The Heights March 18, 2019

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Monday, March 18, 2019

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Heights Rewind

SPORTS

ARTS

Head couch Acacia WalkerWeinstein got win number 100 as No. 1 BC routed No. 21 Georgetown, 21-11.

Heights editors and staff writers recall their favorite throwback albums and films.

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Beloved Professor Leaves Mid-Semester

Rise in Tuition

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Vahid Montazerhodjat, a comp. sci. professor, left March 8.

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By Jack Goldman

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News Editor

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ikram ali / heights editor

Attendance Cost Rises Above 70k for 2019-20 The change marked a 3.9 percent increase from last year.

By Jack Goldman News Editor Boston College’s Board of Trustees has set tuition for the 2019-20 academic year at $56,780—a 3.9 percent increase over the 2018-19 total—bringing the final cost of attendance to $72,736 per year, according to a University release. Need-based financial aid has also been increased for the upcoming year to $140.3 million per year, a $9 million, 6.9 percent bump from the current level.

The tuition increase is set at a slightly higher increment than previous years—tuition was increased 3.6 percent prior to both the 2017-18 and 2018-19 academic years.

The financial aid increase is smaller than

last year, when it was increased by 8.1 percent, but still far larger than the 5.1 percent increase in aid made prior to the 2017-18 academic year.

Over 67 percent of BC students receive financial aid, according to the release, which is consistent with the 2018-19 mark. BC is a need-blind institution, meaning that it does not consider one’s need for financial aid when making admission decisions. The average financial aid package will be more than $47,000 in 2019-20, a $2,000 increase from the 2018-19 level.

Tuition for BC’s graduate programs will increase this upcoming year. BC Law students will see tuition rise to $56,940, up from $54,750 in 2018-19 and $52,640 in 2017-18.

The Carroll School of Management’s full-time M.B.A. program tuition has also

See Tuition, A3

‘Lies Feminists Tell’ Talk Prompts Student Outrage Posters torn down, but leaders on both sides seeking dialogue.

By Jack Goldman News Editor Controversy has swirled around the upcoming Pro-Life Club event titled “Lies Feminists Tell With Kristan Hawkins,” a sold-out talk featuring the president of Students for Life of America. The marketing posters for the event have been ripped down from Office of Student Involvement (OSI) approved locations every day this past week within hours of the fliers being posted.

A “protest” has been organized on Facebook by abortion rights activists on campus who plan to attend the event and ask Hawkins

questions about her anti-abortion stance.

The posters ripped down display the three lies Hawkins claims feminists tell about abortion: “Women need abortion to succeed,” “Women need planned parenthood for healthcare,” and “You can’t be a student and a parent.” The Pro-Life club has reported the issue to OSI, which is lodging a complaint with the Boston College Police Department. The issue has been persistent in relation to prior Pro-Life Club events, which have also had one or two posters ripped down, but this time the issue is much more rampant. Almost every flier that is posted is ripped down within hours without fail in this case.

The protest is not a University-approved protest, nor is it really a protest in

See Abortion, A3

Boston College computer science professor Vahid Montazerhodjat left the University on March 8, mid-semester, to pursue other academic opportunities, according to an email Sergio Alvarez, chair of the computer science department, wrote to computer science majors and students in Montazerhodjat’s classes. Montazerhodjat was a tenure-track professor, originally from Iran and MIT-educated, and was one of the most well-reviewed and liked professors in the department.

“Vahid was easily one of the best professors I’ve ever had my entire life,” said Jolene Lozano, MCAS ’21. “Initially I didn’t want to become a computer science major because as a minority in the tech field, I’ve always felt I wasn’t good enough. But I ended up taking

[computer science I] with him and he was easily the most inclusive and welcoming professor I’ve ever had.”

Alvarez did not respond for a request for further comment. Rev. Gregory Kalscheur, S.J. declined to comment, citing University policy against commenting on the comings and goings of faculty members.

Montazerhodjat’s departure poses further problems for the already-embattled computer science department. Since 2017, the department has dealt with a massive influx of new majors, requiring an increase in tenure-track hires. That issue remains unfixed due to the inherent difficulties of making mass hirings in a single department in the short-term.

The computer science department reached the point that, due to being so understaffed both at the faculty and staff level, it briefly had to stop taking new majors in order to concentrate on course management. In a previous interview with The Heights, Alvarez noted that there were nine “core faculty members”—three tenured senior faculty, four junior faculty members

who are yet to apply for tenure, and two non-tenure-track faculty members. The department has also hired four visiting faculty members, who can be kept on for three years at a time.

Montazerhodjat was a junior tenuretrack faculty member who, according to students, provided a lively, highly educated perspective on approaching computer science both while at BC and beyond.

Jay Agrawal, MCAS ’20, said that the reason students were so eager to take Montazerhodjat’s classes was because he promoted computer science outside the classroom, which at times was a hard resource to find given how stretched the department faculty already is.

“Vahid wanted students to be involved in CS outside the classroom, which you see in the information system department as well,” Agrawal said.

He noted how helpful it was to have a computer science link to hackathon events, in addition to information systems

See Vahid, A3

BC Successfully Limits Scope of Lawsuit Only process-related evidence will be admitted in case.

By Jack Goldman News Editor The scope of the jury trial taking place next month in the $3 million lawsuit being brought against Boston College will be limited solely to whether or not administrative interference took place, specifically a breach of contract or violated a basic fairness principle. It will not consider whether an

alumnus described as “John Doe” in court documents was wrongfully convicted of indecent assault.

That scope is more along the lines of what University attorneys argued to Massachusetts District Court Judge Denise Casper. Doe’s representation posited that potentially-exculpatory evidence in Doe’s case should be brought before the jury.

Casper said that only the information that the BC disciplinary hearing board, which originally heard Doe’s case, should be considered by the jury. Additional information, like forensically analyzed video and DNA evidence that was not available to the BC hearing board, will not be admissible in

the trial.

Casper has not officially issued a ruling on the matter, but detailed her inclinations at the hearing that took place on March 14 in District Court. An official order will come out this week after she further examines if emotional damages can be sought by the plaintiff, and, if so, how that would affect what other information could be presented to the jury.

In the case’s previous hearing, Casper also clarified her thoughts before issuing an order after further consideration of the matters brought before her. That time, she

See Lawsuit, A3

Changes Made to Move-In School-Wide Welcome Week shortened, Move-In Day pushed back.

By Scott Baker Copy Editor and Danny Flynn

Copy Chief Move-in day for Boston College students will be pushed back a day to August 24 and Welcome Week will be shortened to four days for incoming freshmen, according to Greg Jones, residential life’s director of

housing operations. Additionally, students who want to move in early will have to pay a fee.

Jones said in an email that the fee comes in response to higher costs accrued by the University when students move in early.

Arrival costs stem from increased overtime hours needed to prepare rooms earlier than scheduled, in addition other costs for having students living on campus for additional nights, according to Jones.

Certain student groups that must move in early for mandatory University events, like orientation and other related first-year activities, will not have to pay $75 per day to do so, according to Jones. Groups that

are sponsored by the University but not in a mandatory program are given two nights without a fee. Student groups, as in years before, must have a faculty adviser and must be sponsored by a department to be eligible for their fees to be waived.

The new fee for early arrivals is likely to increase the amount of students moving in on official move-in day. The University’s on-campus housing options can accommodate over 7,700 students, according to the Office of Residential Life, but Jones was not concerned about any logistical problems that could arise as more students move in

See Move-In, A3

BC Received Fake Test Scores in Scandal Nationwide scam involved bribes paid to selective institutions.

By Andy Backstrom Managing Editor Federal officials revealed during a press conference on Tuesday that the largest college bribery scandal ever prosecuted by the United States Department of Justice affected admissions at some of the most well-regarded universities in the country.

Boston College, along with Boston University and Northeastern, received fake test scores, according to U.S. Attorney Andrew

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

Lelling, but none of these schools were named in the charges.

ABC News reported that officials said the scheme was prosecuted in Boston, partly due to the fact that it was discovered by FBI agents who were investigating another case. Institutions such as Yale University, Stanford University, University of Southern California, and Georgetown University were named as colleges where the scam was perpetrated. Fifty individuals were charged on Tuesday, including William Rick Singer, who entered guilty pleas in Los Angeles and admitted to masterminding the plot to help wealthy parents try to guarantee their children’s admission to various selective universities.

FEATURES: Julianne Malveaux

The BC ’72 alum examined racial income disparity in her doctoral thesis................... A5

The architects of the scheme bribed college coaches and university officials and accepted payments from parents to fake test scores and athlete profiles for as much as $6.5 million, according to the charges Eight schools were named: Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, University of San Diego, USC, University of California Los Angeles, University of Texas at Austin, and Wake Forest University.

BC released a statement on Wednesday to clarify that the University was not involved in the scheme.

“We reiterate that the U.S. Attorney’s filings do not allege that any BC employee

See Admissions Scandal, A3

FEATURES: Régine Jean-Charles The professor describes her journey to a doctorate, Haiti, and her heritage......................A8

photo courtesy of ken jancef / bc athletics

Eagles Upset No. 7 Providence BC erased a 1-0 series deficit, advancing to the semifinals behind Logan Hutsko’s heroics.

INDEX

NEWS.........................A2 METRO..................... A5 Vol. C, No. 7 © 2019, The Heights, Inc. MAGAZINE.................. A4 SPORTS.................... A9 www.bchelghts.com OPINIONS................... A6 ARTS..................... A16 69

The Heights

Monday, March 18, 2019

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New Ancient Students Pitch Visions for UGBC VP Position Greek Minor

By Madeleine Romance Heights Staff The Boston College Classics Department will now offer a minor in Ancient Greek. The department cited a need to incorporate the study of classics into other disciplines.

Because Ancient Greek is deeply integrated in the foundation of many subject areas, such as philosophy and theology, the department believes that having some knowledge of Greek language and culture will help students attain a deeper understanding of their other studies.

“What we were thinking about was how we could make a mini-program that would deepen those more traditional and maybe larger majors and incorporate the ancient world,” Gail Hoffman, the director of the new minor, said.

The requirements for the minor include four courses in Ancient Greek above the elementary level, one course on Greek culture—either Greek Civilization or Greek History—and one elective in either Ancient Greek (intermediate or above) or a course on Greek civilization.

Classics professors hope that the minor will help students hesitant about taking on the entire Classics major learn more about ancient civilizations.

The focus on training philologists—those who study oral and written historical records—sets the Classics major apart from the Ancient Greek minor. While the Classics major trains students in the tools needed to study various traditional classical texts, the new minor tries to forge connections to later developments in intellectual and historical traditions.

In Hoffman’s eyes, the new minor is just another step in BC’s goal of creating well-rounded graduates by enabling students to look to the past and make connections with modern society.

Concerning the job interview process, Hoffman offers that major companies who are hiring people are not just looking for specific business skills, but the ability to think more broadly—which is attained through a minor like this.

Most Classics majors tend to be Latin-based, with many students having taken Latin in high school. As a result, these students ascend into the upper levels of the language with less time to learn Greek.

The department began the development process by drafting the goals they wanted to accomplish and looking to other schools’ departments for reference, rather than design a plan from scratch.

“What we were trying to do was repackage,” Hoffman said. “Take strengths that we already had and pull them together to make them more focused.”

Although there was no outwardly expressed demand from students for this minor, the department recognized a need for it nonetheless.

Hoffman explained that many people do not realize the benefits of having a background in a subject like Ancient Greek until they are late in their careers and have a desire to pursue a master’s or another type of degree. By then, a lack of a foundation in Ancient Greek poses a much larger challenge.

The department acknowledged that sometimes students need assistance in figuring out a framework of an area they want to study deeper.

“The minor can help undergraduates as they start to realize and find their focus and realize that starting to do this study now will benefit them as they move forward,” Hoffman said. “It wasn’t that the students actively came and said, ‘I desperately, really want this minor,’ but that we could see that the need in these various areas existed.”

Being able to read Greek can allow students to broaden and enrich areas of study they are passionate about, she said. Hoffman points out that many important, ancient documents are written in Greek. Ideally, an education in Ancient Greek will empower students to read the original text while also helping them understand the civilization’s culture and history.

“If you’re a philosopher, you’re going to expand that and make the links into philosophy, and if you’re a theologian, you’re going to expand that and make the links into theology, or political science” she said. n

By Jack Miller Assoc. News Editor and Abby Hunt Asst. News Editor

The process of selecting a new Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion (VPDI) for the Undergraduate Government of Boston College kicked off with a series of presentations by three candidates on Sunday night, hosted by Michael Osaghae, UGBC presidentelect and MCAS ’20.

The candidates—Arvin Mohapatra, MCAS ’21; Amaka Nnaeto, MCAS ’20; and Aneeb Sheikh, MCAS ’20—spoke in front of an audience of interested students and members of the Diversity and Inclusion Council. The council will vote and send their recommendation to the Student Assembly (SA) for confirmation.

Every candidate enumerated several detailed proposals for the AHANA+ Leadership Council (ALC), the GLBTQ+ Leadership Council (GLC), and the Council for Students with Disabilities (CSD). All three highlighted some form of reform to the DiversityEdu module, which the Division of Student Affairs pioneered at BC last fall. They also unanimously endorsed various infrastructure improvements for students with disabilities, which ranged from increased care for accessibility ramps and better Eagle Escort service to group therapy at University Counseling Services and more options for pronouns on official BC forms.

Despite some similarities in the basics of their platforms, the three candidates managed to lay out different visions and driving messages for their potential tenures.

Mohapatra, who serves as an executive board member for the South Asian Student Association, focused on

fostering empathy and open discussion among the broader BC community.

One of his common refrains was a desire to help students who wish to know more about being good allies for their marginalized peers.

“A lot of my friends would love to learn more about [the] LGBTQ+ community, but they are afraid to ask, because they think it’s rude, they are scared to offend people,” Mohapatra said. “My kind of main goal here is to make sure that they know we have spaces where they can ask their questions and learn more so that they are less involuntarily ignorant.”

Mohapatra shared his own experience of growing up in a town that grew increasingly diverse throughout his life and how new and old residents interacted.

Mohapatra’s main proposal was the creation of a “Diversity of Personalities Branch” that would aim at spreading understanding to privileged groups of students. He stressed the importance of creating a “casual” space to encourage approachability.

“A Diversity of Personalities Branch is for those people who don’t really know much about AHANA+, LGBTQ+ communities, the Center for Students with Disabilities,” Mohapatra said. “It’s a branch for students who are afraid to ask questions, afraid to be rude, afraid to be offensive. It’s a space that they can … just become more informed about situations, scenarios, topics.”

In response to audience questions, Mohapatra clarified that this proposal would be a smaller sub-branch and would not divert resources from current Diversity and Inclusion Programming.

Nnaeto offered up a long list of policies and improvements, drawing on her experience as the chair

of Diversity and Inclusion Programming Board. Nnaeto is also the events coordinator for the African Student Organization and a self-described “life consultant.”

Nnaeto called for upgrades to on-campus speakers, explaining that a focus on a speaker series could contribute to the longevity of important conversations, as opposed to booking individual and unconnected lectures.

Although she used speaker series as her primary example, Nnaeto suggested that this mindset could allow for more consistent and continuous programming in general.

“I really like the idea of speaker series because it allows the conversations that get started to continue … event after event, so it gives people more opportunities to engage,” Nnaeto said.

Turning to Showdown, the yearly ALC-sponsored dance show, Nnaeto expressed a desire to make it an event for the greater Boston area, rather than just the BC community. She also proposed a Showdown-like a capella event that would be organized by CSD. Nnaeto saw her platform’s many short-term goals as an important foundation for a year of tangible progress.

“With the campus climate survey ... you can really create some very focused, tangible, and streamlined advocacy work,” Nnaeto said. “And I think when you have more short-term tangible goals, as well as some bigger, loftier goals that we might not be able to see through in our four years of school, it allows for less burnout. And it allows for more focused work and … for people to feel like what they’re doing truly matters.”

Sheikh began his presentation by describing his own biography and his experience arriving at BC—and the United States—as an international

student. Born in Pakistan and raised in Dubai, Sheikh’s first time living in the United States coincided with his arrival at BC. “My fear and anxiety around these issues really manifested … when [President Donald Trump] implemented the Muslim ban,” Sheikh said.

“That was something that targeted my community at BC and affected me very deeply, and it forced me to sort of see what I could do for my community at BC.” Sheikh also ran on his record as a senator for the Class of 2020 in the SA, describing his history of working on important resolutions and collaborating with the administration in the wake of racist incidents at BC. Sheikh is also on the executive board of the Muslim Student Association.

“At the time [of the Muslim ban], I was a senator in UGBC—still am—and I was able to use that position to pass a resolution working with Dean [of Students Tom] Mogan and [Associate Vice President of Student Affairs] George Arey to … provide those Muslim students who were affected by the ban [with] summer accommodation for housing,” Sheikh said.

Sheikh also worked on the UGBC resolutions addressing the “Silence is Still Violence” activism in 2017 and the racist vandalism in Welch Hall last December.

Sheikh’s platform has three basic principles: creating intersectional programming, being proactive—rather than reactive—in policymaking, and fostering a sense of community among the Diversity and Inclusion Council members. Some of his specific ideas included more support for Muslim students when they fast for Ramadan and gender-neutral and single-stall restrooms. n

Theology Department Diversifies Core Courses

By Madeleine Romance Heights Staff and Emily O’Neil For the Heights The Boston College Theology Department will be implementing new changes to the theology core beginning in the fall semester of 2019. These changes are centered around breaking up the year-long course of studies currently offered in two separate classes, according to a release from the Theology Department.

The current requirements for the theology core include a two-semester sequence in which students take two sections of the same course successively with the same professor over the course of the academic year.

With the new revisions to the core, students will be required to complete two separate courses taught by different instructors and do not need to take them in any particular order or back-toback. One of the courses must be one of two possible “Christian Theology” classes, while the other must be in the

“Sacred Texts and Traditions” category, according to the release.

The two Christian Tradition courses are named “Engaging Catholicism” and “God, Self, and Society.”

Most of the Sacred Texts and Traditions classes aim at exposing students to non-Western religious traditions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. They will address and explore connections between Christianity and other religions, similar to current Religious Quest classes.

Perspectives and PULSE classes will still fulfill the core requirement, but old theology core courses will no longer be offered, beginning in the fall, according to the Theology Department.

Jeffrey Cooley, an associate professor in the theology department, believes that these changes will give students more flexibility in the way they choose to complete their theology core.

“While in many ways, the opportunity to work with the same group of students over the course of an entire year is pedagogically optimal, what we found is that it was often impractical

for students to do so for scheduling reasons,” he said in an email.

The department hopes that the change will help makes students’ schedules more flexible. Under the change, students can choose to split up their theology courses or take them simultaneously, according to the Theology Department’s summary of the changes.

Another reason the core was redesigned was to allow theology department faculty to teach Enduring Questions and Complex Problems courses, which are all-freshman classes, created as part of the recent Core Renewal program.

“Many of us were enthusiastic about the prospects of participating in these, but faculty members who regularly taught in the theology core were tied to the two semester sequence,” Cooley said. “This made it very difficult for us to participate in a single-semester core course (such as Enduring Questions and Complex Problems), in addition to our elective and graduate instructional obligations.”

The theology department faculty and University administrators spent two to three years deliberating if and how the core requirement should be changed. Faculty members will also work together to determine the best way to prepare for teaching these courses, according to Cooley.

“Some courses in the new theology core (such as God, Self, and Society) are entirely new formulations, and my colleagues are brainstorming as to how best to approach them,” Cooley said. “Other courses are reformulations of the two-semester sequences for a single semester. In some ways, such a dramatic redesign is even more challenging than building course from scratch. I myself consider this an opportunity to re-envision my specific class objectives.”

The new core requirements will be effective this fall, and Cooley believes that if the program proves successful, there could potentially be future changes to the theology major as well, including a greater focus on non-Western religions. n

Schiller Institute to Host Engineering, New Labs

By Jack Miller Assoc. News Editor Boston College’s Provost’s Advisory Council (PAC) released the first public indication of the University’s plans to devote resources and building space to the development of engineering laboratories.

During their Nov. 29 meeting—a summary of which was released publicly last week—the group discussed the current status of the upcoming Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, which the University hopes will promote inter-

disciplinary research.

Tom Chiles, Vice Provost for Research and Academic Planning, led the presentation. He confirmed that the schematic design and design development stages had been completed. Although a number of options had been considered, the University decided to construct a new stand-alone building, which will be built on the current site of Cushing Hall.

The meeting summary allocated several spaces specifically, including “undergraduate engineering and teaching laboratories.” It is the first

public commitment to physical space within Schiller to an engineering program. Previously, any plans for an engineering program had remained under wraps.

University Spokesman Jack Dunn said in an email there was nothing concrete to report on the matter, nor further details relating to whether or not a program would exist and how it would be formed at this time.

When Chiles first announced the University’s plans to build what was then the Institute for Integrated Sci-

ences and Society, he said that he was exploring engineering but that there was no timeline or plans at the time.

PAC is a group of faculty representatives and administrators from the Provost’s office that advises Provost and Dean of Faculties David Quigley on “issues of major importance to the faculty and academic operations of Boston College.” Each division in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences has two representatives, while each of the other schools at BC have two total. n

CORRECTIONS What is your opinion of the college cheating scandal and do you think Boston College is involved?

“When I heard about the college cheating scandal, I was shocked at the fact that such prestigious schools would be involved. At the same time, however, it does make sense. I do not believe that BC is involved.”

– Kayleen Italia, CSON ’22

“I don’t know the specifics of the case, but I was annoyed to hear that this scandal was hurting competitive students and that it could be going on at BC.”

– Julia Natale, MCAS ’22

“I think that this case serves as a huge shock to colleges and students around the country and I would be interested to see if Boston College has partaken in this scandal or others relating to it.”

– Joe McGrane, MCAS ’22

Please send corrections to eic@bcheights.com with ‘correction’ in the subject line.

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Monday, March 18, 2019

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Sides Plan to Hash Out Abortion Issue Tuition Price Escalating Abortion, from A1

the technical sense at all. Attendees who registered their interest in the protest have been encouraged by organizers to voice their opinions at the event, but to sit silently and listen to what Hawkins has to say as well.

Hollie Watts, MCAS ’21, who initiated planning for the “protest” and has spearheaded pushing information out to interested students on the Facebook event page, said that since this isn’t a registered protest, it’s vital that attendees understand that they can be disciplined for disrupting the event.

