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JANUARY 19, 2022 SECOND WEEK VOL. 134, ISSUE 11
University Reports 469 Cases, Pause to Voluntary Testing, and Potential Isolate-in-Place Protocol
The University reported 469 new COVID-19 cases in the past week and a 6.34 percent positivity rate, according to a UChicago Forward email sent out on Friday, January 14. As of Friday, 13 students are in on-campus isolation housing while 310 are isolating off-campus. Earlier on Friday, an email to all on-campus students outlined a potential switch to isolation-in-place protocols, should the University’s current isolation housing, Stony Island, operate at its 120-student capacity. Assistant Vice President for Campus Life Richard Mason and Interim Executive Director of Housing and Residence Life Heath
Rossner wrote in the email that students may be asked to isolate in their assigned rooms instead of relocating to Stony Island. They cited a substantial increase in the number of campus residents who have tested positive as a reason for the change. Public health guidance from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) calls for students to be isolated for 5 days, with the option to leave after five days with a negative rapid antigen test and “if certain symptom improvement conditions have been met,” said the email. Roommates of students isolating in place are not required to follow isolation protocol
unless they also test positive for COVID-19. The CDC states that individuals are considered contagious at least two days before showing any symptoms or testing positive for the virus. Students isolating in place are to keep contact with others to a minimum; they can only leave to use their assigned bathroom, collect meals from a designated location, seek emergency medical care, and discard trash. Isolating students may not leave their room to pick up ordered food or deliveries of any kind. Isolating students sharing a suite with roommates are not to use common spaces, such as bathrooms, kitchens, or living rooms. Residence halls will collaborate with UChicago Dining to provide students isolating in place with three meals each day and a designated meal pick-up location. Students can collect the meals during two pick-up times in the middle of the day. Dinner and the next day’s breakfast can be collected together in the early evening, while lunch can be collected separately earlier. All individuals currently living in a residence hall, regardless of vaccination status, are subject to weekly COVID-19 testing through the Mandatory Surveillance Testing Program. The Voluntary Surveillance Testing Program has been temporarily suspended to accommodate the Mandatory Surveillance Testing Program and the large number of people who have been exposed to COVID-19 or who show symptoms. Ash Arian, Undergraduate Student Government (USG) Chair of the Residence Life and Dining Committee and College Council 2024 Representative, expressed concern that the University is temporarily discontinuing the Voluntary Surveillance Testing Program. He feels that the program was especially im-
GREY: Remembering the work of Gertrude Beasley, UChicago alumna and feminist writer.
ARTS: At the MAB Show in November, Rico Nasty hit all the right notes.
VIEWPOINTS: UChicago’s pandemic decision-making has been delayed and confusing.
UChicago campus. COURTESY OF MEGHAN HENDRIX
By ERIC FANG and ANUSHREE VASHIST | Senior News Reporters
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portant for reducing cases among students living off campus. “As of today, there appears to be a decrease of occupants in isolation housing yet we see that policies, such as the suspension of the Voluntary Surveillance Testing Program, will likely produce a spike in COVID-19 cases,” Arian said. “Although these resources have been used to open a new symptomatic testing site in Stuart, many off-campus students returning to Hyde Park depended on the program as an efficient way to monitor their status.” In light of the fact that peer institutions such as Stanford, Northwestern, and UPenn mandate students test for COVID-19 upon arrival, USG President Allen Abbott wishes the University had increased its testing capacities and provided more support for students and faculty as they navigate hybrid learning models. “The nation is facing a [COVID-19] test and mask shortage, but it is telling that on the same day that UChicago is pausing its voluntary testing program due to capacity constraints, most of our peer institutions are announcing mandatory arrival testing programs for all students, handing out free N95 and KN95 masks for residents, or even just providing explicit guidance for faculty to support hybrid learning models over the next few weeks for the sick and immunocompromised,” Abbott said. The University is maintaining its commitment to resume in-person instruction on January 24. Beyond that date, isolating students are expected to contact their instructors to attend classes remotely, request a recording of the class, or make up work at a later date. Roommates of a COVID-positive stuCONTINUED ON PG. 2
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dent will not have to isolate unless they also test positive, but they may be given an alternative housing arrangement. “Depending on their COVID status and health history, roommates of students who test positive for COVID-19 may be advised to temporarily
re-locate for the period of their roommate’s required isolation,” the Housing email said. When students are notified of their roommates’ isolation-in-place status, they will receive temporary relocation options—which are either on campus or very close to campus and are available at no additional cost.
The University has reserved Stuart Hall 007 as the exclusive location for symptomatic testing. Other testing locations at the Walker Museum (open Monday through Friday) and the Gleacher Center (open on Fridays) will provide only asymptomatic testing for the Mandatory Surveillance Testing and the
Exposure Testing Programs. Asymptomatic students and employees who believe they may have been exposed to COVID-19 or are informed by the University or another public health entity that they have been exposed can sign up for a test through the my.WellnessPortal.
