031021

FITCH RATINGS LOWERS UCHICAGO REVENUE BONDS RATING TO AA+

MARCH 10, 2021 NINTH WEEK VOL. 133, ISSUE 19

PAGE 3

President of United Airlines, Venture Capitalist, and Money Manager Elected to UChicago Board of Trustees

By LUKIAN KLING Senior News Reporter The University of Chicago Board of Trustees elected Thomas Dunn (A.B. ’81, M.B.A. ’86), Brett Hart (J.D. ’94), and Hilarie Koplow-McAdams (A.M. ’87), who began serving their five year terms last spring.

This trio are the newest trustees on a 55-member board that is responsible for “ensuring the capacity of the University to fulfill its mission for current and future generations” through financial planning, global advocacy, and general programmatic oversight.

Thomas Dunn, founding partner and former CEO of institutional money manager New Holland Capital, graduated from the College with a B.A. in English literature and from Booth with an M.B.A. in finance. He then moved to New York where he worked at Goldman Sachs Asset Management until 1994. From there, he led the fixed income asset management team at Lazard Freres and built-up the hedge program at Dutchbased pension fund ABP. He, and a handful

Hilarie Koplow-McAdams, Brett Hart, and Thomas Dunn. COURTESY OF UCHICAGO NEWS of other co-founders, spun off the program into a new company, New Holland Capital, in 2006, becoming one of the first pension funds to do so.

Dunn currently serves on the University of Chicago’s Urban Labs Advisory Council, the College Dean’s Parent and Family

Council, the National Hedge Fund Services Board, and the Committee on Photography at the Museum of Modern Art. Brett Hart, president of United Airlines, graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1994 after receiving a B.A. in philosophy and English from the University

Anthony Fauci Discusses Unique Challenges of COVID-19 at Harris Dean’s Award Ceremony

By MICHAEL MCCLURE News Reporter

of Michigan. He went on to serve as a special assistant to the general counsel in the U.S. Department of the Treasury and became a partner at international law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal in Chicago. From 2004 to 2010, he rose through the ranks at Sara Lee food company, beginning as assistant general counsel and working his way to executive vice president, general counsel and Corporate Secretary. He left Sara Lee in 2010 to become executive vice president at United Airlines and was appointed president in May of 2020.

Hart currently serves as a board member at the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity. He previously served on the University’s Law School Advisory Council and the Board of Directors at Fermilab.

Hilarie Koplow-McAdams, a venture partner at venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA) since 2017, gradu-

Anthony Fauci received the 2020 Harris Dean’s Award at a virtual ceremony on Thursday, March 4, for his contributions to public health policy during the COVID-19

pandemic.

The longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Fauci succeeds the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in receiving the award, which is “bestowed

upon an exceptional leader for his or her lifetime contributions to public policy.”

Fauci has long been a prominent figure in American public health. He joined NIH as a clinical associate in 1968 and progressed through the agency’s ranks to become direc-

VIEWPOINTS: Black History Month Demands a Reckoning

GREY CITY: The Weird History of Snell-Hitchcock

SPORTS: Bears Face Offseason Full of Questions

PAGE 9

PAGE 7

CONTINUED ON PG. 5

CONTINUED ON PG. 3

PAGE 10

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

chicagomaroon.com

THE CHICAGO MAROON — MARCH 10, 2021

2

College Launches New Media Arts and Design Major

By GIACOMO CETORELLI Senior News Reporter A new media arts and design (MAAD) major, proposed by members of the Media Arts, Data, and Design (MADD) Center, will launch this fall.

The major will focus on “historical study, theoretical critique and hands-on experimentation” of experimental media according to Patrick Jagoda, current director of the MAAD minor.

Jagoda said that the proposal comes from a recognition that “computers, networks and screens have had an enormous impact on the way we live, work, think, and play in the 21st century, so the Media Arts and Design major is going to train students to understand that rapid development.”

Previously, MAAD was only available as a 600 credit minor in the College. According to the student affairs administrator for MAAD, Riss Ballard, the development of the major is a result of the high popularity of the existing minor.

“We quickly found that we were getting a lot of students, and we found that the demand for the classes was really high, so we started thinking about turning it into a major,” Ballard said.

“We want to build on strengths in media theory that the University of Chicago has had for a long time and supplement those with an emphasis on practice and making,” says Jagoda.

Unlike other fields related to media theory, such as cinema and media studies, English, or art history, the new

major will include the creation of experimental media in addition to its study.

MAAD will provide students with an opportunity to study new mediums of communication, such as virtual reality and video games. The major aims to prepare students for careers in the design and entertainment industries.

Through the new major, students will have the opportunity to explore clusters, such as game design, creative computing, network art, electronic music, and digital moving image. Its course requirements will include two media theory courses, two media history courses, two media practice courses, five electives, and one capstone, which will be a theory-based or practice-based project chosen by the student.

Courses will include Video Games in the ’90s and Jagoda’s own Critical Video Games Studies in which “students learn how to apply race, gender, and sexuality analysis to studying video games.” Other courses include Podcast Development, Video Game Design, and Electronic Music Development.

Ballard emphasized that the major was designed to be interdisciplinary and flexible. Special care was taken to make it easy for students to double major by allowing up to three courses to count towards a second major.

“Students at UChicago are really creative and really hard working. I think the MAAD program gives them a way to combine interests that seem unrelated together. If someone is in computer science but they really want to explore

more creative elements, then MAAD would be a great place to go,” says Ballard.

Unlike more traditional majors, the new major is launching without a standard intro course, and Ballard says that “students can explore how to make the major how they want it to be. It’s kind of like a choose-your-own-adventure type of major.”

Jagoda believes that “most students

will end up doing practice based projects for their capstone, but we want those media projects to be informed by historical and theoretical thinking.” Ultimately, Jagoda thinks that “one of the strengths of being at the University of Chicago is that people will be able to do in depth reading and thought, and that will produce a more experimental and diverse range of media projects.”

A gargoyle statue on Cobb Gate dons a mask. COURTESY OF HAN JIANG

David Brooks (A.B. ’83) Resigns From Think Tank Over Conflicts of Interest

By OLIVIA CHILKOTI News Reporter The New York Times announced on Saturday that columnist David Brooks has resigned from his paid position at the Aspen Institute.

Brooks (A.B. ’83) has been receiving a salary since 2018 from the Weave Project, which is funded by Facebook

and other donors, BuzzFeed News reports. Brooks did not disclose this to readers of his New York Times columns, some of which promote the project and its donors.

Brooks has had a longstanding relationship with the University as an alumnus. He was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2012, and he served on the Board of Advisors of the Institute

of Politics (IOP) from 2013 until 2018.

Brooks spoke at the inaugural Class Day in 2017, the first year in which that event replaced the traditional Baccalaureate Ceremony, and at an IOP event in 2018. As an undergraduate at the University in the 1980s, Brooks was a columnist and editor on The Maroon’s Viewpoints section.

Brooks has been employed by the

Aspen Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank and nonprofit, since 2018 as the chair of Weave: The Social Fabric Project, which Aspen describes as “a cultural movement renewing America’s social fabric.” The Aspen Institute did not disclose how much Brooks is paid but confirmed to BuzzFeed News that “as chair of the Weave project, he is a CONTINUED ON PG. 6

THE CHICAGO MAROON — MARCH 10, 2021

3

New Trustees Began Serving Five Year Terms Last Spring CONTINUED FROM PG. 1

ated from the University of Chicago with a master’s degree in public policy after receiving a B.A. from Mills College. She spent the first 18 years of her professional career at computer software company Oracle, where she served as senior vice president of Oracle

Direct and played a large part in guiding the company’s growth in the technology and application markets. Koplow-McAdams then went on to work at software company Salesforce and served as president of global sales for a little less than a year in 2013.

From 2015 to 2017, she developed global

growth strategies as president of software company New Relic, before becoming a venture capitalist in 2017.

Koplow-McAdams currently serves as a chair on the Advisory Council of UChicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network. She is also

a board member at Zendesk, BloomReach Global, Knotch, DataRobot, HackerOne, Automation Anywhere, Beyond Identity, and Tulip Interfaces, most of which are private tech companies located in the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston.

New Study Shows at Least 50 Percent of Infections in New York City During First Wave of COVID-19 Were Asymptomatic

By RACHEL WAN Senior News Reporter With the aim of creating better testing policies to mitigate the next wave of COVID-19 infections, UChicago researchers developed an epidemiological model showing that at least 50 percent of infections during the initial outbreak in New York City were asymptomatic.

During the early stages of the pandemic, health officials often had to make estimates based on the proportion of infected cases that develop symptoms in the initial wave of the pandemic due to the limited data available. “Without testing capacity data, it’s very difficult to estimate the difference between

cases that were unreported due to a lack of testing and cases that were actually asymptomatic,” said Ph.D. candidate Rahul Subramanian, a coauthor of the study. “Since New York City was one of the first cities to report the daily number of tests completed, we were able to use those numbers to estimate how many COVID-19 cases were symptomatic.”