On the other hand, she explained, that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t voice their opinions and emotions during the question and answer session of the event.

Bianca Passero, president of the Pro-Life Club and Lynch ’19, said she was very happy to have a multitude of perspectives at the event, and that increased discourse was the end-goal of having the event all along. She admitted that the title of the event is attention grabbing, and intentionally so. In the past, the Pro-Life Club has struggled to get attendance at its events, so when Hawkins and her “Lies Feminists Tell” speaker series was offered as a potential event, Passero and her compatriots were happy to bring Hawkins onto campus.

Watts contended that some in the student population have found the title hurtful and an attack on feminists and humans.

“This is attacking any guy or any person who claims to be a third gender who claims to be a feminist,” Watts said. “This is attacking people’s basic access to social justice.

Feminists just want equality and equity of opportunity. There should be no oppression of anyone.”

Passero said that the talk is intended to examine more closely what it means to be a feminist, noting that she identifies as an anti-abortion feminist, not attack feminists or feminism. The talk’s concentration on what Passero called “mainstream feminist claims” is what the three lies Hawkins advertises have to do with, not the idea of feminism.

“I think third-wave feminism [has promoted the idea] that if you’re a feminist that means you’re pro-choice,” Passero said. “I’m hoping that is brought up, that you can be a feminist and be pro-life and how being prolife does not mean anti-woman at all.”

Watts also noted that feminism isn’t above criticism, citing a lack of concentration on issues affecting minority women, but she thinks that this, which is a broad attack in her opinion, sidetracks any conversation about internally improving feminism.

Both Watts and Passero discussed the differences the two sides have on Planned Parenthood. Watts noting that students should be ready to fact check claims Hawkins makes about Planned Parenthood, while Passero said that Planned Parenthood is a repetitive program that is already covered by other federally funded organizations.

Watts commented that one of the issues attendees will have to grapple with is the outside narrative of what Hawkins stands for beyond issues of feminism and concentrating on presenting their arguments counter to Hawkins’ beliefs about mainstream feminism. In addition, Watts noted her concern about tensions rising if they feel disrespected by Hawkins or other members of the crowd.

Watts’ intention in starting the Facebook

event was to bring attention to the fact that an anti-abortion activist was coming to campus on a premise questioning feminism.

The page has now garnered 171 people who say they are going and 344 people who have said they are interested.

The event caught the attention of the Dean of Students Tom Mogan and his office. Mogan called Watts into his office to discuss whether Watts and other organizers believed the “protest” should be a University approved one. When Watts indicated it would not be categorized that way, Mogan explained how students could be disciplined for disrupting the event. Mogan also decided to convert the event from a free admission one to a ticketed one, effectively implementing crowd control and preventing people outside of BC from attending the event.

But Watts downplayed her own role, noting that it’s just her job to “set the table” for other students to voice their disagreements with an anti-abortion speaker.

The “protest” also caught the attention of Hawkins, who sent out an email obtained

by The Heights to potential donors asking for money to pay for private security for her protection. Passero said that the ProLife Club was not informed that the email was going out, and that nobody in Hawkins’ camp communicated to the club that such an email was going out.

BCPD Chief Bill Evans told The Heights that BCPD will monitor the event, but he has no concerns about security surrounding the event, based on how Hawkins’ prior speaking engagements have played out and the fact that the event is ticketed, restricting attendance to BC students.

He urged participants to respect each other’s views. n

Doe’s Arguments Fall on Deaf Ears Lawsuit, from A1 noted that her inclination was to hold a jury trial, and she shortly thereafter ruled that a jury trial would be held this April.

The primary issue of the March 14 hearing was whether Doe’s request to admit exculpatory evidence was within the parameters of proving that Doe was not afforded a fair disciplinary hearing by BC. The University argued that such evidence would mean that Doe is getting an “on merit” trial on the basis of whether or not he sexually assaulted a fellow BC student on the 2012 AHANA Leadership Council Cruise while reporting on the event for The Heights—which is not among the issues remanded back to district court by the First Circuit Court of Appeals. Doe argued that the nature of the hearing process and the final decision of the hearing board are inextricable. Casper disagreed, saying that since the appeals court affirmed Casper’s original summary judgement decision in BC’s favor on counts of breach of contract in the 2014 independent review of the hearing, gender bias, Title IX claims, and negligence, only the hearing process can still be considered.

The University did detail its planned

argument for the jury. BC will argue that communication between former Program Manager in the Office of Residential Life Catherine-Mary Rivera and former Executive Director for Planning and Staff Development Carole Hughes—who currently serves as a senior associate dean for Student Affairs—was filtered through an assistant, not passed on to the rest of the hearing board, and did not interfere in the final decision in any way.

That communication also indicated that the person Doe believes was the alternate culprit in the assault–known as J.K. in court documents–was “put at ease” because he was being called by the Dean of Students office to serve as a witness in a case, which is generally considered intimidating and could be confusing. Doe is arguing that putting J.K. at ease interfered with the trial, since Doe’s defense was entirely dependent on there being an alternate culprit, and not considering J.K. as an alternate culprit meant that Doe was not being given a fair hearing.

In addition, the University is arguing that when Rivera contacted Hughes about a “no-finding” decision, she was not informing administrators that the hearing board was inclined to render a no-finding

decision, but rather was inquiring about whether a no-finding decision could be legally arrived at. Doe is arguing that when former Dean of Students Paul Chebator told Hughes that no-finding decisions were allowed but encouraged the board to come to a decision, he persuaded the board from making such a decision. Casper mentioned that the jury will be read instructions before the trial explaining exactly what issues are to be decided upon, and that those instructions will adhere to what she deems the final scope will be.

Testimony by Doe’s expert witness, Brett Sokolow—a lawyer who founded the largest education-specific law practice in the country and typically works for and represents colleges and universities—would be severely limited from the original testimony Sokolow submitted on Doe’s behalf, detailed in the briefs Doe’s representatives filed. Sokolow’s previous testimony, which is featured in Doe’s previously filed briefs about the scope of the case, heavily touched upon matters that haven’t been remanded back to District Court—he would be restricted to talking about how the process was interfered with without referencing bias issues, according to Casper. n

Man in Custody for Illcit Videotapes

By Jack Goldman News Editor Eric Tran Thai, a 36-year-old man from Dorchester, Mass., was arrested by the FBI on Monday for covertly recording male students at Boston Latin High School in the school’s bathrooms, according to a justice department statement. Thai has been under investigation for a year, after being caught and arrested by the Boston College Police Department for covertly filming BC students from a stall in the fifth floor men’s bathroom of O’Neill Library in February 2018.

Thai was arrested based on probable cause of five counts of knowingly employing, using, persuading, inducing, enticing, or coercing a minor into engaging in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing any visual depiction of such conduct.

“Each charge of sexual exploitation of children provides for a mandatory minimum 15 years and up to 30 years in prison, a minimum of five years and up to a lifetime of supervised release, and a fine of up to $250,000,” the statement says. “Sentences are imposed by a federal district court judge based upon the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.”

Thai was banned from BC’s campus as a part of his original arrest.

The federal investigation has revealed that Thai was in possession of over 20 tera-

bytes of data gathered over approximately 20 years. The FBI affidavit disclosed for context that the Library of Congress contains 20 terabytes of text, and a terabyte of video is approximately equivalent to 1,000 hours of footage. The Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office originally found folders labeled BU, MIT, Harvard, Northeastern, Bunker Hill, Boston Latin High School, Target, and several malls, airports, and foreign country locations among the data. Authorities found approximately 26 computer hard drives, 20 thumb drives, 27 covert and regular cameras, 14 computers, iPads, and cell phones, and multiple SD and SIM cards at a March 1, 2018 raid of Thai’s home, according to the justice department statement. Investigators identified five minors among the 45 videos of Boston Latin students—which were taken in 2017—according to the affidavit. Two were born in 2000, one in 2001, one in 2002, and one in 2005.

Thai’s bail hearing is scheduled for Tuesday. The violations perpetrated at BC were reported by BC students to BCPD on Feb. 27, 2018, when four officers reported to O’Neill and found Thai in one of the stalls using a small tablet, according to redacted BCPD police reports available through public record. Thai allegedly initially identified himself as a BC student before admitting he was not one. Thai initially said that he was using Grindr and that he had not been taking pictures or videos of students, allegedly saying that

he was not a pedophile.

BC students then confirmed to the officers that Thai was the one they had allegedly seen videotaping them. BCPD then arrested Thai and brought him in for further questioning. BCPD then confirmed during questioning that Thai had previously had a run-in with another male student on Feb. 6, 2018 over alleged videotaping that took place in McElroy Hall. When asked if he had videotaped people before, he allegedly told the officers that he had other video equipment at his house in Boston.

He allegedly told the officers that he had videotaped at UMass Boston, Boston University, and BC. He would not tell officers when or how often he had done this. The case was brought before Middlesex District Court, but it was pushed to Middlesex Superior Court in February amid the FBI investigation.

Mayor Martin J. Walsh told The Boston Herald that he is “outraged,” and that the “allegations are incredibly disturbing and counselors are being made available to any students or faculty that need additional support.”

Additional safety measures are being adopted at Boston Latin, according to the Herald. Increased police presence, adult supervision at entryways, and ensuring exterior doors at the school are locked are among the changes approved, according to Boston Public Schools Spokesman Daniel O’Brien. n

Tuition, from A1

been increased to $53,250, from $51,200 in 2018-19 and $49,230 in 2017-18.

“Recognizing the burden that tuition and student fees has on our families, the University takes great care every year to balance the budget and ensure that expenditures are carefully aligned with the immediate and long-term needs of Boston College to ensure our students have access to a first rate educational experience,”

Executive Vice President Michael Lochhead said in the release.

“Tuition increases this year help offset cost increases related to financial aid for students, salaries for faculty and staff, and costs related to new and existing facilities.”

Provost and Dean of Faculties David Quigley said that the 2019-20 University budget will also fund “critical strategic investments in new faculty and academic priorities,” according to the release. Specifics have not been publicly announced. n

Prof. Suddenly Departs Vahid, from A1 professors’ aid, when that support could be so scarce during semesters depending on uncontrollable, outside factors.

Lozano said that Montazerhodjat was a big part of the reason the computer science department has risen to a top-10 major at the University.

Upon his departure, Lozano explained that majors assembled over 60 handwritten letters to present to Montazerhodjat thanking him for his support and commitment to students.

“I know very very few teachers who have had that impact on students,” she said. “On top of that, Vahid was also an immigrant, a minority teacher.

That was something a lot of students could relate to as well. Aside from all the CS questions, people could also talk to him about personal issues they were having as well.”

Lozano and Agrawal praised Montazerhodjat’s approach to aiding students as they tried to understand many of the more abstract concepts of computer science. Lozano said that

Montazerhodjat never considered her questions stupid, despite some other professors “looking down” on some of the speed bumps she would hit over the course of a semester.

Lozano also noted that students always recommended Montazerhodjat, even if they struggled or didn’t score well on tests. She explained that when Montazerhodjat announced in his classes that he was leaving, students texted her that you could hear a pin drop in the room, before some students burst into tears.

“It just kind of hurt to see someone who made such a great impact on me just go away like that,” Lozano said. “For that entire week, it was very mentally distressing for a lot of students because we were like, ‘What happened within the department that made him leave?’

“Knowing him for three semesters in a row, he would not have left so abruptly if there had not been a serious problem in his department, and I think that’s evident to a lot of students here … I thought [the department] lost its biggest asset.” n

BC on Scandal’s Edges Admissions Scandal, from A1 participated in these schemes in any way, or that any BC student was accepted under false pretenses ,” the statement said. “The Office of Undergraduate Admission at Boston College remains committed to a fair and meritorious admission process that rewards applicants for their hard work and personal achievement.”

While BC isn’t directly tied to the investigation, known internally at the FBI and state department as “Operation Varsity Blues,” the University was mentioned in the unsealed FBI affidavit, available to the public, on a few occasions.

First, BC was referenced in the case of John B. Wilson, a Lynnfield, Mass., resident and the founder and CEO of a private equity and real estate development firm.

Wilson tried to bribe USC men’s water polo coach Jovan Vavic in an attempt to ensure his son’s admission to the school. He also employed similar methods in hopes of getting his two daughters into Stanford and Harvard.

Back on Feb. 10, 2013, Wilson emailed Singer—who founded and co-operated The Key, a for-profit college counseling and preparation business based in Newport, Calif.

Wilaon inquired about the deadline “to decide on side door” for “USC or BC or Georgetown etc.” and to determine where the side door option—finding a way to obtain admission without merit or a history of

significant donations—was actually realistic in this case.

In response, Singer listed the deadline for USC and BC as “mid July.” Wilson’s son ended up attending USC. Later in the affidavit, BC pops up in the case of Marci Palatella, the CEO of a liquor distribution company in Burlingame, Calif.

In March 2016, Singer sent Palatella, who was interested in paying several hundred thousand dollars for admission, a price list, one that Singer detailed as “the number it would take to get admitted even with the fudging of the scores.”

Singer told Palatalla that, if she contributed “a large but not significant” donation, her son—who scored a 1410 out of 1600 on the SAT—would have a 75-percent chance of getting into USC. When Palatella asked for the specific price tag on USC, Singer said “[w]hen we spoke $300-400 [thousands of dollars] was one level, and the second level was $750-1m” before alleging that “Georgetown BC may be over 1m others as stated.”

Palatella’s son—falsely identified as a long snapper—ultimately received an acceptance letter from USC. Defendants have been granted release in district courts across the country, including Massachusetts, Connecticut, Texas, Nevada, Florida, Maryland, North Carolina, and, most notably, California. All are expected to appear in Boston to enter pleas or stand trial. n

Early Arrivals Limited Move-in, from A1 at once.

On the other hand, the shortening of Welcome Week is a response to student feedback, according to Jones.

Welcome Week is now going to take place over four days, condensing the program relative to past years.

To accommodate, first-year movein—previously held on a Wednesday—will now be on Thursday. Returning and transfer students will now be moving in on Saturday instead of Friday.

Asked how this will affect BC First Year Experience and freshman who are getting acquainted to college life,

Jones said that he expects students to be prepared for classes. “ With a more condensed and focused program, we anticipate that students will be ready to begin their classes with confidence,” he said.

Carrie Klemovitch, director of special projects in Student Affairs and the staff member who runs Welcome Week, was not immediately able to provide comment.

Groups and individual students can receive an additional three days of early housing with no fee if they volunteer for Welcome Wagon, a volunteer program in which BC students welcome freshmen and assist them with moving into their dorms. n

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Monday, March 18, 2019

Rideshare Zones Come to Boston Dispensary Set to Open in Brookline Village Saturday

By Abby Hunt

Asst. News Editor

The City of Boston launched a pilot program on Friday that designates specific curb space for ride-sharing services, such as Uber and Lyft, to complete their pickups and drop-offs. Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh, BC ’09, announced the initiative in his 2019 Municipal Bureau Speech on March 8.

The intersection of Boylston Street and Kilmarnock Street in Fenway has been designated as the first pick-up/drop-off zone.

“That was identified as a heavy traveled area, and a location where we’ve observed a lot of commercial vehicles, a lot of TNC activity—Ubers and Lyfts and ride-share vehicles dropping people off and picking them up,” said Gina Fiandaca, Boston’s transportation commissioner. “So we knew that it would be a popular location to locate one of these pick-up/drop-off locations.”

The purpose of the pilot is to reduce the traffic disruptions that ride-sharing services have a tendency to create, according to a press release from the Office of the Mayor. It’s designed to relieve the congestion that occurs when Uber and Lyft vehicles double park or stop in the middle of the street for pick-ups and drop-offs, as well as the dangerous conditions these situations can create for passengers.

The pick-up/drop-off zones also align with Walsh’s initiatives to minimize carbon emissions from motor vehicle behaviors such as idling or circling the block to look for passengers, according to the release.

“The new curbside zone in the Fenway will allow these vehicles to continue to offer their transportation services, but in a way that supports the City of Boston’s Vision Zero safety goals and helps to improve traffic flow on Boston streets,” it said.

The Boston Transportation Department plans to analyze the program’s effectiveness and to install signs to help indicate the locations of the zones, according to the release.

The zone at Boylston and Kilmarnock is available for use from 5 p.m. to 8 a.m. each day. The city worked with Uber and Lyft to identify both the location and the timing of the pilot zone, Fiandaca said.

“There are meter parking spaces during the day, so we wanted to ensure that we maintained maximum availability for folks that need to visit the area to frequent some of the businesses or conduct their business over there,” she said. “And then in the evening when some of the more social activities are more vibrant in that location, we turn the spaces over to be part of the pick-up/drop-off zone.”

Tyler George, the New England General Manager for Lyft, and Koosie Boggs, Uber’s head of rides for New England, expressed excitement to work with the Mayor’s Office on the pilot.

“We’re thrilled to see the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics explore innovative projects like this one,” George said in the release. “These zones will not only make moving around the area more convenient and frictionless, but it can meaningfully reduce congestion and im-

prove the experience for drivers, riders, and the Greater Boston community.”

Fiandaca said that the Transportation Department hopes that the pilot will help support the vibrant economic activity in the area surrounding the intersection— which includes several restaurants, a spin studio, a Star Market, and Target. She said that the department hopes to receive great feedback from drivers, customers, and businesses alike in the area.

“By providing a predictable location, we’re hopeful that we can ensure that the spaces are available and free for the pick-up and drop-off, and that it’s a safer environment for everyone,” she said.

The pilot is also designed to support the goals of the Go Boston 2030 transportation plan, said the release. The plan includes initiatives to encourage non-motor vehicle travel, minimize congestion, and guarantee safety and equity for those who travel on Boston’s streets.

“We really hope to be able to identify some other locations within the city where [the pick-up/drop-off zones] could be helpful to both the neighborhood and support the goals of Go Boston 2030,” Fiandaca said. “We want to see people moving around the city in different ways, and we want to make sure that it’s a safe way of getting around and that it works for everyone.”

Walsh also submitted an act that would require rideshare companies to pay a charge to operate during rush hours, which would be invested into Boston’s transportation infrastructure. n

By Colleen Martin Metro Editor A recreational marijuana dispensary will open in Brookline Village on Saturday, March 23. New England Treatment Access (NETA) is already open as a medical dispensary but was given the go ahead to commence recreational operations by the Cannabis Control Commission on Friday.

This dispensary will be the first to open near a T stop, as it’s in a building steps away from the Brookline Village stop on the D line. It will also be the recreational dispensary closest to Boston.

“We want to thank the Brookline Select Board and the Cannabis Control Commission for the confidence they have shown in our organization,” said Amanda Rositano, NETA’s director of operational compliance, in a statement as reported by Patch, among other news outlets.

“We also want to thank the community of Brookline, the Police Chief, and the public safety and town departments for the support they have provided over these past months of preparation.”

The shop will open at 9 a.m. on Saturday and will not require customers to make an appointment before-

hand, according to the Boston Globe.

NETA has an online app through which customers can order ahead of time. NETA has put up instructions for getting to its store via the T on its website.

Its transportation guide says that NETA is near a T stop, a bus stop, is accessible by bike, and is near two BLUEbikes stops, which is Boston’s bike share program.

The guide also points to areas where customers can park their cars for a fee.

NETA already has a recreational location open in Northampton.

“We consider our medical programs in Brookline and Northampton to be models for operators across the country and are pleased to offer the highest quality products and services,” Rositano said in the statement.

“Built up on this legac y, our Northampton dispensary was the first in the state to register a sale of adult-use cannabis. Our commitment to excellence will be our guide as we serve our patients and customers in the years ahead.”

NETA’s website says it will have extended hours beginning on Saturday.

The shop will be open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. n

‘An Inspector Calls’ Brings Mystery and Suspense from England

By Colleen Martin Metro Editor A group of actors from the United Kingdom arrived in Boston last week—directors, stage designers, and crew in tow.

Everyone had a few days to rest: They had just come from a five-week stint in Chicago, and they were in D.C. before that.

On Thursday night, they assembled at the Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre for the opening night of their rendition of An Inspector Calls, the thriller written by J. B. Priestley in 1945. Set before the first World War, the show opens in London at the home of the Birlings, a wealthy family celebrating the engagement of their daughter, Sheila (Lianne Harvey), to Gerald Croft (Andrew Macklin).

The set consists of a brownstone, inside of which everyone sits to have dinner. You can see the actors through the windows, giving the audience the perspective of being on the street looking in. Outside, cobblestone lines the stage, and brownstones only a few feet high in the back set the perspective of a city street. Rain pours down onto the stage as kids run around outside and lightning flashes.

While conversation inside continues, the front half of the brownstone splits and swings open, revealing the dining room and everyone sitting around the table. This stunt is just the first in a show of impressive

and elaborate feats regarding the set. While the brownstone isn’t proportional—the actors had to bend down to get through the front door—it didn’t take away from the fact that the technicality of it added an element of majesty and skill that wasn’t missed.

As Inspector Goole (Liam Brennan) enters the stage, an aura of mystery and uncertainty follows him. While the people in the house are wearing fancy and traditional early 20th century clothes, Goole is dressed in a striped suit that looks like it came right out of the 1940s. He often faces the audience, even when he’s speaking to people inside the house. He lets the family know that a young girl has died after drinking disinfectant—even though it has been ruled a suicide, he is investigating what drove her to it.

Sheila comes outside of the house while her father, fiancé, and brother are speaking to the inspector. She asks what the commotion is about, and when she’s told that a girl has died, she whines, “I wish you hadn’t told me.” She follows up by asking if the girl was pretty.

In the beginning of the show, it is very clear that the characters were written in 1945, before the second wave of feminism began. Sheila is incredibly shallow, asking only about looks and caring only about her engagement and her ring. Her mother is cruel, acting very arrogantly about her family’s noninvolvement.

Sheila acts as the family jokester—her father and brother and fiancé are all at least speaking seriously to the inspector, but she comes in and derails every conversation that she joins. She was well played

by Harvey, as her voice whined and her movements displayed every annoying trait she had to embody in order to pull off her character.

Sheila’s humanity comes through for the first time when she learns that her fiancé has cheated on her—even then it’s fleeting, but it’s the beginning of Sheila’s character arc that takes her from ditzy idiot at the beginning of the show to most redeeming and sympathetic at the end.

Goole interrogates the family using a photograph of the victim, showing only one person at a time. He asks questions about the family’s connections to shops, jobs, and organizations, drawing connections between everyone in the house and the girl who had died. As the family members begin to turn on each other and themselves, Goole remains calm, only becoming loud when it suits his interest to get something out of someone.