UChicago Among Universities Sued for Antitrust Violations at Federal Court By YIWEN LU and NIKHIL JAISWAL | News Editors The University of Chicago is among 16 major universities being sued for antitrust violations regarding the way they determine financial aid amounts, resulting in a higher net cost of attendance for students across the country. According to a lawsuit filed in an Illinois federal court on Sunday, January 9, the defendants—all private, national institutions— participated in a price-fixing cartel in which they used a shared formula to calculate a student’s ability to pay. Their determination of how much each student could pay in turn affected the amount of financial aid given, which inflated the net price of attendance. The plaintiffs are a group of five former undergraduate students of Duke University, Vanderbilt University, and Northwestern University. The lawsuit, a class action complaint, seeks to represent all U.S. citizens or permanent residents who received partial need-based financial aid packages as a student enrolled at one of the 16 named schools
since 2003. It alleges that the schools have overcharged more than 170,000 financial aid recipients by hundreds of millions of dollars, violating Section 1 of the Sherman Act. In 1994, Congress exempted universities and other higher education institutions from federal antitrust law under the condition that they maintain need-blind admissions processes for U.S. citizens and permanent residents. This exemption allows universities to share and collaborate on financial aid formulas, which would otherwise constitute an antitrust violation. Since the passage of that exemption, need-blind schools have collaborated on a common formula for determining financial aid through a body known as the 568 Presidents Group. The group describes itself as “an affiliation of colleges and universities, all of which must admit students on a needblind basis.” UChicago joined the group in 1998, adopted its consensus formula in 2003,
and left the group in 2014. The suit alleges that nine of the defendants disqualified themselves from the exemption by taking wealth into account for admissions, whether by giving preferential treatment in the admissions process to children of wealthy donors or by taking wealth into account for admitting students off waitlists or for specific programs. Those nine defendants are Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Duke, Georgetown University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northwestern, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Pennsylvania, and Vanderbilt. The complaint alleges that the remaining seven defendants, including UChicago, “may or may not have followed a need-blind admissions policy throughout the Class Periods, but during at least some portion of the Class Periods, they conspired with the other Defendants to reduce financial aid and increase the net price of attendance for their students.” The suit lists UChicago’s class period as lasting from 2003 to 2014, throughout which the University adopted
the 568 Presidents Group’s shared formula for determining financial aid. UChicago has long touted its need-blind admissions process for U.S. citizens and permanent residents. CBS News ranked the University as the most expensive in the country, and the estimated full cost of annual attendance—three quarters of tuition and housing—is $82,848 for 2021–22. The University’s average cost of attendance after aid for the 2019–20 academic year was $36,584, according to the U.S. Department of Education. The University declined to comment on the ongoing lawsuit in its email to The Maroon. Former undergraduate students who received partial financial aid at the listed schools are eligible to sign on as potential plaintiffs of the lawsuit, according to lawyers representing the plaintiffs. Students and families can fill out the form at 568cartel.com or email CollegeFinancialAid@bm.net. Kate Mabus contributed reporting.
Allen Abbott Named New President of Undergraduate Student Government By MICHAEL MCCLURE | Deputy News Editor Undergraduate Student Government (USG) Executive Vice President of Internal Affairs Allen Abbott will become the president of USG for the remainder of the 2021–22 term, replacing Parul Kumar, who vacated the post on December 18. The change, which took effect immediately, was announced on USG’s Instagram account on January 11. Abbott, a fourth-year majoring in East Asian languages and civilizations and Law, Letters, and Society alongside
a joint master’s degree in international relations, was the second person to whom College Council (CC) offered the position. Executive Vice President of External Affairs Natalie Wang, who was first in line to replace Kumar according to USG’s new succession procedure, declined the offer. “We are thrilled to be leading USG together in its inaugural term. Throughout the past year, we have collaborated on numerous projects on issues ranging from the academic calendar to Maroon
Dollars expansion. We worked closely together in the USG transition process. It has been a privilege to work together with brilliant USG representatives and see firsthand the limitless potential that we as an organization have in representing and serving student interests,” reads the post, co-written by Abbott and Wang. Wang is the only remaining member of the original Thrive slate, which ran unopposed in last year’s Student Government (SG) election. In July, former CC chair Murphy DePompei resigned from her post. DePompei was replaced by
Marla Anderson, who served as the acting president during winter break after Kumar’s resignation. The post also announced that Wang will retire from her position at the end of winter quarter to begin a full-time job in the spring. USG will determine “over the coming weeks” how Wang’s position will be filled once she vacates. USG’s succession procedure was approved unanimously at a CC meeting on Monday, January 10. The procedure stipulates that a vacancy in the presidency be CONTINUED ON PG. 3
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offered first to the executive vice president of external affairs, then to the executive vice president of internal affairs. Each office-holder has 24 hours to accept or decline the role before the offer is extended to the next person in line. “The following of a clear line of succession is preferred to a general election for the office because a line of succession allows for swift continuity of executive leadership and direction for Undergraduate Student Government’s ongoing projects, initiatives, and day-to-day functions. It also allows for the preservation of the workflow and synergy that has developed between Cabinet members, committee chairs, and leaders in College Council,” reads the document, which was compiled by Vice President of Advocacy Tyler Okeke. Under the document’s provisions, the responsibilities Abbott held in his previous roles as executive vice president of internal affairs and chair of USG’s transition committee will be distributed among the remaining cabinet members.
Transition committee vice-chair and Class of 2022 CC representative John Fuentes presided over discussions on the succession procedure. To avoid any potential conflict of interest, Abbott “was not involved with the final recommendation,” according to a statement given by USG to The Maroon. Abbott was first elected to SG in October 2020 after winning a tie-breaker vote against fellow write-in candidate Evita Duffy for the fourth CC representative seat for the Class of 2022. He also served as SG historian in the 2020–21 term. In a statement emailed to The Maroon, Kumar wrote that she will continue working with USG on projects like amending Greek life policy, producing a report on marginalized students, and providing emergency funds to survivors of sexual violence. “A lot of the Thrive slate’s original mission was in alignment with the work I’ve been doing since my first or second year here, so it feels more natural to just keep going instead of stopping because I don’t have a position or title,” she wrote.
USG President Allen Abbott. COURTESY OF ALLEN ABBOTT “I’ve been really lucky to have such a supportive community around me and have felt completely affirmed in my decision and in who I am. I feel really confident
and happy and hopeful coming into this quarter to be able to work on so many different projects with so many wonderful people.”
