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NEWS: UNIVERSITY LAUNCHES PUBLIC SAFETY PAGE 2 COUNCIL

MAY 19, 2022 EIGHTH WEEK VOL. 134, ISSUE 25

College Council Elects 2022–23 Chair and Vice Chair

By CASEY KIM | Senior News Reporter During the College Council (CC) meeting on Monday, May 2, representatives voted for second-year Connor Lee and first-year Jordyn Flaherty to become the next Chair and Vice Chair of CC. Lee, currently a CC representative for the Class of 2024, ran unopposed. Lee’s current position will be filled by second-year Aaron Wineberg. As with the president, the CC Chair has the power to veto legislation.

“I believe that my approachability and self-effacing style make me well-suited to take on these responsibilities,” Lee said during the meeting. “If elected, I will regularly devote time to bonding and mentorship during College Council meetings. I am committed to creating a space where everyone’s voices are valued and respected.”

Flaherty, a current CC representative for the Class of 2025, ran alongside Lee and won 13–1. As Vice Chair, she hopes to make CC

more positive and productive.

“I look around this room, and I think that this is a space full of dedicated, talented people,” Flaherty said. “And I think we can accomplish so much if everyone here feels cared for, appreciated, and motivated to do important policy work.”

CC also held runoff elections for the Class of 2023 representative position. The position was previously held by Tyler Okeke, who was voted as the next Trustee and Faculty Governance Liaison during last Monday’s meeting. CC representatives voted 15–0 to elect Meghan Hendrix as the next representative for the Class of 2023. Hendrix had previously tied with third-year Daniel Gendy with four votes as write-in candidates in the general election.

This article was updated with new information as of Wednesday, May 11.

Connor Lee (left) and Jordyn Flaherty (right). courtesy of connor lee and jordyn flaherty

Updated COVID-19 Guidance Recommends Masking Indoors

By SABRINA CHANG | Senior News Reporter The University announced in a UChicago Forward email sent on Wednesday, May 11 that it is now recommending that individuals wear a mask in indoor settings when other people are present. This message came after a rise in COVID-19 cases on campus and in the rest of the City of Chicago, where the Community Risk Level was changed to “medium” on May 6.

“This updated recommendation is informed by the Chicago Department of Public Health’s (CDPH) recommendation to wear a mask in indoor public settings, as well as guidance from experts at the University of

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Chicago Medicine,” the email read.

According to another UChicago Forward email sent on Friday, May 13, organizers of certain group events may request an exception to the University’s mask-optional policy, and requests will be assessed on a case-by-case basis. However, most convenings currently remain mask-recommended, according to the University’s Guidance on Non-Instructional Meetings. The email also mentioned that the Walker Museum testing site will only be open from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Friday, May 27 and will be closed on Monday, May 30, in observance of Memorial Day.

GREY: David Axelrod Talks About His Love of Politics and the IOP. PAGE 5

UChicago reported 388 new COVID-19 cases and 346 close contacts between May 6 and May 12, according to the Friday, May 13, update. This is a significant increase from last week, when the University reported 268 new cases and 311 close contacts.

Between May 5 and May 11, surveillance testing detected 41 new positive cases, resulting in a 6.09 percent positivity rate. Though the number of new positive cases detected is the same as last week, the positivity rate increased from 5.77 percent.

There are currently 34 on-campus students in isolation and 122 off-campus students in isolation.

According to Chicago’s citywide

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COVID-19 dashboard, the city’s seven-day positivity rate is currently at 5.5 percent, which is an increase from last week’s 4.4 percent. The city also experienced a 31 percent increase in average number of daily cases from last week.

As always, the email encouraged individuals with potential COVID-19 symptoms to stay at home, follow the University’s exposure protocols, and get a COVID-19 test even if symptoms are mild and the individual is fully vaccinated and boosted. Since more individuals are using home tests, the University emphasized the importance of reporting positive cases to C19HealthReport@ uchicago.edu.

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University Launches Council to Obtain Community Input on Public Safety Decisions

By PETER MAHERAS | Senior News Reporter The University has created the Public Safety Advisory Council to gather community feedback on public safety policies on campus and within the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) extended patrol area, according to an email sent on Friday, May 6, by President Paul Alivisatos and Provost Ka Yee Lee. The council will collaborate with the University’s Department of Safety and Security (DSS) to incorporate community feedback into the University’s public safety decisions and assist DSS in raising awareness of the University’s efforts to improve safety around campus. This includes collaborating with DSS and UCPD to support “bias-free, community-driven policing,” according to the council’s website.

The council will also report on “UCPD metrics of community concern”—including traffic stops, use of force, and citizen complaints—to inform its recommendations.

Complaints against specific UCPD employees will continue to be investigated by the

University’s Independent Review Committee.

According to its charter, the council will meet monthly during the academic year and conduct at least one public forum per quarter. The charter stipulates that the council’s work “be conducted with the utmost transparency.” In addition to meeting minutes, an annual report detailing the council’s findings will be published at the end of the academic year.

