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NLRB COMMENT DEADLINE NEARS

JANUARY 15, 2020 SECOND WEEK VOL. 132, ISSUE 11

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OI Celebrates 100

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Moderates Pick Bennett at“Mock-us”

Law Student Sarah Gad Challenges Rep Bobby Rush PAGE 2

JEREMY LINDENFELD

CHLOE ZHENG

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LETTER: Stop the Displacement of Our Woodlawn Neighbors

ARTS: “Everyone Was Everyone’s Friend” at Brockhampton Concert

SPORTS: Women’s Basketball Sinks Wash U

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Like our Facebook page at facebook.com/chicagomaroon and follow @chicagomaroon on Instagram and Twitter to get the latest updates on campus news.

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Law Student Challenges Representative Bobby Rush for Congress

By ALEXIS FLORENCE Senior Reporter Sarah Gad, a third-year UChicago law student, launched a campaign in Illinois’s first congressional district against a longtime incumbent Representative Bobby Rush. Her campaign will focus on criminal justice reform, drawing from her personal experience as a formerly incarcerated individual.

Rush has occupied the congressional seat of Illinois’s first district since 1993, which includes the University and several South-Side communities, and stretches to the Chicago suburbs.

Rush is a civil rights activist from Woodlawn who founded the Black Panther party in Illinois, and defeated former president Barack Obama in 2000 when Obama challenged Rush.

“I would not be contesting a 27-year incumbent if there wasn’t a need for it. The community has asked me to because I understand the issues that are affecting our district from both sides of the aisle, I have personal experience with every issue that I am advocating for,” Gad said in an interview with The Maroon.

During her third year of medical school before starting law school, Gad was in a car accident that she describes as life-altering. In her view, being liberally prescribed opioids while being treated for her injuries began an addiction that led to her arrest for writing herself illegal prescriptions. Gad was thrown into maximum-security detention for her nonviolent drug offense at Cook County Jail.

Gad says she is uniquely equipped to call out and solve problems in the criminal justice system because she experienced sexual assault, racial discrimination, and solitary confinement while in prison. She credits this experience as giving her the determination to take on a forceful incumbent.

“After you experience something like that it instills in you the fire, the vigor that’s going to make you really advocate for that passionately to the extent that it needs to be,” Gad said.

In her campaign, Gad is pushing to end discrimination against formerly incarcerated individuals. After being

released from prison, Gad said she felt treated like a second-class citizen as she struggled to find a job and housing.

“The system imposes so many collateral consequences that just continue to punish you after you paid your debt to society,” Gad said.

Gad said her interest and work in criminal justice reform began after working with a lawyer who sued the Cook County Jail on her behalf. “I realized the only way that I am going to be able to overcome this trauma of what happened to me in this jail was to incorporate it into my life in a meaningful way,” Gad said.

As a law student, Gad has examined research on drug addiction in prisons and started a nonprofit called Addiction to Action that works with correctional facilities to provide medication to fight drug addiction among inmates.

In her second year of law school, Gad was invited to work in Washington, D.C., for the legislative affairs division of the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates for changes to U.S. drug policies. This experience—and especially seeing representatives struggle to answer questions about the opioid crisis—led Gad to run for elected office.

“It was just mortifying to me that our senior-most members of Congress are drafting a response to the deadliest public health crisis in modern history and don’t even know basic facts about where the drugs are coming from,” Gad said.

Gad has criticized Rush for missing votes in Congress and for voting for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which she says harmed communities in the first district.

In addition to criminal justice reform, Gad pushes including instituting Pell Grants in state and federal prisons so that inmates can receive an education to aid their rehabilitation back to society. Gad also hopes to tackle the opioid crisis through an approach that focuses on rehabilitation and medical solutions to drug addiction.

Gad advocates for a variety of other reforms, including increasing teacher pay, greater access to affordable hous-

Sarah Gad at the Beverly Fire Department. courtesy of sarah gad 2 0 2 0 ing, fighting against climate change, and implementing policies to reduce gun violence.

“People’s lives, their liberty, is on the line and we need somebody who is going to get in there and actually act aggressively and act on these issues.

And somebody who understands them on a human level, on a personal level,” Gad said.

Gad hopes to draw on her medical-school experiences to make changes to the current health-care system.

While advocating for public universal health care, she criticized existing proposals.

“I believe that we need to give everybody health care, but I don’t think Medicare for All is going to be as easy as people make it seem.” Gad said. “If we go about it in the way that [politicians] are talking about it right now, it’s just going to bankrupt hospitals and drive doctors into cash-only concierge services.”

Gad believes many health-care problems can be solved through preventative measures and primary care physicians. “We are really going to have to up our game as far as preventative health care goes if we really want to make Medicare for All work,” Gad said.

As her campaign largely draws on her experiences at UChicago and as a Woodlawn resident, Gad acknowledges that she is still getting to know the suburban communities in the district.

She has been campaigning in suburban communities on issues including pensions, the opioid crisis, and affordable housing.

“My hope is a strong, unified first district that is working, welcoming, and forgiving—where everyone has a chance, and a second one if they need it,” Gad said.

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With a Month to Go in Iowa, UChicago for Bernie Sanders Starts Final Push at Midway Rally

By CAROLINE KUBZANSKY News Editor On Thursday, UChicago for Bernie Sanders held a rally on the Midway to kick off its last frenetic month of organizing for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders as the clock ticks down to the Iowa Caucuses on February 3. An organizer estimated that about 50 people were in attendance, with more people joining the crowd as the event went on.

With Sanders picking up points in first-in-the-nation Iowa, the rally’s organizers told The Maroon they hope that the afternoon’s event will spark the momentum Sanders needs to place well in Iowa, the primary, and the upcoming general election.

The rally focused on Sanders’s engagement with worker movements, including UChicago’s Graduate Students United (GSU) and the threat of war with Iran. The event featured a number of GSU–affiliated speakers, candidate for

IL-7 congressional seat Anthony Clark, and a student veteran at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

James Skretta, a graduate student in the music department and a member of GSU, welcomed those present and asked them to think of themselves as workers at the University.

“You are a worker the day you set foot inside of a classroom in any country that you live in. This education system is designed to make you work. So, when you put your pen to paper, when you make a keystroke at the University of Chicago, what are you doing?” Skretta asked the crowd. “You are generating capital for our beloved institution over here! You are workers!”

Skretta also discussed problems with the healthcare system before he invited Clark to take the megaphone.

Clark, in light of the escalating conflicts with Iran, focused on his experience of serving in the military to pay for school and other basic expenses, saying that such choices are common among low-income people with limited options

for employment.

Of Sanders’s opponents, Clark said, “They say that health care is a human right, they say childcare is a human right, but then they follow it up with language of choice and options. Those are languages and tools of the oppressor. What choice or options do individuals really have in struggle?”

“Understand the importance of this movement. There’s no other option besides Bernie,” Clark said. “You cannot defeat capitalism with more capitalism.

You cannot reform a broken system.”

Kit Ginsky, an organizer of UChicago for Bernie Sanders, spoke next. Ginsky connected last spring’s GSU labor action to Sanders’s longtime support for the labor movement and called for unity among potential Sanders supporters regardless of their backgrounds.

“We all need to stand together, whether we went to the University of Chicago or the school of hard knocks,” Ginsky said. “This is not a time for a pinky promise, this is not the time to mourn, it is the time to organize.”

Maria Bell and James Skretta speak at a rally in support of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. jeremy lindenfeld

Noah Zeldin, a member of GSU, the German department, and the group Socialist Alternative, reminded the crowd of Sanders’s show of support for UChicago’s GSU last spring and declared that GSU will succeed if Sanders does.

“The members of the billionaire class are ruthless and will stop at nothing to protect and increase their wealth and power. A Sanders victory is a step forward on the path we all share,” Zeldin said.

Zeldin told the crowd that he had recently submitted a proposal to GSU that the organization formally endorse Sanders in the 2020 primary. After his speech, Zeldin told The Maroon he was unsure as to how the organization would decide to process his suggestion— whether by a vote, a discussion on leadership, or otherwise.

The organizers are planning to capitalize on Sanders’s rising status in early-state polls with canvassing trips to Iowa and weekly phone banks.

“This weekend, we’re taking 45 people to Iowa from Chicago. I think after the break, a lot of people came back to campus coming off of Bernie’s surge, there’s a lot of momentum. We just had our biggest phone bank ever,” Ginsky said.

“People are starting to pay a bit more attention now in a place like Illinois that doesn’t vote until March 17,” Skretta added.

Ginsky and Skretta see the increasing manpower of the Sanders campaign as the key to a victory in Iowa, as well as in the primary and the general. They see their job as facilitating Chicago students’ involvement in the Sanders ground game.

“When Bernie wins, it will be because the campaign has structured itself and organized itself to accommodate the huge influx of volunteers that have been activated by the campaign’s momentum,” Ginsky said. “We want to see as many young people from Chicago as possible to participate in that, and if we can be a conduit to connect people to the campaign and this work, that’s really what we’re here to do.”