The model hypothesizes a series of outcomes: If asymptomatic infections transmit at similar rates as symptomatic ones, the average COVID-positive individual may infect more people than expected. Alternatively, if they transmit poorly, then symptomatic cases have a smaller reproductive number.

Study data suggests that if asymptomatic infections transmit at the same rate as

symptomatic infections, the pandemic may spread at faster rates than current models often assume. If they do not, then each symptomatic case generates, on average, a higher number of secondary infections than typically assumed. Regardless of scenario, presymptomatic and asymptomatic cases together comprise at least 50 percent of the force of infection at the outbreak peak.

This study gives researchers a better understanding on fundamental epidemiological questions such as what fraction of cases are symptomatic, as well as the proportion of asymptomatic cases relative to symptomatic ones. Data regarding asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19 can also provide insight into how the virus would spread in a population

in the absence of interventions like asymptomatic testing and early-stage social distancing policies.

This is also the first peer-reviewed model to incorporate data on daily testing capacity and changes in testing rates over time in a large U.S. city, providing a more accurate picture of what proportion of COVID-19 infections are symptomatic.

Information from the model highlights the importance of following public health guidelines to reduce community transmission of the virus, and that controlling transmission requires community-wide interventions informed by extensive, well-documented testing of individuals regardless of whether or not they show symptoms.

Fitch Ratings Lowers UChicago Revenue Bonds Rating to AA+ Grade, Changes Ratings Outlook From “Stable” to “Negative”

By ROSHINI BALAN Senior News Reporter Fitch Ratings, a leading provider of credit ratings, commentary, and research for global capital markets, assigned an “AA+” rating to $300 million in University of Chicago bonds on August 14. Fitch’s “AA+” rating indicates strong financial credibility, but not as strong as “AAA,” which indicates the lowest possibility of default.

Fitch Ratings also downgraded the University of Chicago’s outlook from “stable” to “negative,” writing that soft revenues from fall 2020 will “pressure operating performance and constrain financial flexibility in the near term,” and projected that weak revenues could place further strain on the Uni-

versity’s high debt load. The negative credit outlook indicates that Fitch Ratings may lower UChicago’s credit rating in the future.

The downturn in revenues cited by Fitch and the corresponding negative outlook rating is chiefly the result of the pandemic’s effect on basic University operations, like research and teaching. According to the agency, the negative rating “reflects the additional risk of prolonged coronavirus impacts into spring 2021, including reversion to fully remote course delivery, and the resultant impact on student fee revenues and research activity, as well as increased reliance on endowment draws and/or bank lines of credit to provide operational support.”

To offset the negative effects of the pandemic, Fitch recommended that the Univer-

sity increase both its profitability and the amount of cash held on hand relative to its long-term debts. Nevertheless, Fitch gave UChicago’s $266 million of outstanding adjustable rate revenue bonds its highest rating—F1+, or highest-quality grade—citing the University’s “strong long-term credit profile.”

The report also mentioned that its “aaa” revenue defensibility assessment reflects UChicago’s “very prominent position among educational institutions in research and medicine,” as well as its “strong demand pool for both graduate and undergraduate students.”

Asked for comment, University spokesperson Gerald McSwiggan said, “the guiding principle of the University’s financial investments is to ensure that the University supports the enduring values and distinctive-

ness of our commitment to education and research for the long run. Investments over the last decade to support the University’s academic eminence have resulted in record interest in a UChicago education from prospective students and will continue to benefit the University for decades to come. Though the University is not immune to the current period of financial stress that is impacting all universities, we will continue to take necessary steps to remain on a financially sustainable course and we maintain high grade ratings from all three rating agencies.”

The University of Chicago’s AA+ rating places it in line with peer universities. Stanford University has an AAA credit rating.

Northwestern University and Johns Hopkins University also have AA+ ratings.

THE CHICAGO MAROON — MARCH 10, 2021

4

University Urges Students Not To Travel During Spring

By HAMZA JILANI Senior News Reporter The University reported 10 new cases of COVID-19 this week, according to an email sent by UChicago Forward to the University community on Friday, March 5. According to the email, one out of the 6,267 surveillance tests conducted since February 24 came back positive as of March 3.

The University positivity rate for eighth week was 0.02 percent. There are five close contacts associated with this week’s reported cases. Currently, there are no students in on-campus isolation housing. Seven students are isolating off campus.

The City of Chicago’s seven day positivity rate decreased from 3.0 percent last

week to 2.9 percent, while Illinois’s seven day positivity rate remained at 2.9 percent, with no change since last week.

This week’s UChicago Forward update also referenced a letter sent by Provost Ka Yee Lee and Dean of Students Michele Rasmussen on March 5, which urged members of the University community to avoid traveling outside the Chicago area during the week-long break between winter and spring quarters.

“Travel can increase the risk of infection with COVID-19, especially during high-volume travel periods, and could raise the chances of bringing the virus back to campus or nearby South Side communities,” Lee and Rasmussen wrote.

On-campus housing and dining facili-

ties, as well as University COVID-19 testing programs,will remain open during the break.

The University also provided details about COVID-19 protocol during the upcoming spring quarter. From March 29 through April 2, the first week of spring quarter, classes in the College and most academic units will be held remotely, and students will be expected to stay home to limit the spread of COVID-19. During this time, campus dining will only provide takeout meals.

The email from UChicago Forward announced that registration for the University’s Voluntary Surveillance Testing Program will be available next week. The message also encouraged members of the

University community to anonymously report concerns regarding compliance with COVID-19 health guidelines using the UChicago Accident/Incident Reporting (UCAIR) System. UCAIR received 17 reports this week related to COVID-19 issues, and has received 798 reports since September 20.

Although the University is in phase 1b of their vaccination rollout, the email from UChicago Forward informed members of the University community that a federal vaccination site will open at the United Center on March 9, where general registration for eligible people under Phase 1b+ will open at 4 p.m. on March 7. The first appointments will be available for people ages 65 and over.

Love and Longing in Hyde Park

By MYRA BAJWA News Reporter At what point did the pandemic start to interfere with your daily life?

For some, it felt like the walls were closing in. Graduate students Nick Taylor and Tommy Sodeman have been in a relationship for four years, but the pandemic quickly forced them to spend almost all waking moments together. Taylor lost his job as an intern in the Chicago International Film Festival for their education program.

“As soon as I lost my job I would say it had a pretty immediate impact, because it’s just like I was around the house more.

I didn’t have that much stuff to do,” Taylor said.

Financial stressors had already been impacting the relationship as Taylor’s internship was unpaid, but the loss of the internship cut Taylor off from finding a paid position. On top of that, the constant presence of another person became slightly annoying. With Taylor home all the time, Sodeman felt the pressure of being in a relationship and seeing his partner all day.

“You are still your own individual person, so just being in the same apartment, all the time, has been a little stressful sometimes, but not all the time,” Sodeman said.

Taylor and Sodeman each found the newfound togetherness to be a mix of good

and bad experiences, as the pandemic offered a chance for the couple to slow down and appreciate each other in a new light.

Even though they had spent so much time together, they still stood close and looked to each other when answering The Maroon’s questions.

“If you’re gonna be stuck with someone for almost a year, you either have to come out the other side with them or without them. And I think it’s turned out pretty well,” Sodeman said.

What was the most difficult part of being a health care worker in a pandemic?

Shakyra Payne worked as an in-home caregiver for a patient with disabilities during the pandemic. Although she was an employee at Western Illinois University before the pandemic hit, she moved back in with her parents and started to help provide for her family.

Payne worked with an elderly patient during the spring and was concerned for the safety of the patient in her care. She frequently stayed overnight at her patient’s residence to avoid possibly exposing them to the virus. Steps were also taken to minimize the number of people in the household, altering Payne’s role. Instead of rotating shifts with other caregivers every 12 hours, Payne spent two days at a time with the patient before switching out. This new system had her staying at the patient’s

house overnight.

“I work with people with disabilities, so I didn’t want to get them sick and I had to stay in overnight,” Payne said.

Payne spent most of her time working and minimizing the risk of giving COVID-19 to her patient. Because she did not go out much, she was forced to spend more time with her parents when she was not at work. Before the pandemic, she was fairly self-sufficient. After she moved back, she had to rely on her family.

She said, “We’re actually closer, because we got to do in-home activities [unlike] when COVID wasn’t happening and I was always out and away,” Payne said.

How did the pandemic change your relationships?

Madeleine Roberts-Ganim and Oscar Taub used to spend all day together before the pandemic. Roberts-Ganim and Taub, both second-years in the College, suddenly found themselves hundreds of miles apart when the University went remote for the spring quarter. The couple met during their O-Week and have been together for more than a year. However, quarantine forced them to change how they spent time together.

“Last year, we had a lot of the same friends. So, we were spending most of our time together, but together with our other friends. Over quarantine, even though

we weren’t together, when we were calling [each other] it was just one-on-one time, which I think definitely made us closer,” Roberts-Ganim said.