Hyde Park Refugee Project Hires UChicago Students To Help Ease the Arrival of Refugee Families By NEIVE RODRIGUEZ | Senior News Reporter The Hyde Park Refugee Project, the first program of its kind in Hyde Park, has been working to help refugee and immigrant families settle in the South Side since 2015. The project also assists refugee families with finding affordable housing, connecting with employers, and developing English language skills. In an interview with The Maroon, the project’s co-director Lisa Jenschke described the difficult process of assimilation and how the organization works to smooth that transition. “Although the government provides a stipend for the families when they first arrive, for individuals it does cost more than that to provide services for them. The first job is to raise money to cover costs, and we try to raise about $15–20,000 for that family, so that we can cover the costs [of living] for the
first year,” she said. One of the most essential aspects of resettlement is language learning. “When a family first arrives, they need to learn English, because it’s going to be really hard for them to get a job and support themselves if they don’t have any English. They also need to get their kids enrolled in school and get them signed up for public benefits and health insurance,” Jenschke said. She also explained, “A lot of families that come in, like refugees and asylum seekers, haven’t had medical care in a few years, because they may have been living in a refugee camp or in a country where they didn’t have the resources for medical care. So a lot of times you’re playing catch up, with dental care or health conditions that haven’t been treated for a number of years.” The pandemic magnified the difficulty of
already present political challenges faced by refugees, according to Jenschke. “There’s been so much misinformation about the pandemic and the vaccine that we’ve had to work really hard to counteract that. But it’s really understandable for families that are refugees,” she said. “They’re often coming from countries where the government is not trustworthy. They have been fleeing for their lives. For them to kind of get over that distrust of authority and believe that it’s OK [to get vaccinated] is a big emotional step for them to take. And so that’s something that we’ve worked a lot on, communicating health and safety and just making them feel a lot more comfortable.” The project has been working to cultivate a positive relationship with UChicago by providing opportunities for students who may be interested in refugee resettlement or working for a nonprofit organization. “We have a lot of students who have
worked in our summer camps or have been interns with us. We had spring interns through the [Institute of Politics] as well. There are a lot of different programs where [students] have been able to get involved and really do some hands-on work. Some people may be interested in the nonprofit side of that, or some may be more interested in the social work side of that,” Jenschke said. Gen Bryant (’21), who graduated from the College this spring, assisted with the Project’s summer camp for immigrant and refugee children and shared her thoughts on how UChicago students can become more involved with it. “There are so many different ways to get involved with [the Project], and they are growing constantly. It’s really important for UChicago to get involved with the surrounding community because the community could benefit so much from an institution with so many resources,” Bryant said.
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The Iconoclastic Flamboyance of Gertrude Beasley Almost a century after being banned in two countries, a groundbreaking feminist memoir is back in print, and its author’s extraordinary life is being brought to light. RACHEL ROBINSON | Grey City Contributor Content warning: The following article contains discussion of sexual assault and incest. Gertrude Beasley was not one to mince words. “Thirty years ago, I lay in the womb of a woman, conceived in a sexual act of rape, being carried during the prenatal period by an unwilling and rebellious mother, finally bursting from the womb only to be tormented in a family whose members I despised or pitied, and brought into association with people who I should never have chosen.” If she were a man, she could have well been a literary icon. She was a firecracker of a writer, a patron saint of radical truth in the eyes of her contemporaries, and the kind of woman that made the U.S. and U.K. governments afraid of her putting pen to paper. But shortly after publishing her first book in 1925, a memoir of her young life titled My First Thirty Years, she disappeared. The book went out of print and wasn’t available outside certain academic libraries—save for a 500-copy republication by the Book Club of Texas in 1989—for 96 years. Thanks to a few women with lucky connections and a love for Beasley, My First Thirty Years was republished late last year in September, making it widely available to the public for the first time in history. Beasley’s memoir holds a mirror up to the rural South’s treatment of poor women by describing her own experiences of abuse with the reflective eye of an avowed feminist and socialist. Her refusal to self-censor was an impulse that
eventually landed her in jail. She was harassed, arrested, and stricken from the literary tradition for writing unabashedly about topics then considered obscene and taboo. “She absolutely refused social convention and how society said women should act and think, and which parts of her life that a woman should value,” Beasley enthusiast Nina Bennett (A.B. ’07) said. “She totally rejected that in the most aggressive terms possible and she wasn’t wealthy, she wasn’t married. You’re allowed to be eccentric if you’re rich or part of a particular class of people or have certain powerful backers. And she had none of those.” She was unprecedented, and therefore dangerous. Not only was Beasley a woman candidly talking about sexual violence in the age of obscenity laws and a culture of victim blaming, she was making claims about the very nature of sexual abuse. Rape within a marriage was not considered as such until the 1970s, when it became a major issue in the women’s movement. Beasley’s use of the term “rape,” not just in the opening paragraph but repeatedly to describe her father’s abuse of her mother, shows that she was light-years ahead of her time in how she thought about consent. And that’s just the first few sentences. The book spans Beasley’s traumatic early memories of growing up on the Texas plains to her years as a student at the University of Chicago to the start of her career as a foreign correspondent. Most of the book’s initial negative reception, along with much of the later praise, deals
with the first portion in which Beasley recounts the sexual and physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her family members. “I think the attitude would’ve been that the only thing worse than letting yourself be raped or letting yourself have incest committed upon you would be to write about it, right?” Celia Marshik, a professor of 20th-century literature, said in an interview with The Maroon. “What she’s doing that’s so shocking is telling the story and telling it very straightforwardly.” Marshik is a scholar of feminist modernist studies who wrote an essay on My First Thirty Years and teaches at Stony Brook University. She lives about 12 miles away from Central Islip, NY, where Beasley spent the last 30 years of her life in Central Islip Psychiatric Hospital. She stumbled upon Beasley while researching censorship in the modernist era and became “obsessed with her.” She was shocked that even before the book was published, Beasley and her publisher were harassed over rumors of its content and for sending copies of her writing through the mail. “I just thought it was so unbelievable that a woman who hadn’t even published a book yet was really being persecuted, you know, because of the story she wanted to tell,” she said. Her article, “Sexual Violence as Founding Narrative: Edna Gertrude Beasley’s My First Thirty Years,” looks at Beasley’s life story as an important text in the study of sexuality. For Marshik, Beasley started as an afterthought in her book British Modernism and Censorship, but she remained a point of influence in