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Gearing up for Primaries, UC Dems Send Students to Iowa

By CAROLINE KUBZANSKY News Editor The University of Chicago Democrats (UC Dems) are preparing to facilitate canvassing, door-knocking, and organizing for UChicago students up and down the Democratic ballot as the Iowa Caucuses and Illinois primary approach.

In an interview with The Maroon, UC Dems secretary Lauren Cole, communications director Andy Hatem, and operations manager Daniel Green discussed the organization’s plans for Iowa, Illinois, and beyond.

UC Dems organizational policy prohibits official endorsements in primary races because the group’s membership draws on different parts of the Democratic coalition that often disagree with one another. Hatem said that while about a quarter of the group’s active members were involved in “UChicago Students for” organizations, many more were engaged with a particular figure in the 2020 race.

“We don’t endorse, but our members might have preferences, and we will make it easy for people to get involved,” Hatem said. Once there is a nominee, UC Dems plan to assist the candidate via campus outreach and organizing.

Green said that UC Dems does not anticipate arbitrating problems or major disagreements between campus candidate groups as the historically large and contentious primary process progresses toward its conclusion.

“I don’t know if we necessarily have

a role right now, because that’s the nature of the primary process, people are going to disagree. What we’re going to be important in is the old saying, “vote blue no matter who.” Our priority is electing Democrats, and whoever wins the primary is going to need an on-campus organization, and that can be us,” Green said.

In the meantime, UC Dems is planning to take interested students to Iowa the weekend before the caucuses (February 1–2) and connect them with campaigns to help canvas. They will do the same in the weeks before March 17, the date of the Illinois primary.

In addition to the 2020 national elections, UC Dems plans to send assistance to a number of state- and local-level campaigns for different representatives, using the same tactics as they did in 2018, when the group turned out over 100 canvassers for different races in Illinois.

“You can get a lot done on the back of a presidential campaign turning out voters, and that means [assisting] progressive candidates running for state representatives and state senate seats,” Hatem said.

Presently, UC Dems is not in intensive contact with any of the three major candidate groups on campus: UChicago Students for Bernie, UChicago Students for Warren, and UChicago Students for Pete. Cole posited that their engagement with UC Dems has so far been minimal because they are aware that the group will not be making an endorsement.

“It makes sense that they wouldn’t

use us as a tool this early on because there’s not much we can do to help them,” Cole added.

University-affiliated groups, or Registered Student Organizations (RSOs), are subject to certain rules on political involvement because they receive University money. This is one of the reasons that UC Dems have not engaged heavily with any campaign thus far, especially when organized groups for each candidate are interfacing with them instead.

“Because [the candidate groups] aren’t RSOs, they can do a lot more engaging directly with the campaigns than we can. We aren’t supporting any candidate; we are just taking people to Iowa. We’ll be reaching out to campaigns when we go to Iowa to make sure that people have places to canvas in,” Green said.

However, all three said they were expecting good turnout from the three major groups at their “mock-us” on Monday, as well as student representatives for less-popular candidates.

“We’ve already had [students involved in] certain campaigns come out in force, and other campaigns say, ‘we’ll see,’” Green said.

Going forward, Hatem, Green, and Cole said that the group hopes to provide a forum for students to hear more about the remaining primary candidates, and will be hosting a meeting where groups can pitch their upcoming opportunities to garner support for their candidates at different events, on trips, and through outreach initiatives.

Second-year Cas Crevecoeur, standing behind the “E,” marches with the Biden campaign in summer 2019. courtesy of cas crevecoeur

Bernie Earns Nearly Half of Votes in Dems Mock Caucus

By CAROLINE KUBZANSKY News Editor Representatives from campaigns for Senators Michael Bennett, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders (A.B. ’64) all reached viability at the University of Chicago Democrats (UC Dems) “mockus,” or mock caucus, Monday night. To be viable in a caucus setup, a candidate’s group must number at least 15 percent of

the total number of people present.

Sanders took a plurality of votes, with 47 percent of those attending ultimately caucusing for him, while Warren took 36 percent, and Bennett took 17 percent.

Fifty-three people were in attendance, according to the UC Dems count.

UC Dems operations manager Daniel Green read the contending candidates off his list, allowing time for people who supported each candidate to

go stand in a separate part of the room.

Each group then made a speech for their standard-bearer before the first “count” took place of how many people supported each candidate. If a group did not comprise 15 percent of the total attendance, it was nonviable, and its members had the option to switch their affiliation.

There were two rounds of speeches and opportunities to recombine, with counts taking place after both.

Bennett’s surprising result rested in part on the weak performance of a number of other candidates: Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, Andrew Yang, and a satirical Tom Steyer delegation were all present for the first round of mock-caucusing, but were not viable when taken alone.

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they engaged the large group of “undecideds” in the middle of the room. The two large groups’ back-and-forth mimicked the tug-of-war between their candidates for the party’s progressive wing as the Iowa caucuses get closer.

Second-year caucus attendee Dinesh Das Gupta began the night in the center of the room, and classified himself as a “hard undecided.”

“I like Warren, I like Bernie…. I am so concerned about whether they can beat Donald Trump. And as a young voter, I would like to see somebody under 70 in office. And Pete’s been a mayor. Has he been anything more than a mayor? No,” he said.

Students caucus for Bernie. chloe zheng

Das Gupta added that Buttigieg would be a good fit for a lower-level position in the federal government.

Second-year CJ Jones showed up to the caucus to support Bennett’s longshot bid for the White House. He ended the night with just under 20 percent of the vote.

“He’s kind of under the radar,” Jones said of Bennett. “But I think if you’re somebody who doesn’t really like any of the candidates, or is kind of torn between bad choices, I think Michael Bennett is really an option you should consider.”

Jones emphasized Bennett’s progressive proposals, such as universal pre-K, and role as a member of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” that helped reform immigration policy in 2013. In the next round, Bennett’s four supporters combined with the Biden, Buttigieg, and Steyer groups to reach viability in the next round.

Medical student Shivam Dave, a Warren supporter, said that income inequality is “the biggest issue that dominates this conversation.” While both Warren and Sanders have spoken to the issue, “Elizabeth Warren has done so at a greater level of nuance,” he said.

Along with noting Warren’s accomplishments on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and her plans for a wealth tax, Dave referenced his personal connection when making his case for Warren’s attention to detail and empathy with people on the ground.

“I’m from Texas. There’s a maternal

mortality crisis in Texas, particularly among black women. Elizabeth Warren knows that. She has a plan for that. And I don’t mean that as a meme, I mean that she has taken the time to understand these issues that occur at the individual level,” he said.

He also drew a contrast between Warren and her chief rival, Sanders, on the basis of her intersectional appeal.

“In 2020, we can’t simply look at the problem through a class-based lens. We need to look at it through the lens of gender, through the lens of race,” Dave said.

“And that is one area in which I think Elizabeth Warren surpasses Bernie Sanders.”

First-year Alexis Valencia began as undecided, but ended up joining the Warren delegation. He cited the strength of Warren supporter Dave’s speech as a reason for his newfound support for Warren.

“Coming in here, I wasn’t quite sure who I wanted to vote for…. What I experienced here was that it was hard to decide if it was the candidate themselves who I liked, or the speaker. I really hope that, later on, I’ll learn more about each of their policies,” Valencia said.

In the speech for Sanders’s group, undergraduate Akash Mehta immediately addressed Dave’s charges on race and class, using Sanders’s background as a University of Chicago alumnus.

“No politician in America has worked for so hard or for so long to build [a] multiracial, working-class movement,” he

began. “When Sanders was an undergraduate here, he was the president for the Congress for Racial Equality, and got arrested fighting to end University-segregated housing.”

Mehta also touched on Sanders’s electability.

“Is he electable? Is all of this just talk if it can’t be done? Why does [Trump] win? What draws Trump voters is that he’s running against establishment, corrupt Democrats. I am the voice—of Democrats who aren’t represented in Washington, and aren’t represented in Harvard Law, at McKinsey [where Pete Buttigieg worked from 2007 to 2010], at the corporate law firms Elizabeth Warren has worked at,” he said.

Bennett’s third-place finish, at a respectable 17 percent, represented within the University the problem for Democrats this election cycle: Some voters are uncomfortable with the more disruptive ideology of the Warren and Sanders campaigns, but uninspired by the most obvious default choice, former vice president Joe Biden. That leaves them picking among a plethora of remaining candidates.” In the real Iowa Caucus, many more moderate Democrats have made their choice Pete Buttigieg. The most recent Iowa poll has Sanders on top with 20 percent.

A real “satellite caucus” will be taking place on February 3 at 7 p.m. in University Church for voters registered in Iowa.

Over 12,000 Comments Submitted on NLRB Rule as Deadline Looms

By MILES BURTON News Editor The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) collected more than 12,000 comments about a proposed federal rule that could hamper graduate student unionization efforts across the country—more than any other rule proposed by the NLRB in 2019.

Following an extension of the comment period in November, the deadline to receive those comments is now Wednesday, January 15.