Goole introduces some of the best moments of humor as well, when he breaks out of his serious mystery and makes an off-hand and witty comment. The audience loved it, laughing often throughout the show despite the severity of its subject matter. That’s something that Brennan,

PHOTO COURTESY OF MARK DOUET

Liam Brennan excels in his role as the aloof but effective Inspector Goole. who plays Goole, said is different between American and English audiences. The Americans are quicker to laugh, which Brennan says is lovely.

“It’s always a nice shot in the arm when an audience laughs,” he said. “You know that they’re engaged, you know that they’re with you.”

The laughter died down toward the end of the show, as quiet awe and utter confusion filled the theatre. What happened at the breaking point of the show seemed almost supernatural, and the last 15 minutes left everyone with more questions than they would have if the show had been cut a little earlier.

If it had been shorter, though, the

performance would have lost much of its power. It’s a hard thing to make people enjoy being left in the dark, but as the audience members shuffled out of the theatre, they were raving about the performance and asking each other what they think happened.

Brennan isn’t quite sure what happens either, something that he said he struggled with at first but has been trying to let go of.

“That was probably the biggest challenge initially. Just thinking, ‘Oh, I have to try and solve this big mystery,’ but then as I say, at the end of the day the writer doesn’t solve the mystery,” Brennan said. “And I like the fact that the audience leaves with questions.” n

Boston’s South End Home to Annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade At Boston’s renowned St. Patrick’s Day parade, organized by the Allied War Veterans Council, police officers, veterans, representatives from Miss Massachusetts, and Mayor Martin J. Walsh, BC ’09, celebrated the city’s favorite holiday on Sunday afternoon.

JONATHAN YE / HEIGHTS EDITOR

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Truth Be Told: Julianne Malveaux From NAACP rallies as a child, to segregated high school in Mississippi, and university buildings without women’s bathrooms—the “Mad Economist” explains how she got so mad.

By Timmy Facciola Assoc. Magazine Editor

B

efore teaching her first class, before writing her first book, and before Mississippi officially recognized the Brown v. Board of Education decision, a teenage girl freshly transplanted from the civil rights hotbed of San Francisco to Moss Point, Miss., wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper.

“The word ‘Negroe’ is spelled with a capital ‘N’ and if you do not understand that, you can look in Webster’s dictionary under page such and such,” recalled the then-16-year-old and now-syndicated columnist, economist, professor and activist Dr. Julianne Malveaux, BC ’74, M.A. ’76.

Since penning that letter, Malveaux went on to write countless columns, four books, and give commentary on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, and the Howard University television show Evening Exchange. She’s appeared on panels with some of the biggest faces of contemporary civil rights issues—Cornel West, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Tavis Smiley—whom she now considers to be dear friends.

Malveaux distinguishes her brand of black feminist politics with an unflinching honesty. She’s as much a critic of her own progressive camp as she is of the other side.

The same woman who detests President “rump” (she won’t say his name) and Mitch McConnell (a “turtle from Kentucky”) also criticizes Barack Obama, whom Malveaux felt was afraid of being perceived as “the President of black America,” and instead opted for “President of all America.”

After Mike Tyson was convicted of rape in 1992, many leaders in the black community felt the story of a gifted black athlete taken down by the Justice Department to be all too familiar. But in a column called “Tyson—Villain, Not Victim,” Malveaux wondered why black clergy led prayer rallies for Tyson in Indianapolis “as if his accuser was not also deserving of prayer.

The black Baptist leader who called the rally seems to be saying that a man’s word is worth more than a woman’s, no matter what the circumstances.”

In the forum of contemporary black political thought, Malveaux has dedicated her life to remind her co-panelists and fellow activists that black women are especially marginalized in the United States. When discussing the high single-motherhood rate in the black community, instead of following the line of typical commentary—“To let some mainstream policy analysts tell it, households headed by black women are the root cause of many of Black America’s social problems”—Malveaux celebrates black women, such as with an homage to single mothers like her own in a column titled “Black Women Heading Households: A Tribute to Tenacity” Malveaux’s mother, Proteone, completed her doctorate at University of California Berkeley in social work and went on to become one of the first two black women to teach social work at the University of Mississippi. She was devoutly Catholic and made sure Malveaux and her four siblings were present for Mass at St. Kevin’s Church every Sunday.

But despite growing up with such a self-determined role model, Malveaux took pleasure in rebellion as a kid. A self-described “Problem Child,” Malveaux ran with a fast crowd growing up, “a baby Panther, hanging with a lot of activists.”

She was at NAACP meetings and rallies at the age of 11.

White

So to instill some discipline into Malveaux, her mother sent her to live with her great aunt in Moss Point, Miss. Her great aunt had been the fifth grade teacher in Moss Point for 50 years and taught most of the black fifth-graders in the town.

The year was 1969 and Mississippi had yet to heed the decision of Brown v. Board of Education. Instead of following the rest of the country and putting black and white students in the same classroom, the state had its teachers alternate throughout the year between black and white schools.

“Integration was defined as being exposed to white teachers,” Malveaux said.

Though the cultural climate was much different from the Bay Area she grew up in, Malveaux says that it wasn’t all negative.

Beyond the racism of the Deep South was a rich tradition of black history and culture.

“I loved having to learn James Weldon Johnson’s ‘The Creation’—‘God stepped out on space, and he looked around and said, ‘I’ll make me a world,’” Malveaux recited during an interview, more than 40 years after high school.

In the Dixie State, Malveaux confronted her race in a way she didn’t have to in San Francisco. Her great aunt introduced her to the family that used to own Malveaux’s ancestors.

“So I looked the man up and down, and although I was a baby, I said, ‘Where are our effing reparations?’” she said. “My aunt smacked the shit out of me in front of the man. She smacked me and said, ‘Apologize,’ and I said, ‘I will not.’”

Malveaux says her great aunt had internalized the racism she experienced while living in the Dixie State, and although she was highly educated, “she grew up in Mississippi so she was a colonized black woman, and she believed white people deserved a certain level of deference.”

Malveaux finished the school year there and then returned home to San Francisco.

On May 1, 1969, Malveaux and her brother skipped school and attended a rally for the release of Huey P. Newton, a co-founder of the Black Panthers who was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in 1968 before the California Appellate Court reversed its decision in 1970 and ultimately freed him.

“Black is beautiful, free Huey,” Malveaux remembers chanting as a 16-year-old.

Malveaux’s mother recognized her daughter’s strong will and recommended she apply to college without worrying about finishing high school.

She decided to apply to colleges without starting her senior year and was admitted to a number, including Boston College and Howard University, one of the country’s most esteemed Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). But Howard needed to see a high school diploma before allowing her to enroll. After telling Howard multiple times that she had no intention of earning a high school diploma, she enrolled at BC without a diploma or GED. At the time, BC had a Black Talent Program (BTP) geared toward recruiting prospective black students.

She arrived on campus in the fall of 1969, the first year in which women were permitted to enroll in the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences. Some of the buildings didn’t even have women’s bathrooms.

“The business building at the time did not have a women’s bathroom in it,” Malveaux said. “So if you were in class and you had to relieve yourself, you had to leave the building. Rain, sleet or snow.”

Black White Men

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Women ALLYSON MOZELIAK / HEIGHTS EDITOR

Statistics from 2015 display the income disparity Malveaux explored in her doctoral thesis.

With confidence of mind and strength of conviction, Malveaux excelled in economics classes.

“Economics is the study of who gets what, when, where, and why. It’s the study of how the pie gets divided,” Malveaux said.

“And I realized the reason there was such a wealth gap … between whites and African Americans is because African Americans used to be somebody’s property.”

Malveaux remembers a homework assignment on compound interest. She was much more engrossed with the topic than her classmates—so much so that she decided to type up the homework, a rarity in the age of typewriters. “[The professor] took the name off my assignment and gave it out to other students to show, ‘This is what a good homework assignment looks like,’” she said.

But her experiences in other classes were not as positive. In a freshman English class, Malveaux was accused by her professor of not doing her own work.

The professor insisted that Malveaux was copying the writing of the girl behind her.

“As if I have eyes in the back of my head.

The professor at the time was an adjunct, [a] little blonde woman from Harvard,” Malveaux said. “She was just racist, as far as I’m concerned, even looking back on it.

She just could not believe that a black girl could write as well as I did.”

Little did the professor know, Malveaux was already a published writer by the time she got to BC. When she was 9 or 10, Malveaux wrote a poem for the Journal of Black Poetry, and later as a teenager, a review for The Black Scholar of Martin Delaney’s 1861 book Blake, in which Malveaux admires the protagonist for being the antithesis of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s meek and agreeable title character.

Because she skipped her senior year of high school, Malveaux was noticeably younger than her classmates.

“She had to shoulder her way in, and there was a tendency to see her as this young upstart, and yes, she was young in comparison to the rest of us, but there was no doubting her intellect,” said Ron LeGrand, BC ’72, BC Law ’80, a friend of hers for 48 years.

While at BC, Malveaux was visited by a man named Sam Myers, who wanted to recruit more black students to pursue Ph.D.s at MIT. She was convinced, and after finishing her M.A., BC said goodbye to one of its most prolific students. t first as a Ph.D. candidate, Malveaux was unsure if she should have even been there.

She considered transferring to law school or business school, although she admits she’s “not much of a capitalist.”

The summer after completing her first year, she got her first taste of airtime when she was offered a television internship in Dallas. The person in charge of hiring was recruiting science-oriented students to explore careers in television, and Malveaux was invited for the soft science of economics.

“I had my first on-air story. It was about a flower shop. And it began with the slide, ‘Ruby Begonia is not the name of the owner, but the business,’” she said.

She enjoyed her time at the internship, but cable news had yet to inflate into the phenomenon it is today, so there was virtually no demand for talking heads to provide commentary. She returned to MIT in the fall to continue her education.

While at MIT, Malveaux focused on African American labor.

“Like I said, I wanted to understand how the pie was sliced, and I wanted to understand why black folks had a smaller piece of it,” she said.

She successfully defended her thesis, “Unemployment Differentials by Race and Occupation,” which called into question the tired explanation that people like President Jimmy Carter used to explain unemployment disparities between blacks and whites—“black folks hold the wrong jobs,” mocked Malveaux.

“My dissertation asked, ‘Could you explain the differential by redistributing black people in the same occupations that white people were in? What if you changed the occupational distribution of black folk?

Would that make the unemployment rate better?’ And the answer was ‘No,’” she said.

Malveaux served on a panel with one

A

PHOTO COURTESY OF JULIANNE MALVEAUX

Dr. Julianne Malveaux became a published author before she was a teenager. of the most iconic faces of contemporary civil rights issues during her time at MIT: Dr. Cornel West, philosopher, public intellectual, Professor of Public Philosophy at Harvard University, and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University.

“I could see even then that she was an electrical powerhouse. And then when we found out she was from San Francisco and I was from Sacramento, so we both felt a little California,” West said.

After graduating and teaching at The New School for Social Research for a year, she returned home to teach at San Francisco State at UC Berkeley, where she wrote both public and academic articles on issues surrounding race.

Malveaux built up a steady portfolio of columns and was eventually approached about writing a book. She had contributed to other books in the past but never received the opportunity to have a byline of her own.

In 1994, Malveaux published Sex, Lies, and Stereotypes: Perspectives of a Mad Economist, a collection of essays that covered topics ranging from the economics of black businesses around Christmas, to the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas controversy, to reflections on the life of Malcolm X, to her thoughts on praying to a gendered God. In the foreword, West describes her as “one of the last of a long line of American iconoclastic writers from Lydia Maria Child through H. L. Mencken to C. Wright Mills.”

The book introduced Malveaux to the world as a bold voice, unafraid to part from usual party lines, and she followed it up with Wall Street, Main Street, and the Side Street: A Mad Economist Takes a Stroll in 1999.

Before 2000, Malveaux made a name for herself delivering honest and thoughtful economic and racial commentary in essays that were easy to read but backed by a Ph.D. understanding of economics.

“She’s one of the few persons trained in economics who has a real sense of history and a sense of political struggle. She keeps at arms distance a kind of stale neoclassical economics that’s hegemonic in the academy,” said West. “She understands that economics is a matter of the imbalance of powers and forces as opposed to keeping track of statistics.”

In 2002, she co-authored The Paradox of Loyalty: An African American Response to the War on Terrorism, a collection of essays, by Malveaux and others, that consider America’s response after the Sept.

11 attacks in light of how America has dealt with other victims in the past. In a chapter titled “Shared Status: A Global Imperative,” Malveaux asks the reader to consider how many other days in history 3,000 people died.

Malveaux surveys history and suggests to readers that the Tulsa riots of 1921, the Rwandan genocide, and the AIDS epidemic all probably resulted in just as deadly days, but none sparked a response as urgent as 9/11.

“The optimist in me feels that it is not our intention to elevate some victims over others, while the pessimist in me looks at the expanse of our nation’s history to conclude that the United States has never been able to embrace the concept of shared status,” she writes.

Malveaux’s fearlessness earned her an invitation in 2006 to lecture at Bennett College, one of two HBCUs for women. To

her surprise, they were also looking for a new president of the college and Malveaux was encouraged to apply.

She was hired and served as president from 2007 until 2012. By then, Malveaux had befriended a long list of black leaders.

“I was able to bring my entire rolodex of people like Susan Taylor and Jesse Jackson and others to come down and speak to the young women,” she said.

The students basked in the opportunities to meet such titans of civil rights, and the campus buzzed with excitement.

Though she had been at other HBCUs before, this was Malveaux’s first long-term stay, and it afforded her the opportunity to personally meet the 500 young women at the small college in Greensboro, N.C. “When you do public policy or social science research, you’re typically at the 30,000-feet level and you’re using poverty as an example,” she said. “You don’t know about the young person who can’t get access to a computer and had to send a handwritten letter saying, ‘I can’t get my application online.’”

Malveaux was on the tight-knit campus on the eve of Obama’s presidential election.

She still remembers the vibrancy and sense of hope that permeated throughout campus.

“Students were involved, they were engaged. It was great to be at an HBCU,” she said.

But as excited as Malveaux was that evening, she grew more and more disappointed in the president as his tenure progressed.

“When the police arrested Skip, er, [Harvard] professor Henry Louis Gates for breaking into his own house, President Obama said something which I thought was entirely appropriate. And, you know, several white folks and law enforcement went crazy,” she said. “I think at that point, he maybe said—and I don’t know this—but he maybe said ‘You know what, I want to be a good president. I’m going to distance myself.’ And that’s how it showed up for many of us and for many older black people.”

In her most recent book, Are We Better Off? Race, Obama, and Public Policy, a collection of her columns during the Obama administration, Malveaux considers the economic and social effects of the President, who she criticizes for bailing out banks during the 2008 recession while allowing for the confiscation of a significant portion of black wealth through foreclosure. Obama was a great symbol, but his presidency lacked substance for black people, Malveaux thinks.

“Yes we can. No he didn’t,” Malveaux writes in the epilogue.

“What sticks with me all these years about Julianne is her candor, which hasn’t always sat well with people,” said Legrand.

“It is candid and it is honest. And folks have not always been comfortable with honesty.

But no one can question that it is honest.”

After a career teaching hundreds of students, publishing columns in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and giving commentary on Bill O’Reilly’s The O’Reilly Factor and Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect, Malveaux is now working on her own political talk show through University of D.C. TV, on which she interviews politicians like Stacey Abrams and professors like Ivory Toldson from Howard University.

“The show is called Malveaux! because wherever I go, there is an exclamation point.” n

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MONDAY, MARCH 18, 2019

EDITORIALS

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Reactions to ‘Lies Feminists Tell’ Counter Free Speech Kristan Hawkins, an anti-abortion activist, will be speaking at Boston College on Tuesday. Her talk, titled “Lies Feminists Tell” and sponsored by the BC Pro-Life Club, drew controversy around campus and sparked an official student protest.

The event and the protest illustrate the importance of freedom of speech at BC. At a Jesuit, Catholic university, students who advocate for abortion rights may feel frustrated and disconnected from their college’s views, especially given BC’s repeated refusal to recognize the Students for Sexual Health organization on campus. Students whose views do align with the University’s on abortion may themselves feel isolated because of the perceived liberal political leanings of the majority of the campus. It is imperative that, as a liberal arts university, BC remains a place where discussion and debate can foster understanding and empathy, as well as both personal and academic growth.

In an interview with The Heights on Sunday, both the Pro-Life Club and the protest organizers said that their primary goal was to create dialogue. Protest organizers have been stressing that they are not advocating disruption of the talk itself.

The provocative name of the talk was also designed to attract interest. Though the “Lies Feminists Tell” talk name was originated by Hawkins, the Pro-Life Club could have changed or modified it. Given the small size of the Pro-Life Club, it is unlikely that a similar event with a less controversial name would have

garnered even half of the attention that the current one has. Although greater campus dialogue has been initiated, the predictable outrage over the event has led to a suppression of expression both by students and Hawkins herself.

Hawkins sent out a fundraising email to supporters, claiming that she needed money to hire private security. In the email, Hawkins complained about the protestors, saying, “after the protests that were televised on the national news after Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation and the protests I’ve witnessed firsthand on my past campus speaking tours … my team is looking into hiring security guards.” She adds further, “Sadly, this is the reality we’re facing on college campuses today, even Christian ones.” Boston College Police Department Chief William Evans has stated that there are no security concerns about the event. BCPD will be present at the talk. The Pro-Life Club is not associated with the email.

Hawkins’ complaints about protesting and attempt to use debate as a fundraising maneuver are in bad taste, as is her insinuation that her talk should not be protested at a Jesuit institution. As a Jesuit University, BC identifies with core values such as compassion, service, and empathy fostered through continued conversation. It does not mean that BC is home to a homogenous Catholic student body with identical political viewpoints. Her denunciation of protestors practicing their freedom of speech at their University is inappropriate and unprofessional.

Editorial Editor-in-Chief: eic@bcheights.com Managing Editor: managing@bcheights.com News Desk: news@bcheights.com Sports Desk: sports@bcheights.com Metro Desk: metro@bcheights.com Magazine Desk: magazine@bcheights.com Arts Desk arts@bcheights.com Photo: limcr@bc.edu

“Do or do not. There is no try.”

-Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back, 1980

Separately, many posters advertising the event have been quickly torn down, presumably by students who support abortion-rights. The Pro-Life Club event had foreseen students taking down the flyers, and on some flyers even overtly told students not to remove the posters, but rather to come to the talk and discuss their opposing viewpoints.

Taking down flyers intrudes upon the Pro-Life Club’s right to host an event on campus and further hinders debate.

Attempts to simply block the event do not encourage a free exchange of ideas on campus. It also goes against section four of the BC Code of Student Conduct.

A further roadblock to campus dialogue is the limited number of tickets available for the event. The event is free, but only 150 tickets are available, and those tickets were offered to the Pro-Life Club before they were available to the general student body. Though it was not purposefully done so in an attempt to limit attendance by those with opposing views, it still prevents some students with different opinions from attending the talk.

It is both possible and imperative for BC to remain a university where students learn from opposing viewpoints, and have eloquent debate rooted in respect and empathy.

Students have rights to express their views on campus, in a form that can look like anything from protesting to hosting speakers. These rights must be respected both by fellow students and speakers who are invited to campus.

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Monday, March 18, 2019

Masculinity and I Are Changing Vaughn Feighan | Guest Columnist Author’s Note: I am going to refrain from speaking about transgender individuals, those in gender transition, and females who identify as men; I have zero lived experience regarding this, so it is not my place to write about it.

There are a lot of penises in this world … like, a lot. In 2017, the World Atlas estimated that there were 3,776,294,273 men alive. This means there are around the same number of dicks. There are big dicks, there are small dicks, there are black dicks, there are white dicks … I bet there are even people without dicks—shocking. The reason I say this is because the conversation around masculinity is changing. So what does this mean for me and masculinity? It means that how I view myself as a man has been pushed along by an underlying set of assumptions that are so embedded in our culture that, with billions of dicks, we don’t really know what it means to have one.

I am not a “conservative man.” There is no shame regarding homosexual lifestyles.

Violence is violent. Masking emotions for the sake of showing that “I am tough” is not healthy. Women are not at my disposal nor my pleasure. However, I would feel uncomfortable cross-dressing. I like to win and exert myself in the process. If I became a stay-at-home dad, I would consider myself a type of failure, even though—logically—rearing children is the most important job in any society. My outlook on traditional masculinity has changed since entering Boston College. I expect that some of it has been a natural transition—attributed to inevitable maturation and encountering the “real” world—while some of it has been both forced and intentional. When speaking of these forced parts, I am speaking from a comparative perspective; I grew up in rural Hudson Valley. My hometown was absent of “the gays”, with an emphasis on “dudes being dudes.” Going to clubs in Boston exposed me 69

to much more, such as more feminine ways of dressing, and going to raves showed me yet another side of masculinity. Nevertheless, I know that my perception of masculinity has allowed me to become much more comfortable with who I am. Here are a few ways I have personally evolved:

But First, Define ‘Socialism’ 69

Manuel Boilini I have come to the ultimate realization, after the friction between the ridges of my brain caused by the sheer effort of my thinking was reaching seismic proportions, that definitions are in fact important. They establish the most intrinsic characteristics of whatever it is that is being examined for all members of the discussion to accept. Failure to adhere to the rules established by how words and concepts are defined when debating them would be tantamount to working on a practice test while the reflection of the answer key on your phone screen is still plastered across your cornea—you can do it, but it’s pretty useless.

To the accompanying roar of millions of juveniles’ approval, Bernie Sanders announced his second presidential campaign. The man who went from being an incognito octogenarian to one of the most well-known politicians in the country is back once again with all the policy positions that made him ubiquitous to the American college student in the first place—a free college education, universal healthcare, and a $15-an-hour minimum wage are all among a plethora of ideas and proposals that fall under his iconic brand of “Democratic Socialism”.

This brand has now been picked up by numerous amount of Congressmen and women in his wake and also has gained control of the market share of American brains at an accelerated rate, no doubt. But is it a brand which actually reflects the ideas that these representatives in Congress endorse?