her studies, and she retained a personal interest in the author’s life. “It was just a tiny footnote in my book, because my book is really about British authors, but she was always there. And she was particularly there because she spent the second half of her life in a mental institution just down the road from me,” she said. Marshik’s essay focuses on Beasley’s descriptions of incest, undiscussed at the time and especially significant because she and many of the people she mentions were alive when the book was published. A scholar of modernism, Marshik has stressed repeatedly that Beasley was not a major part of that movement because she was excluded from it by the male-dominated literary establishment. “There are novels about incest that come out much, much later in the 20th century and the authors are really celebrated for breaking the silence,” Marshik said. “Here’s somebody who’s breaking the silence in the 1920s, and it’s important that we listened to her story. I don’t think she had much of an impact on the literary tradition because just not enough people got to her. She’s kind of in her own little box, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.” Bennett was at the center of the republication project. She came across the first ten pages of My First Thirty Years after moving to Dallas and picking up an anthology of Texas literature to better understand the state’s identity. She was drawn in by Beasley’s uncompromising attitude and immediately hungered to read the rest of the book, which she was able to do because her husband was a CONTINUED ON PG. 5
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professor at Southern Methodist University and had access to the academic library. Bennett’s mother-in-law founded the Naperville-based publishing company Sourcebooks, and it remains family-owned. When she brought Beasley up during a family Zoom call, Bennett and her sister-in-law, Marie Bennett, decided to use their industry connection to finally give the author a platform. In an interview with The Maroon, Bennett observed that in the last five years, the publishing industry has responded to broader social conversations such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the #MeToo movement by making a conscious effort to publish marginalized voices. “Publishers right now are really trying to be very thoughtful about how to hand the microphone over to folks who have not historically had a microphone and let them speak for themselves, so that’s why I felt that it was really important to get her voice out there,” Bennett said. “This is remedying a past injustice, and it will never fully remedy the injustice because I can’t give her her career back, right? The best that I can do is I can give her her voice back. It felt important for me to do that for Gertrude.” As a fellow UChicago graduate, Bennett sees the institution’s culture reflected in Beasley’s forceful argumentative style. “I think that [the University] gave her intellectual rigor,” Bennett said, “She becomes a much more powerful opponent and, in that sense, she becomes much more threatening because she’s able to not just get angry, but get angry about very specific things and make wellhoned arguments as to why those things are not okay.” In her book, Beasley recalls a conversation with her first boss out of graduate school in which she quoted a professor whom she often clashed with, but ultimately learned from and admired. “He said I was extremely critical; I had written articles criticizing almost every phase of schoolwork in the whole
Gertrude Beasley, author of My First Thirty Years, in an undated photo. COURTESY OF U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE state. But, I protested, criticism is the chief aim of higher learning; Professor Parker at the University of Chicago held that the chief aim of a University was to make students critically minded.” Bennett wrote the forward for the new edition, providing an empathetic retelling of Beasley’s life beyond the bounds of the book. In the final paragraph of the book, in 1920, Beasley embarks a ship to Japan and reveals a secret wish to meet someone abroad. “Her narration ends when she leaves the United States and from that point— from Bellingham, Washington, she’s on a boat and she ends up on a ship going
to Asia,” Bennett said. “She’s left behind her career as a teacher and is just starting on her career as a foreign correspondent. That is the last time that she comes back to the United States until she’s deported from the U.K. and ends up locked up in [a] Long Island psychiatric center. So, in many senses, [the premise of the book] is like My First Thirty Years, but it’s also like her life in America is within the pages of the book.” After leaving the U.S., Beaseley made her way across Asia, stopping first in Japan, then China and Korea before disobeying the American embassy and sneaking into Moscow soon after the
formation of the Soviet Union. At least one of Beasley’s articles from this period in Russia was published in Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review, and in her foreword, Bennett quotes her as saying that tsarist sympathizers were “as sterile and emasculated, socially and intellectually, as the average Southerner in America.” Eventually, Beasley ended up in London, where she wrote the memoirs that became My First Thirty Years. By this point, she was making herself known in literary circles, spending her time with other American expats and starting to CONTINUED ON PG. 6
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make waves. Her book was picked up by Robert McAlmon’s Contact Editions, a small Parisian publishing company that also published Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein’s debut works. In fact, McAlmon compared Beasley to Stein in his 1938 memoir, where he notes that they were some of his most stubborn writers and calls them “megalomaniacs with an idea that to know them was to serve them without question in all their demands.” In 1925, the proofs of My First Thirty Years were intercepted by British authorities on their way to their author and seized for obscene content. At the time, both the U.K. and U.S. had laws against sending “lascivious information” through the mail, and organizations like the British National Vigilance Association (NVA) were pushing for stricter enforcement. Not long after, My First Thirty Years arrived in the U.S. and was found to be in violation of federal anti-obscenity laws. A couple of copies slipped through the cracks, some ending up in Texas and others in the hands of curious literary types like H.L. Menken, who published a lengthy and glowing review in The New Yorker. Beasley’s story was heavily suppressed, but it by no means went unnoticed. Under the surface of popular culture, big name writers were reading her, though not all were fans. Bennett recently discovered a letter from Ernest Hemingway to Ezra Pound, in which Hemingway responds to Pound praising Beasley’s writing for trying to discredit American exceptionalism. He acknowledges the importance of Beasley’s documentation and admits to having enjoyed McAlmon’s work documenting his own life, but he denies that documenting is a real form of literary art. Pound is biased towards her, he argues, because he hates the U.S. as much as she does. Hemingway writes: “I recognize the value of both [McAlmon] and [Beasley]. That would bring me to my other major bone i.e. your hatred of These or Those United States. You give [Beasley] credit beyond her due
simply because she shows up U.S.A. Why get excited about U.S.A? … [Beasley] is a documenter. [McAlmon], when he is at his best, is a documenter too.” Bennett finds this dismissal of Beasley’s artistic merits to fit Hemingway’s reputation as being at times critical and self-involved. “Just so fucking Hemingway, you know?” Bennett said. “No one is good except for me ever. Yeah, it really absolutely was circulating under the radar with various literati and in Texas it caused a huge kerfuffle partly because she names names in her book.” One of the many names that Beasley mentions is that of the then— Texas governor’s mother-in-law, whom she accuses of having an affair with the preacher at her childhood church. It’s believed that this is why her book was pulled off the shelves in her home state. Texas Monthly recently published a letter calling it “the worst kept secret in Texas political and literary circles” that My First Thirty Years was disappearing under orders from Texas politicians. Meanwhile in London, it took two years for Scotland Yard to find a viable reason to arrest Beasley, and in the end, it had nothing to do with her writing. She ended up being deported on a technicality, for not having the proper stamps on her passport identifying her as a foreign national. More than likely, it had more to do with organizations like the NVA having a vested interest in seeing her thrown out of the country. She never recovered from this. Once she arrived in the U.S., Beasley refused to get off the ship and wrote a paranoid letter to the Secretary of State claiming that people in Texas and British authorities were trying to “destroy me as a writer and a personality and have me put to death.” “She went along and basically said, ‘People are trying to get me,’ sounding very paranoid, but is it paranoia if 10 days after the ship docks in Manhattan, she is locked away in the Islip Psychiatric Center, and is never let back out again?” Bennett said. “Her body is still there. She was buried 34 years later.”
