedent for the rest of the record. While tracks such as “Ojai” may be a little more folksy and down to earth, much of the album is absolutely mesmerizing with spacey, fuzzy, and trippy reverberations that maintain a

healthy balance between energetic and laid-back. Even the more dreary content found in songs such as “Pick Up a Gun”— which basically focuses on a one-sided romance—still retains its buoyant contentment. Even as LaMontagne rasps “I never want to see your face again,” the high spirit of his work is not lost. To put it plainly, this is feel-good music. As LaMontagne himself said while describing his new work: “Fun is a trite word. I kind of hate to use it—but at the same time, I don’t know how else to say it.”

What stands out about Supernova is how smoothly it adds and removes atmospheric layers, keeping each song feeling fresh while maintaining a seamless pace. Reoccurring keyboard melodies, fleeting guitar licks, and harmonizing vocals drift in and out so naturally that the effect is often hypnotic and revitalizing.

Some break-ups are transitory moments of sheer ecstasy. This doesn’t quite remain consistent throughout the entire album, however. Although some variations may appear in songs like “Smashing,” it isn’t always enough to keep the song alive, rendering it a bit repetitive after a few listens. While obviously debatable, the noticeable downside to such rapid refreshing moments is that they may be almost a little too

SUPERNOVA RAY LAMONTAGNE PRODUCED BY RCA RECORDS RELEASED APR. 29, 2014 OUR RATING

PHOTO COURTESY OF RCA

Ray LaMontagne’s ‘Supernova’ is a pleasing, light-hearted folk record, but its songs aren’t revolutionary. brief, making them rather difficult to really latch onto and take in. This may unfortunately make such flashes not quite as memorable as they were enjoyable.

Most of the songs—unsurprisingly, given their vibe—gravitate around some girl or another (“She’s the One,” “Julia,” and “Supernova,” to name a few) while offering hints of nostalgia and sporadic dashes of introspection.

The lyrics themselves are rather straightforward and simple, sometimes generic, but consistently well-executed by LaMon-

tagne’s superb cadence. Indeed, he manages to alter his delivery of the lyrics even when reusing the same exact words, giving them a fresh touch. The instrumentation, while very solid, does get mildly redundant by the second half of Supernova, as certain riffs and arrangements begin to sound just a little bit interchangeable, particularly with the acoustic rhythms. While the later part of Supernova is still very enjoyable, it doesn’t seem to quite match up the catchiness and momentum of the earlier tracks.

Although there are scarcely any glaring issues with Supernova, one could hardly call it a timeless classic—there simply isn’t enough that’s profoundly striking or original. In all fairness, Supernova by no means pretentiously attempts to reinvent the wheel. It effectively achieves its aim, that is, to provide fans with a fun, uplifting record, the kind that makes you just want to enjoy life. One can only imagine how even more energetic and gratifying most of Supernova’s track list will be when played live. 

1 Frozen Soundtrack Various Artists 2 Honest Future 3 The New Classic Iggy Azalea 4GIRL Pharrell Williams 5 Testimony August Alsina

Source: Billboard.com

MUSIC VIDEO OF THE WEEK

BY HARRY MITCHELL

“WASTED” TIESTO

Dutch DJ and producer Tiesto follows up the release of “Red Lights,” the first single on his upcoming album, with “Wasted.” The new single features vocals from Brooklyn singer/songwriter Matthew Koma. The energetic, danceable song has all the necessary components to become a summer radio hit. The charismatic hook partners with harmonious synths and a pounding bass to create an exciting, endearing track.

The music video is set in a 1960s-style home, and it features a young woman setting a table littered with an assortment of colorful deserts exactly in accordance with an image found in a pamphlet titled “How to Plan For Company.”

While the opening moments of the video suggest uniformity and conformity, once “the company” arrives, everything changes.

The young woman throws her apron aside, as if she is discarding any sort of care she previously owned, as the guests to her banquet arrive, an array of colorfully dressed women in ’60s garb. It doesn’t take long before the women throw on a vinyl version of “Wasted,” get wasted, and proceed to remove the majority of their traditional 1950s attire.

While the proud refrain “I like us better when we’re wasted / It makes it easier to say it” echoes in the background, the camera switches back and forth from shots of a pillow fight, the women crowded around a small television displaying the two artists, and a pool party.

The video as a whole is fun, energetic, and original. At face, the piece successfully completes the important objective of generating excitement for Tiesto’s long-awaited project.

His first studio album, A Town Called Paradise, is set to release June 16 through Casablanca Records, featuring collaborations with Krewella, Icona Pop, Firebeatz, and more. Beyond that, however, “Wasted” is simply a creative project. 

SINGLE REVIEWS BY ARIANA IGNERI ARIANA GRANDE FEAT. IGGY AZALEA “Problem” The only real problem with Ariana Grande’s latest release is how addictive it is. Its ’90s R&B vibe, trumpeting sax, whispered choruses, and groovy vocals blend together seamlessly, both reminiscent of the retro style of Grande’s previous work and indicative of a maturation in her sound—Australian rapper Iggy Azalea’s snarky cut on the track is just an added bonus.

JENNIFER HUDSON FEAT. TIMBALAND “Walk It Out” American Idol star Jennifer Hudson takes her sweet time to work things out with her new, smooth single “Walk It Out,” clocking in at nearly five minutes. While the song’s sexy, old school jam and its contemporary R&B finish make for an interesting juxtaposition, it may not be enough to make the collaborative Timbaland track stand out against other current radio hits.

ESTER DEAN “Get My Dough” With her first single since 2009, Pitch Perfect star Ester Dean may just make the “dough” she’s singing about. The song’s infectious pop vibe and confident rap lines are characteristic of past Nicki Minaj hits, making it an easy sell.

Featured on The Other Woman’s soundtrack, “Get My Dough” will inevitably get its fair play on the airwaves this summer.

CLASSIFIEDS Thursday, January 17, 2014

The Heights The Heights

B5 B5

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Community Help wanted $$ SPERM DONORS WANTED $$ Earn up to $1,200/month and give the gift of family through California Cryobank’s donor program. Convenient Cambridge location. Apply online: SPERMBANK.com.

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: · Number can appear only once in each row · Number can appear only once in each column · Number can appear only once in each 3x3 box · The number should appear only once on row, column or area.

The Heights

B6

Bennet’s Banter

The city in our own backyard Bennet Johnson

Let’s face it: April was one hell of a month.

We returned from Easter break to the home stretch: the last week of classes to struggle through, summer jobs to snag, a grueling finals schedule to plan. The memories of our one day of pure joy atop Heartbreak Hill turned into long nights in the library.

The lack of any type of actual spring in New England is another problem—dark skies, rainclouds, and frigid temperatures have pushed back our spring season.

This is also the time of year when high school seniors need to make their decisions about which college they will attend in the fall. Boston College has already hosted two Admitted Eagle Days for thousands of prospective students, and these days have offered them the chance to fall in love with our beautiful campus—just as I did just one year ago.

With the arrival of thousands of prospective new students to join the Class of 2018, that can only mean that in just a few mere weeks, thousands of our seniors will be graduating and leaving the place that they call home.

For many future, current, and departing Eagles, I imagine the place at which one most frequently gazes is Gasson Hall—as evidenced, perhaps, by the apparent need for everyone to Instagram photos of our iconic building.

But I think what very few manage to realize is an even more compelling sight: the view of the Boston skyline at the top of the stairs that lead to St. Joseph’s Chapel on Upper Campus. On a clear morning, you can see the Prudential Center towering in the skyline as you walk to your morning class.

Now I’m not saying that BC students are too naive to notice that they can see the city of Boston from the top of the stairs, but I wonder if they truly take the time to appreciate the city in our backyard.

Earlier this year, I wrote a column titled, “It’s time to find your Boston.”

In the column, I addressed the importance of taking the time to explore our city—whether it is taking in a Red Sox game, shopping on Newbury St., walking the Freedom Trail, or eating at Grill 23.

Although I’m just a freshman, I believe that I have effectively taken advantage of the numerous opportunities available to me as a student living in Boston during my first year. I also know many seniors who look back on their college experiences, however, and wish they took advantage of the Hub of America.

Amid finals, summer plans, and saying goodbye to our friends, here are a few more ways to enjoy this new month of May in Boston.

Boston Calling: If you’re fortunate enough to be in Boston over the summer, make sure to check out the music festival taking over the City Hall Plaza on May 23-25. Headliners of the Boston Calling include Jack Johnson, Modest Mouse, and The Decemberists.

Comedy Festival: From May 8 to 11, Boston and Cambridge will feature numerous stand-up comedians, improv and sketch groups, musical comedy groups, solo artists, and storytellers. The event will host the acclaimed Women in Comedy Festival.

Lilac Day: Lilac Sunday, which takes place on Mother’s Day this year, will feature tours of the lilacs and other collections, live music, family activities, picnicking, and over 11 of Boston’s best food trucks. This free event will take place at the Harvard University Arboretum.

If you are a graduating senior, I truly hope that you have not failed to really look at where you are. If you still have some time remaining at BC, I recommend that you take the time to explore the city that is our namesake.

Next time you see the city skyline shining in the clear night sky, don’t just ignore it.

Go find your Boston.

Bennet Johnson is the Asst. Metro Editor for The Heights. He can be reached at metro@bcheights.com

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Lallitara produces upcycled fashion pieces

By Sarah Moore Heights Editor Just half an hour outside of the city in Lawrence, Mass., is a facility that is revolutionizing the way traditional clothing manufacturing is thought about.

Lallitara, a clothing and accessory company with manufacturing plants located in the Boston suburbs, North Carolina, and New York City, hopes to transform fashion by doing good through every step of the process.

Lallitara’s creative and compassionate focus surrounds the idea of upcycling, or using already worn pieces of fabric and clothing to repurpose into new pieces.

Lallitara’s tank tops, bow ties, and clutches are made out of vibrant, upcycled saris from poverty-stricken areas of India.

Bijal Shah, the CEO and founder of Lallitara, first noticed the potential for this upcycling manufacturing style in 2009 when she was living in India as an American India Foundation Clinton Fellow. Working in an underdeveloped slum with a non-governmental organization (NGO) that helps with poverty and education in India, Shah first encountered the community which would inspire Lallitara: Indian informal recyclers. These people made a meager living by going door-todoor, collecting worn pieces of traditional Indian garb to sell them. As India’s wealth

increases, however, so does the ability for Indians to afford new clothing, leaving the informal recyclers with a dying trade.