The council can recommend policy changes to the University by a majority vote at any time. The University is expected to respond in writing to the council’s recommendations within 30 days. However, the University is not required to follow the recommendations, and the council’s charter emphasizes that policy and funding decisions affecting public safety remain solely with the University.

The council will be composed of 15 voting members and six non-voting members. Of the voting members, 11 will be affiliated with

the University and four will be community members. The non-voting members will be the designated representatives of various University departments, including UCPD, the Office of Civic Engagement, and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture.

University-affiliated members will include a council chair, four academic appointee representatives, three student representatives, and three staff representatives. Two graduate student representatives and one undergraduate student representative will be nominated by the Graduate Council and College Council respectively. Applications to join the council are due on May 27, 2022.

More information on applying can be found on its website.

Community representatives will be nominated by a selection committee in the Office of Civic Engagement. Candidates must either live in the UCPD extended patrol area or be a parent or guardian of a student attending a K–12 school in the UCPD patrol area. All appointees to the council must receive final approval from Alivisatos or Lee.

“Over the past several months, we have implemented multiple initiatives designed to address issues related to public safety,” Alivisatos and Lee wrote in their email. “We have also committed to engaging members of the campus and South Side communities in these efforts.”

The council is the second University-led body formed this year with the aim of evaluating the relationship between the University and its neighbors. In December 2021, the University announced the creation of the Council on UChicago/Community Relations: Historical, Contemporary, and Future to investigate the relationship between the University and the South Side.

Unlike the Council on UChicago/Community Relations, which is scheduled to complete its work in 2025, the Public Safety Advisory Council will be a permanent body.

Members will serve three-year terms, with the exception of student representatives, who will serve one-year terms.

The council’s first meeting is expected to be held in September 2022.

Students Report Being Turned Away From COVID-19 Testing at Walker Museum

By EMMA JANSSEN | Senior News Reporter On Wednesday, April 20, Georgia Wluka, a first-year in the College, was turned away from Walker Museum when she walked in seeking a COVID-19 test. Wluka wasn’t alone. In the past few weeks, students have reported being turned away at Walker, several taking to Twitter to air their confusion and concern.

Wluka learned that she had been exposed to COVID-19 on Saturday, April 16, prompting her to seek a test from Walker on Monday, April 18. Her appointment went smoothly, and she received a negative test result. However, she subsequently learned that she had been exposed to other students who had tested positive.

Hoping to confirm that she remained

negative, she walked into Walker to take a test on Wednesday of the same week. The worker at the front reception desk turned Wluka away even though Wluka told her that she had been exposed to multiple people who were positive for COVID-19.

“I think it’s because she particularly recognized me from [my test on] Monday,” Wluka said. “I don’t know if the workers there are paying attention to that sort of thing.

I think the act of walk-in testing wasn’t an issue, but her recognizing me and saying, ‘You don’t need to be here again’ was a little interesting.” “[The front desk worker] specifically said if you don’t have any symptoms and you’re vaccinated, you don’t need to come back un-

til at least [next] Monday,” Wluka recounted.

The following Monday would have marked nine days after her weekend exposure.

In an email exchange with The Maroon concerning the University’s COVID-19 policy, Associate Director for Public Affairs for the University Gerald McSwiggan wrote, “People who are known contacts of someone with COVID-19 must get tested at least 5 days after their last exposure. See the University’s exposure protocol. People who have been exposed (and are not symptomatic) can get tested at the Walker Museum.”

For the rest of the day on Wednesday, Wluka tried to limit her exposure to others.

She planned to return to Walker on Thursday, hoping a different receptionist would be there instead.

“I got tested on Thursday, and that came

back positive,” Wluka said. “My main concern there is that I was positive on Wednesday and would have tested positive and was walking around for a full extra day potentially exposing other people.”

Describing her experience to The Maroon as she isolated in her dorm room, Wluka said: “I trusted them and assumed that I probably wouldn’t have COVID if they said I didn’t need to get tested again. But I don’t know now.”

McSwiggan described Walker Museum’s testing policies in an email exchange with The Maroon: “The voluntary testing program is primarily intended to provide testing as often as once per week for those who choose to participate. More frequent testing may be limited by scheduling and CONTINUED ON PG. 3

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“Under normal conditions, students can be tested once per week…I went today for a potential exposure test, and I think I should be eligible to receive it.”

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availability. Some individuals have sought tests on successive days, which is generally not possible because PCR test results can take a day or longer to obtain.”

Wluka wasn’t the only student to experience confusion at Walker when trying to access exposure testing, reflecting a lack of communication between University officials and the student body around testing procedures.

Zhengyuan Ling, an A.M. student and the vice president of the Academic and Professional Fund of the Graduate Council, was turned away from Walker on Friday, April 22. Ling had been tested on Monday, April 18, but didn’t know that Walker staff were limiting tests to once a week. When he walked into receive a test, Ling said that a staff member recognized him and told him he could not receive a second test in the same week.