In September, the NLRB issued a proposed rule that would define undergraduate and graduate student workers as nonemployees under the National Labor Relations Act (NLR A). If the rule becomes permanent it will overturn the Columbia decision, the 2016 NLRB adjudication that expanded the labor protections afforded to student workers under the NLRA. As part of the federal rule-making process, the NLRB is required to solicit public comment on the proposed rule.

In recent weeks, Graduate Students

United (GSU) has pressed supporters to submit comments in support of graduate student workers via social media.

“Our members and supporters are incredibly thoughtful and creative, and they’re approaching this in lots of ways,” GSU said in a statement to The Maroon.

Supporters have argued in comments that the University relies on work done by graduate students and contested “the Board’s claims this rule will decrease instability in this area of

labor law,” GSU said.

While the Board has traditionally used adjudications of individual cases to establish precedent, the rule-making process (which includes the public comment period) would make it more complicated for a future majority on the Board to reinstate the rights granted by the Columbia decision.

GSU said that it was undeterred by the prospect of the rule becoming permanent.

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If Proposed Rule Passes, Student Workers Lose Employee Status CONTINUED FROM PG. 5

us, our students, our faculty mentors, and the University as a whole. A poorly reasoned rule from a wildly anti-labor NLRB doesn’t change that,” GSU said.

Student Government’s (SG’s) executive slate has also urged students on social media to submit comments on the proposed rule.

“All undergraduates benefit from

the labor of grad students workers, and we encourage them to submit comments to the NLRB in support,” the SG executive slate told The Maroon. “Grad students have helped us

in countless ways, and it’s our turn to help them.”

Comments can be submitted until January 15 online or by mail to the Board’s offices in Washington, D.C.

2020 Hopeful Joe Walsh (M.P.P. ’91) Talks Trumpism

By DIMITRIY LEKSANOV News Reporter At a discussion in Ida Noyes Hall on Wednesday night, Republican presidential candidate Joe Walsh (M.P.P. ’91) discussed Donald Trump’s presidency and the effect that it has had on Republicans throughout the United States, while also praising Minnesota senator and Democratic presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar. He was interviewed by Monica Davey, the Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times.

Walsh, a graduate of UChicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, unsuccessfully ran for public office twice during the 1990s before winning the U.S. House of Representatives seat for Illinois’s 8th District in 2010. However, Walsh served only one term, losing to Senator Tammy Duckworth in 2012. Since leaving Congress in 2013, Walsh has had a career in conservative talk radio, and his program, The Joe Walsh Show, became nationally syndicated in 2017.

Throughout the 2010s, Walsh was closely affiliated with the Tea Party movement, a political movement focused on fiscal conservatism and right-wing populism. Despite supporting current president Donald Trump in the leadup to the 2016 presidential election, Walsh has opposed Trump since the summer of 2018, which prompted him to launch his presidential campaign in August 2019.

At the IOP event, Walsh began by discussing upcoming steps for his campaign, saying, “We’re going to Iowa tomorrow,” and with Trump as the incumbent president, “it’s a battle to get attention, to get people to notice this race.”

One additional difficulty for Walsh and other Republican challengers running against an incumbent president is that the Republican party is not required to even hold a primary or feature the

challengers on the ballot in every state.

As a result, Walsh said that while he expects to be on the ballot in 35–38 states, certain states, such as Illinois, will not include him on the ballot.

“Right now, in nine states, Republicans will not be able to vote for president…. It’s wrong,” he said.

Walsh was also heavily critical of Trump throughout the talk, repeatedly calling Trump “unfit” to be president.

On the topic of Trump’s impeachment last month, Walsh said, “I think he needed to be impeached…. I think he ought to probably be removed from office.”

When Davey asked whether there was any particular incident that caused Walsh to begin to reverse his original support of Trump, Walsh said, “Helsinki in 2018, when he said, ‘I stand with Putin and not with my own people,’…that was the final straw.” Walsh was referring to the July 2018 summit between Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland, after which Trump said that he believed Putin’s claim that Russia played no part in interfering with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Walsh also criticized Trump personally. “I think our political system is broken…. The problem is, Trump’s a horrible human being,” he said. Walsh also discussed Trump’s repeated lies to the public as a reason that he ceased to support Trump, saying, “More and more and more, it was his dishonesty.”

Prior to and during his presidential campaign, Walsh received criticism for racist and incendiary statements, including Tweets related to “birther” conspiracy theories regarding Obama’s citizenship status. When asked by Davey about racist claims that he had made in the past, Walsh said, “I stepped over the line several times. I said ugly, personal things…that I feel bad about. All I can do is own what I said, apologize where it’s

worthy.”

Walsh added, “Some of my rhetoric helped lead to Trump, and I have to live with that.”

He was then asked if there are any particular people to which he would like to apologize, to which Walsh replied, “President Obama would be on top of that list.”

Walsh also repeatedly said that, during his campaign, he has found that support for Trump among Republicans has decreased: “70–80 percent of Republicans I’ve met in Iowa have told me privately, ‘I like some of the things [Trump] has done, but I can’t take any more of this chaos.’”

Walsh also criticized fellow Republicans for failing to voice criticism of the president, suggesting that it may be out of cowardice or fear: “I don’t think I can say the word ‘chickenshit,’ but if I did, I’d be talking about Republicans like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Nikki Haley…. They’re not afraid of Trump, they’re afraid of Trump voters if they stuck their neck out like me.”

When asked about what the state of the Republican party will be after

the 2020 presidential election, Walsh expressed hopes for positive changes.

“After Trump loses in 2020, there will be a bloodbath…. There will be a lot of Joe Walshes coming out…. There will be a fight for the soul of the Republican party,” he said.

Walsh also suggested that he may be willing to vote for a Democrat if it means helping to vote Trump out of office, saying, “I would rather have a socialist in the White House than Donald Trump.”

When asked which of the Democratic candidates running for president this year he preferred, Walsh named Senator Amy Klobuchar. “If I could pick Amy Klobuchar to be president tomorrow, I would.”

During the audience Q&A session, Walsh was asked what the strategy of the Republican party should be after Trump leaves office. “The Republican party should hold firm to the fiscal issues,” Walsh said. “But on the social issues, the Republican party has to be more embracing to people of color, to women, to LGBT people. If we’re not more tolerant to people who don’t look like me, man, the Republican party is going to die.”

Joe Walsh speaks at the Institute of Politics. courtesy iop

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Millennia of History in 100 Years the oi’s Complicated Origins And Vision Of A Future

By Rory Nevins and Andrew Farry Grey City Reporters

The University of Chicago campus has a facade of history pre-carved into its newly quarried stones. Construction on Hutchinson Hall started in 1890, but its design steals unabashedly from Oxford’s ancient Christ Church college. On a campus so crowded with buildings that project more history than they possess, the unassuming Oriental Institute (OI) is peculiar.

Every square foot of the OI, every moment of its existence, is charged with history—the history of a region halfway across the world, but also a story of innovative scholarship.

2019 marked the 100th anniversary of the OI, an occasion which saw the history and future of the Institute spill out of the building which normally contains them.

Advertisements celebrating the anniversary pepper the University campus and the streets of Chicago, all pointing back toward Institute. The OI itself is as much an artifact as the titanic limestone lamassu it holds within. To reach the galleries inside the Institute, a visitor must pass beneath a tympanum depicting a traditionally dressed and posed ancient Egyptian man, symbolizing “the East,” handing hieroglyphs, which act as a symbol of knowledge, to a barrel-chested and clean-shaven white man who symbolizes “the West.” Each man is flanked by other men intended to represent the best of their respective cultures.

“The West” props one foot up on the stones of a ruin. The carving, designed by sculptor Ulric Ellerhusen and put in place in 1931, is like the name of the Oriental Institute itself—a reminder of the past, a time when scholars considered the ancient cultures of the Middle East separately from their modern descendants; a time when the University’s idealized “man of the West” was

enough to reflect the totality of its student body. The name and the tympanum, much like the OI’s potsherds and clay tablets, direct modern students to look to history to understand.

Speaking into The Maroon microphone stand, seemingly out of place on the antique wooden table within his high-ceilinged office, the current director of the OI, Christopher Woods, recounted the establishment of the Institute. The OI was founded in 1919, Woods said, but its foundation was “closely tied to the origins of the University itself.”

In childhood, William Rainey Harper, a prodigy who went on to helm the University, was fascinated with Hebrew. After finishing his postgraduate studies at age 20, though before he came to Chicago, Harper taught Semitic languages at Yale. It was there that he met and briefly taught James Henry Breasted, the man who would go on to found the OI. The same year Breasted was his student, the nascent University of Chicago was wooing Harper with an offer to be its first president. When the two men parted ways in 1891, Harper suggested that Breasted continue his studies in Germany, and promised him a position in Chicago upon his return. “[Breasted] had an idea that was pretty radical at the time: that civilization didn’t start in Greece and Rome—an idea that people often suppose—but that, in the West, [civilization] really has its antecedents in these much older civilizations of the Middle East,” Woods said in an interview.