On campus, seeing each other was simple because they lived in the same house and had a group of mutual friends. Once the pandemic hit in March, Taub flew home to Georgia while Roberts-Ganim drove home to Iowa. They found themselves FaceTiming, which allowed them to spend more one-on-one time talking together instead of interacting in group settings like they did in school.

“We would FaceTime or Skype every night for like an hour or two. So we just always talk and that really grounds me. It’s almost like if we were [physically] together for that long,” Taub said.

Neither Taub’s home state of Georgia nor Roberts-Ganim’s home state of Iowa have had travel restrictions at any point during the pandemic. Although many other states have at some point implemented travel orders or advisories, neither Georgia nor Iowa have done this at any point in the pandemic. Taub visited Iowa for one night and met Roberts-Ganim’s family over the summer; however, the trip, which was originally planned to last four days, got cut down to one day after Iowa’s caseload spiked and they made the choice to cut the trip short. Even though they only saw each CONTINUED ON PG. 5

THE CHICAGO MAROON — MARCH 10, 2021

5

“It was really great, before the school year started, just to have time to be with each other...”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 4

other for a day, both Roberts-Ganim and Taub said they relished the chance to be together.

Later that summer, Roberts-Ganim moved to Chicago for the months of August and September before classes started. Taub would have been unable to go back home if he had decided to visit Roberts-Ganim, so his grandparents paid for him to have a short-term rental in Chicago nearby so they could spend the last few weeks before school together. Both Roberts-Ganim and Taub stayed in the city before moving into housing in Hyde Park.

“It was really great, before the school year started, just to have time to be with each other and not have to worry about

school or anything,” Roberts-Ganim said.

Who came into your life during the pandemic?

When Orliana Morag downloaded Bumble for the first time, she was in New York finishing her third year after the University went remote. She was with her older brother and mother for the first time since she left for school. Now at a park on campus, she reminisced about quarantine while being distracted by the occasional puppy.

“I think [Bumble] made the pandemic a little bit better, just because it felt like [meeting people] is something I’ve always loved doing and pandemic really prevented me from doing that. But just going on a couple dates with people showed me I could

still make new friends,” Morag said.

On these dates, Morag and her dates got coffee and then walked around—socially distanced, per the letter of the law regarding New York City’s COVID-19 guidelines, though public health officials were encouraging people to minimize contact outside their households. Conversations started with the pandemic as common ground and flowed over the course of several hours. Although she had fun with her dates, Morag does not plan on seeing them again. Instead, she virtually reached out to a new friend at school.

“I had started making friends with another girl at Chicago [in] winter quarter.

But during the pandemic, we had similar mental health concerns and we talked on

the phone every day, and so we’ve become really good friends since the pandemic started,” Morag said.

Unlike the Bumble dates, this connection lasted into the new school year. When she sees her friends now, they are no longer in groups. Now, she is able to have deeper conversations while freezing on her porch.

Illinois guidelines recommend outdoor gatherings over indoor gatherings and promote mask wearing even when outside.

“I’ve made a lot more use of my porch to just have, like, one person over, and sit six feet apart on the porch and have a good time. It’s made me have a lot more intimate conversations with people than I would have at a party,” Morag said.

“A global pandemic requires a global response.”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 1

tor of NIAID in 1984, during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Fauci served on former president Donald Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force in 2020 before being named chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden in January.

In response to questions posed by Katherine Baicker, the dean and Emmett Dedmon Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, Fauci called the COVID-19 pandemic “a very painful learning experience.” “[COVID-19 is] unlike any virus that I’ve had any experience with,” he said. “[When] have you seen a virus in which almost half the people get no symptoms, and yet it can kill a half a million Americans thus far and a couple of million plus globally? That’s just not the way respiratory viruses have worked historically.”

According to Fauci, changing information about the virus made it difficult to keep the public properly informed.

“You’ve got to go with the data that you have. And if that means changing something that you said, you should not feel badly or even guilty about having to do that, as long as the science drives what you say,” he said.

When Baicker asked where better data could have been collected, Fauci pointed to testing as an area for improvement.

Frequent and widespread testing, he explained, would have allowed federal and state governments to respond more aptly to the pandemic, particularly given the long incubation period of the virus. “By the time someone gets sick, it represents the tip of the iceberg of who’s really infected,” he said.

In the United States, the pandemic coincided with the 2020 election cycle and a summer of political upheaval, posing an additional challenge for epidemiologists, according to Fauci. “We were fighting an epidemic in the middle of one of the most divisive periods in…recent memory,” he said.

“You have public health measures that are assuming a political [nature].”

Fauci said that the decentralized federal system, which cedes authority to individual state governments, made a nationwide pandemic response more difficult. “The virus doesn’t know very much the difference between Louisiana and Mississippi or between New York and New Jersey or between Idaho and Montana, [so] you’ve got to do some things that are really uniform. And that was one of the things that actually was the weakness in our response.”

Fauci and his team also had to grapple with health disparities among racial and age groups. A majority of those who died were at least 75 years old, while Black and Hispanic

populations in the U.S. also faced disproportionately high death rates.

Communicating these disparities to the public proved challenging, according to Fauci. “How do you get people to care about not being part of the propagation of an outbreak that almost certainly will not affect them in a serious way but has a devastating impact on morbidity and mortality of other people?”

Ultimately, though, Fauci believes that the fate of the pandemic rests in countries’ willingness to defeat a virus he termed “the common enemy.”

“A global pandemic requires a global response,” he said. “There are parts of the world [where] we could have variants coming back and forth, just when you think you have everything under control.”

Ending the pandemic will require vaccinating enough people worldwide to achieve herd immunity—about 70 to 85 percent of people, Fauci estimated. But while the vaccines currently available have shown good results in preventing infections, researchers have not yet concluded whether they prevent transmission. Until that is proven, Fauci said, the public will need to maintain precautions.

“The instinct is to say, ‘We have a really good vaccine. I’m vaccinated. I’ve had a 95

percent effective vaccine. Why can’t I do whatever I want to do,” Fauci said. “Ultimately you may be able to do that, but not right now, because there are things we don’t know.”

At a time when many municipalities, including Chicago, are deliberating how and when to resume in-person instruction in public schools, Fauci said that teachers need to be prioritized in distributing COVID-19 vaccines. “The reason for that is the importance of getting the kids back to school, and we know that the teachers’ concern about getting infected is one of the reasons why the schools don’t open,” he said. “They’re a very, very important part of the population.”

Like the rest of the world, Fauci too is anticipating a time when the pandemic will abate and everyone can resume a more normal life.

“I’m looking forward to a number of simple things. My wife and I like to…go to a really nice, pleasant bar-restaurant up the block. We know the owners. We know the people. We sit down, we have a beer, we have a hamburger, we come home, and we go to bed. We haven’t done that in a year,” he said. “Part of the fun of natural living is interacting with society.”

THE CHICAGO MAROON — MARCH 10, 2021

6

Pandemic Further Strains Graduate Student Workers

By NIKHIL JAISWAL News Reporter The University of Chicago engages in a delicate balancing act, employing graduate students across a host of critical educational support roles while simultaneously maintaining that graduate student labor does not constitute work, instead being a part of their education.

The conversation surrounding the treatment of graduate workers by the University is resurfacing in light of the impact of COVID-19 on graduate students.

According to Laura Colaneri, a member of the communications team for Graduate Students United (GSU), the as yet unrecognized union for graduate student workers, the COVID-19 crisis has thrust graduate workers into a realm of uncertainty.

Colaneri said that the shift to online classes has been especially burdensome for the graduate students who teach and assist in those classes. As a course assistant during the 2020 spring quarter, Colaneri witnessed the move to remote classes firsthand.

“You don’t just take an in-person class and put it online. You’ve got to do a lot of extra work revamping the types

of assignments to make sure they’re going to be worthwhile as assessments and as a way to provide learning opportunities,” Colaneri said. “You’ve got to rethink what sort of work can get done remotely…. It’s requiring a huge amount of work and learning.”

In a separate interview, graduate student worker Stephen Cunniff had similar thoughts about the shift to online classes and its toll on graduate workers.

In Cunniff’s view, “being a Ph.D. student is very self-motivated, and doing that outside of a university environment can make it feel like a Faustian experience. Everything you do is much more difficult, everything is burdened with stress and anxiety.” Cunniff described the University’s actions so far as “sending their thoughts and prayers” and “a lot of platitudes,” with little sign of any substantive aid—such as an extension of time-to-degree funding or a relaxing of intermediary program deadlines—coming from the administration.

On top of the increased workload of online learning, graduate student workers have had to cope with the loss of critical academic resources due to pandemic. One graduate worker shared with the union that a graduate worker

shared that a long-planned archival research trip had been cut in half due to the pandemic. “Nobody can give 110 percent right now, as we usually expect of UChicago students. There is no way [the University] can expect graduate workers to have accomplished as much as they were expected to be before the pandemic.”