Because although I indeed hear a lot about what it will mean for America within the confines of college, represented as a cradling mother or as Mephistopheles depending on whom you ask, I don’t hear a lot in regard to

ished. The concept of a girlfriend became less of a way for me to prove myself to someone of the opposite sex and, instead, inverted the way I confronted personal and relational emotions. My ex-girlfriends helped me have hang out with. They were certainly not sidepieces, but, at the time, I viewed relationships as a function of utility instead of an expression of emotion. After all, “real men” don’t get emotional.

Before coming to BC, to me, “the gays” were just a group of people that could not “get girls”. The media portrayal of a gay lifestyle freaked me out because I could not fathom how these men could act like women but still look like men. I have since come to understand that being the “ideal man” is impossible to achieve. No one on this Earth can encompass all the different aspects of what traditional masculinity should look like.

Nor should sexuality define someone’s worth as a human being. People can get very close to acting like a “fullman,” but this in itself is but a performance.

Men’s bodies have been a symbol of power and strength. This puts pressure on men to look like a mountain. In high school, I prided myself on being “jacked,” and “swole.”

If you did not have 15-inch biceps, then you were doing something wrong. Now, I realize that obsessing over working out, to adhere to a set of norms, is not a good reason for doing so. While I continue to work out, body shape is such an arbitrary indicator of how manly I was or am. I am not defending myself against animals or other males of different tribes in 2019, I am simply trying to have enough strength to push away other people when I go to EDM concerts so I’m not drenched in their sweat.

The paradoxical defining moment came when I decided to stop wearing boat shoes.

They were extremely uncomfortable, but because I was going to BC, my parents said, I needed to get low-rise socks and Sperrys.

I felt as if the shift derived from conforming to yet another subset of masculinity and decided to critically think about why I was acting a certain way. Why did I need dock shoes on a college campus miles from the ocean?

Having these conversations is very important because what we say now will have an impact later. Masculinity is changing, and I am glad that I have changed with it.

what it is specifically that is to be so epoch-defining.

That last issue is the most important one for me to discuss. I am not here to tell you to support Sanders or to despise him, because that is the decision you must make as an adult.

However, as an adult who is making decisions, it is usually most strongly advised to formulate your opinions on the basis of defined terminology and an accepted basis in reality. Otherwise, you’re really only banishing yourself to the cesspool of political critique and commentary, where the incessant screaming competition is held.

So in the pursuit of creating a more informed and understanding collegiate discussion, it is important to discern what socialism is, if and when it can be conflated with communism, and observe where the chips fall vis-à-vis Sanders, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the entire progressive faction that is so messianic to many college students.

Dancing behind the cadence of political discussion around the campus environment is an opinion that often floats itself into the public discourse.

This is the idea that socialism occurs when the government imposes regulations on how companies operate, or when it collects more taxes and establishes more welfare programs. Yet this is an erraneous assessment, due to the fact that socialism is an economic system which has existed in cases of no government at all in instances throughout the 20th century spanning from Spain to Russia. It seeks to push different levers than those of simply government, and rather pursues to reorganize the governance of society as a whole, namely in the production and distribution of resources.

This is why socialism is defined in actuality, in very loose terms, as “an economic system that involves democratic ownership of the means of production,” where “means of production” are identified as the resources and tools to produce everything in the economy (also known as “physical

capital” for those who took Principles of Micro). Put simply, this means to say that socialism is when workers own the factories they work in, and the role of entrepreneur no longer exists.

How does this align with the vision and ideas being propagated recently within U.S. politics?

Well, to respond to such a question with anything other than “not at all” would only serve in the mitigation of candor, which is a useless exercise. The fact of the matter is that the politics of “economics and social justice,” as presented by people like Ocasio-Cortez do not strive to abolish private property rights nor the exchange of labor for wages. They instead promote capitalism and the right to private ownership of the means of production while giving the government extensive responsibility in regard to regulating industry and providing welfare for its citizens, which, in the realm of political scientists and every place on the planet not called the United States of America, would mean that these politicians are labeled “social democrats”. This, above all else, is the crux of the issue.

And yes, before you ask, this has indeed been an entire column of slowly delineating the differences between socialism and social democracy. However, it is also a column about the importance of, as the old phrase goes, “saying what you mean and meaning what you say.” It is about the importance of fully understanding every word that comes out of your mouth in order to possibly fathom ever beginning to mean them.

If we are going to continue fostering rich and intellectually-laden discussion, then we must learn to always choose our words carefully and with complete understanding rather than resorting to dealing with the oversimplification and sensationalism of those who discuss politics on television who—in lieu of the former—is all they have.

Alexa Sarci I entered with my usual echo, “I’m Home!” I expected the lights to be on and to hear my father talking to the TV. Instead, it was quiet and pitch black. The only exception was the light under my parents’ bedroom door. My mind raced through every possible situation, pondering just how much trouble I could possibly be in.

As I took the long walk down the dark corridor toward the bedroom, my heart was beating so fast that I could hear it in my ears. I knocked lightly and opened the door simultaneously. I was met with my mother’s blank expression, while my father’s eyes were glued to the computer with Anderson Cooper’s voice on CNN muffled in the background. My mother’s puffy, bloodshot, green eyes met my confused hazel ones. I instantly knew that this was not about me.

Before I could say a word, in a whisper, she said, “Alexa, Uncle Jack killed himself today.”

I suddenly felt out of breath. My legs became limp, my body numb.

This was my first of many experiences related to suicide. Before this, the only other time I heard about it is when a major celebrity had attempted or committed suicide—Britney Spears, Robin Williams among others.

Our four years in college are regarded as the most exciting years of our lives, filled with an abundance of amazing friends and memories. I had this in mind when stepping onto campus in August. Even though those experiences are true, so are the ones no one ever talks about or prepares us for, such as the amount of emotional and social stress, as well as academic turmoil, we endure, which lead some to suicide.

Going to a school like Boston College, I am constantly challenged in my classes and my rigorous course load, which is never light or easy. So when I read that one in five college students consider suicide because of the amount of stress we face, I wasn’t surprised.

But, in order to really understand “one in five,” we need to break it down. “One in five” equals 20 percent. Now let’s take 20 percent of our freshman class here at BC, which is 2,327 students. That’s 465 people in our freshman class that may consider suicide. Just one person should be enough for colleges to start taking this matter seriously.

College is stressful, students have newfound independence which can be overwhelming, leaving some of us emotionally numb, and emotionally dumb, giving people good reason to think we suffer from impaired judgment although we’re sober.

Suicide is the second-most common cause of death among college students. The stress of a new environment can cause many of us to mask our true feelings, even to our parents. In a community like BC, however, which is proactive with requiring incoming freshmen to take online courses about BC Safety, Alcohol Education, Sexual Assault Prevention, and Diversity Edu, shouldn’t we also require courses for incoming freshmen on suicide prevention and awareness?

My question is with all the statistics around how at-risk college students are for suicide, why does no one really talk about it? It’s not like were little kids anymore and have to be shielded from the bad happening in the world around us. I’m 1,356 miles from home and am now making the transition into adulthood. So I would prefer to know what I’m up against. Not finding this out until now leaves me blindsided and exasperated because no one bothered to tell me something that affects a majority of my peers.

I want to make apparent that in no way am I calling out BC for not doing anything regarding the issue of suicide. I am well aware there are services on campus that

All Aboard for Abroad?

Maria Ross Parma, Milan, Copenhagen, and Madrid: These are four of the many city names I have heard in the past month as sophomore students grapple with their semester abroad decisions. As a tennis player at Boston College, I can’t go abroad, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been heavily affected by the decision-making process. I have noticed how difficult it has been for many sophomores to get into their top-three programs, and especially how challenging it is for those unfortunate ones to go abroad to a program they didn’t originally want.

Spending four months in a foreign country is certainly a difficult decision to make. To me, BC has always felt like home, and I know many of my friends feel the same way. Going abroad definitely upends any sense of home. It is quite the opposite experience really, as you delve into new cultures and norms and are expected to adapt in just a few short weeks.

It’s not as easy as going home for a weekend when you want to snuggle with your dogs. It’s a big decision to make, and some students are more inclined to dive into the adventure, whereas others really contemplate being an ocean away from everything they have ever known. Those four months may not seem like much, but they could be.

It was tough to accept the fact that many of my my closest friends would be leaving campus for an entire semester. I sometimes still feel like a freshman who is just starting to settle in, yet in reality I am a rising junior surrounded by the pressures of abroad, internships, and long-distance friendships. It truly is mind-blowing how fast time flies. Despite knowing that it is only a semester, I am still upset that I will miss out on sharing a semester’s

Manuel Boilini is an op-ed columnist worth of memories with some of my for The Heights. He can be reached at friends. Despite this, the best thing about opinions@bcheights.com.

BC has always been the people I have met, and I am certain that this will be another

Suicide Prevention Demands Initiative

My perception of love has been demol-

fun and allowed me to have someone to

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help with stress and psychologists, but I still feel as if there is a stigma that surrounds suicide. It’s not like there aren’t options and professional groups to be on campus to help some at risk. Other colleges are aligned with professional educational groups like JED Campus, an organization that partners with colleges and universities through a collaborative process of customized support to build on student mental health, substance and suicide prevention efforts. Even our rival Boston University has partnered with them—it sucks to be us now.

Given all of the issues that take place on and off campus, suicide is barely visible to those of us immersed in the “daily grind,” but somehow it squeezes itself into our lives, presenting itself as a viable option to anyone who is emotionally wrecked. I have personally experienced the loss suicide brings. Just last year, two graduating seniors in my high school class took their own lives, never making it to graduation. Everyone who knew them was crushed and bewildered, asking haunting questions “did you know something was wrong, did you notice anything, did you see anything, did you hear anything?” “Yes, yes, yes, and yes, but we never thought suicide was an option.”

Suicide not only takes a life but steals a part of innocence and joy from those who knew the victim leaving ultimately a bitter feeling. People say suicide is like a pebble rippling in a pond. My uncle’s suicide felt as if somebody had thrown a boulder into my pond—the large waves rippling outward, rocking and changing my world, making it more confusing and frustrated.

The emotions I felt at that time and that are still with me is something no one should have to experience. It’s time for BC to step up and take initiative to be proactive, not reactive—someone’s life depends on it right now.

opportunity for me to meet many more new people on campus and branch out.

Students at BC primarily choose to go abroad in the spring semester, because they don’t want to miss out on the football tailgating season. This creates problems when so many students want to go abroad in the spring and only a limited amount of spots are available. Another issue that BC faced this year was the fact that the Class of 2021 is over-enrolled, which resulted in many students being denied from their third option, as each program has a different number of students it can accept and places restrictions on over-enrolling students from BC. When this happens, those unlucky students fill out another application with their fourth, fifth and sixth choices, which are only the programs that are still available, otherwise known as the programs no one really wanted.

I witnessed the majority of my friend group get denied from their top three choices. From what I understood, BC’s study abroad program is quite dysfunctional; the Office of International Programs (OIP) says that GPA is a major factor, but I’ve seen students with a 3.9 GPA get denied from their top-three choices. My friends who didn’t get into their top choices had to apply to a fourth school in a city they were not thrilled about during the fall semester. It begged the question, was “abroad” worth it?

To this day, I really don’t know. I don’t doubt that it is fun and if I could, I too would be applying for the opportunity.

What I don’t know is would I be desperate enough to go to a city I didn’t really want to visit, just so I could say that I was going abroad. A part of me thinks the notion of “abroad” is hyped up, whereas another part of me believes that is is a great opportunity to find independence and experience different cultures.

It really is a difficult decision, and although BC has placed 80 percent of students into their top-three choices, I feel sorry for the other 20 percent.

Watching my friends struggle with making the commitment has been chal-

Alexa Sarci is an op-ed columnist for lenging, and many are still undecided The Heights. She can be reached at about their future plans. Even though I will opinions@bcheights.com. dearly miss my friends when they go, I feel a tiny bit lucky that I am forced to stay on campus all year and am able to avoid the

The opinions and commentaries of the op-ed columnists appearing on this page represent the mess of the abroad application process. views of the author of that particular piece, and not necessarily the views of The Heights.

Any of the columnists for the Opinions section of The Heights can be reached at opinions@ Maria Ross is an op-ed columnist for The Heights. She can be reached at bcheights.com. opinions@bcheights.com.

The Heights

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Monday, March 18, 2019

Prof. Regine Jean-Charles Comes Full Circle With Work in Haiti

By Isabella Cavazzoni Copy Editor and

Abby Hunt

Asst. News Editor The elementary school she attended as a child is right down the street from Boston College—in fact, she was born and raised in Wellesley, Mass.—but R é gine Jean-Charles’ roots are firmly planted almost 2,000 miles away. Her parents hail from Haiti, and while they raised Jean-Charles solely in the United States, they always planned to return to Haiti, their true home, once they finished raising their children, of whom Jean-Charles is the youngest.

The Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African Diaspora Studies professor visits Haiti from time to time with her husband, children, and, once, a BC student.

“I love going to Haiti,” Jean-Charles said. “I prefer going for conferences. … [My parents] have like, all their friends. They’re like ‘our daughters here!’ They want to, like, parade me around.”

Doting parents aside, Haiti is also the home to a number of Jean-Charles’ family members. And though she’s still working on striking a balance between family and free time while visiting, Jean-Charles’ Haitian roots undoubtedly influence her academic work and activism. Her work—academic or otherwise—is inherently and intrinsically tied to Jean-Charles’ personal experiences.

Although she didn’t grow up in Haiti, Jean-Charles is no stranger to Haitian culture—the French, Creole, Spanish, and English-speaker volunteered at the Association of Haitian Women in Boston during her time as a Ph.D. student and won the Community Service Award for outstanding dedication to the youth program in 2002.

Pulling out the plaque of her award, Jean-Charles lovingly squealed, exclaiming how much she missed her work during her time with the association. The program, titled Haiti Tomorrow—which Jean-Charles can much more eloquently pronounce in Creole—provides a Creole-intensive education for Haitian children in the Boston area.

There, Jean-Charles taught both immigrant and non-immigrant Haitian children the history, literature, and culture of Haitian people. A taste of the home she didn’t grow up in, Jean-Charles chuckled, before reminding herself that she needed to sign her own children up for the program.

Befoe her days as an undergraduate at University of Pennsylvania, Jean-Charles’ parents told her she could pursue one of three careers: She could be a lawyer, a doctor, or an engineer. Jean-Charles likes to write, so she decided she’d follow the lawyer path—that is, until one of her English professors approached her and asked if she

had ever thought about pursuing a Ph.D. The suggestion came much to Jean-Charles’ surprise. She had always thought that people with Ph.D.s were scientists.

“He said, ‘No, your professors in the humanities, they all have Ph.D.s,” she said. “And I was like, ‘Oh, I never knew that.’”

Taking the professor up on his suggestion, Jean-Charles entered a program designed to increase the number of faculty and administrators of color in higher education that helped prepare students for GREs, paid them for summer research, and paired them with mentors. Jean-Charles was paired with Farah Jasmine Griffin, a black feminist scholar and the current chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies department at Columbia University. Griffin, who Jean-Charles eventually named her daughter after, is the one who introduced Jean-Charles to black feminism.

As Jean-Charles’ interest in the subject grew, she decided she wanted to tackle it from a global perspective.

“I felt like all of my [African American studies] courses at Penn were very narrow in the sense that they were only about the U.S.,” Jean-Charles said. “I was really interested [not only] in learning about and thinking about places outside of the U.S., but understanding that the U.S. background was important … when you look at the development of the field.”

Jean-Charles planned on pursuing her doctorate in comparative literature but was told that being able to speak “only four” languages (in addition to her reading knowledge of Latin) wasn’t enough. One of her mentors suggested that she just focus on French—which is spoken in many areas of Africa and the Caribbean—and that way, she could still achieve her goal of looking at feminism through a global lens.

Jean-Charles went on to attend graduate school at Harvard, where she somehow found time to volunteer for Haitian youth, though it sometimes required that she do her homework on the ride over. On days she went to volunteer, Jean-Charles rode the red line all the way down to its end, then took a bus. The hour-long journey gave her plenty of time to do reading and although it was a lengthy commute, she loved it.

Just a single T stop away—or a short walk during the summer months—from Harvard sits the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center (BARC), an organization foundational in Jean-Charles’ academic work. No stranger to activist work, Jean-Charles believes her experience volunteering at BARC neatly complements her academic work as an author and professor.

But Jean-Charles wasn’t confined to Cambridge when she worked for BARC. Specializing in public education, she dedicated most of her BARC training to educat-

ing the public on myths and facts about rape and giving survivors a platform to speak in schools, community centers, and, in one instance, an all-female prison in Framingham.

Jean-Charles, who says she also believes in the importance of working directly with survivors, later volunteered as a hotline counselor for the DC Rape Crisis Center while she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia.

“I always tell my students, like, write what you’re passionate about,” Jean-Charles said. “And I started doing that … because of my activist work too, right. So it was like this nice connection where, on the one hand, I was working at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, and I was doing work with A Long Walk Home. And then also [in] my academic work, I was writing this book.”

Her first book, titled Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary, aligns with the service she committed to victims of sexual violence.

Conflict Bodies explores the representation of and symbolism associated with writings of sexual violence throughout history.

A passion project at its finest, Jean-Charles managed to write her very first book on a topic she’s deeply and personally connected to as a feminist scholar.

“They always say in academia your first book is the book you write to get tenure and then your second book is the book you’re passionate about. But I was so passionate about my first book,” Jean-Charles said.

Years later, Jean-Charles made it back to BARC—some of her students volunteered at BARC as part of a class she taught in the fall called “From #BlackLivesMatter to #MeToo: Violence and Representation in the African Diaspora.” The course, which Jean-Charles co-taught with professor C. Shawn McGuffey, focused on examinations of rape culture in our current society. As part one of four lab options, students could elect to volunteer at BARC as Jean-Charles did in her years as a graduate student—many of her students subsequently elected to undergo the extensive rape crisis training at BARC following the end of their class.

“I went with them on the first day when they went to BARC, and I was so happy,” Jean-Charles said, smiling and laughing. “I had to go through that training, you know, and so it felt like, just coming full circle.”

Jean-Charles currently has two books in the works—one of which is on three female novelists who were born in Haiti and still live there today. The work looks at these authors and their literature through ethics rather than politics, which Jean-Charles says is usually the lens people use to examine Haitian literature. Jean-Charles became enamored with the women—whom she described as being very committed to Haitian people and

Photo courtesy of Régine jean-charles

Professor Régine Jean-Charles advises her students to write about their passions.

Haitian society—while she was working on a different book about the Haitian diaspora.

“I had one chapter about how writers in Haiti represent the diaspora, … and then I was just so captivated by their work, and I said to one of my writing partners, ‘I just want to write about these women,’” JeanCharles said. “She was like, ‘Girl, you already have tenure, why don’t you?’ And I was like, ‘You’re right.’”

Jean-Charles is also working on a book on Haitian girlhood, which she began after she wrote an essay for an academic journal in response to the 2016 book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Jean-Charles says she found two photographs of Haitian girls in the book that really disturbed her, so she decided to write about them, with a focus on the question “What does it look like to put Haitian girls at the center of how we think about Haiti?”

She became obsessed with the topic and,

once again, credits her writing group with encouraging her to pursue a book on a topic she’s passionate about.

“I said, I enjoyed writing this essay so much. I could write a whole book on this, and they [were] like, ‘why don’t you?,’” she said.

Regarding her activist work, JeanCharles says she wants to continue working in the movement to end violence against women and girls, possibly through more work with BARC, but also through her involvement with the National Women’s Studies Association, which is planning on sending a delegation of women on a solidarity trip to Haiti to learn about ways to partner with the women’s activists there and the different kinds of work that they do.

“I see myself doing more sexual violence stuff … and then also just more work in Haiti,” she said. “In Haiti. Not just on Haiti.

But in Haiti is where I see myself going.” n

In Annual Housing Selection, 2150 and 2000 Slowest to Fill Again

By Jack Miller Assoc. News Editor Boston College students filed to enter the housing selection process for six-person apartments, typically seen as the most desirable options for upperclassmen, on Tuesday. The process ran through a familiar pattern to past years, with the Mods filling up early on in the process. For the third straight year, 2150 Commonwealth Ave. was the slowest—and final—dorm to fill up.

The Office of Residential Life provided periodic updates on Twitter as students claimed their rooms. Selection started at 4 p.m. Over the course of the next hour,

just over half of the 76 available Mods were chosen.

Like most students, the ResLife Twitter account focused solely on the Mods until 5:37 p.m., at which point it announced the Mods were completely full—coming at almost the exact same time as last year.

During that period of time, some students opted to try for Ignacio Hall or Rubenstein Hall. At 6:15 p.m.—over half an hour after the Mods closed—Ignacio Hall had reached half capacity, while Rubenstein had “tons of openings.”

In the span of the next two hours, Rubenstein filled at a much more rapid pace than Ignacio: Despite clocking in at only 20 percent full to Ignacio’s 67 percent at

6:40 p.m., by 7:45 it had nearly caught up.

This comes in stark contrast to last year, as Ignacio closed right as Rubenstein reached the 50 percent mark.

Students avoided BC’s newest dorm, 2150, which opened in 2016. At 7:00 p.m., only 5 percent of the building’s six-person rooms had been claimed. An hour later, ResLife reported that the number had only grown a measly 13 percent—at which point Ignacio and Rubenstein had filled completely.

At 8:44, ResLife released a tweet explaining that a technical error had stopped the last 4 percent of rooms in Ignacio from being selectable after two students reported the issue on Twitter. ResLife explained on

Wednesday that the students who were unable to pick a room due to the error would be placed in the remaining unclaimed Ignacio apartments.

The day’s housing selection closed at 9:24 p.m., when ResLife announced that the final wave of students had picked.

Four-person apartments opened up the next day and filled in nearly the opposite order among buildings available both days.

These rooms are scattered throughout 2150, Ignacio, and Rubenstein and make up most of Gabelli Hall, Vouté Hall, and 2000 Commonwealth Ave. Students with early pick times gravitated toward the top floors of Gabelli and Vouté, which are all larger townhouses. All of them

filled in the first 30 minutes of selection.

In the next several hours, 2150 filled the fastest, reaching 95 percent capacity by 5:20 p.m. Ignacio and Rubenstein sat at 83 and 50 percent occupied, respectively. At 5:35 p.m., all three were full.

As late as 6:16 p.m., 2000 was entirely empty. The seventeen-floor apartment building, positioned between Cleveland Circle and Lower Campus, usually attracts juniors looking to stay on campus for all four years.