“As India’s buying power has increased over time, the people now want to buy everything on trend, everything that is fashionable, similar to the United States, but India and the States are very different, and all of these fabrics could no longer be resold, leaving the recyclers in a lot of trouble,” Shah said. “And there I was seeing this happen, and I knew that there has to be a way that I could help—Lallitara became how.”

Recognizing the value and beauty of the secondhand fabrics, Shah began to make her own clothing from the reclaimed saris, and her vision for Lallitara came true “one dress at a time.”

Today, Lallitara has expanded its scope from a few, foot pedal-sewn dresses to three manufacturing facilities in three states, a comprehensive website for online shopping, features at various trunk shows, and sales in boutiques along Newbury St. and across the country. The brand’s products are as unique as its story. Although each piece of merchandise shares a similar style, the fact that each piece is made from different upcycled fabrics guarantees that each product will be distinctly its own.

“Unlike most designers, we start with the fabric as opposed to the idea for a

design or the inspiration from the latest trends—but this means that we have to take our inspiration from the material,” Shah said. “Whenever we get a new batch of saris, we evaluate the fabric in relation to silhouettes or styles that both show off its beautiful patterns, but remain simple and easy to sew.”

Lallitara not only offers support through fair wages and a new market for Indian informal recyclers, but the company also supports other charitable and sustainable causes. In the U.S. every year, 13.1 million tons of textile waste is deposited in landfills, according to Lallitara’s website. In combination with the other textile waste across the globe, the textile industry is one of the top contributors to the increase of global greenhouse gasses and waste water.

By reusing the fabrics, Shah works to “extend its life” by preventing immediate disposal as well as limiting wastes created in textile production.

Shah hopes that her clothing not only inspires unique fashion choices but also that it promotes awareness of the potential for sustainable possibilities in the fashion world. In addition to the revolution in her manufacturing style, Shah continues to further the charitable work with NGOs that helped to initiate Lallitara in the first place. Focusing on the poverty, which strikes the recyclers

as essential to the company’s trade, proceeds from Lallitara clothing contribute to education to help end the poverty cycle that plagues many developing countries.

All Lallitara products are tagged with the exact dollar amount that went to support the NGOs that the company partners with, including the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

Shah has seen immediate success with Lallitara online and in boutiques in the few years since the company’s emergence.

If the company continues to receive a similar response, Shah ultimately hopes to open a Lallitara storefront that would expose the ideals in manufacturing that the company is founded on directly with its consumer. In the plans for the potential Lallitara boutique, Shah envisions a setting in which customers can choose the upcycled fabric for their specific desired items and purchase their finished creations within a few days.

Shah and the rest of her Lallitara team plan to continue with their unique and sustainable approach to clothing and the community.

“Though we may not be able yet to directly effect every household that comes in contact in some way with our items, we hope to continue to provide holistic solutions to both fashion and with relieving the problems associated with poverty,” she said. n

Local club brings people together through sports

Photo Courtesy of BSSC

The Boston Ski and Sports Club, established in 1965, is the largest sports and social club in the greater Boston area, and boasts over 45,000 members who participate in athletic events.

Ski and Sports Club, from B8 looking to get out, get active, network, meet new people, and stay involved in sports and social atmospheres,” said Jessica Woodcome, sports marketing and promotions manager and sports program manager for field hockey at BSSC. “There’s so much going on nowadays, and so many avenues to check out what’s going on. It’s nice that we’re one centralized location, so you’re always in the know of something going on in Boston.”

For those not inclined to commit to an entire season or unsure of what sport they would like to play, the club also periodically offers pickup games and tournaments . In each league, teams have the choice to play at the recreational or competitive level—so all skill sets can find a place. If players feel like sharpening those skills, they can always attend a clinic in the sport of

their choice. While most players register within a pre-established team, individuals are also welcome to join any league and will be assigned to a team.

The BSSC sets itself apart from other sports clubs in the customer service it offers. It maintains a full-time staff of program managers, including Woodcome, in order to ensure that when people get involved in BSSC, they have an all-around positive experience. The program managers are responsible for taking care of scheduling, updating standings, reserving fields and courts, assigning referees, and anything else the players need. That way, members need only focus on winning games and bonding with teammates.

Aside from athletic events, BSSC frequently organizes social events, ski trips, and longer vacations. This summer, the club will offer four different Red Sox pregames, in which 30-60 peo-

ple sign up online to attend a Sox game and meet up beforehand for a pregame party at the Baseball Tavern across the street from Fenway. “We all meet there and mingle, meet everybody, have some complimentary appetizers, and then you get a ticket into the game,” Woodcome said. “It’s awesome because when else can you get group tickets?”

On June 20, BSSC will hold its annual Rock the Boat party cruise, which will feature a live band, live DJ, games, photo opportunities, and more.

As one might expect, though, many of the social aspects of the BSSC are not organized events, but rather come naturally from being part of a team. Brittany Jeye, a current member of the club and BC ’12, said one of her favorite memories was going out to a bar for drinks with her floor hockey teammates after a particularly triumphant victory. They even went out with the team they had

just defeated and were able to talk and make new friends after the game.

Jeye, who works as grant coordinator at the Museum of Science in Boston, travels a great deal for work, and therefore has a hard time fitting in time for social events. Playing for a team with people her age provides an opportunity to stay in touch with her peers in a casual, fun setting. Moreover, as an active intramural participant during her time at BC, she wanted to maintain the same kind of weekly athletic involvement once she graduated.

“BSSC is a great avenue for anyone from a former athlete, recent grad, young professional, to someone just trying to meet people in the area or trying to be part of a team again,” Woodcome said. “We’re a great way of keeping in the know of what’s going on in Boston, and having an organized reason to get out, stay active, and network.” n

Boston’s food trucks appearing in larger numbers Food Trucks, from B8 sha Goldson, the founder and owner of Cameo Macaron. “This is our first event at the Arboretum, and we are very excited to be part of this huge food truck event that is expected to see between 20,000 and 30,000 people.”

Goldson, unable to find a suitable macaroon in Boston after studying abroad in Paris as an undergrad at Northeastern University, founded Cameo Macaron in the summer of 2013. Her company took off from there. Cameo Macaron currently offers 14 flavors of the delicate French confections, and they are sold throughout Boston at various special events, including weddings.

“The weather has been a big factor for us this spring,” Goldson said. “There have been many pleasant Thursday and Friday nights that have worked well for us, as families and workers swing by and pick up a box of chocolate macaroons.”

Another company that is excited

about the upcoming Mother’s Day festival is Batch. This ice cream company is no stranger to the food truck business, and it was founded in 2009 with the tenet of producing ice cream with only natural ingredients.

“We operate our food truck business from mid-April to October, and our truck came out the door last weekend,” said Susie Parish, the co-founder of Batch. “Our main business is selling pints of ice cream at places like Whole Foods and Shaws, but we make a money at festival events like the Lilac celebration.”

On May 11, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., the Harvard Arboretum will invite flower enthusiasts, outdoorsmen, and families and children to absorb the sights and scents of the spring season.

“This event is at an incredible location with thousands of people outside, having fun, and enjoying food in Boston,” Parish said. “Food trucks, beautiful flowers, and Boston. There really isn’t much else you can ask for.” n

Photo Courtesy of Cameo Macaron

Boston food trucks, including Cameo Macaron, will be present at a Harvard Aboretum event.

THE HEIGHTS

Thursday, May 1, 2014

B7

Retriever can reunite owners with lost valuables Retriever, from B8 offering a “finders fee” rather than an up-front insurance cost.

“Our insight was, once you actually lose your cellphone, lost your keys, your willingness to pay to get that thing back goes up a lot,” Longley said. “So we thought about reversing the business model and handing out stickers and tags for free.”

In the short term, Longley says the most important next step for Retriever is to gain a larger consumer base. Right now, with 145 registered users, Retriever is about 15 percent of the way towards its goal of 1,000 users by midMay. “Right now, we’ve just been focusing on the consumers, getting stickers on phones, tags on key chains,” Longley said. “The way we’ve been doing it is just going up to people on the street, but you can probably tell that that is a pretty slow way of growth.”

In the long term, however, the group has slightly different goals. Once Retriever hits what Longley calls a “critical mass,” the group hopes to expand to several other cities in the Northeast.

Additionally, Longley predicts that the startup will need to begin appealing to the corporate sector at some point in the future. “You go to, say, a law firm,” he said. “Law firms have very high data security needs and if they lose a

corporate asset, they can usually wipe it remotely, but their preference would still be to get that Blackberry or get that laptop back.”

Longley said that a change to the revenue model would probably be necessary in the case of expanding to the corporate model, something more along the lines of traditional insurance. “We might charge an ongoing subscription fee, and we would build up some sort of insurance reserve, and we might actually pay the rewards ourselves as stuff is returned,” he said.

At this stage in the process, there have not been any returns, simply because Retriever has only been public for a week and a half. Since it was necessary to test the finding process, the team went out and lost some of their own belongings. The group wants to see somewhere around a 50 percent return rate on lost items, and during the tests, that mark was met. Longley is even more optimistic, though, and believes that percentage could in fact be higher. “Some of the stuff we lost was of extremely low value, like a coffee mug or an old track jacket, and things that were actually returned to us were of a higher value, like a cracked iPod or a $100 finance textbook,” he said.

While it seems too early to start predicting the most likely item to be tagged by consumers, the Retriever

place in Boston,” Whitney said, who hopes that people looking for a way to spend a regular night will stop by Blazing Paddles instead of the typical nighttime entertainment venue.

“We want to establish regulars,” said Whitney.

Whitney said that this can be accomplished through emphasizing what she described as the “multi-faceted” nature of Blazing Paddles. For some, the venue may be useful for company outings. For the college demographic, students might find an interest in the different leagues and tournaments that the location offers.

“It really is the perfect venue for people to create energy,” Whitney said.

The venue’s name—as most young college students are probably unaware— refers to Blazing Saddles, a Mel Brooks movie from 1974. “When I found out I just laughed and laughed and laughed because I think it is so clever,” Whitney said.

For the university student, Whitney described what aspects of Blazing Paddles she considered essential to a first experience.

College students, she said, can be excited about playing in a Ping-Pong tournament, but the venue also offers a well-lit and nicely decorated bar area.