“I did not try to argue with the staff, as I knew it was not her who made the rule,” Ling wrote in an email to The Maroon on April 22. “I have no problem [with the fact] that, under normal conditions, students can be tested once per week as a means to conserve medical resources. But, in my case, I went today for a potential exposure test, and I think I should be eligible to receive it though I have had one on Monday.”

Reports of students’ getting turned away from Walker coincided with a campus-wide surge in COVID-19 cases that marked the return of isolation-in-place policies. During the week of April 15–21, 372 people tested positive, with 611 close contacts.

Second-year Noel McGrory went with a friend to get tested at Walker on April 22. “I overheard the woman at the front desk ask the guy in front of me and my friend when the last time he had been tested was. He said

[he had been tested on] Monday, and she told him that he could not get tested until a week had gone by. He mentioned that he had been exposed to COVID since then, and she mentioned something about being fine for the week and said that he still couldn’t get tested again,” McGrory told The Maroon.

McGrory and his friend, who had both tested earlier in the week, were also unable to get tests.

Students have also been denied PCR tests from Walker while experiencing symptoms of COVID-19. Second-year Natalie Hoge went to Walker while experiencing cold- and flu-like symptoms. She was sent home with a rapid antigen test, which returned a positive result later that day.

A UChicago Forward update email sent on Friday, April 29, explained the policies for testing at Walker Museum. “We have limited participation in the program to twice

per week, because results can take up to 48 hours and there is little diagnostic benefit from getting more than two PCR tests in the same week. Because of the time it takes to obtain results, individuals also should not seek tests on successive days.”

Additionally, the update said of symptomatic testing that “it is vital that individuals with COVID-19-like symptoms do not seek testing at the Walker Museum testing site.… Rapid/antigen testing for individuals who are symptomatic will no longer be provided at the Walker Museum. There is ample availability of symptomatic testing during the week at UChicago Medicine.”

Austin Zeglis contributed reporting.

University Officials Reflect on Late President Sonnenschein’s Legacy of Reform at Memorial Service

By NIEVE RODRIGUEZ | Senior News Reporter The University of Chicago honored former president Hugo Sonnenschein, who served in the role from 1993 to 2000, at a memorial service on Saturday, April 30 at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel. Sonnenschein, aged 80, died on July 15, 2021, in Hyde Park. Sonnenschein has been credited with transforming the undergraduate curriculum, campus facilities, and the University’s reputation through a series of sweeping policy reforms.

President Paul Alivisatos spoke first at the service. “I so much regret that I never had the opportunity to meet Hugo.

I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to get to know him through his significant legacy: the enduring and impactful changes he put into place as president, his reputation as an eminent scholar of economics, and the generation of students and scholars and administrators he inspired and mentored throughout his long and distinguished career.”

In 1996, Sonnenschein outlined a plan for the College that recommended an increase in the undergraduate population from 3,550 to 4,500 students. However, Sonnenschein also believed that an increase in demand for the College must precede an increase in class size. To that end, Sonnenschein determined that the University must be selected more frequently by talented students in order to raise its national ranking.

To make the College more appealing to applicants, he suggested a reduction in the number of required courses for the undergraduate Core Curriculum, which resulted in intense and at times controversial debate among University faculty before its implementation in 1999.

In his remarks, Board of Trustees chair Joseph Neubauer revealed that the acceptance rate for the Class of 2026 was the lowest in University history. “With a 5 percent admissions rate, 80 percent

yield, and with a college population of 7,400 students, we’ve executed what [Sonnenschein] envisioned for us,” Neubauer said. The Office of College Admissions did not respond to The Maroon’s request for confirmation of these figures.

Admissions statistics have changed drastically from the time of Sonnenschein’s presidency; in 1993, the acceptance rate for the University was 77 percent. In 2006, the acceptance rate was 38 percent, and in 2010, 18 percent.

Sonnenschein’s reforms also increased the University’s endowment from $1.2 billion in 1993 to $2.9 billion in 2000. A more robust financial situation allowed Sonnenschein to outline his Campus Master Plan, which suggested the addition of more campus facilities, including the Gerald Ratner Athletic Center, Max Palevsky Residential Commons, more science facilities, and a campus for the Booth School of Business.

Sonnenschein’s colleagues and friends reflected on his character and

how it allowed him to enact such groundbreaking policies. “In true UChicago fashion, [Sonnenschein] always asked the right questions. He always got to the facts and acted upon them. Hugo fully embraced the values and aspirations of our university but understood [that] to preserve and protect those values in the future, difficult decisions had to be made,” said Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law and former provost Geoffrey Stone.

University Chancellor Robert Zimmer, who served as president from 2006 to 2021, felt Sonnenschein’s impact stemmed from his thoughtful approach to his role. “Hugo and I agreed on many things, and likewise often disagreed. I greatly respected and admired him for his independence of thought, and that he was always willing to argue through disagreements,” Zimmer said.

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“[W]e’ve executed what [Sonnenschein] envisioned for us.”

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er stopped being a remarkably gifted teacher. Only the nature of his classroom

and his students shifted,” said Steven Poskanzer, former chief of staff to the president’s office. “As accomplished as

Hugo was, his ego was never wrapped up in being a university president. This liberated him to model honesty in lead-

ership.”