ResLife announced at 7:09 p.m. that the only remaining rooms were in 2000. Just half an hour before, only one percent of its rooms had been claimed—a testament to the popularity of the other buildings. n

Proposed Federal Budget Affects Funding and Student Loans

By Scott Baker Copy Editor President Donald Trump released his administration’s budget proposal for the 2020 fiscal year on Monday, titled “A Budget For A Better America: Promises Kept.

Taxpayers Saved.” The proposals include increased defense spending, homeland security, veterans affairs, and commerce, which are offset with significant cuts across the board, including a 12-percent decrease in education spending—which could greatly affect student borrowers.

Under the proposals for education spending, the conditions for colleges and universities receiving federal funding would change. The proposals mandate the institution of a student loan risk-sharing program for recipients as well as expand debt relief to all borrowers and streamline the repayment process. The proposal additionally asks for expanded Pell Grant eligibility for shortterm programs in fields with high labor

demands, although the program will see its funding reduced. Pell Grants, like student loans, are federally provided funds given to students who need assistance paying for college. Unlike student loans, however, Pell Grants generally do not require repayment.

The changes would allocate Pell Grants to students in short-term education programs, a departure from the current process which provides Pell Grants only for four-year undergraduate programs. As part of the student loan reforms, the administration would eliminate the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. The current program offers loan forgiveness after 10 years only to federal and non-profit employees. With the elimination of the program, loan forgiveness would be expanded to all borrowers, but the timeline would be five years longer for undergraduate borrowers.

The current system offers a variety of repayment plans, but the proposals would consolidate them into one income-driven repayment plan. The plan would cap pay-

ments at 12.5 percent of discretionary income for undergraduate borrowers, and the remaining balance would be forgiven after 15 years. For graduate borrowers, balances would be forgiven after 30 years.

The change would have different impacts on borrowers: While it is a reduction from 15 percent of discretionary income for some borrowers, others who currently pay 10 percent would see their payments increase.

The student loan risk-sharing program for colleges and universities accepting federal funding would force colleges to share some of the costs for defaults on student loans. The proposal’s aim to increase institutional accountability, claiming that “some postsecondary programs fail to deliver a quality education that enables students to repay Federal student loans—leaving borrowers and taxpayers holding the bill.”

The program would be an effort to better prepare students for the job world and thus improve their ability to repay loans, as schools would then have hard financial

incentives to keep students from defaulting on their loans.

The student loans program is widely recognized as in need of reform, but there are concerns that the reforms to the program are inadequate, and the proposals overall have been met with heavy resistance.

Despite the reforms, the education budget would still be cut by nearly $9 billion, a move that critics say will substantially hurt the state of education in the country.

Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education (ACE), released a statement siding against the proposals, characterizing the cuts as “draconian.” ACE is an organization that represents colleges and universities. The release noted that, in contrast to the Trump administration’s consistent request for cuts, Congress has steadily increased funding for student financial aid.

“This is the third year in a row that the Trump administration has proposed to walk away from adequately investing in

student financial aid and incredibly important, life-saving biomedical research,” the release said. “If enacted, the president’s proposal would cut over $200 billion in federal student aid and also cut billions more in funding for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, threatening the well-being of our nation’s students and citizenry.”

It’s unlikely that the proposals will pass, at least in their current form, as Democrats retain control of the House of Representatives. In a sign of how Democrats are likely to respond to the proposals, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D.-N.Y.) railed against the proposals on the floor of the Senate.

“It says, ‘promises kept.’” Schumer said.

“That’s one of the biggest lies I’ve ever seen, because if you look at the booklet, it’s promises broken,The president said that education is the civil rights of this generation. … Promises kept? The president cuts education dramatically.” n

SPORTS

Monday, March 18, 2019

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@HeightsSports

MEN’S HOCKEY

BOSTON COLLEGE 2

NO. 7 PROVIDENCE 1

LOGAN LUCKY

Christian’s Next Step

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Bradley Smart

JONATHAN YE / HEIGHTS EDITOR KEN Jancef / BC Athletics

Logan Hutsko scored the overtime game-winner in Game Two and punched the Eagles’ ticket to TD Garden for the Hockey East Semifinals with a third-period goal in Game Three.

B y P eter K im Assoc. Sports Editor Entering Boston College men’s hockey ’s do-or-die Hockey East Tournament quarterfinal matchup against No. 7 Providence on Saturday, Logan Hutsko was enduring a scoreless streak of immense proportions. The sophomore forward, who led the Eagles in scoring in 2017-18, hadn’t found the net since Dec. 6 in a 4-0 win over Connecticut—a 19game stretch. Fortunately for BC, he

picked perhaps the best time to flip the switch, scoring the game-winner just 23 seconds into overtime as the Eagles won 4-3 to even up the quarterfinal series with the Friars.

Then, on Sunday, he pushed any memory of that scoreless run even further out of mind. With nearly 12 minutes gone in the third period and BC once again needing to win to keep its season alive, it was Hutsko who came up large. The sophomore forward picked up the puck in the right circle and buried a shot past

Prov idence netminder Hayden Hawkey to stake the Eagles to a 2-1 lead. His goal proved to be the final one of the game, and ultimately the score that gave BC a series victory over the second seed Friars and kept the Eagles’ season alive.

The game started off at a fast pace, and the seventh-seeded Eagles (13-21-3, 10-11-3 Hockey East) were awarded the first good chance of the night. Scott Conway was whistled for a face-off violation just two minutes in and BC earned a power play. Julius

Mattila won the ensuing face off, and the Eagles were immediately able to set up in the offensive zone.

In fact, BC spent pretty much the entire man advantage in possession of the puck, and peppered the Providence (22-10-6, 14-7-3) net with eight shots, but couldn’t find beat Hawkey for the opening goal.

Casey Fitzgerald hit the box for charging just a few minutes later, giving the Friars a power

See MHOK Game Three, A11

Sunday night was a time of hope and celebration for 68 fan bases scattered across the country, whether it was perennial title contender Duke or small town Prairie View A&M, as they heard their names called and were seeded in the NCAA Tournament. In Chestnut Hill, Mass., however, fans of Boston College men’s basketball found their team slotted in a different bracket: ESPN’s College Basketball Misery Index, as the No. 2 seed no less.

Using a formula consisting of seven factors, ranging from championships to tournament berths to heartbreaks to comparisons with rivals, ESPN found that just six other programs—a group headlined

by Wake Forest, the No. 1 overall seed in the bracket—had experienced a tougher go of it in the last decade-plus. BC won the Big East regular season back in 2005 and made a famous run to the Elite Eight back in 1994, but ever since it dropped a tough overtime decision to Villanova in the Sweet 16 in 2006, the Eagles have slumped.

It’s now been 10 years since they made it into the tournament field and a dozen since they won a game on the sport’s biggest stage. Head coach Jim Christian’s fifth year in charge was a dramatic step backwards—even though BC lost Jerome Robinson to the NBA, it returned fourfifths of its starting lineup and welcomed in a recruiting class filled with potential—as BC managed just five conference wins, regressed on both sides of the ball, and lost six of its last seven games.

It was a far cry from the optimism around the program coming into 201819, as Christian’s side, despite losing Robinson, lined up well in the preseason.

They returned future NBA point guard Ky Bowman and surrounded him with an interesting supporting cast—a veteran sharpshooter, a prototypical European big man, a similarly explosive guard, a rebounding- and defensive-focused four, and a top-100 recruit who could space the floor. While the Eagles were picked to finish 12th in the preseason ACC Coaches

See Moving Forward, A10

MEN’S HOCKEY

BC Knots Series With Friars With Hutsko’s Overtime Heroics

By Luke Pichini Asst. Sports Editor When Boston College men’s hockey jumped out to a two-goal lead against No. 7 Providence in Saturday night’s matchup, an Boston College 4 uneasy feeling Providence 3 crept into the minds of Eagles fans. Just one night prior, in the first game of the best-ofthree Hockey East quarterfinal series, seventh-seeded BC squandered a 3-1 lead and fell to the second-seeded Friars in overtime. It was a heartbreaking loss—and one that the Eagles could

not afford. To keep its season alive, BC would have to win two straight games at Schneider Arena.

As it happened, Saturday’s contest closely mirrored Game One. The Eagles blew their two-goal lead, allowing the Friars to score three unanswered goals to pull ahead. But, in the waning minutes of the third period, BC tied the game to force overtime. The extra frame did not last long, and this time, the Eagles came out on the winning side, thanks to a beautiful goal by Logan Hutsko, pushing the series to a third day with a 4-3 win.

In the first game of the series,

there was immediate action, as four goals were scored within the first eight minutes of regulation. But on Saturday, the pace of play was a bit slower. The Eagles (12-21-3, 10-113 Hockey East) and Friars (22-10-6, 14-7-3) each traded shots on net in the opening minutes, and it was BC that ultimately struck first. Eight minutes into the contest, J.D. Dudek etched his name into the scoreboard, as he whipped a shot past Providence netminder Hayden Hawkey.

From there, the Eagles continued to apply pressure, and it paid off one minute after their first scoring

play. David Cotton notched his 21st goal of the year—a mark that leads the Hockey East—to give the Eagles a two-goal edge. For the rest of the period, neither team found the back of the net. The Friars were gifted with a power-play opportunity, but the Eagles killed the penalty, the first of three times that they succeeded on the penalty kill.

To start the second frame, BC fended off another Providence power play. It wasn’t long before the Friars finally scored, though. Five minutes in, Jack Dugan won a face off against Julius Mattila and found an open Josh

Wilkins, who beat Eagles goaltender Joseph Woll to put Providence on the board. Soon after, Spenser Young was called for tripping, giving BC its first power play of the night, but the Eagles couldn’t capitalize. Freshman Oliver Wahlstrom fired off five shots, none of which found the back of the net.

The Eagles then killed another power play, but the Friars quickly knotted the contest at even strength.

Wilkins—assisted by Dugan and Kasper Bjorkqvist—once again provided the score. With the game tied

See MHOK Game Two, A11

WOMEN’S HOCKEY

Eagles’ Season Ends With NCAA Quarterfinal Loss to Clarkson

By Nicole Pla Heights Staff After falling to Northeastern in the Hockey East Championship game by the slimmest of margins—it took overtime for the Huskies Boston College 1 to escape with Clarkson 2 the title—Boston College women’s hockey was looking for redemption as it headed to Potsdam, N.Y., for the NCAA Tournament quarterfinals against No. 4 Clarkson.

Despite an early goal from Daryl Watts and an impressive showing by fresh-

INSIDE SPORTS

man goaltender Maddy McArthur, the fifth-seeded Eagles fell to the Golden Knights in a heartbreaking manner, dropping a 2-1 overtime decision to cap a disappointing trophyless season, one that ended one game short of the Frozen Four for the second straight year.

Clarkson (39-7-2, 16-5-1 Eastern College Athletic Conference) took charge right off the initial face off, but BC’s (26-12-1, 19-7-1 Hockey East) defense was ready and denied its hosts any opportunity to take an early lead. The Eagles made a mistake early when Erin Connolly was charged with checking

two minutes into regulation. Despite the advantage, the Golden Knights couldn’t get through BC’s defense, keeping the period scoreless. The following minutes were back and forth, but neither team was able to best the other and secure the first goal of the game.

The Eagles looked to have a golden opportunity midway through the period when Maegan Beres broke away from the defense. Taking advantage of a miscommunication between Clarkson’s skaters, she headed toward goaltender Kassidy Sauve. She closed in on the graduate student, but her one-timer

was blocked, and BC was denied a goal.

Shortly after Beres’ attempt, the Eagles found themselves back in Clarkson’s territory. Serena Sommerfeld passed the puck to Watts, who took a slapshot from the blue line. The puck made its way through traffic in front of Sauve, but the goaltender wasn’t able to deflect it fast enough, and it connected with the twine as the light went off, securing an early BC lead.

With less than two minutes left in the period, Clarkson got a little too aggressive, and Taylor Turnquist was sent to the box for cross-checking. The Eagles

LAX: Eagles Ease Past No. 21 Georgetown BASE: Pitiching Abandons BC at Wake

couldn’t add to their lead in the remaining minute and headed into the break with a few seconds left on the power play. As the second period opened, BC failed to capitalize on its advantage, and the game returned to full strength. The opening minutes of the second frame followed much like the first, with both teams getting caught up in the defense, unable to find the back of the net.

As the level of intensity ramped up, Makenna Newkirk was called for crosschecking, putting the Eagles in a tough

See WHOK Vs. Clarkson, A11

SPORTS IN SHORT..................................A10 BC scored nine straight goals to begin the game, and five The Eagles gave up 38 runs and dropped the final two games MEN’S HOCKEY......................................A11 different players recorded hat tricks in the win.......... A10 of a weekend series at Wake Forest...................................A12 SOFTBALL............................................A12

The Heights

A10

Monday, March 18, 2019

LACROSSE

Walker-Weinstein Earns 100th Career Win, BC Beats No. 21 Hoyas

By Michael Fredericks For The Heights

Fifty-one seconds.

That’s all it took for No. 1 Boston College lacrosse to open the scoring gates on SatGeorgetown 11 u rd ay a f te rBoston College 21 noon against No. 21 Georgetown, and it was a sign of things to come from the unbeaten Eagles. Sam Apuzzo won the opening draw control, and BC raced into the attacking third before settling down and scoring on the first possession with surgical precision, as Cara Urbank deftly fed Kenzie Kent from behind the net.

Eight unanswered goals later, the Eagles were well on their way to a ninth straight win to open the 2019 campaign, cruising past the visiting Hoyas, 21-11. Crisp passing and stellar defense allowed them to easily dispatch another ranked opponent—their fifth such win—for head coach Acacia Walker-Weinstein’s 100th career victory. The Eagles (9-0, 1-0 Atlantic Coast) secured another double-digit margin of victory and topped 20 goals for the fifth time this season, as they rumbled past Georgetown (5-3), escaping a four-game stretch against top-25 opponents without a defeat.

BC’s first-half dominance only built off Kent’s quick strike, as the Eagles carved up the Hoyas’ defense,

scoring eight goals in as many minutes. Kent, Urbank, and Dempsey Arsenault made Georgetown goaltender Haelle Chomo’s day a nightmare, scoring two goals apiece in the opening period. BC opened the game on a 9-0 run and built a comfortable 11-1 lead 12 minutes into the game.

Six minutes in, Apuzzo’s second goal looked like it might break Georgetown’s morale. The senior midfielder forced a turnover at midfield and broke away from the defense with nothing but open space in front of her. Bearing down on net, Apuzzo left nothing to chance, blowing a shot

by Chomo with ease.

Georgetown promptly called a timeout, but it didn’t quell the Hoyas’ disarray. Following the timeout, Georgetown’s offense was stifled for the full 90 seconds on the shot clock against the Eagles’ defense. During the possession, the BC defense suffocated Georgetown’s perimeter players and blanketed cutters, eventually forcing midfielder Natalia Lynch to roll the ball out of bounds in surrender.

The Hoyas e ventually settled down defensively and deser ve a tremendous amount of credit for the adjustments they made. Despite staring down a monumental deficit, Georgetown fought back , and in the last 15 minutes of the opening half, the Eagles were held to just two goals. BC still entered the half with

an eight-goal lead, but it was clear the Hoyas weren’t just going to fold. Liza Liotta, Francesca Whitehurst, and Lynch led the charge for Georgetown, as it closed the first half with a 4-1 run and headed to the locker room down, 13-5.

Georgetown’s first-half momentum carried into the opening minutes of the second period as well. The Hoyas’ Morgan Ryan and Whitehurst scored two quick goals, cutting the Eagles’ lead to six. BC’s Sheila Rietano ended the Eagles’ scoring drought with one of her four goals, but Ryan responded again with what was the most impressive goal of the game.

Ryan caught a cross-crease pass from Jordyn Sabourin and whipped the ball behind her head and into the cage.

Georgetown’s momentum didn’t last as long as it needed to, though, as the Eagles stole back the spotlight in the last 15 minutes of regulation.

They scored quickly and often, giving Georgetown’s replacement goaltender, Micheline Denardo, a major headache. Apuzzo, Rietano, Jenn Medjid, and Arsenault combined for five goals in a six-minute span.

Medjid scored the dagger for the Eagles off a quick cut to the front of the net to put the Eagles up 11 with six minutes to play.

In the final stages of the contest, both teams emptied their benches and played their young talent. BC freshmen Courtney Weeks and Caitlynn

JONATHAN YE / HEIGHTS EDITOR

Sheila Reitano recorded a career-high four goals as the Eagles moved to 9-0 on the year.

Mossman were responsible for some solid play down the stretch. It was an emphatic home victory for the Eagles against a talented Georgetown squad.

Abbey Ngai finished with seven saves and Rietano, Apuzzo, Medjid, and Arsenault all recorded hat tricks.

It was a fitting game for WalkerWeinstein to hit the century mark, a head coach who has built a formidable

program in her seven-year tenure.

When she was promoted to head coach back in 2013, the Eagles were coming off a 10-8 campaign and had never won more than 12 games in a season. Now, as this latest convincing win over a quality opponent shows, Walker-Weinstein has assembled the odds-on national title favorite that’s bursting at the seams with talent. n

Firmly on Hot Seat, Christian Has Plenty of Things to Fix Moving Forward, from A9 Poll, many on campus expected a higher finish—after all, BC finished in the same spot last year in a tougher overall conference and the Eagles had let four of their last five games get away from them.

A 14-win season was an incredibly disappointing outcome, especially considering the steps the program seemed to have taken the year prior.

Sure, the Eagles technically surpassed the league’s expectations by finishing 10th, but they managed just five wins in conference—as opposed to seven last season—and regressed in plenty of major categories. The offense slumped 50-plus spots in the national rankings, falling from 52nd in offensive efficiency to 110th, and the defense slid six spots to 134th. As a comparison, five other teams in the ACC rank outside the top 100 in either offense or defense, and BC managed to go just 3-4 against them.

So, with all of this considered—a failed year aside—what exactly does Jim Christian need to do to avoid an inglorious exit before his contract expires? He’s had all the time in the world to rebuild a struggling program, he has his type of players here, and he’s proven adept with his staff on the recruiting trail. The first thing to take a long, hard look at it is the defensive gameplan Christian tries to implement.

Game in and game out, BC repeatedly breaks down on the defensive end of the floor. How the Eagles do so has changed during Christian’s tenure, though, in the most frus-

trating way possible. Last year, the Eagles were repeatedly torched from long range, leaving shooters wide open after failed switches or lackadaisical coverage, and it translated to opponents shooting 36.1 percent from distance, 239th in the country.

This year, that mark has plummeted to 31.9 percent, the result of a more concerted effort, but opposing teams have still opted to shoot from beyond the arc on nearly 41 percent of their possessions. It’s not like they can’t get inside pretty easily, too.

The first-round loss to Pittsburgh demonstrated the Eagles’ lack of a rim protector, as the Panthers’ duo of Trey McGowens and Xavier Johnson attacked the lane at will.

A part of this can be attributed to the inconsistent approach that Christian takes. Opposing teams either saw a man-to-man defense or a 2-3 matchup zone, and he tried to switch between these two to no avail. The Eagles’ defense never seemed to be fully ready for their opponents and lacked the ability to make mid-game adjustments—just look at some of the numbers players and teams put up on them. For instance, Georgia Tech’s anemic offense, which finished the year ranked 219th in the country, averaged 1.21 points per possession on March 3 in an overtime win.

What’s baffling is how little Christian gets out of his defense.

Steffon Mitchell—who we’ll discuss more in a second—is an anchor with the ability to defend practically every position. He’s the only player that manages to turn in a great effort every game, while the rest of the

defense seemed to float from spot to spot on the floor at times. Jared Hamilton showed flashes of being an excellent perimeter defender, but Christian hasn’t been able to get much down low from Nik Popovic and Jairus Hamilton, while Bowman and even Wynston Tabbs at times reflect high-usage scorers that just want to have the ball back.

The Eagles haven’t been a good defensive team in a decade, failing to crack the top 100 in KenPom defensive efficiency since 2006.

Coincidentally, that year was the same as a Sweet 16 run, so to find success in a difficult ACC, Christian needs to solve his defensive woes.

He found success at Kent State in the early 2000s on the back of a top-50 defense, and if he wants to salvage his job here, it should start with restructuring how he coaches his defense.

On the other end of the floor, the Pittsburgh loss revealed another glaring flaw with Christian: He places a lot of faith in one or two key players to carry the team to victory.

This is especially problematic when people have off nights, like Bowman did, as the rest of the team doesn’t necessarily get going. The offense has a lot of pieces that should be able to mesh well with some creativity—Mitchell is an example of someone who Christian needs to develop offensively, because while he plays a crucial role on defense and is the best rebounder on the team, he can barely score and that makes the team easier to defend.

When you discuss the development of players, though, you run

into another problem—Christian really hasn’t been able to run with a deep rotation since he arrived on campus, and this has created a backlog of players that aren’t capable of meeting the demanding style of ACC play. The Eagles have been firmly outside the top 200 in bench minutes in four of Christian’s five years, with the lone exception the winless ACC season in 2015-16 and that was partially the result of norovirus that wiped out two-thirds of the team. This year, they finished 221st, with players like Johncarlos Reyes, Vin Baker Jr., and Avery Wilson all struggling to have any impact off the bench. A part of their inability to grow and play a bigger role has to partially be blamed on Christian, with Baker, Wilson, and Reyes all largely failing to touch the ball when they got a minimal chance.

There’s a lot of other things that Christian needs to work on as a coach, but the biggest thing that he likely doesn’t have an answer for is how he squandered the ACC’s best backcourt in 2017-18, then failed to find any semblance of consistency in 2018-19. He finds himself in a eerily similar position as another head coach who’s had his share of struggles in Chestnut Hill: Steve Addazio.

Like Addazio, Christian has found himself firmly in the hot seat, with rumors swirling regarding whether he’d return to the sidelines of Conte Forum. The ending of basketball felt eerily similar, albeit less disappointing all things considered, to BC’s football team, which had high hopes at one point—a

top-25 ranking and College GameDay comes to mind—but closed the year on a slide. That prompted endless questions about the status of Addazio, but Athletic Director Martin Jarmond put them to rest on the Tuesday after the regular season finale, handing the coach who can never seem to escape the cycle of seven wins a year a two-year extension.

As evidenced by the lack of reports out of the athletics department, Christian, who last April was rewarded with a two-year extension after a season that featured two wins in the ACC Tournament and a berth in the National Invitational Tournament, will be back for at least next season if not for the entirety of his contract, which runs through 2021-22. Understandably, Jarmond’s decision not to buy the coach out has been met with disappointment from many fans of the program.