Students may also be attracted to the 12 Ping-Pong tables surrounding the bar area.

“It’s a super cool Ping-Pong lounge,” Whitney said. “Simply, simply enjoy.” 

PHOTO COURTESY OF RETRIEVER

Retriever users place tags on their belongings so that others can return them if lost. team believes that the two frontrunners will be keys and cellphones. While there have been more cellphones tagged in the one-week period thus far, it is thought that keys will be the most tagged item, simply for aesthetic reasons. “Of the people who don’t accept the cellphone sticker, most of them say they like the way their phone looks,” Longley said.

“And with keys, you have less of that reaction, because your keys just aren’t

an aesthetic device.”

Retriever will work no matter where one is in the country. This is especially useful for college students who would worry about going home every summer.

“If someone finds your phone, goes to our website, and attempts to return it, we will send them a box wherever they are in the U.S. or Canada and will send it to whatever address we have on file,” Longley said. 

PHOTO COURTESY OF BLAZING PADDLES

Blazing Paddles features 12 ping-pong tables around a decorated bar area near Fenway.

BOSTON FOODIE Metropolitan Club is consistent local hit Owner Sidell discusses role of eateries in her life

BY TRICIA TIEDT Heights Editor For restaurateur Kathy Sidell, a love of food runs in the family. Her mother made everyday meals an occasion, regularly hosting lavish dinner parties and catering charity events. Her sister, Stephanie, became the Stephanie of Boston when, 20 years ago, she opened Stephanie’s on Newbury St., and her father singlehandedly changed the way people eat in the city.

Jack Sidell, then a prominent banker, financed young chefs such as Todd English, Jasper White, and Gordon Hammersly, all of whom soon changed the culinary palette of Boston. “I grew up with these people auditioning at my family table,” Sidell said. “Something about this business deeply fascinated me, and that certain something was triggered very early on.”

In 2005, after a brief stint in the film production industry, Sidell followed in her family’s foodie footsteps and opened The Metropolitan Club in Chestnut Hill. The restaurant, the first of several MET Bar

locations Sidell would soon open, now collectively called the MET Restaurant Group, is located on Boylston St., approximately one block away from the Hammond St. intersection. The MET serves dinner seven nights a week plus a weekly Sunday brunch.

Defining the MET’s culinary style as “classic, modern American food,” Sidell focuses on fresh, high quality ingredients at affordable prices to create the kind of meal that turns first time guests into regular patrons.

“We try to deliver something people will come back for two and three times a week,” she said. Sidell LOCATION: attributes her wide 1210 Boylston St. range of customers—everyone from CUISINE: young professionals American to those past retirement—to the variety SAMPLE DISH: in her restaurants’ Veal Parmigiano menus.

The menu, which

Counting minutes in the past year MAGGIE POWERS

Ping-pong lounge unites nightlife and popular game Blazing Paddles, from B8

THE HEART OF THE CITY

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE METROPOLITAN CLUB

varies between the different MET locations, boasts a variety of classic American dishes.

When Sidell was asked to name her favorite meal at the MET’s Chestnut Hill location, she could not help but name three: the veal parmigiano, MET rigatoni bolognese, and the signature tuna and salmon tartar.

Sunday brunch selections include both breakfast and lunch options, such as cider donuts, blintzes, and a house cured salmon pizza. The restaurant also has an extensive cocktail and bar menu, which is available on the weekends until 1 a.m.

Sidell considers herself “very present” in all her restaurants, often cooking on the line beside her chefs in whatever restaurant she happens to be at that day—and she (only half-jokingly) recommends whatever item she happens to be cooking: “Whoever was in Nantucket last weekend probably got a great omelet, because I was making them,” she said.

All five of the MET locations—Chestnut Hill, Back Bay, Dedham, Natick, and Nantucket—combine American bestsell-

ers with the restaurant’s personal greatest hits to create a menu full of simple yet great food, as well as what Sidell defines as “uniquely ours.” Although the menu is noteworthy in and of itself, the restaurateur emphasizes multiple other aspects of the industry necessary to create a successful business. Utilizing her background in film, Sidell relates the job of restaurateur with that of a producer: “It’s about everything from the name to the door handle,” she said. “You start with a concept, and then you have to execute—not only a food and artistic vision, but also a financial vision.

Coming out of the movie business, I really thought conceptually about what do Americans really eat, and how can I do it better than it’s being done now?”

The success of The Metropolitan Club in Chestnut Hill, as well as that of the other MET establishments throughout Massachusetts, serves to show that Sidell has indeed found a niche. The MET serves a menu so characteristically American that it pleases a crowd uniquely Boston. 

Often, it feels like I spend my life counting minutes. Counting the minutes until my class is over. Counting the minutes left in my spin class.

Counting until it is a socially acceptable time to eat dinner and then counting until I can allow myself to go to bed.

Bigger countdowns are happening too. Counting the days until it will be warm enough to expose my toes to sunlight in my beloved flip-flops, counting weeks until I actually have to write that final paper, and the worst count of all—the slow crawl until the end of the semester, until finals begin, and the few precious weeks left on our campus and in our city.

With every flip of the calendar (or, more accurately, the change of the date on our iPhones) we have seen a year full of counting, a year full of anticipations for Boston.

We waited until Boston Calling legitimized our status as a hub of culture, until we had our own Lollapalooza or Governor’s Ball. Now we are counting the months until September, when the line-up is the most impressive of the three events.

The nervous counting of Red Sox games brought the crackle of energy to the city. The fans crossed each opponent off the list until we could once again claim the trophy that eluded us for so many years. Of course, these games also came with many Bostonian wives and girlfriends counting the days until a razor would once again touch the faces of their bearded significant others.

Years of waiting finally came to fruition when the infamous Whitey Bulger was convicted in November. We all speculated about the number of crimes committed and took satisfaction in the fact that, even though every offense could not be tallied, there would at least be some form of justice.

There was the tally of the number of years that Mayor Thomas M. Menino was the face of the city—29 total.

Then we counted those weeks when everything hung in balance, the days until Menino left his office, the ticks of what he could finish in the final days of his impressive run. The countdown until our new Mayor Martin J. Walsh, WCAS ’09, would take office and the anticipation of the changes that would come to the city. (A little part of us is waiting to see if a Chik-fil-A closer than Burlington will be allowed to open.)

Then we all joined in the long, painful count until this year’s Boston Marathon, the first marathon since the bombing. The count of these many months until Boston could finally begin to move forward from the event that rocked the city a little over a year ago. Now there is the much more pleasant count until the “the second marathon,” which will subsequently just become another Boston Marathon, no longer an event marred by tragedy and media buzz.

There were years spent anticipating the city finally giving in and keeping the T open late. While I’m sure the MBTA employees now count those painful extra hours on their shifts, there is also a city full of nightlife relishing the fact that there is no more pressure to count the minutes until the T rushed them home like a nervous chaperone.

This time of year, we tend to close our eyes and count the hours until the storm of finals is over. College students all over Boston are counting down the days until we move into new apartments or return home to our families and dogs. We count the weeks until our lives slow down and begin to hang in the balance like the thick humidity that blankets summer days. We look forward to the days when the hours at our minimum wage jobs or internships pass slowly, moving gradually like the tides on the beaches where we wish we were. But, soon enough, that hopeful anticipation of September will fill us, and we will begin to count the days until we can return to BC and Boston once again.

Maggie Powers is an editor for The Heights. She can be reached at metro@bcheights.com.

METRO

B8

THURSDAY, MAY 1, 2014

EDGE OF TOWN

Value of a summer job RYAN TOWEY As summer approaches, Boston College students are ceaselessly trying to figure out how they will spend their time off from academics—some are off to internships, others to foreign countries, and some back to that good old summer job one last time.

I have to say that I find myself most impressed by those who proudly march back to their hometowns to give their old job one more go, for the simple reason that those jobs are more valuable than many recognize.

I know kids who have never gotten their hands dirty in their entire lives, which is saddening, both for their personal growth and for the future that they are destined to govern. But the truth is this—it’s not all their fault.

For teenagers, the jobs just aren’t there like they used to be, and Mayor Martin J. Walsh, WCAS ’09, is looking to do his part to rectify the problem as summer approaches. Walsh and his staff took half an hour out of their Monday this week to call around 70 companies in the Boston area asking that they offer jobs to the city’s youth, The Boston Globe reported.

According to the Globe, only one out of every three Boston teens has a job, and Walsh has set a goal of finding jobs for 12,000 teens—2,000 more than his predecessor’s goal last summer.

In February, the Youth Jobs Coalition (YJC) marched to the Massachusetts State House endorsing a summer jobs program for 2015. In an interview with The Heights, Dylan Lazerow, a community organizer involved with the advocacy group, articulated the importance of employment for young adults.

“Youth need jobs many times to support their families, but really to support themselves,” he said. “Many of our participants are well on their way to being on their own, and we see employment as a really important part of being a dignified member of society.”

Lazerow’s analysis has proven itself true, at least in my own life. I was fortunate enough not to have to make money to help support my family, but my parents and I decided that it was time for me to make some money of my own the summer going into my freshman year of high school. My father, who works at a small manufacturing company in my hometown, helped land me a job in the stock room—a mammoth spaced filled to the brim with shelves, dwarfing the desk that the stock room manager, Carlos, calls home.

My job was to take inventory as the fiscal year ended. That meant quantifying almost every product that the company kept in the stock room. I would be lying if I said it was always fun, but it definitely gave me some time to think, at least in between numbers, which (don’t tell my former boss) was not always good for the counting—but I digress.

I found time to think about the meaning of labor—the significance of working with one’s own hands, climbing ladders and digging deep into shelves, precariously balancing the heavier boxes on a free hand, and learning to count hours by money.

I learned who to sit with in the cafeteria—high school never ends, but this time I knew to look for someone eccentric, not just someone cool.

Looking back, I would not be the person I am today if I had not had summer jobs like that one.

I enjoyed putting myself to work, knowing that the McDonald’s I bought on a given night with friends was bought with my own money, with about an hour of my own labor. I like knowing that the dirt underneath my fingernails is the result of my being useful.

Sure, the money is great, but it is really the feeling of capability that I have carried with me.

I couldn’t have had a better summer job—even if the mayor of Boston had been calling on my behalf.