However, the biggest threat, in Colaneri’s view, is the prospect of an austerity budget after the COVID-19 pandemic has ended. Across the country, colleges and universities have instituted hiring freezes in response to budgetary pressures brought on by the coronavirus crisis.

The University implemented its own hiring freeze in April 2020, confirming the worries of graduate students who fear the long-term impacts of an austerity budget. In Colaneri’s eyes, an “austerity budget, and the cutting of faculty and tenure track positions that come along with that, isn’t good for the University.”

“We are going to be fighting against austerity at our university for years to come,” she said. “Higher education has already been decimated by austerity multiple times, and for the good of the profession, the good of academia and

free expression, and for the good of our students in the future, we’re going to have to fight against that.”

In light of these challenges, GSU has published a letter to the administration on their website, outlining what they believe UChicago should do to help graduate students. The letter, which has already garnered the support of graduate students, alumni and professors, asks the University for an additional year of funding graduate degree programs, an extension of health insurance eligibility, and a $4,000 emergency stipend as a COVID-19 relief grant for all graduate students.

“We need an extension on time-todegree and funding so that people will be able to survive,” says Colaneri. “It is the least that the university could offer to help protect some of its graduate workers at this time.”

For Cunniff, the struggles faced by graduate workers during the pandemic highlight the need for a recognized union for graduate student workers. “The only way that graduate student workers can ensure good living and working conditions is if they have the right to organize and bargain collectively.”

“We did totally disclose it. Everything has been public.”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 2

staff member at the Aspen Institute.”

Eileen Murphy, a New York Times spokesperson, stated that Brooks’s paid position presented a conflict of interest. “The current Opinion editors were unaware of this arrangement and have concluded that holding a paid position at Weave presents a conflict of interest for David in writing about the work of the project, its donors, or the broader issues it focuses on.”

The New York Times has already added disclosures to Brooks’s past columns mentioning Weave and will continue to do so in the future.

The Aspen Institute’s 2018 financial report shows that Weave received $1.3 million from private and corporate donors, including $300,000 from Miguel Bezos (father of Amazon founder Jeff

Bezos) and an undisclosed $250,000 from Facebook, as well as contributions from the Resnick Family Foundation, the Robert K. Steel Family Foundation, and Aspen Institute trustee James Crown (LL.D. ’11). Crown was the chair of the Board of Trustees of the University from 2003 to 2009.

The revelation of Brooks’s second salary adds to questions raised recently regarding possible conflicts of interest in the columnist’s writing. Last month, Brooks penned a post for Facebook’s corporate blog promoting a study on Facebook groups funded by the company itself. In a statement to BuzzFeed News, Murphy commented that Brooks did not make his editors aware of his guest posts for Facebook.

While Brooks’s involvement with Weave is well known (he first wrote

about it for The New York Times in 2019), he failed to disclose it to his readers as a source of personal income. The New York Times did not tell BuzzFeed News whether it was previously aware of Brooks’s second salary.

On March 5, Brooks appeared on PBS NewsHour. When asked if he was rethinking his decision not to disclose this funding relationship, Brooks refuted the allegation that he failed to disclose his relationship with Facebook.

“We did totally disclose it. Everything has been public,” he said. “First, The Times completely was informed when I started Weave [as to] what it was going to be and how I was going to get compensated by Aspen. Second, the Aspen Institute is completely transparent about who the donors are, and so we released the donors. Third, since I started

Weave in 2018, I have not meaningfully written about any organization or individual who has supported us, including Facebook…. Fourth, I do understand the concerns, and…I want to be beyond question, and so we’re going to make some changes.”

Despite these assertions, the 2018 transparency report for the Aspen Institute does not list Facebook as a donor to the Weave Project (although $250,000 of non-charitable support from Facebook is listed under the Aspen Ideas Festival, and a $250,000 donation is listed as an anonymous gift towards the Weave Project).

Further reporting by BuzzFeed News revealed that donors to Weave included the social network Nextdoor and the Walton Family Foundation, both of which Brooks has promoted this year.

THE CHICAGO MAROON — MARCH 10 2021

7

Over a Century of House Culture: The Story of Snell-Hitchcock Grey City chronicles the long history of Snell-Hitchcock, a dorm with as much character as it has history.

By SOLANA ADEDOKUN and GABI GARCIA Grey City Reporter, Arts Editor

As students returned to the University’s residence halls this past autumn quarter, the sounds of laughter, chatting, and the general hustle and bustle of college life resumed in most dorms.

But Snell-Hitchcock, a dorm with one of the oldest, most colorful, and most interesting histories on campus, remained silent.

Snell-Hitchcock was shut down three weeks before the beginning of autumn quarter in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is currently being used as isolation housing for students who test positive for the virus. Despite the absence of normally operating house culture, Snell-Hitchcock’s history is being kept alive. Its former residents came together and codified their traditions in a revived annual magazine called The Section Six, a collection of profiles, words from the dorm’s leadership, and jokes that encompasses the culture of Snell-Hitchcock.

Snell, the oldest continuously operating dorm on campus, was built in 1892 as a dorm for the University’s football team and was funded by donations from affluent Chicagoan Henrietta Snell.

The money Snell had donated for the new dorm was from unclaimed reward money for the unsolved murder of her husband Amos Jerome Snell. The dorm’s first resident head was Amos Alonzo Stagg, a famous football coach who led the Chicago Maroons to seven Big Ten

championships and the namesake of UChicago’s Stagg Field.

Hitchcock was built in 1901 and opened in fall 1902, originally as a men’s dorm that housed primarily law and medical students. Hitchcock got its name from Charles Hitchcock, a prominent lawyer who lived in Hyde Park, who left the University money in his will to build the hall. Annie Hitchcock, Charles’s wife, also donated art for the hall and library and visited the dorm frequently. The building has also been included on the United States’ National Register of Historic Places since 1974.

Snell and Hitchcock, which students refer to jointly as “Snitchcock,” have a long history of winning Scav, a College-wide scavenger hunt that spans a few days in May. Snitchcock has claimed the championship title over 10 times since 1993, which dorm members attribute to its residents’ active participation in house culture. The team is also very organized, often beginning to plan around October for each Scav.

Snell and Hitchcock have many traditions they share together, such as a Snow BBQ on the first actual snow day of the year. Though not an actual tradition, many people in Snitchcock are involved in CMAC, which used to stand for Chicago Men’s A Cappella but is now just a low-voice a cappella choir no longer limited exclusively to men, and Hitchcock’s Pirate Choir. As a testament to their closeness, Snell and Hitchcock are the only two houses that share a table in the dining halls.

However, a recently revived tradition

might be the most uniquely Snitchcock thing about the dorm, perfectly illustrating the vibrant culture of these houses.

The Section Six was originally published more than 100 years ago as an annual of the happenings at Hitchcock. The publication’s name comes from the fact that Hitchcock is made up of five towers, labeled 1–5, so the annual is supposed to be the sixth “tower.” But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, members of the dorms felt disconnected from their houses. Last year, more than a century after its initial publication, they decided to bring back The Section Six as both a physical record of the year and to bring a little piece of their dorm family to each other.

Third-year Kathryn Downey, managing editor for The Section Six, said that most of the planning and work for the annual was done toward the end of the year. As a managing editor, she coordinates the logistics of the annual—such as keeping up with who is writing which profile—so the other editors could keep track of the content going in the magazine.

“You had to recognize that you had an impact on the house, even if you didn’t have to stand up at a house meeting and give a 10 minute speech every week, but you know the things you did and the presence you had mattered and people will notice,” Downey said.

The Section Six opens with a note from Dean of the College John Boyer, reflecting on the magazine’s commitment to enriching the house culture in Snitchcock as well as combining the

dorm’s past and present traditions. Next, the resident deans, Larry and Penny Rothfield, add how The Section Six was made to memorialize all the happenings of the year.

This year’s magazine includes profiles and interviews of nearly every resident in Snitchcock, from the resident heads (RHs) and resident assistants (RAs) to the new first-years, along with various posters.

“I think my favorite part was just reading and editing profiles,” Downey said. “It’s genuinely really fun to do.

Because people put in a lot of work into them, and you know it’s just always exciting to see what they do in the way people’s personality comes up for it. We saw that kind of creativity translate over to everybody’s profiles.”

“It wasn’t just…a normal yearbook summary. It was more about capturing what that person’s personality is and what makes them unique and exciting,” she said.

“The thing that makes the Hitchcock students special to me was their commitment to the bit,” said former Hitchcock RH Joe Maurer, a humanities postdoctoral research fellow and former Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology. “They choose to do a lot of weird things, and there’s a great diversity in the kinds of weird things they choose to do, but whatever it is, they fully commit to 110 percent.”