Jarmond has now chosen to leave the school’s two most controversial coaches at the helms of their struggling teams, and only time will tell if Christian can make the necessary adjustments next season. Likely losing Bowman alongside his backcourt mate and sharpshooter Jordan Chatman will sting, but the Eagles have intriguing pieces and a strong incoming recruiting class. It’ll be up to Christian to evolve and save his reputation after piling up 100 losses in his first five years in Chestnut Hill.

Bradley Smart is the Sports Editor for The Heights. He can be reached on Twitter @bradleysmart15.

SPORTS in SHORT ACC Baseball STANDINGS

Numbers to know

Conference overall

N.C. State Louisville Clemson Notre Dame Florida State Miami Virginia Tech Georgia Tech Wake Forest North Carolina Duke Boston College Virginia Pittsburgh

5-1 5-1 4-2 4-2 3-3 3-3 3-3 3-3 3-3 2-4 2-4 2-4 2-4 1-5

19-1 16-4 14-5 7-10 14-4 15-5 13-6 13-7 12-9 16-5 12-8 10-8 9-10 6-11

5.13

Goals per game for Sam Apuzzo, the third-best mark in the country.

14

Home runs for baseball this season, as many as it had all of last season.

21 6

Goals for David Cotton in 2018-19—no other BC player has more than eight.

QUote of the week

“Our seniors have given a lot to our program...they’ve raised it to a new level and changed it for the better.”

— Women’s hockey head

coach Katie Crowley, on her senior class after BC’s loss to No. 4 Clarkson.

The Heights

Monday, March 18, 2019

A11

MEN’S HOCKEY

Eagles Hold Off Friars in Game Three, Advance to Play UMass MHOK Game Three, from A9 -play chance of their own. Providence managed four shots while on special teams, but Marc McLaughlin blocked a drive from Ben Mirageas, and the other three whistled wide as the Eagles successfully killed the opportunity.

The teams went back to even strength, but the quick end-to-end action continued. Hawkey covered a shot from Connor Moore, before Michael Karow and Jack Dugan took matching penalties for unsportsmanlike conduct. Oliver Wahlstrom committed the fifth and final infraction of the first frame with just over a minute to go, and Tyce Thompson rang the post with a slapshot just before the clock expired. Providence couldn’t convert despite being a man up, though, and the teams retreated to the locker room scoreless after 20 minutes.

BC successfully stopped the rest of Wahlstrom’s penalty to begin the middle frame, but the physical play and penalties continued. Dugan took a seat for his second penalty of the game, this time for interference, and Conway and Wahlstrom found themselves also leaving the ice for the game’s second pair of matching penalties. It wasn’t until Kasper Björkqvist took the Friars’ fifth penalty of the

game, though, that either team capitalized.

After the Eagles set up in the offensive zone, the puck was rotated to Michael Kim at the face-off dot, and the senior—who nabbed four points in the first two games of the series—let fly a wrister that found the top right corner through a screen from Christopher Brown. Much like in the first two games against Providence, BC claimed the game’s first lead.

The Eagles had two good chances to double the lead as the second period came to a close, and Hutsko—who nabbed the overtime winner against the Friars on Saturday and was a consistent offensive threat Sunday—was at the center of the attack.

First, he sent a cross-ice pass to Wahlstrom, who was crashing the net, but the freshman’s shot skittered just wide.

Then, with McInnis and Thompson off the ice for roughing, the sophomore winger skated into the high slot and sent an attempt crashing off the pipe with just over two minutes left. The joint penalties took the total number committed to eight through the first two periods, but as the horn sounded for the end of the middle frame BC still clung to a 1-0 advantage.

Any thought that another pause in the action would put an end to the

whistles, however, was quickly put to rest. McInnis was sent off for crosschecking, then Conway committed his third minor of the game just 16 seconds after the Eagles successfully killed Providence’s third power-play chance of the night. BC presumably had an opportunity to double its edge, but Wahlstrom ruined that by being whistled for his third penalty of the game.

After a minute of 4-on-4 hockey, the Friars were presented with an abbreviated power-play chance of their own, and finally cracked the Eagles’ defense on their fourth attempt of the game. Josh Wilkins fired a shot on net that Joseph Woll blocked, but the rebound dropped in front of the crease, and Conway, newly back on the ice, was there to stuff the puck home and tie the game.

Hutsko scored just six minutes later, giving BC a lead to sit on for the final eight minutes of the regulation, and the Eagles defended admirably.

Crucially, BC avoided any more penalties, and though Woll had to make 10 saves in the closing minutes, the Eagles were able to prevent any clearcut opportunities for the Friars.

Kim just missed scoring an emptynet goal from his own end with 30 seconds to play, and the Eagles were flooding onto the ice to celebrate their biggest win of the season just half a

KEN JANCEF / BC Athletics

Joseph Woll made 37 saves, and BC beat Providence to win its Hockey East quarterfinal.

minute later.

With the win, BC advances to the Hockey East Tournament semifinals at T.D. Garden for a date with topseeded Massachusetts, the No. 3 team in the country.

The Minutemen are certainly formidable, but the Eagles can take solace in the fact that they played two competitive games with them earlier in the season.

It’s too bad that BC won’t be able

to play Providence in the semifinal on Friday—four of the Eagles’ 13 wins on the season have come against the Friars—but, even so, it now stands just two games from a berth in the NCAA Tournament.

BC now has a fighting chance if it plays like it did against Providence.

After a largely disappointing regular season, that’s more than anyone would have expected coming into the weekend. n

BC Rallies to Beat Providence in Overtime, Extend Season MHOK Game Two, from A9 and Providence possessing all of the momentum, it looked like BC was headed for another disappointing loss—one that would end an even more dismal season.

The Friars continued to pelt Woll, and they broke through in the beginning of the third period, with Bjorkqvist scoring this time.

With the season on the line, the

Eagles buckled down and found some long-lost offense. Woll continued to withstand a barrage of Providence shots, and BC finally received a quality opportunity when Michael Callahan was whistled off the ice for interference. With less than 20 seconds remaining on the power play, Marc McLaughlin launched a one-timer off a feed from Hutsko, beating Hawkey and tying the game. During the final five minutes of regulation, both

teams traded shots on goal, but neither could convert, setting up overtime for the second straight night.

At the start of the extra period, BC blocked two shots. After Michael Kim deflected the second shot, he sent the puck up the ice. Hutsko turned on the jets and gained possession. Jacob Bryson trailed him and tried to break up the shot, but Hutsko overpowered him.

Hutsko—who came into this contest

having not scored a goal in 19 games— beat Hawkey with the wrister, propelling the Eagles to a thrilling victory and a winner-take-all game on Sunday.

If it wasn’t for Hutsko’s heroics—as well as a strong team effort—the Eagles’ season would have already been over.

Instead, they live to fight another day and can book a trip to Hockey East semifinals with a win against the Friars in Game Three. This entire season has been

one massive step backward as the Eagles, despite boasting some of the most talented NHL prospects in the country, simply struggled to find offense and close out victories. A loss to the Friars in Game Three would only cement this year as one of the most disappointing in recent memory. But a win—alongside a deeper postseason run—would allow BC to finish the season on a much higher note. n

WOMEN’S HOCKEY

Giguere’s OT Goal Dooms Eagles to NCAA Tournament Heartbreak WHOK Vs. Clarkson, from A9 defensive position, as Clarkson began to put more pressure on McArthur. BC killed off its second penalty, though, preserving its one-goal lead. Soon after the Eagles regained full strength, Sommerfield was called for interference, putting BC right back on the defense.

Again, the Eagles killed off the penalty, and the game returned to full strength with BC still in the lead. As the period closed, Clarkson became more aggressive, desperate to knot the game up and avoid a shutout. Ultimately, the period was scoreless, with Watts’ shot from the blue line in the first being the lone point on the scoreboard, as the teams headed into the final break.

Tensions were high when the final period began. Clarkson was desperate to defend its back-to-back national titles and avoid a complete shutout, while BC was looking to add to Watts’

early goal and get some breathing room.

Despite the Golden Knights breaking away multiple times and getting looks on McArthur, the freshman was able to deflect any shot that came her way, not letting the pressure intimidate her.

The Eagles responded with attacks of their own, but Clarkson’s defense was ready to deny them any opportunities.

As the period neared an end, Clarkson finally struck gold. Josiane Pozzebon was able to sneak the puck through McArthur’s skates, and the Golden Knights tied up the game with less than five minutes left in regulation.

Neither team was able to take a lead following Clarkson’s late goal, and the game headed into overtime.

In the sudden-death overtime, the first goal scored would decide the game. Halfway through the session, Clarkson almost ran away with it when Pozzebon launched a shot in the direction of McArthur. The buzzer went off,

but the puck flew just wide of the net, keeping BC’s dreams of a eighth Frozen Four appearance alive. With just over five minutes left in overtime, Clarkson put too much pressure on McArthur.

Dealing with heavy traffic, the freshman couldn’t handle the bouncing puck and ended up sprawled on the ice trying to cover the net. Elizabeth Giguere took advantage of McArthur’s positioning and slipped the puck past the goaltender’s feet, solidifying the Golden Knights’ win and ending the Eagles’ season.

As was the case against Northeastern in BC’s previous contest, it came down to one unlucky bounce that decided the game—the Huskies pounced on a turnover in the neutral zone to set up the game-winning goal in the Hockey East final, while Clarkson made the most of a mad scrum in front of the net. Unfortunately for the Eagles, once again, the bounce didn’t go

SCHULER MEYER / BC ATHLETICS

Maddy McArthur made 28 saves, but BC still lost to the Golden Knights, 2-1, in overtime.

in their favor—as was the case much of the year. BC returned plenty of talent in 2018-19 and was bolstered by three Olympians, but a highly talented senior

class will depart without getting a shot at a national championship, something many expect from the Eagles, year in and year out. n

MEN’S HOCKEY

BC Blows 3-1 Lead, Falls to Friars in Hockey East Quarterfinal Opener

By Jeremy Khangi For The Heights The game was all tied up when the final buzzer sounded, and despite losing an early two-goal lead to No. 7 Providence in the first game of Boston College 4 the Hockey East Providence 5 quarterfinals, Boston College men’s hockey displayed impressive resilience on the road, peaking with Julius Mattila’s game-tying goal at 1:44 in the third period.

Overtime seemingly opened up with all of the momentum on BC’s side—the Eagles were looking to compensate for their underwhelming season, one of their worst in Jerry York’s 25-year tenure. All eyes were on Tyce Thompson of the Friars, who came down on the rush roughly a minute into the extra period. He ripped a wrist shot off Eagles goaltender Joseph Woll’s right pad, and the ensuing rebound bounced out to the left circle, perfectly setting up Brandon Duhaime to blast the puck past Woll.

Just a minute and a half into the overtime period, BC found itself on the losing

end of yet another close matchup, falling, 5-4, in the first game of the best-of-three series.

From the beginning, the stage at Schneider Arena was set for a thriller, as the two teams were a week removed from a game that wasn’t decided until the third period. Although the Eagles (11-21-3, 1011-3 Hockey East) had plenty of regular season struggles—they entered the night as the No. 7 seed for the first time since the 1993 tournament—they had some success against the Friars (22-9-6, 14-7-3) squad, taking two of the three regular season matchups. Providence, on the other hand, entered leading the Hockey East in defense (1.86 goals allowed per game) and third in offense (3.14 goals per game). The game trended toward the latter, though, as it featured nine combined goals and a plethora of shots on goal.

The match was marked by fast pace and electrifying offensive opportunities on both sides of the ice, as both teams wasted no time getting on the board. Less than two minutes after the opening face-off, Providence forward Matt Koopman’s pass

deflected off Vimal Sukumaran’s skate and ended up taking a lucky bounce past Woll inside the left post. The goal was initially called off on the basis that Sukumaran intentionally kicked the puck past Woll, but, after video review, this was deemed inconclusive, putting the Friars up, 1-0, early on.

Yet it took the Eagles no time to respond.

Just 30 seconds after the opening goal, Michael Kim’s shot from the center point was blocked in the slot, perfectly setting up Marc McLaughlin’s forehand wrist-shot strike, which beat Friars goaltender Hayden Hawkey just inside the right post. The Eagles did not slow down after tying the game, though, quickly ramping up pressure in an excellent opening period.

At the six-minute mark, Christopher Grando snuck a bouncing puck through Hawkey’s pads. Then, just two minutes after, Zach Walker pitched a nifty one-handed pass to Kim on the weak side, who fired the puck past Hawkey short-side. The Eagles maintained the most infamous lead in all of sports, a 3-1 advantage, for the majority of the first two frames.

Scoring-wise, the second period was

much quieter than the first, but it was scrappy nonetheless.

Both teams were given two power-play opportunities—the Eagles saw Connor Moore and David Cotton commit interference and tripping infractions, respectively, while the Friars had Shane Kavanagh and Greg Printz both get minors for slashing—but neither was able to capitalize. It wasn’t until the final five seconds of the middle period that Providence was able to score, as Jacob Bryson’s backdoor pass was followed up by a tip past Woll from Spenser Young, cutting the deficit to one heading into the final period of regulation.

The Friars continued the trend of quick goal scoring, tying the game up four minutes into the third frame. Jack Dugan faked a shot and found Young wide open on the left side, allowing for an easy second tally on the night. Then, despite some terrific offensive opportunities by the Eagles, Scott Conway sneaked behind the BC net and flicked a pass into the slot, where Vincent Desharnais snuck a one-timer through Woll’s five-hole—and the Eagles had fully blown their 3-1 lead.

The final few minutes of regulation had fans on the edge of their seats. After a York timeout, BC pulled its netminder with 1:44 remaining on the clock—a decision that quickly paid off. Just eight seconds after the break in play, Mattila located a loose puck amid a scramble in front of the Providence net, jamming it home to tie up the score and eventually force overtime. That was when the Friars escaped with the win, though, as Duhaime’s goal ended a thriller of a game and pulled them within a game of TD Garden and the semifinals.

Even though Mattila’s late goal inspired confidence that the Eagles would rally to avoid the painful fact of blowing a convincing early lead, it ultimately didn’t pan out and BC missed a tremendous opportunity to strike first in the series. Winning two out of three on the road as a lower seed is already a hard enough feat to pull off, and the Eagles now face back-to-back elimination games against the second-best team in the conference. York will need to rally his team to put in an inspired effort on Saturday night, as otherwise a dismal season will sputter out via a first-round sweep. n

The Heights

A12

Monday, March 18, 2019

BASEBALL

BC Drops Two at Wake, Gives Up 35 Combined Runs in Losses

By Marc Occhipinti Heights Staff

Entering Saturday, Boston College baseball had put together an encouraging three-game win streak. The run included a victory to close out the series against No. 8 Louisville, a decisive home opener against Holy Cross, and a masterful pitching performance by Dan Metzdorf to take the first of three games in Winston-Salem against Wake Forest, 5-3.

However, Wake Forest’s bats had something else to say in the weekend’s final two games, in which the Demon Deacons crossed home plate 35 times, including a 13-run fifth inning on Saturday afternoon that led to a 22-9 victory. The dismal frame that would prove to shift momentum to the home bench for the rest of the series saw 17 batters, six walks, a grand slam, and four BC pitchers, all in the span of 44 painstaking minutes. Wake Forest carried its confidence at the plate into Sunday’s rubber match, defeating the Eagles, 13-3.

Wake Forest (12-9, 3-3 Atlantic Coast) was clicking on all cylinders on Sunday afternoon, but BC (10-8, 2-4) was able to fire the opening salvo in the top half of the first inning. Chris Galland and Sal Frelick opened the game up with a pair of hard singles off Demon Deacons starter Morgan McSweeney, and Brian Dempsey brought in Galland on a sacrifice fly. BC

could not capitalize for another run in the frame, though, stranding two runners on the bases.

BC righthander Mason Pelio picked up where he left off from his dominating performance against Louisville in the early going on Sunday. The 6-foot-4 freshman gave up a seeing-eye single to Michael Turconi to start the game, but erased the next eight Demon Deacons, en route to a scoreless first three innings. Pelio was overpowering the Wake Forest hitters, locating his low-90s fastball up in the zone to force batters to harmlessly pop the ball up.

Unfortunately for the Eagles, Pelio’s control deserted him in the fourth. He issued three walks in the inning, and with the bases loaded, Chris Lanzilli tomahawked an 0-2 high fastball the opposite way for the Demon Deacons’ second grand slam of the weekend. Pelio was pulled after the frame, and Joey Walsh and Thomas Lane also struggled in relief. Walsh surrendered six hits and five runs in an inning and a third, and Lane walked two in his two-thirds of an inning. Lanzilli added three more RBIs in the next two innings, making it a 10-run middle third of the game for Wake Forest.

The Eagles’ bats remained silent for the rest of the contest, with the exception of a two-run triple from Cody Morissette in the sixth. Any hope of a comeback was squashed in the bottom of the eighth, though, when Lanzilli added to his career

day at the plate with a three-run homer to give him 10 RBIs on the afternoon.

Despite the tilted final scoreline, BC came out in control on Saturday afternoon as well. The Eagles took advantage of sloppy defense from Wake Forest in the top half of the first to strike for four runs. Frelick lined a hard single that was misplayed by right fielder Christian Long to advance him to second. Dempsey attempted to bunt him over the third, but reached himself when the sacrifice was booted by starting pitcher Jared Schuster. Jake Alu and Jack Cunningham each followed with RBI singles, and Gian Martellini kept the line moving by shooting a double into the left-center gap that plated two more.

The quick four-run lead seemed to be what BC starter Matt Gill needed to pitch comfortably early on. With the exception of a leadoff walk to Turconi, the big righty retired the first 10 batters of the contest.

Gill’s first adversity came in the fourth, where a walk set the stage for a two-run home run by Bobby Seymour, who took an outside pitch the other way over the left-center wall.

After tacking on another run to make it 5-2, Gill stepped onto the mound for the fifth inning. A walk, a hit by pitch, and two singles cut the lead to two when Patrick Frick walked up to the batter’s box with the bases loaded and one out. On the first pitch of the at-bat, Frick sent a high fly ball

into foul territory on the right field side.

Frelick appeared in position to track the ball down and make the catch, but instead, the freshman let the ball drop in foul territory to prevent a run from scoring on a sacrifice fly.

It was a gutsy decision that could have worked had Frick grounded into a double play on the next pitch, but the choice proved disastrous for BC. Three pitches after the “no-catch,” Frick took a big swing at a fastball, and sent it high over Frelick’s head for a grand slam. After Frick’s blast, the next 10 Demon Deacons all reached base, including five on walks. More concerning for the Eagles, four of the five free passes came on four pitches, as the command of BC’s bullpen imploded to allow 12 earned runs in the final four innings of Saturday’s contest.

Despite Saturday’s poor performance, BC’s pitching staff was dominant on Friday night. Metzdorf, who pitched well but was outdueled by Louisville ace Reid Detmers the Friday before, kept the Demon Deacons off balance all night. He scattered seven hits and four walks in five and a third innings, but got pivotal outs with men on base, especially with the punchout. The senior lefty, and Friday’s winning pitcher, struck out six and allowed just one run, maintaining a stellar earned run average of 1.06 to start the year.

BC built up its five runs over the course

of the middle innings, highlighted by a towering opposite field blast by Cunningham.

Wake Forest’s defensive struggles were put on display, as three errors led to a pair of unearned runs charged to Demon Deacons starter Colin Peluse.

Protecting a lead in the late-innings, the Eagles held down the powerful Wake Forest offense. With the bases loaded and one out in the sixth, Lane entered the game and struck out D.J. Poteet on three pitches, then forced Frick to fly out to end the threat. Lane stayed on for the seventh and retired five of the six batters he faced.

Eagles closer John Witkowski gave up two runs in the eighth, but with the tying run at the plate in the ninth the senior delivered, punching out Shane Muntz and securing the save and the victory.

Now six games into its conference slate, BC has shown flashes of being a complete team. The offense is finding its way, but the fact remains that the Eagles will need more consistent pitching to be successful.

They boast a 5-0 record when allowing three runs or less, compared to a 5-8 record when surrendering four or more. BC will get to come home for its first conference series of the season against Clemson next weekend, preceded by midweek tilts with Northeastern and Siena. Having played just one of its first 18 games in Brighton, the week looks like a good opportunity for Mike Gambino’s squad to get right. n

JONATHAN YE / HEIGHTS EDITOR

After winning the series opener in Winston-Salem behind a three-run fourth inning, BC’s pitching collapsed in the final two games, and the Eagles fell in a decisive manner, losing, 22-9, and 13-3.

SOFTBALL

Eagles Score One Run in Three-Game Series, Blanked by Tar Heels

By Taylor Covington Heights Staff

Boston College softball’s final push of a 21-game road swing took the Eagles on their first conference series of the year, a three-game set with North Carolina to open up their ACC schedule. In their recent spring break road trip, the Eagles strung together their first winning streak, knocking off Tennessee-Chattanooga and Pennsylvania before rounding out the excursion with a decisive victory over Florida International. Despite an inconsistent start to the season, BC hoped to feed off its recently acquired momentum and establish an early presence in the conference table. Those goals fell short in Chapel Hill, though, as the Eagles struggled to find their footing offensively and were swept by a receiving votes Tar Heels team.

This offensive drought was most evident in the final game on Sunday, where UNC (15-9, 5-1 Atlantic Coast) completed its series sweep by shutting out BC, 8-0.

Tar Heels senior Kiani Ramsey tripled in a run to put the hosts on the board early, helping her team gain confidence from the outset. Kristina Burkhardt singled at the bottom of the first, but the Eagles turned a double play to end the inning and maintain a hand in the game. They would gradually fall behind, though, as Megan Dray launched a home run in the bottom of the second after BC left a runner in scoring position the inning prior.

UNC pulled away when Abby Settlemyer singled and two runs scored on an error to hoist the Tar Heels to a 4-0 lead.

Lexi Godwin singled soon after to put UNC out of striking distance. When freshman Camryn Dolby replaced C.C. Cook on the mound, the Eagles ran into even more trouble keeping the Tar Heels at bay.

In the fourth inning, Burkhardt crushed a three-run home run to pick up the 8-0 lead and secure a run-rule victory.