Historians don’t know what exactly caused the fear and confusion evident in her letter, but Marshik believes that her living conditions after the release of My First Thirty Years were severe enough to alter her mental state. “The line in the letter that really breaks my heart is when she says, ‘I was doing good work in the direst of poverty,’” Marshik said. “At some point I think she was literally so hungry she couldn’t think straight.” From that point on, Beasley was never heard from again. Marshik has spent years trying to track down records of her time at Central Islip with no success. My First Thirty Years went out of circulation and we have no way of knowing what she wrote while committed, if anything at all. As Bennett puts it in the foreword, “She could not have been silenced more effectively.” It’s hard to say what could’ve become of her if she had been allowed to keep living, writing, and traveling as she had wanted to. Bennett envisions her becoming a sort of Martha Gellhorn, the pioneering war correspondent who reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her career. Gellhorn was the only woman to land at Normandy beach on D-Day and she wrote about the Vietnam War for The Atlantic into her 60s. “I could very much see Gertrude bringing the same hard-nosed critiques, but instead of limiting those critiques to warzones, turning them back on her own society and basically calling out complacency because that’s what she did so well in her memoir, right?” Bennett said. “She does it in Texas, where she calls out the complacency of this relatively small West Texas town and their religious institutions and their education institutions. She calls out basically what normal society looks like, she holds up a mirror and is like, ‘Guys, this is gross.’” My First Thirty Years is a memoir, but its value runs so much deeper than just documentation. It is also a powerful testimony, a manifesto, a debunking of a romanticized image of the West that is so often coddled in “frontier” literature.
It is a success story and a feminist relic, and it is finally being read after a century of suppression. On December 8, the Chicago American Writers Museum hosted a virtual talk on Beasley featuring Marshik and both Nina and Marie Bennett. This was the first time that Marshik and the Bennetts had met, although the three of them are almost certainly the world’s most qualified experts on Beasley as well as her most devoted supporters. Before the event, Nina said she was excited to “hang out with other people who think this woman’s story is important,” adding that there have been so few times in the last 100 years where that has been the case, where people who cared about Beasley could gather in the same place. “Honestly,” she said, “I don’t know if that has ever happened.” Between questions posed by Nina and submitted by audience members, the conversation covered a lot of ground while still managing to feel like only the foundation of a long dialogue about Beasley. The three women discussed My First Thirty Years as a way to examine childhood trauma, to demonstrate the misogyny of modernism, and to start a conversation about believing women in memoir, among other avenues of analysis. “There are so many different entry points,” Bennett said in her opening remarks. “There are so many places to latch on and get excited. Here was a woman who refused to fit in. Here was a book that told extremely uncomfortable truths you weren’t allowed to say, frankly, then or now. Here was a story of erasure—not a witch hunt, because there was no hunt, just witch burning.” Something Bennett has discovered while doing interviews since the book’s rerelease is that Beasley’s surviving work is vast and interesting from any point of view that can appreciate talent and iconoclasm. “[The book] is appealing to so many different people who love to read and people who love authors in all of their iconoclastic flamboyance.”
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VIEWPOINTS
Maroon Handcuffs: Why Dissatisfaction and Inaction Go Hand in Hand We can’t let the fear of alienation from the University paralyze us in pressuring the University to act. By TEJAS NARAYAN It seems safe to say that the news that our return to campus would be pushed back by three weeks was met with a less-thanstellar reception. Many students—myself included—didn’t have enough time to change our travel plans on just over a week’s notice, which stung especially hard given the amount
of advance warning provided by other universities. For instance, Harvard announced that they would go online a week before UChicago did, even though their upcoming term was scheduled to start three weeks after our winter quarter began. Even other schools on the quarter system didn’t sweep the rug out from under their students’ feet quite so sharply; Stanford and
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DePaul announced that their first two weeks would be online while UChicago had still “made no decisions or changes to alter the approach for Winter Quarter.” Our administration was also largely alone in closing the residence halls, which left students’ housing for those three weeks in the uncertain hands of a case-by-case review. But even if it’s a generally held opinion that the University’s handling of winter quarter has been unacceptable, we are beholden to a system of social pressures deterring us from transferring or withdrawing, even if it means enduring administrative failures like this one. The problem is that when we allow the University’s decision-making to escape scrutiny, we give up our only leverage by which to hold it accountable for its actions. And as long as we continue to uphold the aspects of our culture that discourage frustrated students from transferring, our criticisms will always play second fiddle to our devotion to UChicago. Without a doubt, there’s a stigma attached to leaving college, and UChicago’s academic environment is far from exempt. As is the case with most highly ranked colleges, being here is viewed as a rare opportunity that we’re expected to take full advantage of. Given the chance, there’s little doubt that students across the country would trade places with us in a heartbeat. We’re naturally reluctant to sac-
rifice this privilege over gripes that seem trivial in comparison; after all, aren’t a few weeks of advance notice on housing plans a small price to pay for the chance to attend the University of Chicago? Giving that up means forgoing the quality of education, the value of a UChicago degree, and the connections we might have made here. And if we still don’t believe that’s worth the drawbacks, people whose opinions we care about often will, encouraging us to stay strong amid whatever challenges may come our way. That messaging resonates with us largely because we welcome challenges. Many of us are here specifically because we expect to be challenged. No matter how difficult it is to keep pace with the academic demands we’re faced with, we judge ourselves by our ability to overcome situations that push us to our limits. At UChicago, trials like these are to be found around every corner, and we take it upon ourselves to meet them. Having accepted the challenge of making it through the College, we feel compelled to see that goal through; deciding to abandon it feels as though we’re admitting defeat. That pattern isn’t unique to UChicago, either—in fact, our freshman retention rate is around 99 percent, second only to MIT. As another top school with the reputation of being something of a pressure cooker (feel free to look up the acronym