First-Year Sells Desserts to Benefit Ukraine

By KAYLA RUBENSTEIN | Senior News Reporter First-year Jonah Herrera-Dodd came up with a “sweet” way to help those impacted by the war in Ukraine: selling cookies and brownies on the quad with his two-man group, Cookies for Ukraine.

After reading about the Ukrainian conflict, Herrera-Dodd and first-year Ethan Clark felt driven to help those in need.

“We were talking one day and were like, ‘we should do something.’ And then we did something,” Herrera-Dodd said.

Herrera-Dodd makes brownies and white chocolate oatmeal cookies from an old family recipe for the bake sale in the Burton-Judson kitchen. Occasionally accompanied by a friend or two, he bags the finished

treats and sells them on the quad at a rate of $5 for two items.

Herrera-Dodd begins to bake as soon as classes end, taking a Divvy bike to get back to B-J quickly. With the items ready to be sold, he and Clark set up their table on the quad with a large Ukrainian flag to grab the attention of passersby. They usually sell all 20 bags within an hour and a half, bringing in $100 at each of the 12 bake sales. Typically, the bake sales run from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m.

Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and from 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays.

“It’s been doing spectacularly. We’ve sold a lot of cookies, and people seem to really like

them. So you know we’re doing something right,” Herrera-Dodd said.

Beyond the satisfaction of donating to a cause he believes in, Herrera-Dodd enjoys watching people try the cookies. He recounted the time a woman purchased a bag containing one cookie and one brownie. As she walked away, she tried the cookie and immediately turned around to buy a bag with two cookies. “She said they were awesome,” Herrera-Dodd said. “It was a really proud moment for me. I was like, ‘Man, people really liked this.’”

When searching for an organization to donate their profits to, Herrera-Dodd looked for one with a civilian focus. He decided on Project HOPE, a healthcare charity dedicated to fundraising for medical supplies. Cook-

ies for Ukraine donates to HOPE’s Crisis in Ukraine campaign, which raises money for hospital necessities.

Herrera-Dodd also seeks to expand Cookies for Ukraine. “If we had more people to man more tables, then we could grow the operation. If anyone reading wants to help with Cookies for Ukraine, it would be greatly appreciated,” he said.

Cookies for Ukraine has raised over $1,200 through dessert sales, and hopes to donate more. Their biggest challenge, however, has been finding a kitchen to bake in, as the Burton-Judson kitchen has been closed since April 21. “We need to figure out how to work around [the kitchen closing], but we definitely still want to keep going,” Herrera-Dodd said.

New Course Discusses Video Game Design and How Gaming Has Shaped History

By ZHIJIE HUANG | News Reporter A new course, Gaming History (IRHU 27010, KNOW 27010, MAAD 17010), is being offered by the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge in Spring 2022. The course is taught by Brad Bolman and Katherine Buse and is cross listed for the inquiry and research in humanities program and media arts and design major.

Buse’s research focuses on how science shapes and is shaped by its cultural environment. She also studies and designs video games. Bolman is a historian specializing in the history of science.

The course teaches students how history is represented in games, how games have influenced history, and which methods are used in video game research.

“We wanted to convey some of these ideas about how to do research about video games, about how to think about video games historically, and how to study video

games like novels or films,” Bolman said.

Both instructors believe that the study of video games is an emerging field of research that deserves more attention.

“It is incredibly important to analyze [video games] and study them historically and think about its significance,” Bolman said. “People acknowledge video games as an area of study that is important at this point, but I would say that since it is so nascent and emerging as a field that people haven’t figured out how to do it yet,” Buse added.

Through playing and analyzing a variety of games in the course, students reflect on topics such as how games can represent the economy and the role of women in video games. For example, the class discusses HalfEarth Socialism, in which the player plays as a future world government leader implementing sweeping policies against climate change. The students also learn how these

topics are reflected in the game design industry in the real world, such as forced overtime in gaming studios and inequalities in the labor force.

Bolman and Buse faced a variety of challenges while designing the course structure.

“How do we introduce enough of a game that people understand it, and they can talk about it without having to spend six weeks playing a single game?” Bolman said. “A class about one video game is very different from a class about ten video games.”

Bolman explained that they wanted to introduce a game in which the students can explore randomly generated emergent historical events under the “big, vast history” that the game creates. “You could play this game for 600 hours or something if you wanted,” Bolman said, “but it is hard to guarantee that they’ll have the exact experience as the one that we want.”

The instructors have been impressed by how the students’ analysis of the games have

improved throughout the quarter.

“We want students to be able to think critically about the video games that they are consuming and think about what it is doing, and how it’s communicating things about culture and about society,” Bolman said. “We’ve seen a real development just in that ability to engage with a game and think about its context and the choices that the developers made.”

Bolman hopes that younger students in the class can continue researching video games using the methods and topics taught in class. “If we do a really good job,” Bolman said, “we would train a small future generation of video game researchers.”