Susannah Anderson kept the Tar Heel offense in check in the second game of the series, but the Eagles found it difficult to

get runs against her counterpart, UNC freshman Hannah George. She went five innings and teammate Brittany Pickett spun two scoreless frames in relief for the save in a 2-0 win. Despite scoring early in the first inning, the Tar Heels found it difficult to find any offensive rhythm with Anderson on the mound. Going six innings, Anderson scattered six hits, walked three, and conceded just two runs to open up opportunities for the Eagles lineup.

BC began the third with a single from Kennedy Labshere, but the offense stalled, as George struck out the next three batters. Ramsey looked to widen the lead when she hit a double to start the fifth, making it all the way to third, where Anderson resolved to hold her. She was able to, ending the threat as the final batter in Dray popped out to short.

It appeared as if the Eagles were in position to tie the game late when Lexi DiEmmanuele opened up the sixth with a leadoff single. Emme Martinez subsequently singled to the right, but UNC’s

right fielder Kristina Burkhardt threw out DiEmmanuele en route to third. The Tar Heels ultimately escaped the inning with two groundouts, then set down the side in the seventh to secure the 2-0 victory.

In the first game at Anderson Stadium, the Eagles found it difficult to cross the plate—but their hosts didn’t have the same problem in a 9-1 rout. The lone hit for BC came in the third inning with a home run from sophomore Emme Martinez, her second of the season, and it proved to be Pickett’s only mistake of the day—she struck out eight and only walked one.

That couldn’t be said about Anderson, who continued her up and down season as she ran into difficulties on the mound, giving up three runs to the Tar Heels—including two earned in the first two innings.

In response to a sacrifice bunt that brought in UNC’s third run, BC shifted pitchers, but the moved proved fruitless against the Tar Heels’ strengthening batting game. Dolby struggled mightily in

relief, coughing up six earned runs in just two innings. Burkardt went 2-for-2 with an RBI, while Ramsey drove in another three. Cook conceded a hit up the middle to score the ninth run and end the game in five innings, as the Tar Heels improved 3-1 in the ACC. If the Eagles hope to make noise in the conference, they will have to find a way to steal wins when their pitching keeps them in games. UNC is second in the conference standings right now, so a sweep is understandable, but the second game is one that head coach Ashley Obrest surely wanted her team to come away with. Last season, BC started conference play with a winless weekend in Durham, N.C., against Duke—but it rebounded by sweeping Virginia upon its return home.

They’ll have a similar chance to bounce back with back-to-back midweek games against non-conference opponents in Quinnipiac and Providence, two teams that have posted a combined 16-24 record thus far. n

WOMEN’S TENNIS

Women’s Tennis Rebounds, Sweeps Binghamton and VTech

By Luke Pichini Asst. Sports Editor

Boston College women’s tennis entered this weekend in desperate need of a win. After starting the season on a nine-game winning streak, the Eagles proceeded to drop five straight games against ACC teams. With weaker opponents like Binghamton and Virginia Tech on the docket, this weekend marked a great opportunity for BC to snap out of its recent struggles—and the Eagles did just that. BC kicked off the weekend with a 7-0 victory over Binghamton on Saturday and followed it up with a 5-2 win on Sunday against conference foe VTech.

Both of these teams were much weaker than the Eagles’ (11-5, 2-5 Atlantic Coast) previous opponents. The Hokies (7-9, 1-6) entered with just one ACC win, while the Bearcats (1-16) had managed a lone win the entire year. On

the other hand, three of the conference teams that BC lost to currently occupy three of the four spots at the top of the conference standings.

On Sunday against V Tech, the Eagles kicked off the match with a strong showing in doubles play. Head coach Nigel Bentley shuffled up his doubles lineup once again, but this time it paid off. The pair of Yufei Long and Jackie Urbinati was still slotted in first doubles. Kylie Wilcox and Natasha Irani were bumped up to second doubles, and Laura Lopez and Elene Tsokilauri occupied the third and final doubles position. Wilcox and Irani defeated Nina Kozar and Nina Sorkin, 6-3, and Lopez and Tsokilauri handled Sarah Baron and Samantha Gillas with relative ease, 6-2. These two victories helped the Eagles secure the doubles point.

Singles play was more uncertain for BC, though. Irani was the first Eagle to fall, as she dropped her match in

straight sets against Gillas, 6-4, 6-4.

Long gained a singles point for BC against Natalie Novotna, winning, 6-2, 7-5. Long’s doubles partner, Urbinati, also had a strong showing, beating Elizabet Danailova by an identical score, 6-2, 7-5. Wilcox, however, was unable to prevail against her doubles opponent, Kozar. She cruised in the first set, 6-3. But then she stumbled in the second, 6-3, and dropped a close third set, 7-6.

At this point, the Eagles were up, 3-2, in the overall score. Only two singles matches remained, as Lopez and Tsokilauri were taking the court against Shene Disbergen and Sorkin, respectively. Tsokilauri put herself in a hole early, going down, 4-1, in the first set. Meanwhile, Lopez demonstrated strong command, grabbing a quick lead against Disbergen. From there, the freshman would not look back, racing out to a 6-3, 6-0 victory to secure the

win for the Eagles. To make it even better, Tsokilauri erased her deficit and triumphed over Sorkin, 7-5, 6-2.

While the match against the Hokies was fairly competitive, Saturday’s contest against Binghamton was anything but that. Bentley, recognizing how weak the opponent was, rested Long, Wilcox, and Irani so that they would be fresh for VTech. The Eagles did not drop a single set on the afternoon. It started in doubles play, as Reagan Posorske and Loren Haukova won against Michelle Eisenberg and Maria Pandya, 6-4. That was perhaps the most competitive set in the entire match. To make matters worse for the Bearcats, Lopez and Micayla Casella blanked Ashley Granieri and Maya Haykal, 6-0.

It was pure domination from top to bottom in singles. Urbinati, Tsokilauri, Lopez, Haukova, Posorske, and Casella all picked up straight-set victories against their opposition. Granted,

Binghamton has struggled immensely this season, but defeating a team in dominant fashion like the Eagles just did is exactly what they needed to snap out of their recent funk.

With these two wins, BC is now back up to 10th in the conference standings.

Next weekend, the Eagles will welcome a fierce Florida State team to the Flynn Recreation Complex before flying down to Atlanta to face Georgia Tech. Despite the five-game skid, the Eagles are up to 11 victories on the year with eight regular season contests remaining.

It’s worthwhile to compare this mark with last year, a season in which BC won 13 matches total. It’s clear that this program has taken a noticeable step forward with an influx of fresh talent and upperclassman leaders. If the Eagles can continue their success in the regular season, then there’s a solid chance that they will make an impact in the postseason. n

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‘Five Feet Apart’ Features Familiar Dreary Plot

By Jacob Schick A1 Editor Five Feet Apart is A Fault in Our Stars with less kissing in the Anne Frank House. If that’s not enough to deter you, you’ve already seen this movie.

But if you’ve made it this far in the review (a whole two sentences), you’re either a glutton for punishment or related to this reviewer. Either way, settle in, Mom. Five Feet Apart starts, as any great movie should, with moralizing voice over narration. Washed out video footage glazes across the screen while our main character, Stella Grant (Haley

Lu Richardson), waxes philosophically on the nature of love, loss, and human contact. Then, in a flurry of integrated exposition, the audience learns through context clues that Stella has an essentially terminal illness (cystic fibrosis) and spends a lot of time in this hospital.

She knows all the nurses and doctors, has her medical regimen down pat, and spends her time teaching herself French, coding an app, and uploading daily YouTube videos chronicling her journey. She is friends with another cystic fibrosis patient down the hall, Poe (Moises Arias). Arias, for reference, plays Rico in Hannah Montana.

That has nothing to do with Five Feet Apart, it’s just important to me that

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five feet apart justin baldoni distributed by cbs films Release mar. 15, 2019 Our rating

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you know.

But it’s not Arias on the poster making eyes at our heroine. No no no, dear reader. It is a different child star popularized by a Disney Channel show—Cole Sprouse, of The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, playing Will Newman.

Will is the edgy and cool and nihilistic cystic fibrosis patient. At first Stella wants nothing to do with him, because she’s a smart girl who plays by the rules.

But he wins her over with his moodiness and artistic ability (and his heart of gold, if only you can get under his tough exterior). Suddenly, Will and Stella want nothing more than to be with each other, but alas, they cannot touch. If those four sentences are tiring to read—imagine how tiring the nearly two-hour movie feels.

Now the title makes sense. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation advises patients to remain at least six feet apart at all times to avoid cross-infection. Will and Stella take it a foot closer because they’re teenagers and it’s romantic and definitely not because it sounds better as a title. So we have our movie.

In all fairness, the acting in this movie is, on the whole, quite good.

Richardson, Sprouse, and Arias are all believable in their performances.

The three of them are better than this movie, but they squeeze all of

the genuine emotion and gravity they can get out of this like water from a stone. The secondary characters are all serviceable, aside from the rotating cast of unimportant teenage friends that are so unimportant it’s not worth finishing this clause.

The main problem with this movie is that its characters become extremely frustrating very quickly. Teenagers, as they are wont to do, break the rules and endanger themselves (and others). Five Feet Apart toys with these ideas but ultimately discards any real meditation in favor of using them as tearjerkers or tension builders.

If audiences want to simply get lost in a sad romantic drama, it’s perfectly fine to use Five Feet Apart to do it. It’s just hard to watch these characters make objectively bad decisions (decisions that are out of character for them to begin with) in the name of love. It would be different if the movie took itself seriously. Five Feet Apart has the opportunity to explore the ideas of mortality for terminal illness patients, or the value of life for those who are asked to be old when they are too young. But instead, we get a few grim jokes, some dramatic moments, and those three sad songs that are in every teenage drama movie. You know the ones. n

‘Development’ Release Disappoints Longtime Fans

By Jack Miller Assoc. News Editor Netflix released the back half of Season Five of Arrested Development on Friday, which is likely to be the final episodes of the show’s run. After the first eight episodes of the season—released last May—failed to live up to the high standards the show had set for itself in previous years, fans hoped that the remainder of Season Five could provide a return to form for the Bluth family.

The good news is that this latest batch of episodes provides a welcome increase in quality and clarity compared to last year’s release. Unlike their predecessors, episodes 9 through 16 are not saddled with the duty of making sense of Season Four, which split the Bluth family up across their separate, although accidentally interconnected, journeys.

The writers have to jumpstart the plot to accomplish this, such as reminding the audience that George Michael’s (Michael Cera) fake tech startup had received threats from hacktivist group Anonymous—a thread that had been ignored since its introduction in Season Four. During its heyday in the midaughts, the show would have teased this out in the background, like in Season Three’s “Mr. F” mini-arc, but it’s an acceptable price to pay to get the characters moving after a rudderless first half.

Even better, individual scenes and lines are just as funny as classic Arrested De-

velopment. Characters don’t just serve to represent their own plot lines but actually communicate like a real (albeit dysfunctional and narcissistic) family. This change in course from part one of the season lets some weaker jokes coast off past characterization rather than simply falling flat. There are also plenty of moments that carry the nostalgia of Seasons One through Three, such as when Michael (Jason Bateman) is tasked (yet again) with pulling the Bluth Company out of financial catastrophe, or when Buster (Tony Hale) and Oscar (Jeffrey Tambor) bond after their unnecessary jailbreak.

The bad news is that, while all the individual parts work out fairly well, they fail to come together into the slow-burn vision that Arrested Development has mastered in the past. Much of the show’s longevity stems from the subtle, long-running gags and extraordinary season-long payoffs. Before Season Five, there was always a sense that the showrunners knew exactly where the plot was headed and how it would all come together, even if the viewers were in the dark.

Season Five (part two) feels muddled. While the Bluth Company and FakeBlock plots were clearly mapped out well in advance, other parts lacked that vision. The worst offender is the ongoing investigation into Lucille Two’s (Liza Minnelli) murder, which occurred in the Season Four finale and supposedly was the driving force of Season Five that would bring the family together. That didn’t pan out in the first wave of episodes,

and while it’s more present in the second half, something is missing. Consequently, this plot jumps forward in fits and spurts and doesn’t even touch some characters—do George Michael and Maeby (Alia Shawkat) even know that Buster is on trial? Lucille’s (Bluth, played by Jessica Walter) plan to profit off a U.S.-Mexico border wall seems to jump around, and its status is unclear from one moment to the next.

Some attempts at classic callbacks simply come across as lazy—an allegation any Arrested Development fan would shudder at the thought of. When Tobias (David Cross) and his weird acting troupe/family (who feel out of place the whole season until a brief spark of relevance) start the season

living in the Bluth attic, it feels less like a callback to George Sr.’s (also portrayed by Jeffrey Tambor) stay in Season Two and more like the writers just needed a thing for the group to do.

Netflix’s Arrested Development revival is a great show with a lot of funny moments, but it doesn’t have the foresight of the series’ first three seasons or the intricacy of Season Four. It’s more like The Office insofar that the best parts stand independent of some grand plan and that the characters really shine. Longtime fans will be happy to see the Bluth family one last time and the season will probably feel better with time, but right now Season Five is a disappointing end to a great series. n

Heights Staff Triple Frontier begins, and ultimately prefaces itself, with a retired special ops fighter addressing an audience of attentive, soon-to-be discharged members of the United States armed forces.

Captain William Miller (Charlie Hunnam) stands sturdy and poised, his golf shirt tucked neatly into his Wranglers, speaking bluntly about his experience returning from combat, detailing the harsh reality of reintegration. Even as Hunnam struggles to keep up a convincing American accent, his words carry weight.

He goes on about the innate biological effects that come with committing and witnessing acts of violence before we cut to a helicopter carrying a special police force into a village in Colombia

where, as expected, we bear witness to more bloodshed: Santiago “Pope” Garcia (Oscar Isaac), a graying American military contractor and friend of Miller, leads a team of local forces against a drug cartel.

Intel from the mission reveals the location of the cartel kingpin, Lorea (Reynaldo Gallegos), deep in the jungle near the tri-border of Brazil, Peru, and Colombia. Following suit, Garcia assembles a gang of ex-special forces fighters to take him out and plunder his fortune. Along with Miller, the motivational speaker, there’s his brother, Ben (Garrett Hedlund), an MMA fighter; Francisco “Catfish” Morales (Pedro Pascal), a former pilot; and Tom “Redfly” Davis (Ben Affleck), a real estate agent and single father struggling to support his daughter.

Reunited after years of living their

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‘missed connection’ the Head and the heart

The Head and the Heart undergoes a shape-shift on the indie powerhouse’s latest single, “Missed Connection.”

Ambition and ar tistr y come together on the track to produce a lyrically smooth, bass-heavy track with a distinct sleekness.

What really differentiates the track from the band’s past tracks is the up-tempo rock beat, a welcomedeparture from the slow-burning “Rivers and Roads” or folkish “Lost in My Mind.”

An echoing a cappella intro of “na na na nas rings in the groovy bassline of the track before lead singer Josiah Joseph slips into the catchy first verse.

Ad o p t i n g a r a n g e o f v o c a l s throughout the track, Joseph aptly recounts a haunting missed connection that leaves the singer grasping for any semblance of the brief yet visceral memory—“sunny days,” “a purple dress,” and “the heat” are just a few traces of the moment that weave their way through the lyrics.

The first single off The Head and the Heart’s upcoming album Living Mirage, “Missed Connection” leaves listeners with a desire to deep-dive into the band’s vibrant and exciting new sound. n

music video emily Himes

maren morris

Arresteddevelopment mitcehll hurwitz distributed by netflix Release mar. 15, 2019 Our rating

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own lives, these brawny Avengers of private security contracting catch up and bro-out, drinking PBR and listening to dad rock (expect selections from Fleetwood Mac, Metallica, and Creedence Clearwater Revival), all while recalling the glory days in the armed services and the dissatisfaction with domestic life that followed. The risk involved with undertaking such a ludicrously dangerous mission proves irrelevant in the end, as the promise of wealth and the chance to catch an adrenaline high prove convincing enough. Shortly after, they’re in the Amazon rainforest staking out Lorea’s compound, deciding when to strike.

Triple Frontier begins like a Peter Berg movie, in the vein of a Lone Survivor or Mile 22, concerned with vaguely jingoistic notions of heroism, masculinity, and armed service exceptionalism.

This seems to be the case until the raid takes place, which goes sideways and sends the narrative into a welcome frenzy as the story shifts gears and becomes something of a morality fable—a take on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre—that reveals the greed and arrogance of these characters. It shouldn’t take a character criticizing these sorts of unquestionably illegal foreign interventions for us to draw a line between the attitudes of these former soldiers and the outlook of 21st century U.S. foreign policy, but nonetheless, it’s nice to see the film, through the natural progression of its narrative, navigate this murky terri-

kaylie ramirez

‘common’

Television

‘Triple Frontier’ Tackles Realistic Military Issues

By Peter Gavaris

Single review

tory. In the end, it’s this self-interrogation—juggling genuine sympathy and harsh criticism of its characters—that places the film more closely in line with Clint Eastwood’s recent work.

The film is directed by J.C. Chandor (A Most Violent Year, Margin Call), but more tellingly, it was written by Mark Boal, a journalist and screenwriter known for his work with Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty, The Hurt Locker). Most, if not all, of Boal’s creative projects and journalistic work deal with the slippery relationship between boots-on-the-ground armed service fighters and the greater military industrial complex—how the system can shape ideology, which can seep back into the fabric of life at home. Tragedy in Boal’s work, Triple Frontier included, comes from his sympathy for these flawed characters sucked into and spit out by the system. When Tom considers passing on the mission early in the film, Santiago prods him: “You’ve been shot five times for your country and you can’t even afford a new truck.”

These ideas have been handled more eloquently in other films (even others written by Boal), but it’s the genre trappings and the loony tilt into absurdity that keep Triple Frontier interesting throughout.

There’s a good deal of fun to be had here, and Chandor, with some slick, economic direction of action, keeps everything together for much of the runtime. n

For Maren Morris, who has garnered so much applause in recent months for her influential singles “Girl” and “The Middle,” “Common” is both a poorly written song and a boring music video. “Girl” carried a sense of emotional catharsis and factored in a painfully relatable aspect as well. “Common” tries to achieve that same impact but fails miserably.

The song itself is long, overly simple, and repetitive. It features Brandi Carlile, one of country music’s newer vocal powerhouses, but she is not enough to carry the weight of the song. In the second verse, her smooth vocals make the song a pleasant listening experience. Yet they don’t overcome the overall feel of the track.

The lyrics really seem to be trying too hard to be deep, with lines like, “But we got way too much in common / So what’s the point in fighting? / We got way too many problems if I’m being honest / I don’t know what God is.” It has good intentions but doesn’t even rhyme.

The video itself doesn’t add anything to the song. It starts off with a sweet sentiment, as it candidly shows Carlile on the phone with Morris after recording the song together.

But after that, nothing else really happens. The video alternates between clips of Morris in the recording studio and the two of them onstage performing (strangely, the live clips were all shot from the back, which really adds to the low-quality feel of the video). There are a couple clips that display the strings section and background singers recording, which was somewhat interesting but not really all that exciting in the grand scheme of things.

“Common” tries to be another impressive song like “Girl” but doesn’t quite cut it. The song and the video both appear as if they were made in a rush. Morris has been one of country music’s more prolific artists in recent years, but “Common” is one of the first songs that seems to compromise her natural talent. n

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Monday, March 18, 2019

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Shameless Comedy Shines at Fleabag Spring Cafe Home with

By Kaylie Ramirez

Arts Editor

A packed Gasson 305 erupted into a “No more men!” chant—prompted by Maya Rao, MCAS ’21, and quickly adopted by Graysen Parish, MCAS ’22—at My Mother’s Fleabag’s Spring Café on Thursday night. The moment of communal candor epitomized the shameless and often absurd brand of humor with which Fleabag entertains its audience, a comedic style that can cause one to unquestioningly betray his gender for the sake of landing the joke—and oh, did it land.

Fleabag’s Spring Café consisted of a number of improv games that relied heavily upon crowd involvement, and unlike the classes that take place under the oddly ornate ceiling of the Fulton Room by day, the attendees were more than willing to raise a hand or volunteer an answer to an open-ended question. The freeze game warmed up the crowd, as the basis of the game is that Fleabaggers will go through an improv skit with the added pressure of being “freezed” and swapped with other members of the comedy troupe. A highlight of the game came when Rao assumed the role of a bank robber who boasted about her loot on Instagram.

Laughter erupted later in the night when Nick Edel, MCAS ’19; Ari Malliaros, CSOM ’19; Brendan McGinty, MCAS ’20; and Maqui Bernava, MCAS ’22, took part in a game in which the cast members had to run on or off stage when a specific word, such as “eel” or “skill” was said by

another actor in the skit. Eventually, Malliaros and McGinity switched off working Edel’s trigger word “eel” into the dialogue to keep him running back and forth and, perhaps even funnier, fishing for excuses to leave or re-enter the scene.

“I left my car in drive,” Edel frantically screamed at one point in the skit.

Edel later got back at McGinity when introducing a game that required two crowd members to feed McGinity and Mike Bamford, MCAS ’20, random lines during the bit.

“Fleabag is entirely scripted and Brendan and Mike are the worst at remembering their lines,” Edel joked when explaining the premise of the game.

Throughout the brief one-hour show Fleabag members showed off a distinctive flexibility in comedic style, easily transitioning from the asinine to the academic (yet accessible).

Parish earned snaps from the crowd when he declared that “Aristotle was one of the best philosophers of all time” during a game with Sam Harmon, MCAS ’21. Later in the game, Aristotle’s teachings about love served as the basis for a proposal, one that Harmon answered with “I’m going to accept but it’s going to be platonic.”

Malliaros crafted a long-running joke about a play that deals with laissez-faire economics and the principle of the invisible hand, while Tom Mier, MCAS ’19, gave ample exposition about the “Fiddler family” before getting to the Fiddler on the Roof punchline in the final game of

John Hughes Maggie DiPatri

ASHTON CARROLL / FOR THE HEIGHTS

Fleabag encouraged crowd involvement with various improv games at its spring cafe.

the night, “185 plays walk into a bar.” If comedy doesn’t work out for the group, the members of Fleabag have certainly gotten the most out of their liberal arts

education. After a strong showing at its Spring Café, however, it’s likely comedy will continue to work for My Mother’s Fleabag. n

‘Significant Other’ Candidly Explores Adult Dating

By Stephanie Liu Copy Editor

Self-deprecating quips, catty small talk about colleagues, and the struggle that comes with navigating the diffficult waters of adult dating all pop up throughout Significant Other, a surprisingly deep comedy that lit up the stage with a bittersweet

commentary on growing up and dating in the modern age.