Breasted took his mentor’s suggestion and spent three years studying Egyptology in Germany. During that time, he also met and married Frances Hart, another American student studying at a German university. Before the Breasteds came to the newly founded University of Chicago to claim the faculty post Harper had promised,

OI founder James Henry Breasted and his family at Abu Simbel in 1906. photo courtesy of the oriental institute

the pair embarked on a University-funded working honeymoon to Egypt. Working with the consent of local governments, the Breasteds collected artifacts on nominal loan, promising to return them at some unspecified date. They finally arrived in Hyde Park in 1894. It was a fortunate time for a scholar of Breasted’s interests: Scientific archaeology was then beginning to develop as a professional field, and a growing mania in Europe and America for all things Egyptian brought generous funding for any scholars willing to augment their research by engaging in the then common, though now more morally contested, practice of carrying exciting artifacts away from their native lands.

By the early 20th century, the rule of “partage” had been established: “The agreement you would have with the local authorities was: ‘You can excavate, but we will split the artifacts, with the host country picking first,’ ” Woods explained.

Such practices have been phased out, according to Woods, and the OI now boasts “a very robust acquisitions committee.” The committee vets all prospective acquisitions for ethical provenance and archaeological value. The OI prefers to make models of artifacts for study in Chicago, leaving the artifacts to be exhibited in their country of origin.

“Like many institutions and human endeavors, [the OI] doesn’t always have altogether proud roots,” Woods said. “Certainly, early excavations had a strong colonial component to them, but the OI really has been a leader in collaborative work. Almost all of our field work projects are collaborations with local scholars and museums— this is something we are really proud of.”

Back in the early 20th century, Breasted’s finds and accessible teaching style quickly won him a following of admirers, drawing interest even from outside acacontinued on pg. 8

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“No doubt, [the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary] is one of the greatest humanistic endeavors of the 20th century” continued from pg. 7

demia. He mounted a number of further expeditions to Egypt, and delighted Americans by supplying the University’s Haskell Oriental Museum (a predecessor of the OI) with a supply of antiquities.

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 made travel difficult and interrupted Breasted’s research. It is no coincidence that the centennial of the OI comes so soon after the centennial of that war’s end.

Breasted, who, according to a memoir written by his son Charles, had been disheartened by the war and by conflicts with the University administration, seized the opportunity that came with armistice. In 1919, Breasted skirted the administration’s rules and reached out directly to the University’s founding donor’s son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., with a proposal for the foundation of an oriental institute. After having underwritten years of budget deficits, Rockefeller, Sr., had made clear his intention never again to donate to the University, so Breasted’s letter was a long shot.

Months after the letter was sent, Charles Breasted was watching his father open the mail when he heard him exclaim “Good lord—at last!”—and then after a pause, “Oh, if I were only 10 years younger!”

To Breasted’s surprise, Rockefeller, Jr., had chosen to provide Breasted with a grant of $10,000 per year for five years. The University assented to the arrangement and placed the newly organized OI in the same building that housed the Haskell Oriental Museum.

The OI was soon producing a steady stream of world-class research. Breasted used the Rockefeller grant to continue traveling to Egypt, but his students and peers were soon expanding the OI’s archaeological missions to every part of the Middle East. The OI also gained a new home: A curious mix of collegiate Gothic, Art Deco, and Middle Eastern influences, the building which houses the OI to this day was completed in 1931 and opened to the public. Thousands of visitors immediately swarmed the new building’s first floor museum and lecture hall while scholars worked above them in the library—now a well-regarded study space for students and academics alike—and below them in the archives. Breasted, who had previously been in the spotlight for helping Howard Carter

identify Tutankhamun’s tomb, soon found himself staring out from a December 1931 issue of Time magazine.

“He was a great popularizer,” Woods said. Woods also noted that some of the OI’s new strategies for drawing more visitors during and after the centennial, such as redesigning the building’s lobby to be more welcoming, were inspired by Breasted’s early success.

By the time Breasted died in 1935, the OI was strong enough to carry on without him.

“Many of the archaeological expeditions that the OI has conducted have really defined their fields,” Woods said.

First among these stands the excavation of Persepolis, the ancient Persian capital which had lain in ruin since Alexander the Great destroyed it. The expedition, sponsored by the OI in the 1930s, was led first by Ernst Herzfeld and then by Erich Schmidt.

Schmidt conducted multiple aerial surveys of the ruined city. To carry out his nearly unprecedented plan for archaeology by airplane, Schmidt had to get permission to fly in Iranian airspace, which required him to personally visit Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Iranian monarch. Pahlavi granted permission, and the flights began.

Reza Shah was forced to abdicate when the British and Soviet armies invaded Iran at the end of World War II, but his successor and son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi continued to support the OI’s excavations.

Before being overthrown in the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Pahlavi granted women’s suffrage and sought to modernize Iran.

His rule was also, however, marked by human rights abuses, including the banning of leftist parties and the arrest and torture of thousands of political prisoners. He also participated in a 1953 U.S.– and U.K.– backed coup to oust Mohammad Mosaddegh, the prime minister of Iran. Through all this, he was a valued contributor to the OI and the University, pledging $3 million in 1968 for the construction of a Mohammad Reza Pahlavi building which would house the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. The donation was announced at a dinner for the shah at the OI, but the planned building was never completed.

This chapter of the OI’s history was new information to Woods. “I’m not even aware of that episode,” he said. The OI, he said, is

now more circumspect about inviting controversial foreign leaders. “There haven’t been any of those dinners under my watch.”

As time passed, the OI settled into a routine of scholarship. The Institute, although less squarely in the press spotlight than when it started out, has maintained a reputation for high-quality and field-defining research.

Since 1921, throughout almost the Institute’s whole history, scholars at the OI have been working on the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, compiling, defining, and cataloging each use of every known word of the extinct Akkadian language. When Breasted first proposed the project, he expected it to take around 10 years to complete, but its scope expanded massively, and the final volume was only just published in 2011.

“No doubt, [the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary] is one of the greatest humanistic endeavors of the 20th century, a dictionary that took 90 years to write,” Woods said.

Currently, the OI is working on the Chicago Hittite Dictionary, a task which began in 1975 and may not be completed until 2045. The project began with the letter L (so they wouldn’t immediately cover the same ground as other Hittite dictionary projects) and, over the course of 44 years, has worked its way to the letter S. Meanwhile, the Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes (CAMEL) in the OI has taken up the legacy of Erich Schmidt’s archaeology-by-plane: CAMEL does archaeology from space, using the power of modern mapping technologies for previously impossible landscape archaeological research. The OI has had a pioneering role in developing landscape archaeology from ladders to kites, airplanes, and now satellites, said Woods. “It is one of the accomplishments that most people don’t know.”

The OI also continues to perform field work throughout the Middle East, and oversees the Chicago House in Luxor, Egypt.

Many of the OI’s contemporary efforts include working with local communities to build archaeological and preservation infrastructure in situ, marking a distinct shift from its first generation of expeditions in the Middle East.

“A huge component of that work now is training local conservators and making these sites accessible,” said Woods. “You look at a place like Egypt, where tourism

of the ancient monuments is a huge foundational economic bedrock of the Egyptian economy: By preserving and conserving these sites, and making them accessible to the public, you really are helping the contemporary Egyptian people.”

While the OI has never caught the public’s attention as consistently as it did in Breasted’s time, it has not kept entirely out of the headlines.

On September 4, 1997, suicide bombers killed seven people and injured many more in an attack on Ben Yehuda Street, Jerusalem. After Hamas, a Sunni fundamentalist militant organization, took responsibility for the attack, David Strachman, a Rhode Island lawyer, sued the nation of Iran on behalf of American victims. Strachman argued that Iran funds Hamas, and a federal judge agreed, awarding millions to the victims to be collected from Iran. The case hinged on a 1976 law which allows U.S. citizens to attempt to sue a foreign sovereign nation under unusual circumstances. The OI entered the picture because many of its artifacts do not actually belong to the OI, but are instead officially on loan from their nations of origin. The plaintiff argued that Persian artifacts at the OI, including an important set of cuneiform tablets, should be claimed and auctioned off to fund the damages payment. The suit went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 2018 in favor of Iran and indirectly in favor of the OI. The tablets stayed.

“We obviously have great empathy for the victims of that attack, and would not quibble with them having a favorable settlement,” said Woods. “But our obligation was to return what was lent to us and to preserve the cultural heritage, and this was the appropriate means of doing so. Our concern was, if we had lost the case, the tablets would have been sold off piece meal. Their value as cultural relics would have been diminished; they would have gone to collections that wouldn’t have been properly cared for.”

Woods explained that the Iranian tablets had been crucial for the study of the Achaemenid Empire. “There are lots of languages represented in them, but they are written primarily in a language called Elamite,” said Woods. “Nothing like it had ever been found to that point. To study continued on pg. 9

the chicago maroon — jANUARY 15, 2019

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“What we want to do is look toward the next century” continued from pg. 8

these tablets meant really inventing an entire new field of study.”

Since the case, the tablets have begun to make their way back from the OI: “We just returned the first 1,700-odd tablets to Iran,” said Woods.

In 2019, the inside of the glass dome of Mansueto Library was covered in huge translucent pictures of Egyptian and Mesopotamian statues. These haunting figures, watching students as they worked, were scans of OI artifacts. This art installation, called aeon, was part of the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the OI’s founding, which saw a series of celebratory events coupled with permanent changes to the OI’s operations.