Buse and Bolman plan to offer the course again next year and encourage all interested students to enroll in the course.

Rachel Wan contributed reporting.

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David Axelrod Reflects on 10 Years of IOP Leadership In an interview with The Maroon, David Axelrod talked about his love of politics, the beginnings of the IOP, and the future of the Institute.

By NOAH GLASGOW | Grey City Reporter The office of David Axelrod, director of the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics (IOP), is exactly what you might expect from UChicago’s foremost policy pundit.

The wall nearest the door is a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf bearing mostly political hardbacks. Some of them are old and yellowing; some of them pristine; more than a few of them written by Axelrod. On Axelrod’s desk, in lieu of a brass nameplate stands a pint glass that commemorates Hacks on Tap, one of Axelrod’s two political podcasts. And on the wall, signatures in silver and gold paint pen decorate a poster for HBO’s documentary By The People, which chronicles former President Barack Obama’s star-making 2008 presidential campaign—the campaign Axelrod led as Obama’s chief strategist.

The room is lived-in, cluttered, but undeniably glamorous, lined with all the memorabilia accrued by a near half-century spent in politics. It’s this office that Axelrod will be vacating next spring when he steps down as the director of the University’s Institute of Politics, the organization he founded in 2013, after a decade-long tenure. It was because of the decision to step down that I found myself, interview questions in hand, on the second floor of the IOP’s South Woodlawn Avenue brownstone in David Axelrod’s office.

The IOP is one of the leading political organizations—if not the leading political organization—at the University of Chicago.

A professedly nonpartisan group, the IOP brings in political speakers, connects students to internships and campaigns, and

David Axelrod has stood at the IOP’s helm for almost 10 years. stella bevacqua

broadly hopes to foster in its students “a passion for public service, meaningful dialogue and active engagement in our democracy.”

While the IOP has drawn criticism, particularly from students that object to its centrist, careerist approach, the IOP remains one of the University’s most prominent extracurricular organizations.

Axelrod, who has stood at the IOP’s helm for almost 10 years, has assured students that his decision to step down from the directorship has been long in the making.

“This transition had always been my plan,” he wrote in a public letter published on the IOP’s website in mid-February. “I love the IOP but however comfortable and rewarding it would be for me to remain as director indefinitely, I believe strongly that change and renewal are necessary and important.”

Axelrod will become chairman of the Institute’s advisory board after stepping down as the organization’s director.

Early in our conversation—which ranged from President John F. Kennedy to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and proceeded always, invariably, back to the IOP—I asked Axelrod when the idea for an Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago first struck. It was a question he clearly anticipated, and one he has practice answering.

“It wasn’t instantly apparent to me that [the IOP] could be at the University of Chicago,” Axelrod said. “I remember, I had lunch with [former University president Robert] Zimmer downtown. And the first thing I said to him was ‘Bob, I went to the College, and I hated it. And I hated it because all I heard about was the life of the mind, and I was interested in the life of the world.’ And so, I don’t know how something as, you know, as prosaic in the minds of some as an Institute of Politics would be received at the University.”

At first, Axelrod worried that such a

forthright critique of the University would leave Zimmer disaffected. Instead, Zimmer assured him that an institute focused on the real-world practice of politics over the study of abstract political theory would be a welcome addition to a university with a famous disregard for applied studies. The Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering had begun to bridge this gap in 2011, and Axelrod’s IOP would continue the work.

Axelrod considered establishing the IOP at Northwestern; he had “a lengthy courtship with both.” But, of course, he changed his mind when his wife Susan, herself a UChicago alum, told him: “There’s no decision here. It has to be at the University of Chicago. We’ve got too many ties here.”

There was a terrific note of confidence— finality, even—in the story, which Axelrod delivered with casual aplomb. No matter where he has gone, he seemed to suggest, the University of Chicago has always found him: first as an undergraduate in the 1970s, then much later in his career.

That career spans a number of distinguished positions, particularly during the Obama years, when Axelrod served as a senior advisor to the president and the architect of both the 2008 and 2012 election campaigns. Indeed, Axelrod is a larger-thanlife figure. His physical prominence—6 foot 2 and broad-shouldered even into his sixties—is a reminder that larger-than-life figures are, in reality, often just a bit larger than everyone around them. I was reminded of the old elementary school tale that Washington (who stood at Axelrod’s six-foot-two) towered over his fellow statesmen and must have looked rather uncomfortable in those low-hanging colonial doorways. So too does Axelrod feel outsized at the small, plastic table and chairs at which we had our conversation.

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“His tone is still subtle and professional, but it leaks pride.”

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Axelrod’s youth feels almost mythic, although perhaps this wonder is simply generational. “[When] I was five years old, John F. Kennedy came to Stuyvesant Town, where I grew up in New York,” Axelrod told me casually. For Axelrod, the memory of seeing Kennedy speak remains fiercely alive; it’s one of Axelrod’s earliest and most vivid inspirations behind a career in the political world. “I was transfixed by the whole thing, by the spectacle of…this event, but also by the rapt attention that people were paying to him.… It all seemed very important to me, and very dynamic.”