Ryan Towey is the Metro Editor for The Heights. He can be reached at metro@ bcheights.com

BRECK WILLS | HEIGHTS PHOTO ILLUSTRATION / PHOTO COURTESY OF BATCH

As the weather warms, the city’s food trucks take to the streets Lined up in a circle around Dewey Square Plaza, a handful of food trucks await the arrival of hundreds of hungry customers on their lunch breaks.

Before the lunch rush begins, vendors greet one another with fist bumps and handshakes, shouting various greetings out of truck windows.

Since the first trucks hit the streets in 2011, the food truck community has been consistently supportive of each other, their jovial manner only amplified by the long-awaited arrival of sun and warm weather.

As the spring season reaches Boston, one of the city’s newer and most cherished traditions includes the reemergence of food trucks.

Whether it’s a sunny, outdoor lunch break or a weekend family festival, Boston’s mobile eateries make the

unpredictable spring season that much better. This April, the city will have 56 trucks dishing food out in Boston’s neighborhoods, up from just 15 when the city launched a food truck initiative in 2011.

On April 1, this year’s food truck season began, with a majority of vendors setting up shop in the streets of Boston. Many of the food trucks are taking advantage of the new policy implemented by Mayor Martin J. Walsh, WCAS ’09, which allows for expanded hours of operation at Copley Square, Boston University, and Northeastern University. The new regulations allow food trucks to stay open until midnight on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

For more than a century, the arrival of spring in Boston has also been affectionately linked with the

peak blooming time of the worldrenowned Lilac Collection at the Arnold Arboretum. On May 11, the Food Truck Festivals of New England will be teaming up with Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain to host the 106th annual Lilac Sunday celebration.

A premiere springtime event in New England, Lilac Sunday offers Bostonians a chance to enjoy warm weather, beautiful flowers, and a variety of activities. Festivities include ongoing tours of the Arboretum’s lilacs and other collections, children’s activities, displays, and demonstrations.

The tradition of this event began more than a century ago as a celebration of the Arboretum’s beloved lilacs, a one-of-a-kind collection of nearly 370 plants representing over

176 different kinds of lilacs. Recently, the festival has taken place on Mother’s Day, hoping to encourage families to visit the attraction in celebration of the holiday. In past years, the event has seen thousands of visitors, and this year 20,000 people are expected to file through the area.

This Mother’s Day event will be filled with 11 of Boston’s best food trucks, which all range in their food options and prices. The large list of trucks includes many big names in Boston, ranging from Batch Ice Cream to Boston’s Baddest Burger, Cameo Macaron, and Captain Marden’s Cod Squad.

“We were contacted by the Food Truck Festivals of New England to participate in the festival,” said Kine-

Startup helps recover lost objects

Club builds athletic community

BY GUS MERRELL

Boston Ski and Sports Club replaces college social scene

Heights Staff

ment, she came to a realization.

“Everybody is happy when they are playing ping-pong,” Whitney said. Blazing Paddles’ opening night reaffirmed this belief when she saw people of all ages and walks of life engaged in an experience that Whitney believes helps to create a sense of playfulness and healthy competition.

Blazing Paddles has captured people’s attention as a spot for both preand post- Red Sox game celebrations.

For this purpose, the venue has prime real estate, as the lounge is located on the corner of Brookline Ave. and Lansdowne St., adjacent to Fenway Park.

The location has also been popular for outings such as birthday parties or corporate events. Even with the last few months of success, however, Whitney expressed still more goals for Blazing Paddles.

“What we want to do now, in addition to being a Red Sox pre-game, postgame hangout is to be also a destination

Every week, countless people lose some item important to them, whether it’s their keys, phone, wallet, or jacket.

Getting that item back can involve retracing steps to where the item might have been lost, numerous phone calls, and a lot of frustration. But Retriever, a Boston startup created by seven Harvard Business School students, seeks to make the return of lost items as painless as possible, using unique Retriever tags.

“You can think of Retriever as a success-based insurance policy that only has a cost to someone if it actually delivers them value,” said Cliff Longley, one of the founders of Retriever.

Retriever involves a simple process and is completely free until an item is to be returned. Tags and stickers can be ordered and delivered for free, and attached to almost any item. The owner then registers each item online and sets a monetary reward to be paid upon the return of a lost item. When someone finds a lost item, they log it online, are shipped a prepaid box, and they then mail the item back to the owner, receiving the reward in return.

Retriever is actually modeled after other companies trying to facilitate the return of lost items, but the difference is in the business model. While other companies make consumers pay directly for the tags, Retriever is completely free until one loses something and it is found. The Retriever team reasoned that people would be much less willing to pay for insurance if they had a high degree of confidence that they would not lose the item they were tagging,

See Blazing Paddles, B7

See Retriever, B7

BY MAGGIE MARETZ Heights Staff

PHOTO COURTESY OF BLAZING PADDLES

Boston College students receive not only an education, but also a four-year membership in a tight-knit community with a built-in social network and recreational system. Graduation means that Eagles are inevitably propelled in multitudinous directions, though, and it might not be quite as easy to stay active and involved with peers.

For those who choose to stay in Boston after their time at BC has come to an end, the Boston Ski and Sports Club (BSSC) provides an array of opportunities—both social and recreational—to replace those that graduates will miss most.

Founded in 1965, the BSSC is the largest sports and social club in the greater Boston Area and boasts over 45,000 participants. Active adults of all ages play in organized leagues in more than a dozen sports, which run yearround, every day of the week. While membership is not required to participate in anything the BSSC organizes, members save on every activity they do within the club. Members are also automatically part of BSSC’s Member Rewards Program, which offers discounts and special deals at hundreds of retailers, bars, and restaurants in the greater Boston area.

“It’s a great outreach program for young professionals to anyone just

See Ski and Sports Club, B6

I NSIDE METRO THIS ISSUE

Lallitara

See Food Trucks, B6

Blazing Paddles, a ping-pong lounge near Fenway, provides a bar and playing tables.

Ping-pong lounge looks to draw college students Blazing Paddles offers drinking and games near Fenway

BY VINCE RUBERTONE Heights Staff Ping-pong lounges first appeared in bustling cities like New York, London, Los Angeles, and Dubai, and the combination of the famous game with alcohol, food, and other social activities reached Boston this March when Blazing Paddles opened downstairs at the sports bar Game On! Fenway.

Rachel Whitney, an event planner and marketing manager for Blazing Paddles, was a little surprised when first approached with the concept of bringing table tennis to the sports bar scene, but as she talked to more people, ranging from avid competitors to those who have not enjoyed the game since playing in a friend’s or relative’s base-

A company located in Lawrence, Mass. produces fashion pieces made out of upcycled saris from impoverished parts of India ........................................B6

Boston Foodie: The Metropolitan Club....................................................................B7 Column: Bennet’s Banter.........................................................................................B6

Thursday, January 17, 2013

The Heights The Heights

B3

People of the Year 2013-2014

Paul Chebator&mer zovko ryan towey | Heights Editor

Emily Sadeghian / Heights Editor

Dean of Students Paul Chebator and Assistant Director of the Student Programs Office Mer Zovko met while working at BC and got married in 1997. They have been advocates and friends of countless students and are retiring together this year.

They’re not sure how to pose for the picture.

Paul Chebator wants to put his arm up on one of the shelves in his Maloney Hall office, but Mer Zovko is uncomfortable with just standing beside him awkwardly. Chebator seeks a compromise and puts a hand on her shoulder—she remains unsatisfied, and it is her warmth that ultimately wins out: “I’m going to put my arm around you.”

On the shelf behind them, there are photos from their wedding day.

Chebator, the dean of students at Boston College, and Zovko, an assistant director of the Student Programs Office, met at BC when she was offered a job in 1989 to run the Emerging Leader Program (ELP), which was only an eight-week program at the time and has since grown into its current form, in which 50 freshmen are placed under the tutelage of 10 sophomore facilitators who help the new students reflect and establish positive relationships throughout the majority of their first year of college. Chebator, who had been at BC since 1980 and was an associate dean at the time, worked with Zovko on the young program.

At the time, Chebator was married to another woman, but he and Zovko knew that they would be fast friends. When they drove to New Hampshire together to price out a location for a retreat, they spent time laughing on the site’s rope bridges, an early sign of the playfulness that became an essential part of their friendship, eventual relationship, and marriage in 1997.

In her, he found someone who appreciated his quirky sense of humor, and she found someone who could laugh with her about what she calls her own scatterbrained nature.

“It was a very natural relationship that we had,” Zovko said while sitting beside Chebator in his office.

“Like an old pair of jeans,” Chebator said. “Not that I’m equating you to an old pair of jeans.”

Zovko smiled, amused. “Of course not.”

After years of working together and separately to improve the University that they call home, Chebator and Zovko made the decision to retire together at the end of this semester.

They consider themselves fortunate to be able to retire at this time in their lives—they enjoy greater financial flexibility than most couples, having never had children together.

But Zovko insisted that this is not exactly true.

“We have 9,000 of them,” she said.

Michael Padulsky, LSOE ’15, is but one of the many students who Zovko has treated as she would one of her own children. An ELP facilitator during his sophomore year, Padulsky’s relationship with Zovko actually began in 2005, when he met her through his older brother Tim, then a CSOM student and member of ELP. When Tim was diagnosed with leukemia in 2006, Padulsky’s family spent almost every day in the hospital, with Zovko as a frequent visitor.

Soon, it came time for the Padulsky family to move its second son Stephen, BC ’12, into his freshman dorm, and Zovko readily volunteered to spend the entire day at the hospital with Tim so that the family could spend the day focusing on Stephen.

“It kind of gave us a sense of normalcy,” Padulsky said. “She was there for my brother and also for us.”

Tim ultimately passed away in 2008, but Padulsky still sees Zovko most days while working at the Student Programs Office. “She is always just so aware of people around her and always so conscious of supporting and loving people,” he said. Padulsky can always expect an e-card from Zovko if she senses he is having a bad day, a human touch that makes up for what she says she sometimes lacks in administrative skills.

“What I’ve really grown to understand is that, obviously I need administrative skills, obviously I need to do my job, but I have other gifts as well that are really important,” Zovko said. Her passion is for freshmen, the new kids trying to understand the fast-paced changes in their lives, but Zovko said she

keeps an eye out for anyone who looks like he or she might need someone to talk to. It is often the ones who look confident—the resume builders and social butterflies—who actually need to talk the most.