Woods said that leading up to the centennial, the OI museum underwent a “massive reinstallation of the galleries, which took five years. It was a massive

Enjoy! by chris jones

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multimillion-dollar project.” The museum also gained a new Early Islamic section, which displays artifacts which the OI has long held, but never previously displayed, such as the earliest known manuscript of One Thousand and One Nights. The OI also collaborated with contemporary artists to create works for display in the museum and around campus, including Ann Hamilton’s aeon.

Another core part of the centennial changes was the OI’s effort to rebrand and raise its profile.

During the centennial, the OI made a major publicity push, including event series, media spots, pervasive advertising across the campus and the city, a new website, and a retrospective book.

“Everything here had really been homemade. You had publications or descriptions of our work, all of this was done in house with people, talented but not really trained

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in this work,” said Woods. “It’s been really a major effort to raise the visibility and profile of the OI really at every level. The OI is an interesting place where we have an international academic reputation that doesn’t need to be burnished… but we need more help with our visibility and our outreach.”

One important new change is that the new marketing material primarily refers to the Oriental Institute as the OI. “The term ‘orient’ as a geographic designation has fallen out of the common vernacular, so it’s easily conflated with other uses of the term. It’s something that we are cognizant of, but what we want to do is look toward the next century and increasingly refer to the Oriental Institute as the OI,” said Woods.

While the OI focuses its studies on worlds frozen in the past, its hundred years of existence have seen great changes in the living world around the OI. Although there have been missteps along the way, the Insti-

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When Breasted first envisioned the Institute, it was as an exploration of the lineage of “The West.” Now, Woods sees the OI as studying “the first data point” in the story of many human innovations.

“If you are interested in the origins of cities, if you are interested in how writing was invented, if you are interested in how people domesticated plants and animals, and how sedentary life was created… there are lots of places in the world where these developments happened independently, but what you have in the Middle East is at once a very early data point and one that is incredibly well documented,” said Woods.

“I think the differences tell you something profound about human experience and the breadth of the human experiment.”

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the chicago maroon — January 15, 2020

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VIEWPOINTS The Poor Communication of Hong Kong’s Cancellation The University Failed to Properly Update Students Regarding the Suspension of Hong Kong Study Abroad Programs By brinda rao

Viewpoints Columnist Following in the footsteps of other American universities, the University of Chicago cancelled its winter quarter Hong Kong: Economics program. The University went a step further by moving the program to its Center in Paris. This announcement came in the wake of recent developments in the anti– Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement, commonly known as the 2019 Hong Kong protests. The movement has made the threat of violence a reality on the region’s university campuses, leading to

concern for the safety of UChicago undergraduates studying in Hong Kong. The study abroad department’s decision ultimately prioritized a commitment to student safety. However, the lack of transparency and delay of this decision must not be a precedent in any future relocation plans.

Although the administration ultimately made the right decision to move the program, its lack of correspondence to students registered for the Hong Kong programs prompts concern. Before the announcement of the relocation, students in the winter economics program received little to no in-

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formation about the possibility of relocation or termination. This ultimately reflects a disappointing lack of administrative oversight pertaining to the concerns of students.

As someone who has studied abroad through UChicago twice, this situation was surprising.

There was a strong standard of precaution and safety promoted in both of my programs. While applying for the programs, I was interested in the Cairo: Middle Eastern Civilizations program and was required to meet with the program coordinator to discuss the safety logistics of the program before even applying. Ultimately, I attended this past summer’s Paris: European Civilization program. During my time in Paris, the UChicago Center would frequently forward us advisory warnings for possible riots in the city, and asked us to register for U.S. State Department alerts. Following this program, I attended the autumn quarter London: British Literature and Culture program.

Universities like Georgetown immediately instructed their students in Hong Kong to leave Hong Kong following protests on university campuses. UChicago, however, delayed any response to student outreach. When some students contacted members of the study abroad office, advisors, and administrative figures, they either received no response (in the case of the spring 2020 program) or were told that more details would come in the following days. A College student accepted to the spring quarter Hong Kong: Colonizations program told The Maroon that they received a vague response when they emailed the study abroad of-

fice inquiring about the status of the program. The department informed the student, who requested anonymity, that more information regarding the status of the program would come eventually but that the program would occur as planned.

The student was “frustrated by the lack of consistent information and transparency.”

Until November 18, the only substantial administrative development regarding Hong Kong study abroad programs was the recent announcement of a new autumn 2020 program for gender and sexuality in world civilizations in the region. While violence in Hong Kong escalated, the University continued to plan for a program a year in advance.

Opened in December 2018, the University’s new Hong Kong campus was the result of an endeavor to massively expand UChicago’s graduate and undergraduate presence in the region. The UChicago campus in Hong Kong is on the coast, away from much of the protest activity, possibly explaining the delay in the University’s decision to relocate. However, all UChicago students studying in Hong Kong board at the Robert Black College guest house at the University of Hong Kong. Members of the winter cohort would have been placed in a location that would potentially be another site of the protests. This concern has been at the forefront of Hong Kong universities that have elected to end classes for the rest of the term due to safety concerns for students.

UChicago has relocated study abroad programs in the past. In 2016, the University moved its Istanbul: Mediterranean Civilizations program to Paris following

a bombing in an Istanbul shopping center. Regarding the move of the Istanbul program to Paris, Sarah Walter, the director of the Study Abroad office, emailed the program, “...holding your Civilizations program in Istanbul this year would be subject to continued unrest, and could at best offer a highly constrained experience of Istanbul.”

The University had planned three programs for the 2019–20 school year based in Hong Kong: a September human rights program, the winter economics program, and a spring colonizations program. Despite the rise in violence and concerns over safety, the University chose to run its human rights course this past September.

The University offered escorted transportation from the airport to the dorms, but failed to consider the chance of delivering a dangerous and “highly constrained experience” to members of the cohort.

Ultimately, the delayed announcement displays unacceptable administrative neglect of the needs and safety of students. The University gave students in the winter economics program the opportunity to withdraw and not go to Paris, but with only a few days to make this important decision that could impact the rest of their college careers. Many of these students did not have housing arrangements for the winter quarter. Should they have chosen to withdraw, they may have been in the stressful position of needing to find a place to live, registering for classes, and abruptly rethinking the rest of an academic year they thought they had planned out.

the chicago maroon — January 15, 2020

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Uncanny Perseverance: Sarah Gad for Congress Law Student Sarah Gad Has the Background and Experiences That Make Her Worth Fighting for

By LEENA EL-SADEK It wasn’t until high school that I realized I possessed the qualifications to become President of the United States. Up until then, I believed, or perhaps I was coerced to believe, that there was a religious qualification to run.

Despite my successes, I was led to believe that there existed a ceiling too high and too heavy for me to break. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor once described, a goal remains in the abstract if there is not a palpable example to turn to for guidance. For too long, I did not believe I could influence policies or laws because no one in these roles resembled me or fought for my communities. I believe this is the case for many communities, too. But what is traditional is not always right.

Sarah Gad is set to break tradition. While completing her last year of law school here, she is also a Democratic candidate for U.S. Congress in Illinois’s First District. This district includes most of South Side Chicago, including Hyde Park. While most of our third-year law student peers are unwinding before graduating, Sarah is ramping up her campaign

and preparing for the March primary. Anyone who meets Sarah would agree that UChicago should support Sarah’s campaign.

Sarah and I have a lot in common. Not only is Sarah my sister in faith, but she’s also Egyptian and the daughter of immigrants, like me. In many ways, I am indebted to Sarah for her commitment to uplifting so many communities that we share. However, Sarah’s commitment to representation doesn’t stop with her faith or origin story.

During Sarah’s third year of medical school, she got into a serious car accident that resulted in near-fatal injuries. The pain associated with her multiple surgeries compelled her doctors to prescribe opioids, to which she became addicted. Her addiction persisted for two years and took her from a medical school classroom to a cell in the Cook County Jail, just north of UChicago. While incarcerated, Sarah was assaulted, stabbed, and placed in maximum security due to overcrowding.

Sarah was a nonviolent offender, but she quickly discovered that society is unsympathetic to anyone who has engaged with the criminal justice system. Sarah’s

reentry was fraught with challenges, tending towards impossible. She was inhibited from finishing her medical degree, from gaining meaningful employment, and even from obtaining adequate health care. Her past was a nagging burden that she could not shake off.

Sarah credits a lot of her success to a civil rights and wrongful convictions attorney, who provided her with employment after months of searching for a meaningful job. It was there that Sarah knew reforming the criminal justice system was not just an interest—it was necessary for the millions of Americans whose lives are intertwined with an unjust justice system. For too many people, the system isn’t corrective or rehabilitative; it’s damaging and demeaning. So, Sarah joined the UChicago Law Class of 2020, focusing on learning how to change criminal and juvenile justice laws, and reform this country’s response to addiction.