Sprinkled throughout are ads and posters commemorating the jokes in the house during the year, most notably CONTINUED ON PG. 8

THE CHICAGO MAROON — MARCH 10, 2021

8

“What makes Hitchcock Hitchcock is just the absolute love of community that permeates the whole experience.”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 7

Snitchcock’s war against Woodlawn Residential Commons. There are also lyrics to house songs like the “Battle Hymn of Section Two,” revived from an old inter-section war, and lyrics to a song in the house musical.

Downey explained that the posters, which are sprinkled throughout the annual, have wide-ranging purposes: A person in a particular section is starting a fake fight with someone from another section about how their section is better, or someone is advertising events they are doing.

“We took those posters and put them in Section Six because they’re cool and exciting and [we] put a lot of work into them. Some of those fake advertisements were things that we made after the fact that were what we thought was a fun and exciting way to keep something that was mostly a verbal inside joke and translate it into something that still feels like an inside joke when you read it,” Downey said.

The first edition of the revived Section Six concludes with a letter by Hitchcock president and former Hitchcock admiral Roy McKenzie. In it, he touches on the struggles of the last academic year with the pandemic breaking apart this community, but he also remarks on how the pandemic has made the community stronger and appreciate one another more.

“Someday, the impact that each of us has had on the house will fade into the continuum of generations: our names forgotten, our traditions unexplainable, and the house as we knew it long gone.

Despite this, I am proud to have laid my footsteps in these hallowed, harrowed halls, and each one of you should feel the same pride for taking part in a tradition which is much bigger than any of us,” McKenzie wrote.

Fourth-year Lillian Hermes, the president of Snell’s House Council, describes Snell as being more subdued and relaxed than Hitchcock. She says Snell doesn’t necessarily have concrete traditions like Hitchcock, but rather little quirks: For example, they take their important votes related to House matters

in the dark. As president, she would officiate meetings, call out different house positions to report to others, and plan a house event every quarter, like a game night. Currently, Snell has meetings on Zoom every Tuesday, which Hermes described as “very, very unofficial.”

“To be a Snellian, you know I don’t need to run around and cause a ruckus at 10 p.m. [like Hitchcock]. I’m just going to sit here and do my thing. We know what we’re about and we’re going to be chill,” Hermes said.

Individually, Snellians enjoy relaxing in their Tea Room, which is the name of the house lounge, and eating Dat Donuts there in their pajamas on Undergraduate Break Day. Conversely, Hitchcock has many traditions of its own that have changed over the years. For example, the dorm used to host small men’s parties known as “smokers.” Over the years, these small social gatherings turned into traditions like Midnight Tea where students would gather in a room and drink tea late at night with friends to relax. Less relaxing, however, is Hitchcock’s tradition of “ponding”—throwing people into Botany Pond—which is regarded as a high honor.

Usual people who are thrown in are RAs, RHs, House Presidents, Scav captains, and Scav first-year representatives. Every house has house meetings that bring house members together, yet Hitchcock’s frequently last over an hour.

“I think Hitchcock is a space for people to realize that they actually are extroverts and meet people that they find so interesting and fun. What makes Hitchcock Hitchcock is just the absolute love of community that permeates the whole experience,” said fourth-year Anna Whitney, president of Hitchcock’s House Council.

Like Hermes, Whitney hosts weekly house meetings on Zoom in an attempt to keep the Hitchcock community happy and tight-knit. Though she is grateful she gets to continue holding house meetings, she is also frustrated with not only the late notice given for Hitchcock’s closure, but also with how housing assignments this year have negatively affected current first-years and possibly later classes.

“Randomizing housing assignments eliminates the ability for students to choose what culture they want to enter dorm-wise when they’re entering the university. It makes it harder for people to feel a kinship with younger and older students. It just doesn’t seem like a wise choice on the part of the University. It seems like it will only cause them more trouble when it comes to moving people around later,” Whitney added.

What’s more, the dorm’s remote meetings do not compare to physically being together.

“Being online does not compare at all to being together in real life. I think that what makes a community its strongest is the little experiences of living together day to day. I really miss just seeing people in the rec room,” she said.

Hitchcock, in its quintessentially patriotic fashion, is the only dorm with a navy. In a ceremony at the beginning of every academic year, every Hitchcockizen soberly pledges their soul to their elected admiral, a house council position, and the admiral makes conquests in the name of Hitchcock. The admiral “walks the plank” into Botany Pond at the end of their term. Last year, the Navy was led by “Admiral” Gabe Sanchez, who began a siege on Woodlawn Residential Commons by eating dinner at Arley D. Cathey Dining Commons together with the Breckinridge Army. The Navy, Army, and Snell’s Air Force then approached Woodlawn on foot and laid siege to the then-uncompleted dorm by chanting at it. Sanchez mentioned how he requested help from both the Snell Air Force and the Breckinridge Army. The Navy’s previous conquests include North, Northwestern, the State of Nebraska, and Albuquerque.

“It’s quite telling when a bunch of people just wake up at 8 a.m. to go to Northwestern and fool around and pretend to be conquering Northwestern for the sake of Hitchcock,” Sanchez said.

Another unique tradition in Snitchcock is the house musical, both written and directed by its house bard, a recently created position in Snitchcock. Residents put on the house musical around the fourth week of winter quarter as a

way for people in house positions to show off their talents on the stage in order to entice their dormmates to vote for them in elections a few weeks later. Last year’s musical, entitled Tommy and the Dorm, was about a Snellian who is conflicted about possibly moving to Woodlawn.

The musical’s opening song, called “Snelle” and sung to the tune of “Belle” from Beauty and the Beast, was a hit among Snitchcockizens.

Maurer tried to implement his own traditions during his RH tenure. For example, he tried to do a lot more cooking tutorials with house members. Hitchcock would have house meal nights where they voted on what they wanted to cook, and Maurer would buy the ingredients. He said he tried to tone down the rivalry between Snell and Hitchcock to make it more amicable and friendly.

“It’s very much about finding the appropriate balancing point between reining in students when they might be doing things that are a little too ill-advised, but also encouraging them to do things like having giant snow sculptures or making blanket forts in the lounge. Being an RH, it was fun to be invited into this pre-existing community and try to play a leadership role that balanced like bringing in new things while ensuring that the old things continued,” Maurer said.

While the house culture of Snitchcock is largely dormant now, the building is no less rich with historical symmetries; the dorm currently houses students who have tested positive for COVID-19, just as, a century ago, a student with scarlet fever quarantined in Room 69 to avoid infecting others. But above all else, to the dorm’s devoted residents, the pandemic has demonstrated the beauty and resilience of Snitchcock’s house culture.

“The last little room dorm party was toga themed…. No one knew it was the last one when it was happening, but it was the last,” Hermes said. “I remember being in the room and I felt comfortable with every single person in that room, and just could laugh with every single person in that room. It was a really good feeling. I think that’s really just what makes Snitchcock a special place.”

THE CHICAGO MAROON — MARCH 10, 2021

9

VIEWPOINTS Black History Month Is Over, but We Can’t Look Away From UChicago’s Racist Legacy In order to move forward, the University must first confront its past.

By NOAH TESFAYE In February 1926, UChicago alum Carter Woodson (A.B., A.M. 1908) announced the first Negro History Week for the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, later rechristened Association for the Study of African American Life and History. What began as a single week to celebrate the his-

tory of African peoples in the U.S. during the birth month of both Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln later developed into Black History Month as we know it today.

In 1976, Gerald Ford recognized February as a month to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

Miles Burton, Editor-in-Chief Emma Dyer, Editor-in-Chief Caroline Kubzansky, Managing Editor Jessica Xia, Chief Production Officer Matthew Lee, Editor-in-Chief-elect Ruby Rorty, Editor-in-Chief-elect Adyant Kanakamedala, Managing Editor-elect Suha Chang, Chief Production Officer-elect The MAROON Editorial Board consists of the editors-in-chief and editors of THE MAROON.

NEWS

Tony Brooks, editor Peyton Jefferson, editor Yiwen Lu, editor Kate Mabus, editor Pranathi Posa, editor Justin Smith, editor Brad Subramaniam, editor GREY CITY

Alex Dalton, editor Laura Gersony, editor Avi Waldman, editor

DESIGN

Matthew Chang, head designer Claire Dennis, deputy designer Matthew Rubenstein, design associate BUSINESS

Gianni LaVecchia, chief financial officer Charlie Blampied, director of strategy Trent Carson, director of marketing Yeewin New, director of marketing Victor Doddy, director of development Kenneth Chu, director of operations ONLINE

VIEWPOINTS

Firat Ciftci, software engineer

ARTS

Editor-in-Chief: Editor@ChicagoMaroon.com Newsroom Phone: (312) 918-8023 Business Phone: (408) 806-8381

Gage Gramlick, editor Veronica Chang, editor Wahid Al Mamun, editor Alina Kim, editor SPORTS

Alison Gill, editor Thomas Gordon, editor Brinda Rao, editor COPY

James Hu, copy chief Cynthia Huang, copy chief Jason Lin, copy chief Ray Davies-Van Voorhis, copy chief Gabby Meyers, copy chief Charlotte Susser, copy chief

For advertising inquiries, please contact Ads@ChicagoMaroon.com or (408) 806-8381.