Chebator agreed that Zovko’s greatest strength lies in her ability to connect with individual students, both in ELP and beyond, but he refused to let her say that she was somehow shirking her administrative duties. Zovko, he said, often returns to her office later at night to finish paperwork so that she can spend the day talking with students in her office, asking them about their lives and goals over a cup of coffee.

“Compassion and kindness,” Zovko said. “Those are my two biggest values.”

Chebator’s own relationship with students has changed over the years.

Aside from a section of Courage to Know that he has taught for about a decade—what he calls an “enriching and rewarding” experience—he does not have the chance to interact directly with students as much as he did as an associate and assistant dean, but he has striven to focus his office as a place of advocacy for students—all while working to respect the University and its traditions.

Chebator’s office, for example, advocates for GLBTQ resources such as the Spectrum Retreat. “We can have a retreat sanctioned and funded and sponsored by the University for our GLBTQ students so that they can explore some of the issues that are critically important to them in a way that works within the Boston College tradition,” Chebator said.

Chebator insists, however, that the suffusion of the Catholic Jesuit tradition throughout the University does not stand at odds with his efforts to support the students, but most often enhances them. At BC, he knows that he can pick up the phone at 3 a.m. in a time of crisis and that anyone involved with the University would be willing to help. “That’s not true at many places,” he said.

Rev. Jack Butler, S.J., the vice president for the division of University Mission and Ministry, has been on the receiving end of several such phone calls from Chebator. Early in Butler’s time at BC, a student suffered a severe head injury—and Chebator was trying to muster a response.

Butler made his way to the hospital only to find Chebator himself already there, leaving Butler wondering why Chebator would even call him in the first place. Butler would learn over time, however, that Chebator never asks anyone to do something if he is not going to do it himself as well.

The two men alternated tasks—one would work with the student and the other would work with the mother, but it soon became apparent to Butler that Chebator was not concerning himself only with the matter immediately at hand. Throughout their response to the crisis, Chebator would send Butler notes of gratitude or boxes of cookies.

“I started to realize ‘Oh, my God. Not only is he caring for the student, he’s caring for me,’” Butler said.

Since then, Butler has developed a close friendship with Chebator. “Paul has lived out and embodied my understanding of cura personalis in the way he has cared for our students,” Butler said.

Cura personalis, or “care of the whole person,” is one of the core Jesuit values with which Chebator’s relationship has changed significantly over the years. While he and Zovko were both raised Catholic, negative early experiences with religious education drove them from their faith—Chebator recalls being afraid to step on the property of a Protestant church as a young boy, and Zovko remembers her fear of accidentally mishandling the Eucharist.

In their time at BC, however, the couple’s relationship with faith has been largely repaired and deepened. Conversations with Jesuit friends such as Butler have proven themselves foundational for Chebator, and Zovko is currently working her way through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius over a nine-month period.

“These last couple of years have been so rich for us in terms of our spirituality,” Zovko said—she considers herself and her husband fortunate for not having decided to retire any sooner. Had they left BC earlier, they might have missed one of the many paths that led them to the exact moment they are in—and these paths have not always been clear. She compared her

and Chebator’s experiences to the 1998 movie Sliding Doors, which follows Gwyneth Paltrow’s character into two radically different universes—one in which she caught a train, the other in which she didn’t.

Chebator agreed, calling his arrival at BC not the result of traditional career steps, but instead a series of stumbles—he was just in the right places at the right times. In an alternate universe, Chebator might have taken a job in the private sector. While he was working at Bunker Hill Community College in 1980, he was offered a job at The Seagram Company. An offer from BC was also on the table, but Seagram flew him down to Tampa to discuss working for the company in the South—a tempting offer.

In her own alternate universe, Zovko might have never left her secretarial work at Lehigh University, never pursuing higher education of her own.

But in this universe, Chebator was on the flight back home from Tampa, remembering a man that he knew who had moved his family countless times just to reach that corner office on Fifth Avenue. He decided that working in education was what truly brought him joy—and he accepted the job offer from BC instead. Zovko, meanwhile, was encouraged by a man at Lehigh to pursue her education, and, after some resistance, she eventually made her way to Ithaca College, designed her own major, and set upon the path that would ultimately lead her to her own job at BC. Now, a new path: In the first three months after retirement, the pair will stay with friends in a small Italian village between Rome and Florence, but they will quickly return to serving their communities—Chebator would

“

‘It was a very natural relationship that we had,’ Zovko said while sitting beside Chebator in his office. ‘Like an old pair of jeans,’ Chebator said. ‘Not that I’m equating you to an old pair of jeans.’ Zovko smiled, amused.

‘Of course not.’

like to spend some time volunteering at his local library and working on environmental issues, such as helping to protect sea turtles near the Florida home in which he and Zovko hope to spend their summer months. Zovko, meanwhile, would like to, as she calls it, “accompany people” through all stages of life by spending time with babies in neonatal care and volunteering in palliative care units.

Both are comfortable with the idea of making a new life without their current BC titles, and, unlike many married individuals preparing to retire, they’re not too worried about growing sick of each other—almost two decades as a married couple in one workplace has taught them how to spend every day together.

One of the photos on Chebator’s shelf shows him and Zovko in front of the doors of Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio on their wedding day, moments before they would be married by the city’s magistrate.

Zovko holds her bouquet in one hand, and Chebator grasps her other hand with his two, supporting her as she lightly lifts her leg from the ground and throws back her hair. It looks like they are in the middle of some elegant dance, but Zovko remembers that they were actually horsing around like always, trying on different semi-poses, and a friend of hers captured the moment.

They were just enjoying each other. n

Nathan McGuire / Heights Editor

Thursday, January 17, 2013 2

The Heights The Heights

Momentum Awards

B3

Thursday, May 1, 2014

2013-2014

robin fleming Julie Orenstein | Heights Editor

If you’re looking for Robin Fleming in a tent on an exotic archaeological dig, you probably won’t find her there.

While field archaeologists dig and lab rats perform scientific analyses, Fleming—whether foraging through filthy and disorganized storerooms or lecturing in a classroom at Boston College—is fleshing out the stories that unearthed materials alone can’t tell.

The professor and chair of the history department has made it her job to paint a picture of ordinary life for ordinary people in medieval Great Britain, shifting her focus from traditional textual evidence to material objects.

In this way, she is unlike many historians.

“I’m certainly more interested in bioarchaeology and scientific archaeology, which I do think gives me a different idea about what kind of questions we can ask and what kinds of questions are important,” Fleming said.

Through analyzing materials, from skeletal remains to pottery and metalwork, Fleming can tell where people from the medieval period were born, what they ate, and where they stood in society. In her work, kings and elites are no longer the sole characters in historical studies, but peasants and lower classes are represented as well.

Her interdisciplinary mindset has her collaborating with scientists across the world, particularly in Britain, her true area of focus. Currently, Fleming is working with archaeologists from the University of Reading and the British government to analyze skeletal remains from 22 excavated Roman cemeteries in the small town of Baldock, north of London.

For Fleming, poking around for material evidence to fill gaps in a story that may have been previously told using only textual documents is satisfying work. In her body of work, which includes three books and numerous scholarly articles, she tries to make people actors in a story, and avoids writing in the passive voice.

“I think everybody deserves their stories be told, and I’m happy to be telling their stories,” she said.

Growing up in California, Fleming did not like history, or at least the history she was taught in school. It was not until her experience as an exchange student in mid-1970s, apartheid-era South Africa that she realized she was interested in pursuing the subject in her career.

She sat in a classroom learning history that doubled as government propaganda, and the teenaged Fleming recognized that something was off. The history was being manipulated and used in different ways depending on the political and social context.

“I was in a history class where everything I was taught

seemed wrong to me,” Fleming said. “It was really studying history there and thinking, ‘Wow, that can’t be right,’ that made me interested in history.”

As a sophomore at the University of California at Santa Barbara—where she received both her bachelor’s degree and Ph.D.—Fleming narrowed her focus to early British medieval history, and pursued it further while studying abroad in London.

Fleming said that her interest was sparked by an assignment to read a work by the eighth-century English historian and monk known as the Venerable Bede. While reading on the beach in Santa Barbara—not a place that immediately comes to mind for inspiring a passion for medieval history—Fleming had only one thought.

“I thought it was the most interesting thing I had ever read,” she said.

Sitting in her simply furnished corner office on the third floor of Stokes Hall South, Fleming lowered her voice and did her best impression of the mysterious person on the other end of a call she received in early September.

“Are you alone?” she mimicked. “Can we speak confidentially?”

It was the afternoon of the third day of the fall semester at BC, where Fleming has taught since 1989. She was sitting in the same chair, minding her own business, when she answered the call that she initially thought was not only dodgy, but also obscene.

The call, though, was neither dodgy nor obscene, but rather, life changing. She had won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, widely known as the “Genius” grant, and she would receive $625,000 to pursue her academic interests with no strings attached. Each year, 20 to 40 U.S. citizens or residents receive the grant for displaying outstanding innovation and dedication to their field, and Fleming was the first BC scholar to earn the recognition.

She was allowed to tell her family, yet no one else could know about the accomplishment until the foundation made an official announcement later that month.

“I wandered around here for three weeks like a zombie, not being able to tell anybody,” Fleming said. “It doesn’t seem real if you’re the only person who knows.”

One day when Fleming was still remaining tight-lipped about the award, a camera crew arrived on campus at BC to film a short video for the MacArthur Foundation’s website. The original plan was to film in her office, yet hot temperatures and a large crew would have made it necessary to keep the door open. Seeing as Fleming and the entire crew were sworn to secrecy, they insisted that the shoot be moved to the Burns Library.

A portion of the video shows Fleming teaching a graduate course to students who were under the impression that the footage was being used for the History Channel. Fleming recalled their reaction when they found out the video was actually for the MacArthur Foundation.

“They were really disappointed … they wanted to kind

Emily Fahey / Heights Editor

This year, chair of the history department Robin Fleming became the first BC professor ever to receive a MacArthur Genius grant. of mock the History Channel,” she said.

And the people working at the Burns Library?

“I lied to them, too,” Fleming said with a smile.

Fleming already has plans to use the grant money, which she said will go toward scientific work and materials associated with her current project in England.

The nomination process for the fellowship is completely anonymous, and Fleming said she has no idea how it works, but that numerous colleagues must have written to the foundation on her behalf. She got a small glimpse into the foundation’s methods, though, with a somewhat random encounter a few weeks ago.