“IHTFP” if you’re unfamiliar), MIT similarly dares its students to hold firm through four years of brutal academic rigor. Going to college is a significant investment in terms of time, money, and effort, and UChicago is especially demanding in these respects. With the combination of the taxing coursework and exorbitant price tag, returning students—especially the 60 percent relying on financial aid— are forced to carefully consider the sunk cost from their time in the College before deciding to withdraw or transfer. The Core also plays a major role here: At universities that don’t share the general education requirements that we fulfill in our first two years at UChicago, transferring could cause us to fall behind our peers in progress toward our majors. Another contributing factor is that UChicago has deliberately set itself apart from other major research institutions through its trademark emphasis on free expression and individualism. By staking out this position as a unique feature of our shared identity, it has cultivated a sense among us that the assortment of interesting people we engage with on a daily basis can’t be found anywhere else. Even though that’s obviously false—the wealth of fascinating human beings and inimitable ways of thinking in the world could never be constrained to CONTINUED ON PG. 8
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The problem is that when we allow the University’s decision-making to escape scrutiny, we give up our only leverage by which to hold it accountable for its actions. CONTINUED FROM PG. 7 such a narrow bubble as ours— we’re all too happy to subscribe to that image because it boosts our own egos by telling us that we’re special. That, in conjunction with the validation of being admitted to a selective university, is a ripe breeding ground for the elitism of which name-brand universities like ours tend to be accused. Internalizing the belief that our college marks us as exceptional, however, serves as a powerful deterrent from withdrawing; we’re unwilling to forsake UChicago if it means giving up the “elite” status that comes with it. Of course, it’s not as though
students elsewhere are clamoring to drop out in comparison. No matter where you go to college, withdrawing or transferring is always a difficult and involved process, and it is enough of a time commitment that few people will attempt it without being sure that they’re dissatisfied where they are. It forces them to uproot the lives that they’ve already built and adjust to a completely new environment, whether academic or professional. Despite these universal concerns, however, the fact remains that UChicago students are particularly averse to leaving—a pattern that begs explanation. It’s also undeni-
able that our administration is markedly more willing to make unpopular decisions than its peers around the country, such as closing campus on next to no notice, increasing UCPD presence in Hyde Park, shortening the quarter by a week, manipulating our financial aid, refusing to make stronger commitments to sustainability, or not improving a mental health support system that often does more harm than good. Even if not all of these demands enjoy unilateral support from the UChicago community, each one marks an instance where the University has disregarded the concerns of its students without fear of reper-
cussions. In the absence of the economic leverage that typically keeps large organizations in line, the administration is at liberty to act wherever its own interests may lead it, however the rest of us may feel about those actions. This isn’t to say that we all need to immediately take a leave of absence just to make a statement to the University— indeed, nobody should derail their career paths for the purpose of being petty. What we do need is to recognize that UChicago’s abnormally low transfer rate emerges directly from our collective identity and culture, which is something we absolutely can do something about.
By holding the status of being at UChicago in such high regard, every student here contributes to the social pressure deterring us from leaving. The responsibility lies in every one of us to purge our mentality of the notion that there’s something uniquely indispensable about this particular university. Because as long as we continue to idolize “the one and only UChicago experience” well past what it deserves from us, there’s nothing keeping the University from ignoring our voices simply because we allowed it to. Tejas Narayan is a second-year in the College.
Too Little, Too Late The University’s decision to delay the return to campus was announced far too late. By LUKE CONTRERAS The University of Chicago’s decision to delay winter quarter and begin the first two weeks remotely surprised many undergraduate students, as it came only about a week before most students planned to return to campus. But how surprising is it, actually? This is certainly not the first time the University has waited to make a significant decision during the pandemic. On numerous occasions, it has left students scrambling to readjust to last-minute plans. The University’s late decision is a result of poor planning. Moving forward, the University needs to transition from its current, reactive strategy to one that is adaptive, considerate of students’ time and finances, and maintains the safety of the community.
The Omicron variant is more transmissible but less deadly, and it is certainly manageable on a campus full of individuals who are fully vaccinated and boosted. Two shots of Pfizer are 70 percent effective against severe disease due to the variant; and while they are only 33 percent effective against an Omicron infection, a booster shot is likely able to raise that number dramatically. Additionally, the FDA recently approved another antiviral pill to treat COVID-19 for those at higher risk. For vaccinated and boosted individuals, the risks associated with the virus are much lower than they have been in the past year. Why, then, would the University decide to delay our return to campus for three weeks? Despite the lower risk, the University still needs to take precautions to ensure our
safety. It is certainly responsible to test students following winter break, considering that over one million positive tests were recorded the Monday after New Year’s. The University would need to acquire and administer thousands of tests to undergraduate students on a weekly basis (which would likely be impossible, considering that UChicago recently suspended asymptomatic testing to accommodate demand for symptomatic tests). Preventing an immediate outbreak would also require enough workers to administer and process those tests and the proper space to accommodate multiple testing stations. Now we must think about the situation from the perspective of the University administration. These are actions that need to be coordinated more
than a few weeks in advance, which might have only been possible soon after the first case of Omicron was detected in the United States in early December. The country is also experiencing a shortage of PCR tests, which could make the task of obtaining enough tests for the entire student body barely feasible at the beginning of January. Worse yet, the number of staff needed for testing would likely exceed the number of available workers, as the provost’s email mentioned reduced staffing capacity. Current conditions present a logistical nightmare for the University, and a three-week delay in our return to in-person learning just might buy them some time to plan for our arrival amid this new variant. But the unfortunate timing of Omicron’s detection is
no excuse for the University of Chicago’s late decision to move classes online. Within days of the variant’s arrival in the United States, DePaul University announced a return to online classes for the first two weeks of its winter quarter. University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University made similar plans soon after. These decisions were made due to the relative lack of knowledge about the emerging variant and the anticipation that testing supply would be low in the new year. UChicago ultimately took the same precautionary measures as these universities, but it announced them weeks later, when many students could not change their travel plans. Whether or not UChicago should have kept classes in-person is irrelevant. The University’s decision came CONTINUED ON PG. 9
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“Omicron is not the first variant of COVID-19, and it certainly will not be the last.”