Throughout my law school experience with Sarah, I have seen her throw herself into learning how to change the criminal justice system. Although we both worked in Chicago during our

summers, I rarely saw her. I knew exactly what kept her busy. She spent hours in the Law School’s Mandel Legal Aid Clinic, where she represented indigent children and young adults accused of delinquency and crime. She was also traveling the country to speak to doctors and medical students about the impact of opioid addiction and how the medical community should address it. Her busy schedule continued throughout the year, too. I have seen Sarah leave law school classrooms emboldened to change the very laws we just learned. I distinctly remember Sarah impassioned after our discussion of mental illness and criminal justice. The next time I talked to Sarah about mental health was at the Clinton Global Initiative University conference, where she was being recognized for her new organization called Addiction 2 Action, which advocates for improved opioid addiction treatment in jails and prisons.

Earlier this year, I asked Sarah to give opening remarks at the National Muslim Law Students Conference, hosted by the Muslim Law Students Association chapter here on campus. She discussed

how her faith played a central role in her life, and how it continues to shape her interactions with people entangled in the criminal justice system. Sarah empowered an entire auditorium to always be zealous advocates for clients, especially when an entire society and system has turned its back on them. But more than that, Sarah represented a tangible example of what is possible. Politics (and law) is a white man’s pulpit: Rarely is it controlled by those from underrepresented groups, even though it frequently impacts these groups the most. Sarah is determined to address and change that. She is an activist, a woman, an emerging lawyer, a Muslim, a daughter of immigrants, and a former inmate of the Cook County Jail in Chicago. She’s also a friend, a role model, and a great source of inspiration for many. I hope stories like Sarah’s are no longer anomalies.

If you want to help put more people representative of marginalized voices (and not just by faith or color, but in struggle, too) in power, support Sarah’s campaign.

Our laws and policies will be more reflective of the lived experiences of the American people because of it.

Stop the Displacement of Our Woodlawn Neighbors We Should Stand With Our Neighbors in Their Fight for a Community Benefits Agreement Housing Ordinance

By LAURA CHEN Four houses recently sold for upward of $700,000 in Woodlawn, just a block from campus and several blocks from the future site of the Obama Presidential Center (OPC).

The homes, on the 6100 South Ellis block, are box-like structures with floor-to-ceiling windows. They set

the record for the highest-priced houses in Woodlawn.

These home prices are prohibitively expensive for the majority of longtime residents of Woodlawn, where the median household income is just $25,000 per year. In comparison, the median household income for the City of Chicago is $55,000. 83 percent of Wood-

lawn residents are Black, down from 94 percent in 2000. Due to a dramatic increase in housing prices since the announcement of the OPC’s location in Jackson Park, our Black, working class neighbors are being increasingly priced out.

I firmly believe that longtime residents have a right to remain in the community they call home. For

this reason, I support the passage of the Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) Housing Ordinance.

Through the Obama CBA Coalition, residents and allies have been organizing for over five years to combat displacement and ensure housing stability in the communities around the incoming OPC. When the University submit-

ted a proposal for the Center to be located in the South Side in 2014, residents knew the OPC could either bring great opportunity, or threaten their ability to remain in their communities and reap the benefits of investment. The Coalition, along with allied aldermen Jeanette Taylor (20th Ward) and continued on pg. 12

the chicago maroon — January 15, 2020

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“Due to a dramatic increase in housing prices since the announcement of the OPC’s location in Jackson Park, our Black, working class neighbors are being increasingly priced out. ” continued from pg. 11

Leslie Hairston (Fifth Ward), crafted and introduced the CBA Housing Ordinance. The ordinance includes key strategies to create housing stability for longtime residents who face rising housing costs. The history of Chicago and of the United States at large shows that without collective pressure, wealthy white residents benefit from investment at the cost of working-class Black people. It is imperative that we don’t stand idle.

I urge University of Chicago students, faculty and staff to stand in solidarity with our Woodlawn neighbors in this struggle.

This fight is happening in our backyard. If you believe longtime residents—particularly Black, working-class residents—should not be displaced but instead benefit from investment coming to the area, I encourage you to support the Obama CBA Coalition and its allies in the fight for a CBA Housing Ordinance.

In late November, as a member of the student organization UChicago Against Displacement, I joined neighbors and allies outside of a meeting held at 62nd and Ingleside by the City’s Commissioner of Housing.

The meeting’s aim was to discuss solutions to the rising housing crisis. We gathered outside of the meeting to express our support for the CBA Housing Ordinance. Over a month and a half later, the ordinance still sits in the Housing Committee, and our neighbors continue to be pushed out.

Without the Ordinance, profit-driven real estate developers will gobble up property to build luxury housing. These units, meant to attract wealthier, whiter residents, will push out longtime residents. With the Ordinance, 30 percent of all new housing will be set aside for truly affordable housing. Two-thirds of that 30 percent will be set aside for households making up to 50 percent Area Median Income ($45,000 for a family of four) and one-third for households making up to 30 percent Area Median Income ($27,000 for a family of four). For city-owned vacant lots, 100 percent of new housing will be affordable.

Without the Ordinance, when owners decide to sell a multi-family building, they will sell to the highest bidder, likely displacing current tenants. With the Ordinance, the first offer will go to an entity that will keep the building affordable and prevent displacement. This could be a non-profit, a commu-

nity land trust, or tenants themselves could purchase it cooperatively.

According to a recent study out of the University of Illinois at Chicago, 14,429 units of affordable housing are required to meet the housing needs within a two-mile radius surrounding the incoming OPC. While there is no silver bullet in a political-economic context dominated by capitalism, the Ordinance is a crucial step in moving the needle towards that number.

To understand why University students, faculty and staff should support the Ordinance, it is important to acknowledge the University’s close ties to the OPC, the Obama Foundation and the Obamas. These ties make us, as University affiliates, complicit in the devastation that the OPC could cause without protections in place. The University offers “support for the center’s efforts in community engagement, planning, economic development, and individual and institutional collaborations.” A variety of individual actors within the University administration also have relationships with the Obamas and the OPC. Susan Sher, senior advisor to President Robert Zimmer, was tapped to lead the campaign to bring the OPC to the South Side.

Prior to her work with the University, she worked alongside President Obama in the White House and then served as Michelle Obama’s chief of staff. Derek Douglas, vice president for civic engagement and external affairs, served as Obama’s advisor on urban policy.

We must also look at the current situation in the context of the University’s long history of displacement. The University provided financial and legal support for the racially restrictive covenants of the 1930s and ’40s. The Chicago Defender reported that restrictive covenants were colloquially known as “the University of Chicago Agreement to get rid of Negroes.” The Hyde Park–Kenwood urban renewal program of the 1950s and ’60s, backed by the University, displaced around 4,000 families.

While there is not space here to delve into the University’s long history of displacement, communities around campus are justified in distrusting University dealings in real estate and development. This includes its bid for the OPC and the consequential massive investment in the area. Since the announcement of the OPC coming to Jackson Park, the University has continued its own

expansion in Woodlawn—with incoming developments like the Woodlawn Residential Commons, Study Hotel, and Rubenstein Forum.

Alderman Jeanette Taylor of the 20th Ward (which includes numerous University properties such as Burton-Judson Courts) stated the need for the CBA Housing Ordinance in the clearest terms: “This is about people who actually live there being able to stay. In the black and brown community, trust has always been betrayed. That’s why we need it in writing.”

I’m calling on members of the University of Chicago to stand in solidarity with our

neighbors in this fight.

Educate others. Come out to Obama CBA Coalition actions. Join UChicago Against Displacement (formerly UChicago for a CBA) in its organizing efforts. The longer it takes for protections to be put in place, the longer our neighbors will be pushed out.

Let’s listen to community members in their call to prevent their own displacement before it’s too late.

Laurel Chen is a graduate student at the School of Social Service Administration and organizer with UChicago Against Displacement, which is a member of the Obama CBA Coalition.

JESSICA XIA The University of Chicago Law School presents The 2020 Coase Lecture

Re-examining Ethnically Homogeneous Trade: A Social Network Approach Featuring LISA BERNSTEIN Wilson-Dickinson Professor of Law

Tuesday, January 21 12:15 - 1:20 PM Classroom II

The University of Chicago The Law School 1111 East 60th Street Lunch will be provided This event is free and open to the public, but seating may be limited. For special assistance or needs, please contact Norma R. de Yagcier at ndeyagci@uchicago.edu.

THE CHICAGO MAROON — JANUARY 15, 2020

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ARTS Asian Americans Deserve Better than The Farewell

By ALEX KONG Arts Reporter

Asian-American films are ascendant.

Hot on the heels of the box office domination of Crazy Rich Asians, Lulu Wang’s film The Farewell is the latest entry in this emergent category of cinema to win the recognition, both critical and commercial, of the gatekeepers of American entertainment culture. Its most recent and significant accolade is the Golden Globe for Best Actress, awarded to Awkwafina for her performance as Billi, a Chinese American tormented by her liminal status in American society. This is only the most recent notch in the belt for a film that’s enjoyed near-unanimous critical praise. According to this consensus, The Farewell performs a crucial social service by sensitively exploring the Asian-American identity through the framework of a serious indie drama.

However, it’s worth questioning why this narrative has become so prominent in the first place, and why a thoroughly pedestrian and unremarkable film has somehow managed to dupe so many people.