“A woman popped her head into my office and said, ‘I’m just here for my daughter to look at BC, but I work for the MacArthur Foundation and I’m the person who led the investigation on you,’” Fleming recounted.

The woman then asked if Fleming had known she was being investigated, to which Fleming replied that she had not had a clue.

While she credited hard work and some serendipity for her grant, Fleming has not attained her current stature in her field alone. Working with both accomplished colleagues and students has allowed Fleming to toe the line between history and archaeology. These people have changed the way she thinks about her topics of study, just as she is changing the way people view the early medieval period in Britain.

Graduate students, many of whom are trained archaeologists, have applied to BC to work with Fleming specifically. Undergraduates are “lab rats” and willing to break out of their comfort zone to experiment with her unique approaches. Thesis advisees push her to read things she might not normally read as they become experts themselves.

One of Fleming’s advisees, Maggie Scollan, A&S ’14, is

a biology major and history minor who recently finished her thesis on reconstructing the dietary habits of medieval populations using isotope analysis. She admires Fleming’s casual, yet informative teaching style and her engaging and approachable demeanor.

“As someone who is officially considered a genius, she never is off-putting or intimidating,” Scollan said in an email.

As Scollan will pursue a master’s in archaeological studies at the University of Durham in Britain in the fall, Fleming said that Scollan could become a go-to person on bioarchaeology, adding to her extensive network of contacts.

Frank DiRenno, A&S ’15, will work with Fleming on his thesis next year, focusing on isotope analysis and population migration using pre- and post-Roman teeth that are currently being shipped to Boston from Italy. He noted that Fleming has not only opened up connections for him within her field, but also helped him keep an open mind about the possibilities of his findings.

He pointed right to the heart of Fleming’s interdisciplinary work as a beneficial aspect of her advising. “[She taught me to] really follow what I’m passionate about, and that comes through in the fact that I’m interested in this stuff, but it’s not really what I can study here,” DiRenno said. “It’s not really in the biology department, it’s not really in the history department, but she’s still been very open about allowing me to pursue what I’m interested in.”

Just like her students, whose passions are split between academic departments, Fleming straddles a divide between history and science, disciplines that provide her constant intellectual stimulation. She may not live in tents or dig underground for the fourth-century beakers she studies, but she leaves her mark as a teller of tales previously untold, centuries in the making. n

Campus school volunteers connor farley | Heights Editor

Nestled in the corner of the first floor of Campion Hall, there exists a small, relatively drab room.

Not much bigger than a typical dorm room, Campion 183 is visually unimpressive. Surrounded by grayish walls, mildly worn linoleum floors, and home to only about a half-dozen plastic chairs and a modest table, the room initially evokes a sense of the mundane, the ordinary—just a room.

But every week, six Boston College students file into the room and a transformation of the once-muted space tucked away in Campion Hall begins to take place.

Brianne Shannon, CSOM ’14; Chelsea Beyrand, LSOE ’14; Chris Marino, A&S ’14; Alex Schlatter, A&S ’14; Paige Marino, A&S ’15; and Max Jackson, A&S ’14, comprise the executive team of the Campus School Volunteers of BC (CSVBC), and convene every Tuesday to discuss the daily, weekly, and longer-term progress and plans for all things

Campus School.

Taking seats circularly around a table partially covered with about four or five pizzas for the week’s meeting, the six start dishing jokes with each other and catching up on weekly activities, and the formerly lackluster room begins emanating a sense of radiant purpose.

Shortly after, the students are accompanied

by Volunteer Coordinator Sean Schofield, a longstanding figure of the Campus School community, who starts the meeting with an update on the latest event to be put on by CSVBC—the organization’s 18th Annual Campus School Golf Classic, taking place tomorrow.

When discussing his role and transition to the University, Schofield—who currently oversees the student volunteers at BC’s special education day school for students aged three to 21 with multiple disabilities and often highly sensitive health care needs—said there was a time earlier in his life when he faced an uncertain career crossroads, but he was ultimately led toward BC. “[The Campus School] is student-first and celebrates the individualities in each one of our kids,

Photo Courtesy of sean schofield

The Campus School volunteers faced a difficult year, fighting to keep the special education school on BC’s campus.

and saying ‘We’re going to work on what you can do, not what you can’t do,’” Schofield said on his approach to working with Campus School students since arriving at BC. In scale, CSVBC has approximately 375 students on the organization’s email list and about 60 fully committed volunteers who work within nine different committees—the six officers are responsible for managing the entirety of that volunteer base. The student volunteering experience, Jackson noted, not only helps students develop substantive relationships with their individual buddies, but also affords that experience to others within the BC community.

“What’s really unique about the Campus School is that we are connected with the BC community in so many different ways,” said Jackson, who is CSVBC co-vice president alongside Schlatter. Jackson noted that professors such as James Gipps of the information systems department in the Carroll School of Management have worked with the Campus School—Gipps having developed a software project called Eagle Eyes designed to enable young adults who cannot speak to use eye movement as a means of accessing a computer.

CSVBC members have also integrated ways of expanding their outreach with initiatives like Creative Kids—a music program within the Campus School—and interaction with student clubs like on-campus sketch comedy troupe Hello…Shovelhead!, which donated all of the profits from its last performance to the Campus School.

Despite its popularity among students, faculty, and alumni, though, the Campus School and its volunteers navigated a rather turbulent 2013-14 academic year.

Last November, the University, along with Campus School Director Don Ricciato, announced its consideration of relocating the school to the Kennedy Day School—a newly-built, 20,000 square-foot wing of the Franciscan Hospital for Children in Brighton, Mass. dedicated exclusively to special needs children and having an enrollment of 70 students, compared to the Campus School’s 38. The announcement, said Marino, CSVBC copresident, shocked many volunteers, but served as a reminder of the school’s value on campus.

“In the moment it was definitely a nerve-wracking year, and there was so much in question that was difficult to deal with, but I also look at this as kind of a blessing, because you become complacent with having something that’s part of your everyday life like the Campus School has become for us,” he said. “It’s very easy to take for granted, but I think while we all truly love working with these students and making these great friends in

the classroom, and with the volunteers, and staff, I think when you do something long enough it’s kind of easy to forget how important that is in your life.”

“This was a very different year for a lot of us,” said Beyrand, CSVBC co-president. “It’s something none of us expected … we had so many people at stake in these issues, and we all really needed to come together, but that’s exactly what we did.”

After a nearly semester-long dispute among Campus School students’ parents and the administration regarding the possibility of relocating the school, a decision was reached to keep the Campus School on campus grounds, pending a long-term sustainability plan to be created by staff, parents, and students by the end of the year in order to help combat the declining enrollment and decreased fundraising that led the University to consider alternative locations for the school.

Just a few months after settling the Campus School’s location, the Boston Athletic Association announced that due to heightened security concerns surrounding the 2014 Boston Marathon, bandits, or unregistered runners, would be prohibited. Tradtionally, hundreds of BC students—CSVBC runners and non-volunteers alike—have run the marathon each year as bandits to raise money for the Campus School. This year’s newly implemented set of restrictions made unregistered race participation impossible, halting an annual tradition.

In response, members of CSVBC held their own marathon one week prior to the Boston Marathon, still garnering a major showing of BC students along Mile 21 to support friends and family running for the Campus School.

“I think what everyone from Boston College thinks about the marathon and Marathon Monday—a huge component of that is seeing those yellow shirts supporting the Campus School,” Marino said. “But I think what is most exciting about these Campus School runners is that they’re running for something bigger than themselves.”

Although faced with what seemed one of their most demanding years since the school’s inception in 1970, the officers remain highly optimistic about the future of the Campus School and the volunteers that have continued to adapt in a year filled with obstacles.

“I guess the key this year has been the word resiliency,” Marino said. “I think that our organization—whether it be the Boston Marathon or even more so the possible close of the school has shown just how resilient we can be as a community, especially when you care about the people you are working for so much.” n

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Thursday, May 1, 2014

The Heights The Heights

3B3

Momentum Awards 2013-2014

Ande giancarlo & joey palomba Eleanor hildebrandt | Editor-in-chief

The t-shirts are a bright, unapologetic red, and the message they bear is equally uncompromising: We will not stand by.

Student trainers for the Bystander Intervention program at Boston College don these shirts on a regular basis. This small group of undergraduates works together to educate their peers on rape and sexual assault, as well as methods to stand up against rape culture and step in during situations that may lead to assault. As lead trainers of Bystander, Ande Giancarlo, CSOM ’15, and Joey Palomba, A&S ’15, have taken on greater responsibility for coordinating these presentations, training the trainers, and improving Bystander overall. This year is the first in which the Bystander program included student lead trainers—the program is traditionally managed by a graduate assistant within the Women’s Center (formerly the Women’s Resource Center).

Although they both speak openly and with good humor, there is an undeniable solemnity running throughout their descriptions of Bystander. The pair is serious about cultivating a community that does not condone sexual assault and rejects the rape culture outright.

Giancarlo and Palomba have followed a relatively similar path within Bystander, and they have worked together since their own training before the fall of sophomore year. They did, however, take different paths to involvement. “I joined initially because of family reasons—I was personally affected by it,” Giancarlo said.

“I think that a decent amount of people who join the program have a personal connection to the issue, but it’s also really admirable when people don’t, and they still recognize the gravity of it.”

Palomba is one of those Bystanders who joined without a personal link to the issue of rape and sexual assault.

When he was a freshman, he found himself listening to three BC women practicing their speeches for Take Back the Night. He hadn’t been doing much that night, and one of his RAs invited him to come to the program. Without any idea of what to expect, Palomba went. “It was really powerful, and I was kind of very overwhelmed,” he said.

“I had never heard a story like that before, and I was just very taken aback. I kind of just sat back and went, ‘Look, you know, most of my friends are girls. I have a sister, I

have a mom’—I had no idea that this was such a big issue.

Something like this was not even on my radar screen.”

Over the last two years of involvement, Palomba has also been particularly aware of another sort of stigma that surrounds these issues—that they are only of concern to women. When men are involved in speaking out against sexual assault and the rape culture, Palomba said, people tend to look for specific justification of their interest.

“I think that there’s just a lot of … misconceptions about who would be interested in helping out in a cause like this,” Giancarlo said. “And I know that Joey gets that a lot, where his friends don’t really understand why he’s involved, because he hasn’t been personally impacted, but he’s like, ‘I don’t need a reason, it’s just what’s right.’”