Circulation: 2,500.

© 2021 The Chicago Maroon Ida Noyes Hall / 1212 East 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637

Woodson’s story is the kind of narrative about Black people that the University likes to spotlight: a non-threatening, establishment-centered vision. It is not about Black people growing the political consciousness for self-determination or liberation, but rather about vulnerable people who require institutions like the University to step in and effectively provide local austerity and charity measures. The University’s history with Black people, from its origins through the present, is nothing less than despicable. In order to save face and preserve the status of this institution, the University propagates a revisionist history of its relationship to the South Side.

By consciously cherry-picking and uplifting a few figures in its lineage, like Woodson or Barack Obama, the University ignores its mass urban renewal efforts, which have destabilized Hyde Park, and its origins in enslaving Black people. Now that Black History Month is over, a thorough interrogation of how the University’s success has come at the expense of the narratives and communities of Black residents is an imperative step toward the University giving power back to the neighbors from whom it solely extracts and to whom it never gives back.

Even though the University has continued to assert that it was founded in 1890, a documented history traces the origins of the University of Chicago to 1856 and to Stephen Douglas—yes, that Stephen Douglas. In a publication in the Journal of African American History (also founded by Woodson),

members of the Reparations at UChicago Working Group shared their findings that demonstrate that the University we all know would not have been developed were it not for the enslaved people that Douglas owned. By artificially separating the Old University of Chicago and the present-day University of Chicago, the school justifies its stance that the institution was founded in 1890 instead of recognizing its slave-owning origins.

Black History Month, over the years, has gone from recognizing the complex, exploitative relationship America has always had with Black people to lauding superheroes and immortalizing Black political leaders. It is not just how we are never told about the anti-capitalist, working-class analysis that MLK was developing right before he was assassinated; it’s the way that the U.S. manufactures certain Black “leaders” into invincible, perfect people while dehumanizing the masses of Black people with whom leaders like Malcolm X and Kwame Ture were organizing for liberation. Black History Month becomes, then, a space attempting to be apolitical or at least moderate in its position of centering voting rights while belittling the likes of the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, or the Haitian Revolution.

The University participates in this selective discussion of the history of Black people not only in our country, but also in its own history. The University will tout its civic engagement programs and COVID-19 relief grants without ever conceding that its own

practices are the reason why it even needs to take these “reparative” measures. UChicago’s history of supporting restrictive covenants during the 1930s and 1940s, later continued through gentrification efforts as the campus has expanded southward and into the Woodlawn neighborhood, is a part of the broader racist, anti-Black policies the University has supported and continues to support. The enforcement arm of these policies is the largest private police force in Chicago: the University of Chicago Police Department. #CareNotCops, which began in 2018, has joined forces with local grassroots groups like GoodKids MadCity to organize for the dissolution and abolition of this unaccountable, armed organization that disproportionately harasses Black residents.

But it’s not as if the University is isolated from Chicago’s history of crushing Black organizing efforts.

The recent renewal of the discourse surrounding Fred Hampton after the release of the film Judas and the Black Messiah has facilitated a revisitation of how the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and the FBI assassinated Hampton and his fellow activist Mark Clark. There’s a common sentiment in the city that every single map of Chicago is identical, that disparities in education and health resources fall along the same class and race lines. For Black people in particular, Chicago’s racist policies of segregated housing and lack of access to mortgages during the 1960s resulted in the segregated city we live in today.

Most recently, citizens learned that CONTINUED ON PG. 10

THE CHICAGO MAROON —MARCH 10, 2021

10

Meeting collective community needs is how we begin to divest from this institution, however entangled with it we all may be.

CONTINUED FROM PG. 9

Mayor Lori Lightfoot used $281.5 million of the City’s federal COVID relief budget on CPD. Instead of expanding and building a thorough testing infrastructure or providing more access to relief checks, our city dumped money into an institution that survives by terrorizing Black and brown people.

If the University has refused to recognize its origins, refused to make substantive efforts to build

or support affordable housing projects, and refused to defund or abolish its police department, what can we say about their treatment of Black people? What can be done regarding the contradictions for Black students like myself that go here, knowing the University has caused such irreparable harm?

While I cannot resolve these contradictions on my own, I organize and support the groups that are fighting for a better lived experi-

ence for Black folks in Chicago, like Assata’s Daughters, Ujimaa Medics, and GoodKids MadCity.

I do this through my writing and reporting, seeking to tell the truth about Black folks here in Chicago and throughout over 400 years of Black people’s history in the United States’ settler-colonial empire.

I reflect constantly on the contradictions of being a Black student here. Yes, the University has practiced and continues to prac-

tice selective revisionism in its history and continues to expedite urban renewal, pricing out Black and brown residents of Hyde Park.

Yes, the University runs a racist private policing apparatus that must be abolished. But if there’s anything we know about this institution’s history, it’s that we can no longer rely on it to seek to solve the problems it creates. Black History Month, however co-opted it is, still has the capacity for us to begin

to thoroughly unveil the University’s disturbing relationship with Black people. It can function as a start, but never an end, toward our collectively organizing with Black residents. Meeting collective community needs is how we begin to divest from this institution, however entangled with it we all may be.

Noah Tesfaye is a second-year in the College.

UChicago’s COVID Plan: A Class in Confusing Contradiction The University must be more consistent and diligent with its COVID-19 guidelines.

By CLARK KOVACS Arriving on campus this January, I found myself standing outside of the room in which I normally get tested. After a few confusing minutes and several text messages, I eventually found out that it would be another five days after I got to campus until I would receive my first COVID-19 test. It was decisions like this that made up the University’s plan to bring students back to campus for winter quarter, a plan with several glaring holes that sent a message that the University community is being held to different rules from the rest of the South Side. From January 11 through February 8, the City of Chicago mandated that travelers arriving from 48 states and two territories—that is, from everywhere in the U.S. but Hawaii—follow a 10-day quarantine or test negative within three days prior to their arrival and adhere strictly to “masking, social distancing, and avoidance of in-person gatherings.” The plan developed by the University “in consultation with CDPH [the Chicago

Department of Public Health] and experts at UChicago Medicine” stands in stark contrast to this citywide plan. Students are only required to follow the University’s seven-day “stay at home” quarantine policy upon arriving on campus. This policy does not call for students to get a COVID-19 test before traveling to Chicago or immediately upon arrival at school, and it allows students to leave their residential halls for “groceries and food, medical care and supplies, and outdoor exercise.” And while the University explicitly endorses outdoor exercise for students, it also quietly contradicts its own directives—as I found out when my suitemate returned one day dripping in sweat—by allowing all students to exercise indoors at the athletic center during their quarantine period. The University must immediately rectify these obvious instances of complacent COVID-19 planning, all of which demonstrate that it’s not fighting the spread of this virus with necessary diligence.

It is shocking that the University saw it as necessary to

test students immediately upon arrival during autumn quarter, but no longer deemed it important when winter quarter began, especially given the increasingly dire state of the virus in the U.S. and abroad. Some may cite the fact that COVID-19 may not be detectable until roughly five days after transmission, so waiting this long allows for more accurate testing should a student contract the virus en route to the school. Yet this disregards the possibility that students had already contracted the virus before departing their homes. The University has no reason not to test students when they first get to campus in addition to regular testing beginning approximately five days later.

While there’s no published proof of this, friends, social media, and first-hand experience all confirm that fraternities on campus continue to operate more or less as they would in a normal year, holding in-person rush events and parties. This trend warrants a Viewpoints column of its own. Regardless, given the violations of the UChicago Health

DARYA FOROOHAR

Pact that have occurred and will occur simply by bringing students back to Hyde Park—evinced best by fraternities—testing upon arrival going forward is incredibly important. To my knowledge, several frat parties took place during

the “stay at home” order. And while the University seemingly has no intention of preventing these events from taking place, they should at the very least operate under the assumption that CONTINUED ON PG. 11

THE CHICAGO MAROON — MARCH 10, 2021

11

The University must immediately rectify these obvious instances of complacent COVID-19 planning, all of which demonstrate that it’s not fighting the spread of this virus with necessary diligence.

CONTINUED FROM PG. 10

they do by testing rapidly and liberally to keep cases to a minimum.

All that said, credit must be given where it’s due. Campus data on COVID-19 testing, both this quarter and last quarter, demonstrates that the University has successfully minimized the presence of the virus on campus. For this, as a student and member of the community, I’m grateful. Yet the same policies that have been successful at managing statistics have been far less successful when it comes to managing actual people. Leaving gyms open and not requiring students to test immediately upon both arrival and after five days of quarantine are questionable decisions. Although evidently not critical to preventing a massive outbreak, closing gyms and increasing testing are obvious steps the University could take to prevent viral transmission—and it seems foolish not to.