The Farewell is a film that’s more interested in telegraphing, rather than truly exploring, its Asianness. It regurgitates all the pieties that Asian Americans love to repeat about themselves: Yellow people have better food, yellow people throw better parties, and, above all, yellow people care more about family. It’s not as if there isn’t a kernel of truth to each of these propositions—but the film insists on them so stridently, in such a flatly uncritical way, that they end up as little more than empty signifiers designed to flatter the sensibilities of their audience. The film doesn’t explore the intricacies and difficulties of Chinese culture so much as it merely displays them. Its deeply cynical strategy is to transact in this iconography of Asianness as a way of exploiting the Asian-American hunger for recognition, while simultaneously failing to do justice to the Asian-American experience.

The central example of the film’s obsession with invoking Chinese cultural practices is “the big lie,” told by the main character’s family to her dying grand-

mother, that propels the narrative. That lie, which we’re told (in the rather lazy form of a monologue), stems from the essential difference between the Chinese and the American conception of family.

For the Chinese, “one’s life belongs to the family,” so it’s the family’s responsibility to bear the grandmother’s suffering on her behalf. While this anecdote of tension between East and West is clearly meant to serve as a proxy for a broader exploration of the differences between the two cultures, the fact that the main character Billi simply acquiesces to her family’s request for secrecy, with hardly any pushback, betrays this reasonable expectation. She delivers some perfunctory objections, asking, “Do you think it’s wrong to lie to her?” while looking very concerned indeed— only to drop the question immediately.

The film fails to involve us in what must be a tumultuous internal struggle on Billi’s part—it only tells us the outcome.

This utter neglect of the main character’s interiority is especially frustrating given the richness of the subject that Wang gestures towards: namely, Asian-American alienation. I’m not denying that this subject is an urgent one that deserves to be explored on the big screen. What I am denying is that Wang has the cinematic chops to deliver on what she promises. Her most egregious deficiency in this respect is her evident failure to internalize the very first lesson of film school: Show, don’t tell. The film doesn’t portray Billi’s internal struggle so much as it flatly informs us that one is taking place.

The primary way it does so is through its many labored and forced monologues.

This is a gratingly verbal film, yet devoid of any of cinematic dialogue’s pleasures— there’s none of the sparkling wit of Hawks or the psychological subtlety of Rohmer.

Instead, it serves as an instrument to shove neatly prepackaged ideology into the mouths of its characters, pro- and anti-Western alike. These monologues are the staging ground for the film’s supposed exploration of the tensions between East and West, but they advance the film’s thematic concerns in a painfully transparent and artless fashion.

The dinner scene with Billi’s extended family is a particularly egregious example.

It plays like a carousel of opinions, with characters mechanically trading observations about the pros and cons of Western assimilation. The blandness of their observations is matched by the blandness of Wang’s visual style. She films the scene in lazy medium shots that depict the characters delivering their takes with all of the visual intelligence of a CNN segment of talking heads. In no way, shape, or form are the artistic resources of cinema mobilized to augment the emotional stakes of the conversation.

The film’s overreliance on dialogue points to a broader problem: The delicacy and nuance that Wang’s subject requires outstrip her skills as a filmmaker. The psychological conflict of the Asian American’s competing allegiances plays out on an interior terrain, and Billi’s struggle is internal in character, but this film doesn’t know how to access her interiority. The result is that she appears to change her mind on a whim, or doesn’t even have a mind at all.

This is why Billi’s eventual surrender to her family’s request feels so shallow. It can only reproduce, in the most straightforward way, the words uttered by the other characters that surround her. This incessant talkiness reflects the film’s origins as an NPR podcast, but I see no evidence that Wang’s story is better served as cinema.

More perniciously, the film is uninterested in exploring the emotional nuances of Billi’s predicament because that’s just not what it’s after. In reality, the film is little more than a collection of calculated gambits to appeal to the Asian-American ego.

We see this when Billi tearfully confesses to her mother that she wants to move to China and that she was right all along about the perils of Western individualism.

Life in the States as a Chinese American is just too hard for Billi to take anymore. For the Asian American watching the film, this functions as an implicit acknowledgement of the superiority of Eastern cultural logic.

In other words, it’s an endorsement of the uniquely Asian component of their bifurcated Asian-American identity: What distinguishes them from Americans becomes

a source of strength and dignity. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with this claim in and of itself—the problem is that in the context of this film specifically, it comes at the expense of a meaningful exploration of that identity. Wang can’t, or won’t, say anything meaningful about the serious issues that result from the cultural bifurcation of the self; she just gestures toward their existence in a self-serving gambit to solicit her audience’s approval.

The counterpart to the Asian American’s internal struggle with their conflicted identity is an external battle that’s constantly being waged against the presuppositions ascribed onto them by others. Wesley Yang characterizes the world’s default attitude towards Asian Americans in this way: “you [are] presumptively a nobody, a mute and servile figure.” Against this backdrop, it’s understandable that, for many Asian-Americans, seeing the particulars of their lives playing out on the big screen would be cause for excitement.

It’s a way of extracting recognition from a world that otherwise refuses to supply it.

But the danger in indulging this pleasure too excitedly is that it will dupe us into slackening our critical faculties—and it is precisely this possibility that The Farewell preys upon.

What would a cinematically literate portrayal of the Asian-American condition look like? Luckily, we don’t have to imagine, because one already exists. Wayne Wang’s low-budget indie Chan Is Missing (1982) concerns the attempts of two Chinese Americans, a cab driver named Jo and his nephew Steve, to track down their friend Chan, who has disappeared with a bundle of their money. Their voyage into the nooks and crannies of Chinatown soon takes on an existential overtone, as the object of their investigation gradually shifts from their missing money to the essence of the man who took it. It turns out that Chan, like The Farewell ’s Billi, found himself caught between the push and pull of assimilation and cultural fidelity. The multifarious portraits of the man that emerge—radical political activist, bookish computer technician, unassimilable ChiCONTINUED ON PG. 14

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“In reality, [The Farewell] is little more than a collection of calculated gambits to appeal to the Asian American ego.”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 13

nese national—reflect the fragmentation, and ultimately the illusory nature, of the “Chinese-American” identity itself.

The unrecognized status of Chan Is Missing only confirms that the recent clamor for more Asian American representation is not a desire for representation itself. If that were the case, then Chan Is Missing would be enjoying its day in the

sun as a classic of Asian American art. Its continued neglect reveals the true desire of The Farewell ’s partisans. What they want is representation of a very particular sort: namely, representation in the circles of power. In the realm of movies, power is represented by Hollywood and its big stars, big budgets, and big box office returns; increasingly, indie dramas (the specialty of The Farewell ’s distribu-

tor A24) have risen to a position of power, too. Crazy Rich Asians cornered the former market, and now The Farewell has cornered the latter one. The film’s claim to cultural prominence has been further cemented by Awkwafina’s Golden Globe win. With this award, it looks like the film’s partisans are finally getting what they want: the assimilation of an East-Asian identity into the structures of mainstream

commercial prestige. But is this something worth wanting in the first place? To me, it seems like nothing more than garden-variety status envy masquerading as political virtue. The end goal should be to surpass the traditionally mainstream artistic mediocrity—not to imitate it in the name of liberation. Asian Americans deserve better than that.

“Everyone Was Everyone’s Friend” at Brockhampton Concert

By MARIA ROJAS Arts Reporter

One of the most wonderful things about a concert is how the audience can consist of such a myriad of people all connected by one thing: their love for the music being performed. Maybe the music happens to be what they casually listen to on their way to work or what they throw on when they’re with their friends. Or maybe it’s the music that saved them from themselves. You never know. All you know is that the music means something to you and something to them. Maybe it’s the same, maybe it’s not.

And that’s okay, because you’re both here and that’s all that matters. This is especially the case when it comes to Brockhampton.

It’s incredibly difficult to put Brockhampton’s style of music in a box, and completely impossible to pick any one of their songs to represent the band as a whole.

Brockhampton is essentially a mixture of pop and rap elements with songs ranging from party bops to melancholy ballads.

This engaging style incorporates various sentiments of the band, such as their backgrounds, rise to fame, success, personal mental health struggles, religion, shortcomings, and times of despair and healing.

Though some of these concepts are quite popular in the music industry, what really strikes through is how genuine and raw the vocalists are—especially when they’re performing live.

A key thing to know about Brockhampton is that they are a 13-member self-proclaimed boy band—a term that they’ve been very adamant about, even though

their image and sound seem to not exactly fit what we’ve come to imagine as a stereotypical “boy band.” In fact, in their song Boogie, they refer to themselves as “the best boyband since One Direction.”

Despite the group having 13 members— one fewer than the original 14 since Ameer Vann was kicked out of the group for sexual misconduct—not every member’s voice is heard in the songs. There are only six, previously seven, distinct voices on stage, but the rest of the members, who take care of the video and sound production, are considered full-fledged members. It’s important to know that when referring to Brockhampton, you’re referencing the whole team who bring different talents to the table and, more importantly, a diverse group of very close friends who are black, white, gay, straight, South Asian, Hispanic, Irish, American, and African.