In their capacity as Bystander lead trainers, Giancarlo and Palomba have pushed to create a more public image for the program. In part, this has meant taking the initiative to bring their work to the general student body, rather than confining it to training sessions. Last fall, after the infamous “BC Confession” post sparked discussion about the prevalence of sexual assault on campus, the pair helped organize a response event, bringing in administrators and members of BCPD as well as giving an impromptu Bystander presentation to help students process the week’s events.

Not all their work is visible, however. Megan O’Hara, the graduate assistant for Bystander, works closely with the pair and lauded their personalities and their commitment to the program.

“I’ve just been so proud and inspired and honored to work with them,” O’Hara said. “I’m impressed with all the Bystander trainers, just in the way they’re so committed to it, but Ande and Joey specifically devote so much of their time—I don’t think other people even realize how much they do.”

Although Bystander, and the pair’s work in the program, often flies under the radar, Palomba in particular did come to the limelight a few weeks ago. At the end of February, he and Jessica Stevens, another student staff member of the Women’s Center and A&S ’15, were invited to the White House in order to participate in a roundtable discussion about preventing sexual assault on college campuses. Just a few days ago, on April 29, the White House released “Not Alone,” the first report of the White House Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault. In one of the sections dealing with prevention methods, the Bystander model was specifically referenced, echoing the same points that Palomba and Giancarlo raise in their work at BC. “Among the most promising preven-

Emily Fahey / Heights Editor

As Bystander lead trainers, Palomba and Giancarlo have served as leaders in the mission to stop sexual assault on campus. tion strategies—and one we heard a lot about in our listening sessions—is bystander intervention,” the report read.

It noted that when peers’ acceptance of sexual assault is overestimated and their willingness to intervene when a woman is in trouble is underestimated, the likelihood of individuals stepping in to help goes down.

Stepping in doesn’t only apply to situations wherein someone is in physical danger—throughout her involvement with Bystander, Giancarlo said, she has become increasingly confident and willing to speak out, even outside of the presentations. “I think there are groups of people that know that I will speak up if someone makes a rape joke, or if someone makes a sexist comment,” she said. “I think they probably see it as annoying, but I see it as necessary.”

Although Giancarlo may describe this willingness to voice objections as “annoying,” those who work with her don’t see it the same way. “I have such confidence in her ability as a trainer,” O’Hara said. “In both of them, but just focusing on Ande at this point—I have full trust in her ability to speak for our program and to represent our program, not only in what she’s saying about it and how she’s able to articulate it—but I know that she’s the kind of person, just in life, that is not afraid to be herself and stand up. Our whole program is about intervening … Ande has example after example of times where she can use her humor to step in and not make people feel bad, not make people feel judged,

but to get her point across.”

When discussing such sensitive topics, a welcoming demeanor and ability to connect with other students is paramount—and both Giancarlo and Palomba possess that knack. “From what I have seen as Bystander trainers, they both take their work seriously, are passionate about the topic, and work really hard for the program, but they also know how to make it fun and engaging for others,” Stevens said in an email. “I think they do a good job of helping people feel welcome and comfortable no matter what the situation is.”

O’Hara agreed. “They’re such friendly and welcoming people, I think they’ve created a really good spirit within our community of trainers,” she said. “They have a lot of energy and really get excited for the things they’re doing.”

Next year, Giancarlo will be joining the Women’s Center staff as a Bystander advocate, yet another step up in responsibility. While Palomba will be easing back from his leadership role in Bystander in order to apply to Ph.D. programs in chemistry, he plans to continue delivering presentations and keep the conversation going.

“The average BC student either doesn’t want to talk about these things or doesn’t want to believe that this kind of environment exists in the Mods or their off-campus party, you know?” Palomba said. “But hopefully—fingers crossed that it gets easier to talk about.” n

Andre williams Connor mellas | heights editor

Ask Andre Williams why he loves football, and he’ll tell you the story of his athletic evolution—

how he went from booking around on his bike to earning karate belts to wearing cleats and kicking around that other, rounder type of football called futbol, to finally ending up in a helmet and pads with the rock in his hands and holes to hit. Ask Williams about his legacy with Boston College football, and he’ll take you through the highs and lows of a redemptive senior season that defibrillated a program and concluded in bitter anguish in Louisiana. Ask the Heisman finalist about God and spirituality, and he’ll let you into his mind, deliberately and confidently sharing his beliefs and carefully crafting each thought before he speaks.

But if you ask Andre Williams a tough BC ResLife question, then he really has to think.

“Ummmm,” Williams responded, the gears in his head cranking. Silence filled the phone. “I mean Gabelli, Gabelli was nice. It was nice, and it had a kitchen.

But I think that building that I most enjoyed—what’s the one across the street from Vandy?”

He’s thinking of 90, his former summer home. The verdict is in.

It’s been five months since the mild-mannered student-athlete Williams went national, exploding into the bludgeoning force of nature and defensive back nightmare known as #Andre44Heisman, and it’s been four months since the running back graduated a semester early from BC to become, in his words, a “real person.”

Heading into his senior season last fall, Williams could have struck stiff-arm poses for hours on end under the most advanced Heisman candidate radar without causing so much as a hiccup. Running back No. 44 had never broken 600 rushing yards in a season, and he had rushed for 10 touchdowns over three seasons.

The Eagles were limping off a dismal 2-10 campaign and following new head coach Steve Addazio into the great unknown of an uncertain future. Williams’ personal goal was simple: hit 1,000 yards.

His story is old news by now—his stats and accolades are firmly engrained in the collective consciousness of the Alumni faithful: 2,177 yards and 18 touchdowns in 13 games, a fourth-place finish in Heisman voting, the Doak Walker Award on the shelf, and a fifth place overall rank among running backs destined for the 2014 NFL Draft, according to CBSSports.com.

Williams obliterated his rushing goal with a season of highlight-reel stampedes and literally ran, stiff-armed, and flipped his way into the national spotlight. Then, under the press conference hot lights, he talked his way into the hearts of the crustiest of media members, his thoughtful responses, offbeat quotes, and overwhelming sincerity combining for a unique breath of air in the pea soup of PR drivel.

As the hype grew, Williams became famous and a picture of the running back’s off-the-field life emerged.

Sports Illustrated’s Pete Thamel dubbed him the

“Renaissance Heisman candidate”—Williams was a teacher’s assistant for Courage to Know, the fledgling author of a philosophical memoir, and a highly regarded student. Over the winter, the quirks kept popping out of the woodwork. Williams laughed about Jameis Winston’s table manners and called Johnny Football a “freaky guy,” and at BC’s Pro Day, he revealed that he had been working with a renowned sports psychologist to improve his catching ability.

Knowing Williams is as simple as hitting a butterfly with a paper airplane in a hurricane: there’s always another surprise waiting around the corner. In the months leading up to the draft, Williams has been engaging in typically atypical activities: he’s putting a t-shirt design into production, customizing a car,

finishing his book, and taking steps toward obtaining a pilot’s license. Despite the fact that an NFL career is beckoning just around the corner, “real person” Andre is pursuing every interest he can.

“He is the kind of person to take on unique things and do that even if he doesn’t have much time to do it,” said Williams’ friend, former four-year roommate, and teammate Alex Amidon.

From taking down Nazi zombies in Call of Duty to nailing yoga poses, Amidon saw Williams engage in a spectrum of interests over the course of their years in Chestnut Hill—his only complaint stemming from Williams’ alleged snoring.

“We’d occasionally have real deep conversations about something new he’d just learned about,” Amidon

Emily Fahey / Heights Editor

Alex Gaynor / Heights senior staff

Williams played a key role in bringing BC’s football program back to significance, rushing his way to a Heisman nomination.

said. “God knows what.”

Common themes persist in everything Williams tackles and every tackle he breaks—focus and a constant awareness of spirituality. Raised in a Christian household, Williams describes himself as spiritual rather than religious—he reads the Bible every day but doesn’t make it to church every Sunday. Williams’ interest in his spirituality was sparked by a high school relationship—a glimpse at love filled him with an understanding of the phrase “God is love” and left him full of questions. Since then, Williams has been asking questions about himself and the world around him, questions he believes have led him to the point he’s reached today.

“I’ve learned a lot of things,” Williams said. “The Bible says when you knock, the door will be open, but you’re not going to learn anything unless you ask the questions yourself, and that’s what makes it such a personal relationship that each person has with God.” “I think he’s probably one of the most spiritual individuals I’ve ever met,” said Audrey Friedman, assistant dean for undergraduate student services and Williams’ former advisor and teacher.

Williams and Friedman worked closely throughout Williams’ collegiate career and developed a phenomenological study on conflict as it’s manifested in the writing of urban high school students during Williams’ senior year. Friedman witnessed many of Williams’ curiosities and ponderings—they discussed God and heaven and cognitive moral development, interpreted poetry, and recommended books for each other.

“He has it all together,” Freidman said of Williams.

“Incredible perseverance, drive, very bright, very good writer, and very honest. Just a great young man, a wonderful ambassador for Boston College and the Lynch School of Education.

“I think what I liked best about Andre—I mean, he’s a terrific athlete—but he’s a very kind, compassionate person who possesses extremely high moral standards.”

In less than two weeks, Williams will, in all likelihood, begin a professional football career. The past year of his life was a whirlwind of change, success, and incredible achievement, one in which he exceeded all rational expectations and played a huge role in reinstalling pride and triumph in the BC football program. Surrounded by his family and friends in Pennsylvania, Williams will watch the Draft and hope that his name is called.

Thamel called Williams the Renaissance candidate, but he was off by a thousand years or so—the Socratic running back would be a more appropriate name. If the past is anything to go by, regardless of what happens in the Draft, it’s a safe bet that No. 44 will do what he’s always done: keep asking questions, finding new interests, and taking life one day at a time.

“Things get done on their own time frame,” Williams said. “Not gonna get everything done in a day—there’s not enough hours in a day—but the sun will rise tomorrow, and you’ll have a new opportunity.

You just gotta try not to waste your time.” n

Thursday, January 17, 2013 4

The Heights The Heights

Momentum Awards

B3 Thursday, May 1, 2014

2013-2014

BARRY GALLUP Austin tedesco | heights editor

Graham Beck / Heights Senior Staff

Barry Gallup has been a source of stability for the BC football program throughout the past few decades. He has helped ease several head coach transitions and formed lasting relationships with fellow coaches, players, and alumni.