When the University makes such loose decisions as they have—decisions an aver-

age student would, in my experience, balk at—it creates vagueness and confusion regarding its directives, undermining trust and efficacy. Last quarter, Emily Landon, the executive medical director for infection prevention and control at UChicago Medicine, told students that they should only have “five up-close contacts in their friend group.” But what this actually meant is still unclear. One resident assistant ran up against this problem when confronting several students congregating in a single room, ostensibly violating the UChicago Health Pact, who cited Landon’s speech in their defense. Housing & Residence Life’s policy—only one extra person per room, masks on—doesn’t match the University’s own advice.

When messaging from the University is self-contradictory and unclear, people are less likely to take what it says seriously. Not testing upon arrival, keeping gyms open during quarantine, and making ill-defined rules for socializing all signal to under-

graduates that things are different for our community. The data backs up this claim, showing that we can abide by shockingly loose COVID-19 measures while avoiding massive outbreaks because of the vast resources we can put behind testing, contact tracing, and the like. Despite the questionable sense of security these resources have given the University, we’re susceptible to the virus just like everyone else.

While writing this column, I was informed that a close friend was experiencing COVID-like symptoms. As soon as I heard the news, a wash of concern came over me, alongside the questions we all dread having to ask—Is my friend okay? Do I have COVID? Who have I seen recently?—that make daily concerns about being a student feel trivial. It’s easy to look at the data and only feel gratitude. And for the most part, that’s absolutely what I feel. But it’s also easy to forget that each number you see, each positive COVID-19 case, is a person with friends and loved ones. It’s easy to

brush off the negligence of the University in not testing students upon arrival or in their vague messaging, citing their overall success—at least until you or someone you care about becomes one of these statistics.

For a school that leans so heavily on theory, it makes sense that we could be lulled into a sense of complacency through impressive data. Yet those involved in the ongoing planning process must stay grounded and aware of the effects of their policies and the messaging they send to members of our community. Establishing stricter COVID-prevention guidelines— temporarily closing indoor gyms and reinstating testing on arrival to campus—is the perfect place to start. And, although by definition harder to measure, awareness of the qualitative effects of University COVID-19 policies is long overdue.

Clark Kovacs is a first-year in the College.

ARTS Artists Run Chicago: Supporting Artists Through COVID-19

By SUZANNA MURAWSKI Arts Reporter Allison Peters Quinn, director of exhibitions and residency program at the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC), sits down with The Maroon to discuss the Center, artist-run spaces in Chicago, and how to best support artists through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chicago Maroon: How would you describe the Hyde Park Art Center’s mission, and what distinguishes it from other art centers of its kind?

Allison Peters Quinn: The Hyde Park Art Center’s mission is to stimulate and sustain visual art in Chicago, and it’s been doing this since 1939 when it opened its doors. It’s always been on the South Side, and it’s always been in Hyde Park, though in different locations. Our programs include education,

exhibitions (including artist residency), and outreach. Everything we do is to support artists at every level.

CM: How about the Artists Run Chicago Fund?

APQ: The fund provides COVID-19 relief to 70 artist-run spaces in Chicago. It came out of an exhibition we did in September 2020 called Artists Run Chicago 2.0 [ARC 2.0], which was actually meant to be in March before the pandemic hit. The 50 artist-run spaces featured in [ARC 2.0] will receive grants, and the fund also decided to extend donations to 20 more spaces in a second phase.

ARC 2.0 was the 10-year anniversary of a show I cocurated in 2009 with Britton Bertrand, Artists Run Chicago, which was taking a pulse on Chicago’s artist-run contemporary arts scene: We had 36 artist-run spaces represented. Because the Chicago art landscape

changes so much—it’s very much tied to the rhythm of an art career, as well as the five schools producing M.F.A. artists in the city—I felt it was really important to document those spaces before they disappear. Artists tend to make their own spaces and their own opportunities because our commercial gallery scene is fairly small compared to other large cities.

Ten years later, there are so many more artist-run spaces in Chicago, so I felt like something was happening, something different in the scene, and before we lost that energy I wanted to document it. I say “document” to mean pause and summarize, but it was also important that we made some kind of publication. So we partnered with Public Media Institute to create an issue of the free magazine Lumpen with maps of these artist-run spaces, because a big part of [ARC] is letting

people know that these spaces exist in their neighborhood, in their communities—maybe it’s their neighbor, and they don’t even know it. We wanted people to go to those spaces, see the art, meet the artists, and feel that there is this creative energy that they can tap into.

CM: When you say artist-run space, what exactly does that mean?

APQ: I’m throwing out the word space, but really that could be a platform, a project—they don’t physically have to have a space to operate out of, and that’s what’s so beautiful about the scene I was describing. One space called Western Pole, their gallery is a light pole on Western Avenue. They put an installation of artwork on that pole every couple of weeks and that’s their program. The visitor experience is unassuming and immediate. SomeCONTINUED ON PG. 12

THE CHICAGO MAROON —MARCH 10, 2021

12

“Artist-run spaces are at the root of cultural production...”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 11

times the artwork disappears or falls down or gets taken because it’s out in the elements.

The visitor experience is unassuming and immediate. Sometimes the artwork disappears or falls down or gets taken because it’s out in the elements. But you also have your traditional galleries, such as Document, by Aron Gent.

Gent, a photographer, has been running this space in the West Loop for 10 years, and participates in art fairs and is pretty traditional in how he goes about accomplishing things.

We’ve also worked with the Sweet Water Foundation, which is a community garden and cultural campus that is redeveloping an area of Englewood on the South Side. Art practice can include socially engaged art or working with the community to make change, as long as there’s documented proof that art and artists are involved. We really wanted to show the breadth of these different spaces—there’s no right or wrong way. I don’t know that these spaces, especially these really experimental spaces, could exist in other places. I think something about Chicago makes it possible.

CM: How recently was the fund created and provided to HPAC? Is all the funding from a single donor?

APQ: All $560,000 is from one anonymous donor. The grant is specifically to provide COVID-19 relief and get support into artists’ hands as soon as possible. There has been a quick turnaround: they contacted us in No-

vember, and we’ve already released about 25 grants since the fund was officially announced on February 1.

CM: Why did HPAC choose to fund spaces and collectives, rather than individual artists?

APQ: Artist-run spaces are at the root of cultural production in the city. The donor wanted to make sure that relief wasn’t only going to larger institutions but to artists running spaces for other artists. The artist-driven initiatives featured in [ARC 2.0] have ambitious ideas and are fast to realize them. This money allows them to refresh projects they may have had to pause during the pandemic, perhaps to accommodate the changing needs of their communities. This grant was a direct way to get the money infused deep into Chicago’s many neighborhoods and to the artists who work there.

CM: There must be more artist-run spaces in Chicago than HPAC could choose for the original show. How were these spaces chosen, and as the fund expands to its second phase, what are you looking for in the 20 new spaces?

APQ: Originally, ARC 2.0 was about telling a story of the network of [artist-run] spaces, and about the diversity of these kinds of spaces, and how they function in collaboration. We were looking at geography as well, to accurately document that these spaces exist all across Chicago and not just on Milwaukee Avenue.

That’s where the scene primarily was when we made the first exhibition 10 years ago, but

it’s more fanned out now, which is very interesting.

Now, we’ve put together guidelines to make the fund more expansive and better represent the equity goals of the Hyde Park Art Center. There were a lot of artist-run spaces we weren’t able to include in the show, having a limited amount of gallery space, but they still deserve recognition and support. With the next round of grants, we are prioritizing support towards spaces run by and for BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of color], queer or women artists, or artists with disabilities.

CM: How best can we support artists in times of pandemic, and in general?

APQ: In general, just by buying artists’ work.

People tend to think artwork is thousands of dollars, but emerging artists are selling drawings and works on paper and photography for really accessible prices. What you pay to frame a mass-produced poster of a painting could be more than the price of an actual hand-made artwork. By going to exhibitions and programs in these neighborhood art spaces, you can find original and affordable artwork by local artists. And especially during the pandemic, many of these spaces have been hosting fundraisers and selling work through their websites. Hyde Park Art Center’s website for the Artists Run Chicago 2.0 show has links to the spaces that are nonprofits and can take tax-deductible donations.

CM: Where should someone interested in the

Chicago art scene pay particular attention as the scene evolves?

APQ: That’s the tricky part—there isn’t one place to look. The Lumpen issue we made has a map of spaces, and on our website for Artists Run Chicago, there’s a Google map with all the spaces pinned. I’d recommend starting with looking in your neighborhood; almost all of these spaces have websites, Facebook pages, and Instagram accounts.

In Hyde Park specifically, there are a couple of spaces we included in our exhibition: The Silver Room on 53rd, who runs the Silver Room Block Party during the summer, is a flourishing business as well as a supportive hub for artists on the South Side. Owner Eric Williams includes artists in the block party every year, and programs exhibitions in his retail space, which provides an exciting space to find fashion, music, and visual art in conversation.