EVA McCORD CONTINUED FROM PG. 8 much too late. Our current predicament speaks to the fact that the University administration and faculty have been repeatedly unprepared for the challenges associated with COVID-19. For example, this past autumn, columnist Jennifer Rivera pointed out that professors essentially punish us for absences due to COVID-19 or other illnesses, a policy that further exposes other students to health-related
dangers. Even last year’s April outbreak led some, including The Maroon’s editorial board, to conclude that the University’s policies were unaccommodating and sometimes nonsensical. The University should implement plans and procedures that will make these unforeseen circumstances much less impactful on the student body. Omicron is not the first variant of COVID-19, and it certainly will not be the last. It is conceivable that an even more
transmissible or deadlier variant could emerge in the future. How would the University respond? Would they once again send us home to view our college experiences from a laptop screen? Keeping us away from campus is not a solution, but a split-second reaction to an obstacle that could have been anticipated. Considering that Omicron causes less severe illness, it appears as though the move to online classes could have been avoided with better
preparation. Those in charge of our health and safety should be better prepared for new periods of uncertainty because they are inevitable. Additionally, we must push for a more adaptive approach to our education. At the beginning of last summer, I argued that we should retain some of the virtual tools we used during the pandemic to optimize our work in a transition to the post-pandemic world. Some professors, who completed their education
in the absence of a global pandemic, might not consider that students face novel difficulties when it comes to their academics. For this reason, the University should implement new policies that specifically accommodate those who have tested positive for COVID-19. This might include requiring professors to offer temporary remote participation, restricting attendance requirements, and demanding that all lectures be recorded. These policies would prevent infected individuals from incurring academic consequences and protect their classmates from exposure. To the University’s credit, keeping many students away from campus for three more weeks is responsible in light of the number of unvaccinated individuals overwhelming our hospitals this winter. However, the timing of the decision has had a largely adverse effect on students. The delayed return to campus affects many different members of the student body, from those struggling with mental health to those who have nowhere to stay for an additional three weeks. In this time, when some of us are confused, upset, anxious, or even angry, we must direct our focus to the future. There are many changes that we can initiate to become more adaptive to the challenges presented by COVID-19. Ultimately, moving to online classes is an avoidable and unoriginal approach to continuing instruction during this phase of the pandemic. We should push for the University to make longterm changes, because we may one day face an even more consequential variant. Luke Contreras is a second-year in the College.
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ARTS Rico Rocked the Reynolds Club Rico Nasty’s MAB Show Was Exactly the Energetic Return to In-Person Shows that UChicago Needed By KAYLA MARTINEZ | Arts Reporter When Rico Nasty said, “I can tell you got a crush, that’s the reason that you came here,” she was right, at least about me, specifically. Bringing in Rico, known for her never-ending energy, for the first in-person show since 2019’s Summer Breeze was a perfect choice (thank you, Major Activities Board [MAB]). You could feel the hype the minute you walked in the Reynolds Club side door. As the venue filled up, people clad in neon, mesh, and black Doc Martens shouted across the aisle to friends and posed for Instagram stories. MAB started taking fit pics. The crowd was ready. At 8 p.m., opener Cristiano the Curator (@cristianothecurator) started DJing. A second-year in the College, Cristiano has performed at clubs in Chicago and the U.K. His techno beats were accompanied by a Matrix-esque loop of a back alley complete with a dancing crash dummy. By 8:45 p.m., MAB’s leadership team was on stage telling us how excited they were to bring back the fall show and asking us to “try to stay in [our] seats.” We’d found out before that the pit was closed, so there wasn’t much of an alternative, or so I thought. MAB walked away to the sound of applause, and finally, Rico Nasty herself strutted on stage, ombré hair down to her knees matching with an orange and black crop top. She opened her mouth, and the “stay in your seats” thing went out the window as fans crushed their way to the front, shouting lyrics under masks and preparing to record “iPhone” on their iPhones. Rico opened with her hit song “Smack a Bitch,” and the performance was killer, but since this was the song where we squeezed our way up the aisles to the stage, I couldn’t really tell you what happened until the last notes. Since I was one of the lucky ones, though, I made it to the first couple of rows, and the first thing I noticed was her facial expres-
sions. Rico Nasty is a performer—her choreography matches her energy, which matches her lyrics. Whether you knew all the words to all her songs or were just there for the vibes, you were sucked into the show. You could feel the floor shaking and hear the words from the artist in front of you and the people behind you. The performance was impeccable. About halfway through her set, the Coalition for a Community Benefits Agreement unveiled a sign from the balcony that read “RICO! TELL UCHI STOP GENTRIFYING BLACK HOODS #REPARATIONS.” Prior to the beginning of the show, organizers at the concert spoke to students about the issues and the campaign. You can find more information at @uchicago_against_displacement on Instagram. The sign brought attention to the new reparations campaign working to alleviate the hardships created by UChicago’s displacement of Black neighborhoods, but was taken down without Rico’s acknowledgment. On top of performing her solo songs, Rico threw in “Money,” which features Flo Milli, Doja Cat’s “Tia Tamera,” and 100 gecs’s “ringtone (Remix),” all of which were huge crowd-pleasers. One third-year (@havana_syndrome) who also attended the 100 gecs show at Concord Music Hall in October tweeted, “i cannot believe i’ve seen ringtone performed live twice in the past month. i am living a charmed life.” I can’t help but agree—when I posted a clip of Rico rapping her verse on “Tia Tamera,” my cousin swiped up to tell me she was jealous. Of course she was. After seeing Rico, there’s no doubt that my life is charmed. After complimenting the crowd (thanks for making my life), Rico ended her set with “Smack a Bitch” again, which frankly was needed—we didn’t get to enjoy it as truly as we could have the first time. After the last “sugar trap!” we
all scampered back to our seats to grab coats and bags and little things, ears deafened and eyeliner smudged, gossiping and laughing, and finding friends we lost in the push to get to the front. Of course, a lot more goes into the making of an MAB show than we see from the crowd. MAB member Kealoha Ogunseitan told The Maroon it was hard to pinpoint campus taste after such a long hiatus from in-person shows. Choosing someone as energetic as Rico
was intentional, Ogunseitan said. “We wanted someone hype—who would get people on their feet to celebrate being able to come back together.” She also said that Rico’s team was easy to work with, and that Rico herself seemed incredibly kind—they’d happily book her again. Kealoha emphasized that she really enjoyed the process of watching the show come together, from the pitch to the performance, and that she can’t wait for more performers to return to campus.