Performed in the Bonn Studio over this weekend, Significant Other, written

by Joshua Harmon and directed by Nick Swancott, MCAS ’19, brings a new perspective on love and dating to Boston College, as the play follows Jordan, a gay man in his late 20s, looking for love in New

MEEGAN MINAHAN / HEIGHTS EDITOR

‘Significant Other’ spotlighted the trials and tirumphs encountered while looking for love.

York and encapsulates the hopes and fears found in modern dating, commenting on the expectations of needing to find that one special person.

Judging by the start of Significant Other, the audience would not expect to be crying by the end. Opening the show is a light-hearted bachelorette party for Kiki (Juls Martinez-Alvarez, MCAS ’21), where the main character Jordan (Miki Peiffer, MCAS ’19) and his two friends Laura (Debbie Aboaba, MCAS ’21) and Vanessa (Lyana White, MCAS ’20) drink and talk about relationships—mainly the lack thereof. As the play progresses, the audience follows Jordan’s attempts to find love, while the friends who sympathized with him at the beginning of the play find their own significant others, and Jordan feels increasingly alone.

Significant Other explores the difficulty of having no one to commit to, despite a willingness to commit. Examining the expectation that “everyone has their person,” Significant Other shows how the real dating world is much less idyllic, filled with awkward moments, rejection, and disappointment.

The dialogue of the play is natural and humorous, and often prompted bouts of laughter from the audience. The characters are hilarious but at the same time recognizable, as each has their distinct archetypes but also feel like people in our own lives. The setting is modern and familiar, with the characters speaking like real people and going through things that everyone can relate to, like having a crush on someone at work, or sending a risky email that didn’t pay off. Significant Other also makes commentary on the experience of dating as a gay man and how that poses

difficulties in contrast to the love lives of his female friends.

Beyond just dating, Significant Other also tackles the terrifying idea of growing up and seeing your friends outgrow you and move on with their lives. Showing the progress of Jordan and his friends through their late 20s, when people begin to settle down, Significant Other can strike a chord with college students who may see their friends finding significant others and be feeling left out. The play is also a commentary about isolation and loneliness and the feeling of inadequacy when one feels alone.

The show is presented through the lens of Jordan. With the exception of the wedding scenes, everything unfolds as stories that Jordan is telling to his friends, with different parts of the stage lighting up to show both the present time and the past events that have transpired. As a result, the show has an interesting continuity, where all the events that Jordan is recounting have occurred before, and the audience sees his stories through his perspective at the same time as his friends do, making the audience an extension of his friend group.

Jordan’s grandmother (Hadley Durkee, MCAS ’20) stole the show. Appearing from time to time on one warmly set-up corner of the stage, Jordan’s grandmother remains a constant in Jordan’s life, telling the same stories and reassuring Jordan that everything will turn out well, while Jordan’s countenance changes in each encounter with his grandmother, showing his increasing anxiety and sadness.

Significant Other does not have a perfect ending, but perhaps that’s what makes it so genuine. Nothing is always going to turn out just the way you want it to—that’s just life. n

Michelle Fornabai Cements Art in Architecture

By Tonie Chase Heights Staff

Combining various forms of art and art techniques creates depth. For instance, adding visuals to a song can change or elucidate the meaning. Who knew concrete—yes, the building material—could also be used for music and visual art simultaneously?

Michelle Fornabai, a Boston Artist Fellow, took this cross-over technique and reinvented it through her project, Act 3 Mix: ‘To a Water Lily. The past CURRENTS event on Thursday hosted Fornabai as the guest speaker. Students gathered in a Devlin art classroom, where she revealed her journey to executing this performance-project twice.

CURRENTS is an initiative started

by BC professor, Hartmut Austen, to “fill gaps in our [Art, Art History, and Film] curriculum with other thoughts … or views of art-making and topics that are not necessarily fitting or not appearing in our regular curriculum.”

“Act 3 Mix: To a Water Lily is a part

of concrete poetry—10 conceptual acts of architecture in concrete, which is a decade-long conceptual art project based on architectural construction documents,” Fornabai said. “The mixed design of the concrete was engineered to be less dense than water, which means that it would float.

Its vibrational setting was used to affect the aggregate and pigments of the mix.”

Concrete and ink are her primary tools in architecture, and they did not fail to take stage during her two recent exhibitions: the first in October 2018 in Government Center and the second in February 2019 in celebration of City Hall’s 50-year anniversary.

A ‘mix’ is what she describes as the proportions of concrete and aggregate. Fornabai combines this concept with musical art, as she recreated Edward MacDowell’s “To a Water Lily” in 143 chords captured in floating cylinders.

Put simply, it is almost like frozen music, and different notes freeze in certain positions, creating air bubbles that make different sounds. As a table vibrates, it shakes the concrete and creates sound. In addition to auditory aesthetics, the posi-

TONIE CHASE / HEIGHTS STAFF

Artist Michelle Fornabai discussed and showcased her unique approach to art.

tioning of the cylinders makes for good visual satisfaction.

Fornabai prefaced her abridged, six-day performance summary by introducing some of her own mistakes while critiquing her own poetic and visual art. “[The word] ‘I,’ the nominative, first-person, is the proper subject, so by misplacing the work and misusing themes borrowed

from the current context, ‘I’ will misunderstand ‘I’ … and I will suggest something is a miss to indicate what may be missing from contemporary critiques,” Fornabai said.

“I trained as an architect,” Fornabai added. “I am a conceptual artist sometimes mistaken as an architect who uses architecture as a mean. The architects tell me I’m an artist. The artists say I’m an architect.” n

Every time I’ve heard the word “icebreaker” during my freshman year, I stress about the same question: Do I say I’m from Chicago, or do I just say I’m from Illinois?

The reality is that neither is accurate—I’m from Wilmette, on the north shore of the Chicago suburbs, a place that people who aren’t from the Midwest don’t know exists. I realized this when my roommate asked if I was from “the part near Nebraska,” as well as from other native east-coasters who gave me confused looks when I tried to explain that “near Wisconsin” does not mean away from civilization.

It doesn’t surprise me that almost no one at Boston College understands the Midwest—I myself was vocal about how I was bored of the Midwest and longed to go east for college. Still, I wanted to solve this problem. I needed a reference point.

And that’s when it dawned on me: Instead of complaining about the tundra I call home, I could show everyone my favorite of its few redeeming qualities—I practically live on the set of everyone’s favorite movies, whether they know it or not.

Now, when it’s my turn to answer the icebreaker, I say I live “where Ferris Bueller lives.”

First, though, I need to backtrack.

Ever since I watched Star Wars as a (probably too young) child, I’ve loved film.

I’m not talking “I spend a lot of time on Netflix.” Rather, I would describe it as “I spend long periods of time updating my Letterboxd account and I talk about Lady Bird way too much.” Of course, one of the first must-see movies I ever watched was The Breakfast Club. It soon became one of my favorites, and from there, I fell in love with John Hughes movies—the ’80s classics everyone knows and loves.

While I will always love the absurdity of Home Alone and the cute romance in Sixteen Candles, what made Hughes’ movies stand out was not only the stories they told, but rather the type of familiarity in his movies that wasn’t present in any others. Most of his films take place on the north shore of Chicago, yet people who don’t live there can get through most of Hughes’ filmography without really noticing. But, to me, his movies felt like an homage to my home.

In Sixteen Candles, I didn’t just see Samantha’s house. I saw a house just down the street from my brother’s swim practice. In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I didn’t just see some windy road by Cameron’s house. I saw the ravines, an area my friends and I drive through to get to the beach. In The Breakfast Club, I didn’t just see Shermer High School as a random high school. I saw a reference to Shermer Road, a frequent shortcut I take to Target. In Home Alone, I didn’t just see Kevin’s chaotic home or his nameless church. I saw a house a few blocks away from my own and the church where I get my Halloween pumpkins each year, right across from my preschool.

As much as I grew tired of the north shore of Chicago as college drew closer, I also grew to appreciate the way John Hughes made my mundane corner of the Midwest become the place that some of the most memorable laughs and love stories call home. This realization reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from Lady Bird, when Sister Sarah Joan tells Lady Bird that her writing makes her love for Sacramento clear. Lady Bird, feeling the same way about Sacramento as I do about the Midwest, says that she was “just paying attention,” to which Sister Sarah Joan responds, “Aren’t they the same thing? Love and attention?” It was not until I came to love the way John Hughes drew attention to the north shore of Chicago that I realized maybe I did love the place I wanted to leave so much.

As Ferris Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Just kidding, I’m not going to be cliché. Really, my favorite quote comes from Cameron, when he says, “Ferris Bueller, you’re my hero.” Ferris and the characters that Hughes created helped me grow to love my little slice of the Midwest.

Ferris Bueller, you’re my hero.

Maggie DiPatri is the assoc. photo editor for The Heights. She can be reached at @maggiedipatri on Twitter.

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Monday, March 18, 2019

Time Springs Forward, Heights Rewinds ALLYSON MOZELIAK / HEIGHTS EDITOR

By Heights Editors and Staff Each March, people all around the world do something peculiar: We collectively enter into a pact to lose an hour of sleep (a pact that is quite troubling for college students who are recovering from spring break vacation). We essentially alter time, reset clocks to be an hour forward, and usher in the looming sunshine-saturated summer days, even when it’s still snowing in Boston.

But what if we could collectively enter into an agreement to go back in time? Time travel has historically acted as a seemingly impossible scientific moonshot and an ever-present pop culture phenomenon (think Back to the Future, Donnie Darko, or even “Year 3000” by the Jonas Brothers). The opportunity to travel back in time is an exciting prospect for many who feel that they had missed out on a musical era or cinematic moment that was made just for them. In honor of daylight saving time, The Heights decided to take matters into its own hands and send readers back in time by recounting the sonic and cinematic success of years long passed.

‘Rumors’ - Fleetwood Mac, 1977 Emily Himes, Assoc. Arts Editor Rumours is quite possibly one of the most timeless records ever released. The album, replete with a cohesive air of mystique that ties each song to the next, still features an impressively dynamic collection of music. The heavy bassline sounds of “The Chain” are dramatically different from the light and airy picking heard throughout “Never Going Back Again,” WARNER BROS. RECORDS but both are easily recognizable pieces of Rumours.

Ultimately, Rumours is held together by two key aspects: John McVie on the bass and Mick Fleetwood on the drums. The two carry a significantly strong and steady rhythm that marches through much of the record, from “Don’t Stop” to “The Chain” to “Gold Dust Woman.” The duo gives the album a sense of stability, despite its otherwise chaotic undertones and overall theme.

Any sort of commentary on Rumours wouldn’t be complete without noting its incredibly desperate lyrical theme: broken hearts and betrayal. It’s the poster child for the ultimate breakup album—it’s the Tapestry and Blood on the Tracks that still proves as resonant and popular today as it was in 1977. It continues to inspire and console us over 40 years later—we probably trust the album far too much when it comes to providing reassuring comfort. But Fleetwood Mac should know a thing or two about heartbreak—at the time of Rumours’ release, the band was in the throes of ultimate drama.

When the album was written, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, longtime couple and both integral parts of the band, had just broken up. On top of it, Christine and John McVie had just gotten divorced, and Fleetwood began having an affair with Nicks the same year. It’s pretty impressive the album was written at all.

Rumours doubles as one of rock music’s timeless releases and a collection of songs that provides solace to people (and horses) of all ages going through countless different trials and tribulations. The album itself is a messy, complicated, cathartic release that somehow got tied together with a bow. The album has persisted in popularity for decades and likely will for many more. As long as life is complicated and people keep cheating on each other, Rumours will have a place on our playlists.

‘Heathers’ - Michael Lehmann, 1989 Jillian Ran, Asst. Arts Editor Among the sunnier, more earnest high school movies that reigned supreme during the ’80s, Heathers stands apart as a cynical satire of teenage dynamics.

Provocative even for its time, there’s no doubt that anything like it could be produced today.

The film follows a clever teenage girl, Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder), who is dissatisfied with her superficial friendships with the three most popular girls in school, the titular Heathers. She falls in love with bad boy outsider J.D. (Christian Slater), and the couple proceeds to wreak havoc in the school, staging a series of murders disguised as suicides in order to get revenge on their tormentors.

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Heathers is merciless in the way that it exposes the hypocrisy of high school life. In one of its most ironic twists, the shallow, cruel characters who are murdered become even more popular after their deaths, and their classmates’ memory of them transforms them into more complex personalities than they ever were. “I love my dead, gay son!” proclaims a football player’s father at his funeral, mistakenly believing that the stereotypical NEW WORLD PICTURES dumb jock was some sort of tragic martyr. When a lonely, frequent target of bullying attempts suicide, she is criticized as just another follower trying to be like the popular kids.

Modern-day viewers will recognize familiar hallmarks of high school movies in Heathers—there are varsity jacket-clad jocks, hazy-eyed stoners, and a trio of mean girls. Yet there’s also an absurd element in the movie that creates a strange, almost dreamy atmosphere. The characters use a fictitious lingo instead of real teen slang, listen to a fake band whose smash hit is called “Teenage Suicide (Don’t Do It),” and spend an inordinate amount of their free time playing croquet.

Heathers, Slater’s breakout film, cemented his rebellious heartthrob image. In a post-Columbine world, viewers will likely view J.D.’s psychopathic musings and ever-present overcoat with more than a little skepticism, but removed from this context, there’s an undeniable charm to his character. Like the rest of the students populating Westerberg High, he’s an easily recognizable archetype: the motorcycle-riding rebel who’s above it all. Slater brings his own unique traits to the character with his raspy voice, Nicholson-esque eyebrows and wild, jerky hand gestures.

For fans of ’80s movies who are tired of rewatching The Breakfast Club, Heathers offers something with a little more bite. While at times more than a little on the nose, Heathers’ wicked sense of humor is still just as sharp 30 years later.

‘Paul’s Boutique’ - Beastie Boys, 1989 Danny Flynn, Copy Chief With the release of their 1986 Licensed to Ill, the Beastie Boys of New York City had their music dismissed by the greater hip-hop community and music critics as frat-hop fodder. They weren’t wrong to do so—the album was a commercial success but its simple beats and puerile lyrics did little for their mission to be recognized as giants in the hot genre. Still to this day, that album carries the charm of three geeks DEF JAM RECORDINGS from Brooklyn laying down their cheeky adventures on an easygoing track, but the trio clearly wanted to set themselves apart in the genre.

Enter 1989’s Paul’s Boutique, a trailblazing masterpiece laden with cultural references on steroids and a number of samples only legally feasible before Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc. In creating Paul’s Boutique, the Beastie Boys and the Dust Brothers revolutionized the art of production, particularly in multi-layered sampling—apart from the Beastie Boys’ rapping, nearly every sound on the album is sampled, drawing from 105 different songs for a 15-track album. The album’s end bookmark “B-Boy Bouillabaisse” boasts 24 samples alone.

The popular “Shake Your Rump” weaves 17 samples into the three-minute tune and shifts moods with each different clip—from a funk feel in an exclamation by Funky Four Plus One (“It’s the Joint!”) to the mellow sound of a rip from the group’s bong, affectionately identified by MCA as the Big Blue Bong. The sound of a shotgun blast plays immediately after.

Just as iconic as the samples are the lyrics that could star in a Genius.com contributor’s wet dream. Nearly

‘My Mother’s Fleabag Spring Cafe’

every stanza features a quip referencing pop culture— modern or dated, obvious or subtle. In “Shadrach,” the group makes an obvious reference to Kentucky Fried Chicken (“Got the girlies in the Coupe like the Colonel’s got the chickens”) and, in the same song, cements their unusual place in the hip-hop game in their lyric “Music for all, not just one people / And now we’re gonna bust with the Putney Swope sequel.” The Robert Downey Sr.-directed 1969 satirical flick follows a black executive who removes all but one white member from his advertising firm. A trio of MCs of Jewish heritage rightfully draws surprise from the hip-hop community, but the Beastie Boys assure that, like that one white guy in Putney Swope, they remain and will continue to do their thing for a reason.

‘Is This It’ - The Strokes, 2001 Kaylie Ramirez, Arts Editor The year is 2001. Your hair is greasy from all the sweat that accumulated at a packed show at CBGB last nite (oh, baby, I feel so down), and your Converse have acquired yet another layer of sticky, cheap beer. The liquor laws in New York City are but a mere suggestion because NYC cops, they ain’t too smart. Your cigarette dangles in between your dirty fingers, threatening to fall as you stumble in the garbage-lined streets of Manhattan.

And this is it.

The RCA RECORDS Strokes anthologized their precious, anything-goes New York with the short and oh so sweet three words “is this it” just in time for that vision to fade in the space of a New York minute. Is This It really is it—the last rock ’n’ roll album. Never again would a band with such sharp lyrics and such vicious riffs find a time and place so perfect to sink their teeth into.

Rugged recording made for a sound that Julian Casablancas likened to “your favorite blue jeans—not totally destroyed, but worn-in, comfortable” when describing his vision to the album’s producer, Gordon Raphael. From the purposefully imperfect recording style to Casablancas’ almost conversational lyrical delivery, the album sounds as if it’s being frantically relayed from the other end of a cell phone call with a longtime friend. Throughout the whole call, there’s an air of familiarity, an immediate understanding of the other person on the line—even when Casablancas’ slurred words are obscured by Fabrizio Moretti’s raucous background noise.

With the same don’t-give-a-f—k attitude of The Ramones on “Alone, Together” and the instant classic kick of “American Girl” on “Last Nite” (Casablancas admitted that Albert Hammond Jr.’s guitar riff was in fact stolen from Tom Petty in an interview with Rolling Stone.), Is This It immediately stood apart from its contemporaries. Oscillating between Nirvana-level discontent (“Is This It”) and chaotic complacency (“Barely Legal”), The Strokes took a cocktail of competing drugs and mixed it into one healthy dose of garage rock rebellion for an otherwise unresponsive rock scene. Try it once and you’ll like it, try to hide it—say, we’ve been doing this for 18 years.

‘The Room’ - Tommy Wiseau, 2003 Stephanie Liu, Copy Editor What is the best legacy a movie can leave? A 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes? All the Oscars? No. What really makes a movie spectacular is its cultural impact, even 16 years after its release. The masterpiece The Room— w r itten, directed, and acted by triple threat Tommy Wiseau—left i t s m a rk i n the history of Western cinema as the ultimate movie that is so bad that it ironically becomes a TOMMY WISEAU work of genius.

Beyond the dialogue that would barely make it past

‘Significant Other’

the third-grade level, the random side plots that never get resolved (How is Lisa’s mother doing with the cancer?), and random football playing, the real star of the movie is Wiseau as Johnny, a man who loves nothing more than his fiancé Lisa (Juliette Danielle). Wiseau’s performance is at once emotionless and hilarious, as his robotic, dubbed over voice (as Wiseau could not remember the short, choppy lines that he himself wrote) delivers beautiful lines, like “Chicken, Peter, you’re just a little chicken. Cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep!” His ghastly pale countenance and disheveled long hair is a stark contrast from the more naturally skin-toned cast, and his suit constantly seems two sizes too big for him, adding to the unintentional comedic tone.

Beyond the main plot, nothing else makes coherent sense in the movie. Character relationships are blurred and confusing—Denny (Philip Haldiman), a youngish boy, seems at times like a son to Lisa and Johnny, but later confesses to Johnny that he is also in love with Lisa. People wander in and out of the room that gives name to the movie randomly and bring up random plots that are only mentioned once, with no context and no further explanation. The entire movie leaves audiences wondering whether the movie is actually a drama or in fact an ingenious work of dark comedy.

You can argue the prestige of The Room all you want, but what other movie on this list has achieved a level of greatness to have an Oscar-nominated movie, The Disaster Artist, made about it? The movie that graced the world with such memes as “You’re tearing me apart, Lisa!” and “Oh, hi Mark!” has definitely left a resounding impact on our cultural legacy.

‘Back to Black’- Amy Winehouse, 2006 Gio Lavoile, Heights Staff In his 2015 documentary, Amy, director Asif Kapadia provides us with an image of Amy Winehouse that many did not see: Through candid photography and the aid of her close friends and loved ones, the audience is able to see Winehouse as a genuine artist, infatuated with her work but trapped in the complex and dangerous minefield of popularity.

Fame is a wild thing, one that can improve or hurt one’s life drastically, as we’ve seen through Winehouse and her fellow UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP member of the 27 club—the group of artists and other public figures who died at the age of 27—Kurt Cobain.

Winehouse was constantly lambasted by the media, portrayed as a fool and a lower class singer who could not handle the fame, and a horrible alcoholic. She was never able to achieve the peace that she sought, and, like many of her contemporaries who left us too soon, the question of what she could have been, and what music she could have gone on to make, will always linger.

But, even before she passed, Winehouse left us with a masterpiece in Back to Black, her second and final studio album, released in 2006.

Back to Black is an immaculate work of R&B, an ode to the pop and soul of the ’50s and ’60s and Motown sound, brought together with the aid of producer Mark Ronson. Through her lyrics, Winehouse provides listeners with a candid look into her life, detailing the ups and downs of addiction, love, and fame. Album opener “Rehab,” one of her most significant songs, is an upbeat tale of Winehouse fighting her demons, coming to terms with addiction, and, sadly, concluding in strong self-assuredness that she’ll be alright. The album is riddled with personal tales, detailing her tumultuous love life, as she expresses bitterness and cynicism toward love on the wonderfully moving tracks “Back to Black,” “You Know I’m No Good,” and “Love is a Losing Game.”

Winehouse narrates the album with the kind of frank and eye-opening lyricism that caused so many fans to fall in love with her music. The album is riddled with that same strong defiance and belief that, through it all, she’ll emerge okay, which only adds a tragic element to the music in retrospect. Back to Black is a wonderful album, drenched in soul and pop, as well as a brutally candid tale of a woman trying to find happiness in life.

It is not just a beautiful listen, but a tragic example of a complex, once-in-a-generation artist, victimized by the invasive society we live in, passing before the world could see what else she had in store. n

My Mother’s Fleabag riffed off jokes about Aristotle and eels at BC Theatre’s production of ‘Significant Other’ featured its lively Spring Cafe.........................................................................A15 strong performances and a relatable storyline......................A15

‘Five Feet Apart’.......................................... A14 ‘Arrested Development’................................ A14 ‘Triple Frontier’.......................................... A14