I had the pleasure of experiencing Brockhampton at the Aragon Ballroom for their Heaven Belongs to You Tour in celebration of their fifth album, Ginger.

This performance was opened by Slowthai and 100 Gecs. Though most people were solely at the concert for Brockhampton and piled in just in time to see them, those who arrived early enough for Slowthai, a British rapper from Northampton, who is featured on Ginger rapping about his mental health and relationship with religion; and 100 Gecs, a musical duo who just released their debut album this year; were not disappointed. Despite differing from Brockhampton in musical style, Slowthai and 100 Gecs performed with a similar amount of energy. The crowd bopped along

to Slowthai’s gritty and rough instrumentals and 100 Gecs’ experimental electronica. When Brockhampton finally came on, the crowd was more than hyped for whatever was going to be performed.

Pockets of air were few and far between in the audience. The entirety of the ballroom had steadily filled to absolute capacity, rendering it near impossible to see the stage. I remember feeling my makeup streak down my face as sweat filled the air from the pushing and pulling. It would have been all too easy to lose someone and I could feel bodies on every side of me. This experience was further enhanced by the band who made many attempts to directly engage the audience. At one point during the concert, the band actually invited what must have been about 20 lucky individuals to go on stage and perform one of their songs with them. During the fast songs the crowd would bounce like crazy, and the band would take the initiative to demand that the crowd “open up the pit” for various small moshes to form all throughout the room. Fortunately, despite having the capacity to end with accidents, those people who I saw fall during the mosh were all helped up before they could get trampled.

However, all of the heat and energy did prove to be a bit much for some people—I later found out that there were some cases of people passing out in the middle of the show.

Halfway through the concert, the band started a call and response that went, “Can I get an ‘I’m gay’?” “I’M GAY!” Coming from the Bible Belt, I personally had never had an open experience like that and was

later even more surprised when I found out the band originates from Texas.

A little while later, the band demanded that audience members “raise [their] hand if [they’re] gay!” This was met with the openly out rapper, Kevin Abstract, raising his hand alongside what must have been over half the room. These might seem like little things, but I couldn’t help but be taken aback by the sheer number of queer-positive individuals in the room. The band was using their platform to not just normalize being queer, but also celebrate it. This is a big deal because, though being queer has become more commonplace and accepted in society, it really still is an issue in various places—especially in communities of color. In the Hispanic community specifically, “machismo” is a term meant to refer to the extreme masculinity men are expected to portray throughout their whole lives. It’s impossible for machismo and queerness to coexist. To see a band composed of various ethnicities all celebrating queerness means the world to young individuals who have had to grow up thinking that being gay was not okay.

Ultimately, the concert was definitely a night to remember, and I’m positive it was quite a few audience members’ favorite night of all time. Brockhampton performed amazingly for their fans, and Slowthai and 100 Gecs likely gained some new supporters. Even if someone wasn’t a fan of the musical styles in the room that night, they’d have to admit that the energy in the room was incredibly crazy, positive, and accepting. Everyone was everyone’s friend that night.

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Baum and Nolan’s Battle of the Basketballs

By BRINDA RAO Sports Editor

Kicking off their UAA season, the UChicago men’s basketball team failed to secure a win against rival Wash U. The Saturday game was the first of the Maroons’ conference season. The game was exceptionally close, with the Maroons losing by one point (66–65). Despite the loss, fourth-year Jordan Baum ended the game as the top scorer with 27 points compared to Wash U’s Jack Nolan’s 23 points.

The game opened with a decisive play from third-year Brennan McDaniel, who immediately scored after the initial possession. This set the stage for the Maroons’ momentum as they continued to score eight three-point plays. The Bears were left in the dust,

with Baum taking a key role in scoring 11 points within the first half. By the end of the half, the Maroons led by 11 points.

However, the Bears picked up speed in the second half, cinching the gap and taking the lead from the Maroons. Nolan and Baum dueled it out, securing point after point as the half continued.

Baum secured 16 points as Nolan took 15 on his own. With only eight minutes remaining, the game was left with a one-point margin in favor of the Maroons. Nolan captured the Bears’ lead with a trey before Baum followed with a perfect layup. This energy continued for the remaining time with Baum and Nolan at each other, securing play after play. With less than a minute left, the Bears took the lead and the Maroons failed to recapture the lead.

Despite the loss, the Maroons dis-

played an excellent game, especially from three upperclassmen: Baum, McDaniel, and fourth-year Cole Schmitz.

McDaniel reflected on the game: “Even though we lost a tough one on Saturday, I think we can build on the positives. We made big improvements on the defensive side of the ball and battled to the very end. Now, we need to focus on carrying these things over to our upcoming games against Carnegie Mellon and Case Western to help put us in a good position in the UAA.” The Maroons will play their next conference game on Friday, travelling to Pittsburgh, PA, to play against Carnegie Mellon University.

Jordan Baum notched 27 points. uchicago athletics

Women’s Basketball Downs WashU

By ANDREW FARRY Sports Reporter

The UChicago women’s basketball team beat Wash U 78–64 behind a

combined 43 points from seniors Taylor Lake and Miranda Burt, extending their winning streak to nine games. The Maroons, ranked No. 16, are now 10–2 overall for the season.

First-year Grace Hynes drives to the basket. uchicago athletics

The game started slowly, with no points in the first one and a half minutes as the teams exchanged missed shots. The Maroons then jumped out to a 5–0 lead, but the game remained close

and only a point separated the teams after the first half as the Maroons led 35–34.

The Maroons took a commanding lead with a 14–2 run to start the third, with their first seven points coming from Burt. From then, the Maroons’ smallest lead was eight points, and in the end the game was comfortable.

The story of the game was the Maroons’ starters: They scored 72 points, including 22 from Burt, 21 from Lake, as well as 13 points and 10 assists from first-year Grace Hynes. Wash U’s bench outscored UChicago’s 24–6, but it didn’t matter as UChicago dominated in the paint, with 40 points to Wash U’s 28. In fact, this is the second game in a row that the Maroons have scored over half their points in the paint, which isn’t to say that the Maroons have no outside shooting: Burt has a 46 percent three-point percentage on 72 shots.

If there’s anything to be concerned about coming from this game, it’s turnovers: UChicago gave the ball away 22 times. Overall though, this was a great first game in UAA conference play, and the women’s basketball team is continuing its dominant form.

THE CHICAGO MAROON — JANUARY 15, 2020

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SPORTS

Track Runs Away from Field

By CAMILE AGUILAR Sports Editor

This past weekend, track and field kicked off their season with the Phoenix Invitational. Since 2014, when the Athletics program began hosting the annual invitational, they have placed first amongst all participating teams. With the high hopes and reputation to uphold, the Maroons headed energetically into the season on Saturday. With both teams posting scores in the mid-200s the first runner ups all placed well below the 150 mark.

With the Maroons pulling so far ahead on their first showing of the season, I spoke with fourthyear runner Rohan Kumar to understand the future of the team, from a seasoned perspective.

Kumar first spoke on the team from his perspective as a member of the men’s running team. Beginning with the meet

itself, Kumar spoke of the momentum which builds when the whole team begins winning their respective events. Beyond the high from winning each event, Kumar mentioned the infectious energy of certain members of the team. Rohan says this season Andrew Kates and Coach Hall have focused on energizing the team. Kumar believes the whole team builds off that good energy and he looks forward to moving with it everyday.

Looking ahead, Kumar cautioned fans to keep a close eye on the freshman class, “This year we have a really strong freshman class whose contributions are already clear. Pay attention to Ryan Cutter, Andrew Kates, Will Shine and Henry Myers who recently rated in Nationals.” Explaining how he could foresee the good fortune of his team, Kumar added “It looks like we have the best distance team

Fourth-year captain Alex Scott won shotput at the Phoenix Invitational. uchicago athletics

possibly ever. Cross Country can be indicative of the track team’s success as many players cross over.”

Cross Country runners are not the only players switching their trade for the season. Kumar mentioned second year Rachael Hutson who brings her soccer talents to the distance portion. Hutson won her first collegiate race yesterday, winning the 3000 meter event with 10:54 seconds. In fact, the first four spots were filled by Maroon athletes. Kumar suggested that this season may be especially favorable for runners Hutson, Elgamal and Jorgenson.

According to senior Laura Darcey, the women are of the same mind as Kumar. Speaking on the great opening yesterday she said “we have had a great class of freshmen join the team, with particular strength in the sprints, which will really help us as we move forward through the season.” Darcey certainly has nationals on her mind as she admits “I am really excited to see how this team progresses this quarter as we prepare for UAAs and ultimately nationals!”

In terms of the field team, Kumar shared his foresight, he insists “Alex Scott, one of our team captains, is looking to have a dominant season in shot put and weight throw. Chris Dann as well, they have the grace and strength to dominate this year.”

For their efforts, Scott, Elgamal, Cutter, and fopurth-year Garon swept the UAA Athlet of the Week awards.

Good luck to the Maroons as they move forward this season and a special congratulations freshmen Jade Dombroski and Cy Chittenden on their joint win!

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