Rico Nasty performed in MAB’s first in-person show since 2019 this November. COURTESY OF THE RECORDING ACADEMY
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Man on a Mission: Chicago’s Friendly Neighborhood Pizza Man Tour de Pizza is adding a deeper meaning to our collective love for pizza. What makes it so good?
With over 400 “pizza stops” under their belt, Tour De Pizza has taken social media by storm. COURTESY OF @TOURDEPIZZACHICAGO
By ANANYA SAHAI | Arts Preporter Four weeks ago, yet another invention took place on UChicago grounds—this time at the Arley D. Cathey Dining Commons. Seated at the round Dodd-Mead table, I watched my friend pick up a slice of pizza that proceeded to flop downwards at a precise 90-degree angle. And with that, the Pusateri Flop Scale (named after the victim of this pizza mishap) was invented. The lower the flop scale value, the better the pizza. This got me wondering: What constitutes a good pizza (apart from its flop, of course)? We all eat it, we all love it, but do we all know why that is? In search of an answer, I met with Eric Hernandez, the person behind Tour de Pizza, Chicago. He has been bringing pizza lovers together as he bikes across Chicago on a mission to taste and review every single pizza joint in the city. Founded in July 2021, Tour de Pizza has seen Hernandez visit (and review) 43
pizza places on his Instagram, Facebook, and website to date. Hernandez grew up near downtown Chicago and is a self-employed automotive detailer. Alongside that, he runs Tour de Pizza. The project started off with a neglected bike and has grown into a community with nearly 4,000 followers on Instagram and Facebook, separately. Hernandez had purchased an e-bike, but after using it for a couple of months, it started collecting dust. As a hardcore pizza-lover, he came up with an idea to use the bike more often: “Going out to the city and trying all the different pizzerias.” He told me, “I wasn’t going to do it as a page but just something more personal: A way for me to get on the bike and go try some new pizza at the same time. I told people about it and one of my friends was like, ‘You should make that into a page! It sounds
like something people might like reading about.’” Eating pizza endlessly, as much as it sounds like a dream, is hard! As Hernandez said himself, “If I was doing it by myself, I’m pretty sure I would have quit after a few weeks because it gets tiring.” And that’s when it hit me: the experience of eating pizza is more than just consuming bread, tomato sauce, and cheese. It’s about sitting on the floor with your friends at 1 a.m. and fighting over the last slice; it’s about ordering 20 boxes of it to enjoy at a pool party; in fact, it’s even about laughing hysterically with your housemates at its terrible Pusateri flop. Tour de Pizza has built on that very idea of community: bringing people together through the one dish we all like. It has created a place where people can passionately argue about the best deep-dish in the city, shoot recommendations at each other, and simply enjoy reading about the many pizzerias in Chicago.
This relatability is what sets Tour de Pizza apart from any other restaurant-recommending platform. It’s personal, it’s real, and it’s from the heart. Hernandez claims that he doesn’t know anything about food or critiquing it: “I just know if something’s good or something’s bad. You don’t need to be an expert in certain foods. You may not be a critic, but if you go and buy some pasta right now and it’s awful, you’re going to know it’s awful. If it’s good, you’re going to know it’s good.” This is how the vast majority experience food, so the Tour de Pizza reviews speak to them. I look at a pizza slice, I see it flop at a 90-degree angle, and I know it’s not a good sign. What I won’t know—or frankly, want to know—is why there is a specific “movement” in the crust or what the “color symbolism” is. As Tour de Pizza grows, Eric Hernandez hopes to use this community he has fostered “to do some good in the world, even if minor.” “I hope to tap into my following and bring them together through our common love of pizza. Like, for example, next week I was originally donating about $150 of pizza from my own money to be sold at nameyour-price to raise money for [a] school. I made a post about this and got about $75 in donations to help the cause and offset my costs at the same time.” Learning about Tour de Pizza made me realize just how much joy pizza brings us. When we got sick of eating home-cooked food in the past two years, my family and I resorted to pizza. When I can’t find anything appetizing at the dining halls, I fall back to the beloved pizza (because somehow, even its extreme flop brings joy). As Hernandez puts it, “I have never met someone that says, ‘I don’t like pizza.’ If you don’t like pizza, there’s something wrong with you.” So, why is that? Through Tour de Pizza, he has found that this universal love of pizza stems from its inclusivity. The sheer variety that pizza offers is unmatched—vegan, gluten-free, lactose-free, vegetarian, non-vegetarian. From my childhood birthday parties to my first day at Arley D. Cathey Dining Commons, pizza has been a constant. It brings people together because, as Hernandez says, “there’s pizza for everybody.”