With all due respect to the people who are a part of Boston College’s Student Admissions Program, the University ’s best tour guide works on the third floor of the Yawkey Athletics Center.

Barry Gallup first arrived at BC almost 50 years ago, back when the idea of his current office—the one that sits on the right-hand side of the head football coach, inside a $26 million facility with offices for the assistant coaches, rooms for meetings, breaks, film study, and recruiting, and a plethora of other resources for the football program and the athletic department—would have seemed like an impossible dream. He remembers the place as a New England-centric commuter school, struggling at times with finances. Now, the fact that BC football players from across the country come and go from this expensive facility for training and studying, getting ready for competition on the field and in the classroom, would surprise Gallup if he hadn’t been around the whole time to see the University grow.

“I know I couldn’t get in now-a-days,” Gallup said, with a hearty laugh.

After graduating in the ’60s, Gallup returned to BC as a member of the football staff in the ’70s. Since then, besides serving as Northeastern University’s football coach and athletic director in the ’90s, BC is all he’s ever known. Although he’s not coaching on the field anymore, he’s still doing what he loves—dealing with student-athletes. As the director of football operations, Gallup maintains relationships with high school teams and coaches, acts as a mentor and liaison for current players, and keeps former players connected to the school and the program. Former BC linebacker Bill Romanowski called him recently, saying he and his daughter, a high school junior lacrosse player, were coming to visit the school, so Gallup gladly showed them around.

“My job is to bring the past, present, and future together,” Gallup said.

Watching him work, it’s difficult to imagine anyone doing it better.

Gallup has been around for BC’s highest highs and lowest lows. The 2012 football season, when the Eagles went just 2-10, was nothing compared to 1978. Gallup was then an assistant under first year head coach Ed Chlebek. The Eagles had lost all 10 of their games, and for the final contest, BC took a bus down to New York, meeting the Temple team at JFK airport. The two squads shared a 747 to Tokyo, Japan, where the Owls beat the Eagles 28-24, forcing a winless season. To make things even worse, BC had to get back on the plane and travel across the Pacific Ocean while sitting right next to the Temple team that delivered the final defeat.

“They called it the Mirage Bowl,” Gallup said. “I wish it was a mirage so we couldn’t remember it.”

For all of the lows, though, there have been even more memorable highs. During Gallup’s first two years at BC, he was a two-sport athlete, playing foot-

ball for Jim Miller and basketball for Celtics legend Bob Cousy. Although, if you mention to Gallup that he played for Cousy, he’ll politely clarify that it’s more accurate just to say he was on the team.

Football was his best sport. Players he would later coach have since eclipsed them, but when Gallup graduated, he held nearly every school receiving record. It’s a time that Gallup remembers fondly, if not a little longingly.

“You didn’t think as much about the future,” he said. “You didn’t think about the NFL—if those things happened, they happened. But we were playing Harvard, and Holy Cross, and Dartmouth, and Providence, and UMass, and Connecticut, and all the teams, and we had great rivalries.”

A Swampscott native, Gallup over-annunciates the name of every school in a uniquely, deep-rooted Massachusetts grunt. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do after he graduated with a marketing degree from the business school. The Boston Patriots selected him in the 11th round of the NFL Draft, but he gave up on his professional career rather quickly.

While trying to sort things out, he taught fourth, fifth, and sixth grade for a year, before he realized he wanted to get into coaching.

Coaches—from Cousy to Joe Yukica, the football coach his senior year at BC, to Jim Smith, the coach at Deerfield Academy during Gallup’s post-grad year at the school—had been such a major influence in his life that it made sense to Gallup to do the same thing.

So, in 1971 Gallup came back to BC and coached the defensive line for nine seasons. Then, Jack Bicknell took over the team in 1981, and Gallup became the receivers’ coach, while also helping to recruit star players like Doug Flutie.

“If you look back at Boston College history, he was the centerpiece of all their recruiting,” Buffalo Bills head coach Doug Marrone, who was an assistant under Gallup at Northeastern, told The New York Times. “He was the one who was able to get all those great quality players in there. I was able to learn about recruiting and how to act from a professional standpoint.”

Gallup’s goal has always been to make football fun. He’s competitive, sure, but he realizes that there’s a lot beyond what happens on the field. It’s something that Gallup brought with him to Northeastern. He knew that his team wasn’t going to be in bowl games or make it onto TV every year, but he wanted to give the players something to remember, so the Huskies took a trip every season. Gallup had them stop at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown on the way to a game at Colgate. They went to the Football Hall of Fame another year when they played against Youngstown State in Ohio, and they even visited the Grand Canyon after playing at Northern Arizona.

Despite a significant age difference, Gallup has no trouble connecting with BC’s current players.

“My wife’s always said—I didn’t get married until I was 37—she said, ‘You had all these kids before,’” he said. “People used to tease me about that all the time, and that’s what I enjoy, the relationships, you know?”

He meets with each player at least once during the semester, but oftentimes it’s more than that.

Parents call him frequently to check in.

Due to NCAA rules, his job doesn’t allow him to go off campus to recruit, but Gallup does help when recruits are brought to campus. He meets with all the families, makes presentations to visiting groups,

and discusses BC’s tradition. He’s even closer with the alumni. Current head coach Steve Addazio can see when former players come back that they’re excited to be there and that Gallup has a good rapport with them. The relationships are what make him excited to come to work every day.

It’s not just the players with whom Gallup has a strong bond—it’s the coaches, too. Gallup has worked for seven different head coaches in his career. It was Tom O’Brien who eventually got him to return to his alma mater.

“I’ve got to get you back to BC,” O’Brien told him after Northeastern lost at BC 33-22 in October of 1999.

The prospect came up again that spring, and it took a few weeks for Gallup to decide. His wife, Victoria, asked him if he was sure he wanted to give up coaching the players on the field, and he wasn’t, but it was a chance to get back to BC, and it was a more stable situation. For Gallup, it was the right time to return. Since then, he’s stuck around through three

“

“If you look back at Boston College history, he was the centerpiece of all their recruiting,” — Doug Marrone, Buffalo Bills head coach

head coaching changes in the last seven years, but he says the latest one, with Addazio, was different. “[Jeff Jagodzinski] had never been a head coach,” Gallup said. “I would say, ‘Okay, this is how we did it under Tom O’Brien,’ and he would say, ‘Okay.’ A lot of the stuff was set in stone. We had a good team returning. We didn’t do any radical changes there.

Then when [Frank Spaziani] came, we didn’t do many radical changes at all. He was a Tom O’Brien guy. We had done these things for 15 years, we were going to continue to do it. I wish he had brought some ideas. He didn’t do anything different. We just got stale. We didn’t have any change. We didn’t have any life. I’m not criticizing him, but Steve comes in, and he’s got a lot of ideas.”

Gallup and running back coach Al Washington were the only holdovers from Spaziani’s staff to Addazio’s, and Addazio took advantage of Gallup’s vast knowledge of the BC program and how to run a team—Gallup is one of the best at sharing ideas and picking up practices from other teams in the conference. The transition wasn’t always easy, however.

“He’s hard to work for, because he’s demanding, which is fine,” Gallup said. “The program needed discipline, it needed structure. He relies on me a lot, which I like.”

Addazio instituted a lot of changes. The team switched to morning practices, the players wear a shirt and tie to games, and they have a pre-game Mass in Gasson Hall on campus rather than at the team hotel. Some other changes are taking time, though, and Gallup has to remind Addazio to be patient.

“You’ve got to know who to push the buttons with, you’ve got to know how to get it done, and sometimes it’s going to take time,” Gallup said.

“Not everything’s going to happen over night. He wants a new indoor facility—okay, we need a new

indoor facility—but, it’s going to take time. There’re other things on campus that BC needs. He’s got to understand that.”

That’s what Addazio has Gallup for—Gallup understands how those things work. He’s open to the change and sees it as necessary, but he also knows what that kind of change takes. Addazio brought the new life, enthusiasm, and discipline into the program on the way to a successful 8-5 first season, but he needed Gallup to get there.

Although he’s received several calls during his career to move on and give the NFL a chance, Gallup never had that ambition.

“I didn’t want to go to that madness from job to job,” Gallup said. “I just wasn’t going to move our family.”

For his whole life, he’s never lived anywhere besides Massachusetts—an unheard-of claim for someone who has worked in football for this long.

When Gallup and Victoria got married, the reception was at Lyons Hall. They met when he was an assistant coach and she was the secretary for basketball coach Gary Williams and hockey coach Len Ceglarski. Gallup has BC in his blood, but so does his family.

Gallup’s daughter, Lisa, loved BC. She helped work the summer football camps with him for 10 years. She’d walk to the Alumni Stadium end zone with him and stand on the field for the singing of the alma mater. She’d go home with Victoria after the games, but before that, she’d leave a note on his desk saying that she loved him and she’d see him at home.

Lisa was diagnosed with cancer in the fall of 2011. She and her brother Barry, Jr. had already gotten involved with Cycle for Survival, a charity in which teams ride spin bikes to raise money for rare cancer research at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Lisa’s passion only grew after her stage IV sarcoma diagnosis. Cycle now has 13 locations across the country, but when Lisa got involved, there was no Boston event.

“It was really a dream of our daughter’s to have it brought to Boston,” Victoria said.

Lisa made Gallup promise that no matter what happened to her, he would continue her efforts to bring the event to the city they love. She died in December of 2012, but with the support of the Gallup family, the first Boston Cycle for Survival event took place two months later, in February of 2013.

“I have been fortunate to be in a lot of bowl games—I was with Doug Flutie when he won the Heisman trophy,” Gallup said at the event. “But Cycle for Survival is the most inspirational and emotional and inspiring event that I have ever been a part of. We are going to win this battle against cancer.”

Through the help of field hockey coach Ainslee Lamb, BC now hosts a satellite event on campus.

The second year of the event took place yesterday, raising more than $10,000.

“Lisa’s memory is very important to me,” Gallup said. “It’s very important to BC that we do something, whether it’s our daughter or someone else.”

“Boston College, Brad Bates, Steve Addazio, they know that Barry has a broken heart, and they have been very kind to him,” Victoria said.

Gallup pushed forward to carry on his daughter’s dream and help support the football program during a time of major transition, and after more than 40 years watching BC grow, he’s still pushing to make it better. n