Fourth Ward is another space that’s existed for about 10 years now in the basement of a three-flat apartment building close to Kimbark Plaza so it’s deep in the neighborhood. We really want people to understand that artists make these spaces and welcome the public.

The ultimate goal of ARC 2.0 is to get people to look up these schedules and visit these spaces. Besides funding spaces with half a million dollars, of course.

Applications for the second phase of ARC 2.0 are now open.

SPORTS Chicago Bears Face Offseason of Questions

By ARJUN CHANDRA-MOHANTY Sports Reporter

An 8–8 win-loss record and an unsurprising Wild-Card exit in the playoffs. For the second straight year, the Chicago Bears were utterly disappointing. Entering the 2020–21 season, the team hoped to be past the atrocious quarterback woes of the previous few years. The offseason signing of quarterback and former Super Bowl MVP Nick

Foles generated a lot of excitement around the organization, as most fans assumed that either he or quarterback Mitchell Trubisky could put the pieces together. This premature optimism existed despite Foles’s miserable play with Jacksonville in 2019 and Trubisky’s subpar start to his NFL career. But as late Cardinals coach Dennis Green once said, “they were who we thought they were.” While both quarterbacks had their moments, their inability to exhibit consistency and generate offensive success game after game was once

again the Bears’ fatal flaw. So where do the Bears go from here? The organization faces an agonizing offseason with many issues left to be resolved, especially their quarterback situation. Here are the three major areas that the Bears have to address the quarterback position, Allen Robinson’s impending free agency, and defensive secondary woes.

Let’s start with the most obvious and important question. Historically, the Chicago Bears have always been searching for a franchise quarterback. You have to go back

80 years to Sid Luckman’s playing years to remember what it felt like for the Bears to have a great signal-caller.

The last few years with Mitchell Trubisky at the helm, have definitely augmented the Bears’ concerns about the quarterback (QB) position. So once again, the Bears’ search for an upgrade at the QB position continues this offseason. There are several important details to consider. Mitchell Trubisky is currently an unrestricted free agency and at this CONTINUED ON PG. 13

THE CHICAGO MAROON — MARCH 10, 2021

13

“So where do the Bears go from here?”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 12

moment, it appears that neither side wants to construct a deal to extend Trubisky’s tenure with the Bears. Meanwhile Nick Foles, who started several games in 2020, is still under contract with the Bears for the next two years. Yet moving forward, the entire organization understands that his role is well-defined as a backup quarterback. So where do the Bears find their next starting QB? There are three potential avenues: trades, free agency, or the NFL Draft.

In the past few weeks, the Bears’ general manager Ryan Pace was in several different talks trying to negotiate trades for quarterbacks like Matthew Stafford and Carson Wentz. But as most fans know, these two guys were taken off the board as Stafford was traded to the Los Angeles Rams and Wentz was sent packing to Indianapolis. In terms of trading for a quarterback, there aren’t many viable options left. Despite Deshaun Watson’s numerous trade requests, it appears that the Houston Texans organization is unwilling to negotiate. There were several rumors about the Bears having interest in Las Vegas Raiders’ quarterback Derek Carr, but like the Philadelphia Eagles’ situation, the Raiders asking price was presumably too steep for Ryan Pace’s taste. As far as trade targets go, only a few other players have been connected to recent speculation: Sam Darnold of the New York Jets, Dak Prescott of the Dallas Cowboys, and Gardner Minshew of the Jacksonville Jaguars. If the Bears do target one of these quarterbacks, Sam Darnold may be the best value. The asking price would be much lower for Darnold and many analysts believe that he could thrive under a different system. Yet more likely than not, the Bears next quarterback will be signed in free agency or drafted.

While for now the Bears have completely written off a reunion with Mitch Trubisky, things could look a lot different a month from now when free agency officially starts. If the front office finds themselves in a desperate situation, Trubisky could be back. The Bears could also consider the likes of several other free agent quarterbacks. Veterans like Andy Dalton, Cam Newton, Tyrod Taylor, or even Ryan Fitzpatrick, fondly known as “Fitzmagic,” could be in play for the Bears. But none of these guys are Super Bowl–caliber or even playoff-caliber players today. They could only serve as a temporary solution and so the Bears would be right back where they started

in search of a franchise quarterback. Turning to the draft, Chicago has a couple options.

Chicago has six picks in rounds 1–3 and 5–7, although the exact positions of the latter three rounds is currently undetermined.

Having the 20th pick in the draft, they’ll miss out on guys like Trevor Lawrence, Zach Wilson, Justin Fields, and even Trey Lance. If they do select a QB early on, Mac Jones and Kyle Trask are the best options. However, these two guys are not worth the early picks especially if the team, like the Bears, has other needs to meet. If the Bears do not trade for a quarterback, my best guess is that they will pass on free agency and draft a quarterback, like Sam Ehlinger or KJ Costello, in one of the final rounds.

For the last few years, Allen Robinson has been the only silver lining of the Bears dumpster fire offense. Since Robinson signed with the team in 2018, he has been Mitch Trubisky’s number one target and one of the team’s only reliable pass-catchers. But Allen Robinson will become an unrestricted free agent this offseason and it is quite obvious that he does not want to be in Chicago next year. During the last two years, he has frequently voiced frustrations with the Bears’ lackluster offense. However, despite his opposition, the Bears could try to retain Robinson by placing a franchise tag on him.

The franchise tag is a recently introduced designation where a team can keep a free agent player by paying him the greater of two options: 120 percent of his previous year’s salary or an average of the top five players’ salaries at a given position. In other words, it is an exorbitant amount of money that the Bears should not waste to keep Allen Robinson as he is not a franchise player. There is recent speculation that the Bears could franchise tag him and then use him as a trade asset (tag-and-trade). It’s a very unique and risky scenario as Pace and the front office would have to be confident that the trade value exceeds or is equal to the franchise tag price.

The Bears should not take this gamble as there are several wide receivers in free agency that could be a replacement for Robinson.

Chris Godwin and Juju Smith-Schuster are perhaps the most appealing options. In their young careers, both players have made the Pro Bowl and demonstrated the ability to run routes at an elite level. The only catch is that currently, Godwin and Smith-Schuster have explicitly stated their desire to stay on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Pittsburgh

The Bears have been in search of a franchise QB since nearly 1936, when they made UChicago’s Jay Berwanger the first ever pick in the NFL draft. COURTESY OF UCHICAGO ATHLETICS Steelers, respectively. But situations in the NFL can change in a heartbeat, so the Bears should stay prepared to pursue one of the two. A couple veterans that the Bears could evaluate are Antonio Brown, T.Y. Hilton, or A.J. Green, but these players are only shortterm options. The Bears could instead take a flyer on young and somewhat unproven guys like Corey Davis, Will Fuller, Curtis Samuel, and a few others. The organization may also take a survey of the wide receivers in this year’s draft. However, there is a clear dropoff from the consensus top three, Ja’Marr Chase, DeVonta Smith, and Jaylen Waddle, and the rest of the field. At pick number 20, there is little chance that the Bears could snag one of these game-changers. The Bears should realistically stick to free agency to find their next number one wide receiver.

In 2018, when they went 12–4, the Bears had the best defense in the league, and they were utterly dominant. Since then, while the defense has carried the team, the defensive unit is no longer dominant. This can be attributed to a lot of different factors: defensive coordinator Vic “Fannypack” Fangio’s departure, defensive injuries, and just basic regression to the mean. Yet, the team’s biggest problem this past year was a lack of depth in their secondary that led to mediocre performances, especially when rookie stalwart Jaylon Johnson got injured. Cornerbacks Buster Skrine, Duke Shelley, and Kindle Vildor all struggled to keep up with average wide receivers in one-on-one situations, which is ironic considering that’s what they get paid

to do. Even former Pro Bowlers Kyle Fuller and Eddie Jackson experienced regression in their production and were unable to spark the same turnovers that had made the 2018 Bears defense so formidable. The Bears could look toward free agency, but most of the top cornerbacks in this year’s pool of free agents, like Patrick Peterson, Richard Sherman, and Xavier Rhodes, are entering the latter stages of their careers. The Bears are best off not spending money here and instead drafting and signing one or two secondary players to rookie contracts. Players they could draft include Shaun Wade, Paulson Adebo, or even hometown kid and Northwestern cornerback Greg Newsome II. The Bears should look to develop one of these youngsters into a player who can start competing for starting spots as next year’s season approaches.

When Ryan Pace traded for Khalil Mack for several first round picks in 2018, the organization’s mindset was win-now, and the team was expected to contend for Super Bowls. As the defense slowly ages and contracts start expiring, the Bears’ title window is gradually coming to an end. If the Bears can make some drastic moves this offseason to bolster their offense and resolve minor issues in the secondary, the team can once again be a contender. But as of now, that seems like a long shot. Instead, this is the question that Bears fans will be left with: What could have happened if they had drafted Patrick Mahomes or Deshaun Watson and complemented their stellar defense of the last few years with a quality quarterback?