In his autobiography Believer, Axelrod describes a childhood spent around politics.

At 10, he was volunteering for New York gubernatorial candidate John Lindsay, and by 13 he was getting paid by a state assembly campaign.

This interest in politics carried Axelrod to the University of Chicago where, as a student in the early ’70s, he became involved in political journalism. Anti-war protestors at the 1968 Democratic National Convention had been met with a sharp and violent police crackdown orchestrated by then-mayor Richard J. Daley. It was conflict between Hyde Park activists and Daley’s political machine—his vast network of bureaucrats and political operatives, infused throughout Chicago’s political landscape—that dominated Axelrod’s early political reporting at the Hyde Park Herald.

“That was a very turbulent time in our history,” he said. “We’d just had this Democratic convention in 1968 [that] famously exploded…and Hyde Park was kind of the focus of independent Democratic politics in a city that was dominated by a political machine.”

This reporting proved an escape from what he saw as the closed-minded University’s neglect of real-world politics. “I always joked that nobody wanted to talk about anything that happened after the year 1800 here,” Axelrod told me. He admitted that this jape was always “a little bit of an exaggeration,” but added that “there was nowhere to go if you wanted to have a good sort of conversation about what was going on politically.”

It was Axelrod’s unfulfilled curiosity as a University student that would inspire the mission and direction of the IOP four decades later.

“It has been so satisfying…to bring to

this campus the thing that I missed so much when I was a student, to see how enthusiastically people have embraced it. It’s just been an incredible gift.”

In its time on campus, the IOP has granted a significant boost to the careers of budding politicians, political staffers, and journalists. The IOP has sponsored more than 2,500 internships for University students, and hosted more than 2,000 speakers and hundreds of fellows, who range from journalists to activists to scholars, commentators, jurists, and elected leaders.

There are a few projects that Axelrod is particularly proud of. Among these is the Iowa Project, which enables students to intern with political campaigns during the crucial Iowa Caucus presidential campaign season. Another flagship project is Bridging the Divide, an inter-institutional initiative led by students at the University of Chicago, Eureka College, and Arrupe College at Loyola University Chicago, which examines the political differences in voting behavior between rural and urban Illinoisians. The three schools collaborate to analyze political and cultural trends across a variety of neighborhoods and socioeconomic groups.

Axelrod is proud too that the IOP draws engagement from all across the University’s student body, not just those students who study political science. He said, “You know, I always make this point: Angela Merkel was a physicist, [Václav] Havel was a poet. Some of the great leaders came from completely different disciplines.… And being engaged, whatever discipline you go into, is an important part of living in a democracy.”

With the crisis in Ukraine, Axelrod is reminded that life under a democratic government is a lucky privilege, and not one that everyone shares. “[My father] and his family came to America for the chance to participate in a democracy,” Axelrod said. In 1919, his father fled antisemitic violence in eastern Ukraine. “[Democracy]’s precious, and we should be about the business of keeping healthy and strong.” Axelrod hopes that people recognize “the degree to which people are willing to risk everything for the right to govern themselves.”

Axelrod remains a firm believer that political engagement and genuine conversation are among the cornerstones of democracy.

It’s the IOP’s continued commitment to bring in speakers from all ends of the politi-

cal spectrum that Axelrod is most proud of, and he believes it’s a commitment for which efforts must be redoubled. Axelrod sees political polarization as a fundamental “challenge to democracy.”

To my ears, this is a somewhat modish refrain. But there’s real frustration, even sorrow, when when Axelrod speaks about the ramifications of polarization, particularly in the context of the IOP. “The world is different than it was 10 years ago,” he said. “10 years ago, it was easier to get people to come, it was easier to get people to open their minds, be they left or right.… I believe strongly that our mission is to bring good, provocative speakers, [and] also to make sure that they are challenged, and that students have the opportunity to do that.” Axelrod believes that in a democratic system, “you can’t simply shut out ideas you don’t like or disagree with. You need to contend with them.”

Behind Axelrod’s words hides his disappointment that, in 2022, students and community members interested in politics aren’t as willing to have conversations that span the political divide. Polling data demonstrates the reality of Axelrod’s disappointment. Pew Research Center data from 2019 suggests that 64 percent of Republicans and 75 percent of Democrats believe members of the opposing party are “close-minded,” with more than a third of each party further believing that opposing party members are simply “unintelligent.” The study points out that “partisans who are highly attentive to politics are most likely to express negative sentiments about the opposing party,” meaning it’s among students interested in politics—students whom the IOP attracts— that these sentiments are, statistically, the most robust.

Axelrod told me that among his favorite events hosted by the IOP was a conversation from May of last year between former senator Justin Amash, a libertarian, and Deval Patrick, former Democratic governor of Massachusetts. Both Amash and Patrick spent significant time discussing the importance of bipartisan conversation. “I don’t think we can afford to live in a country where each side says, ‘Well, we have power now. So, we will use that power to achieve our ends,’” Amash said; Patrick called himself “a Democrat who doesn’t believe you have to hate Republicans to be a good Democrat.”

Axelrod said the discussion was “emblematic of the…sorts of conversations we

should be having.” It’s an ironic twist that the most important conversations are about the importance of conversation. What purpose do these conversations serve? How do they translate into real political action? Do they only serve to self-aggrandize?

The leading question for the conversation was “What does freedom mean to you?” For Amash, freedom means restricting federal authority to allow for increased individual and regional autonomy. For Patrick, it means a basic social safety net that works to ensure equal opportunity for all Americans. These are diametrically opposed understandings of freedom; Amash and Patrick don’t reach an obvious compromise.

Perhaps when Axelrod calls this conversation “emblematic” of how we should discuss politics, what he means is that we should aim to replicate their tenor: respectful, curious, and with a genuine effort made to listen. If such a tenor could be replicated in other settings—say, on Capitol Hill—we might make more progress on our democracy’s most intractable controversies.

“Democracy really does require working through issues,” Axelrod said, “not trying to overwhelm your opposition.… [That]’s not possible and it’s not healthy.”

Here, the immediate critique is obvious: It is possible to overwhelm the opposition; that’s been the de facto political agenda of both the Democratic and Republican parties since the mid-’90s (at the latest). Axelrod’s rosy fondness for an old brand of politics is plain, and for the IOP’s critics—and many in my generation—the notion of bipartisan compromise in our real political action may well appear inimical to the pursuit of justice and progress.

But I, like Axelrod, would be inclined to suggest that a relentless struggle for one set of particular, inflexible ideals—just or otherwise—is not democratic. Democracy requires us to work through our ideas, likely with conversation, then put those ideas into action.

Axelrod will maintain a strong guiding hand in the program as the chairman of the advisory board, a position that he said will be “essential to the director and the IOP, in terms of offering ideas and rolodexes and assisting [the IOP] in executing on some of its big dreams.”

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he will remain a presence on campus even as he moves into a more advisory role.

“You’ll be seeing me around,” he said, although he was quick to note that he doesn’t want to step on the new director’s toes. “The worst thing would be to have two directors, you know, one emeritus and one active.… So I’m going to be thoughtful about my participation, but my participation will be evident.”

Axelrod feels the IOP has become a “part of the fabric of campus life,” but he’s hesitant to measure the program’s success with such abstract metrics, or on the merits of individual programs, or—worse yet—with the name

cachet of past speakers and fellows.

But Axelrod does have some idea how to assess the Institute’s success. “People used to ask me at the beginning [of the IOP], ‘Well, how will you judge your success? And I said, ‘I’m going to judge our success by the things that people who pass through this program do when they leave here.’” Over the past decade, Axelrod said, students who have spent time at the IOP have gone on to become journalists, politicians, political activists, nonprofit workers, and scholars at think tanks.

One of the IOP’s first student affiliates, Erin Simpson, has returned to the program this spring as a fellow. She’s now an expert in her

field, disinformation and technology theory.

For Axelrod, this is the supreme testament to the IOP’s success.

It’s when Axelrod discusses the success of these alums that he is at his most vibrant.

His tone is still subtle and professional, but it leaks pride.

At a point in the interview, Axelrod brought up Kennedy—this time, Robert Francis, not John Fitzgerald. He quoted RFK: “The future is not a gift, it’s an achievement.” If each generation doesn’t work to ensure the stability and character of our democracy, Axelrod believes, it will simply slip away.

“I think this is the most public-spirited group of young people that I’ve seen since the ’60s,” Axelrod said. “And I do think that you guys have lived through such turmoil over the last two decades, that…you don’t take the future for granted, and that’s good.” Axelrod has real, robust faith in the work of the IOP and, more importantly, in the students that the program works to mentor. “I go home every day optimistic and people—you know, these have been dispiriting times—people say, ‘Well, what makes you optimistic?’ And I say, you spend time with the young people I do, and you’ll have a better feeling about the future.”

VIEWPOINTS

Free Expression, Freeing Expression When professors divulge their own identity and personal experiences with the class, discussions are more fulfilling and offer opportunities for growth.

By ISABELLA O’REILLY I always study on the A-level of the Regenstein Library because on the first day of O-Week, my Peer Mentor told us about a late night she had there while studying for finals. I sit in the same seat in chemistry every class solely because I recognized the person next to me on the first day. Many of my friends have been shaped by similar experiences and have developed similar habits. As impressionable young people thrust into the new environment of a college campus, we tend to be more influenced by our surroundings than we might expect, which gives our instructors—people in positions of authority—a great deal of power. A professor expressing their views could easily unintentionally force students in their classes to conform to them. That being said, when a teacher shares their identity, class discussions can feel much more in-

timate and individualized. Sharing personal experiences helps to both further and ground the discussion, resonating more with those who participate. It’s the responsibility of our professors to create a safe, non-judgmental environment so that sharing their identity and personal experiences will encourage discussion and exploration rather than the suppression of creativity.

It’s true that when professors actively participate in discussion, there is a risk that students will feel obligated to think in the same manner as their teacher, thus potentially dampening independent thought and creativity. But doesn’t following this line of thinking go against the free expression that is emphasized at our own school?

Our university claims to provide “an education that fosters free expression and empowers students to engage with challenging ideas.”

This free expression should apply to professors as well: Barring pro-

fessors from sharing their identity in any manner is an infringement on this statement that we pride ourselves on. However, it is important to first establish the classroom as a safe space so that a professor sharing their identity is not only possible but also beneficial. Even in a classroom setting, true neutrality is impossible; instead, acknowledging this idea right off the bat allows for the students to feel the full impact of the class. As a first-year, the classes I took this past quarter were all Core requirements that involved little discussion. Yet there were still moments when I believed that if my professor had connected our discussion to the modern world and shared their own personal experience, I would have walked out of class contemplating the topic even further.

Even in high school, I found that the more personal a class discussion got, the more room there was for growth and learning. Spe-

cifically, I participated in The Identity of Self, a class in which each student discussed and explored their identities through the various works that we read. My teacher refrained from sharing her own identity or commenting on others’ journeys until the last week of class.

As she told her personal story, our entire class was transfixed by what she said: She used a racist demonstration that was targeted towards her in a high school volleyball game to bring her team to the championship. This story still resonates with me to this day. I do not think that how I feel about my own identity would have been the same without hearing about and learning from her experience. However, thinking back, if she had shared her experience with the class earlier, I likely would have attempted to mirror my own experience after various aspects of hers, as she too is a biracial Black woman. In this moment, I realized two key things: how im-

pressionable the human mind is and how, by sharing her narrative, my teacher positively impacted the lives of several students. She allowed us to expand upon our own experiences and learn to prepare for future journeys. We walked out of the class better equipped to handle real-life situations, and that is what we should expect for our college classes as well.

Each person—student or professor—walks into a class with their own unconscious biases, regardless of race, gender identity, sexuality, and more. These biases affect the way we think and operate in life. However, there is no way to dismantle our own implicit biases unless we share and actively discuss them with people who are different from us. Our classes at UChicago are meant to further our education in a way that is applicable both inside and outside of the classroom, and discussion allows us to grow outside of the written

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curriculum.

Cherie Fernandes published an article earlier this year about her stance on the sharing of identity in the classroom. In her article she states, “any individual’s engagement with a topic is inevitably filtered through the prism of identity, it is prudent to recognize and account for its influence in academic environments.” This statement highlights the undeniable benefit of professors sharing their identity. It is naive to believe that anyone, even a tenured professor at a prestigious university like UChicago, would be able to fully separate themselves from their identity when participating

in class. Early acknowledgement and sharing of these unconscious biases can not only set the stage for the rest of the class but also allow people to come into the classroom with an open, knowledgeable expectation for discussion.

In a world where vulnerability can often be dangerous, sharing should not be forced and is best done in a safe space: one fostered by the professor and upheld by the class. A safe space allows students to speak their minds freely on topics pertaining to the discussion.

Yes, it is naive to believe that everyone will feel comfortable to share their experience and it is naive to believe that a safe space is completely realistic, but as a student

body, we should strive to make the classroom one of these spaces. In my personal experience, when a safe space is established, students are able to not only flourish in the discussion, but also reevaluate their own views, attitudes, and perceptions and gain significantly more from the class. In that same high school class on identity, when we watched Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X, I was able to hear new perspectives on Malcolm X’s influence as an activist from my fellow classmates that I believe would not have been shared without the assurance that their beliefs would be respected. I did not agree with all of the things that were shared— some I even adamantly disagreed

with—but hearing from others allowed me to adapt and grow my own conclusions based on the new perspectives.

When a professor contributes to a discussion, they should encourage students to express and elaborate or even push back with their own opinions rather than inhibit students with opposing viewpoints from sharing. Even though we would like to believe our campus, and the people on it, are not immune to outdated and offensive beliefs, many students and even faculty have never been exposed to situations where they realize that their views can be detrimental to the well-being of others.

Discussion is an integral part of

shifting a person’s understanding of the world. If the classroom is established as a safe space, everyone, including the professor, should be able to share their identity. We as students and human beings grow from communication, and the relationship between a professor and students in a classroom setting should not dampen this important discussion. After all, the University of Chicago is trying to prepare well-rounded, well-adapted people to send into the workforce.

Isabella O’Reilly is a first-year in the College.

Is There a Vision of Hyde Park That Works for Everyone?

Like it or not, the University is in Hyde Park, and we should stop seeing ourselves as guests.

By HENRY CANTOR

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It isn’t unfair to say that students struggle to conceptualize our university’s situated position in Hyde Park. Many articles in The Maroon have lambasted the arrival of new businesses and diagnosed our university as imperious or anarchic, all the while rejecting the conflation of University, student, and Hyde Park interests. The way I see it, these arguments provide skillful consolations to students’ discomfort in a new neighborhood. These articles are built around a sense of false activism, perhaps performing some moral accounting; however, in their defiance and denial of the University’s placement in the neighborhood, these arguments serve only to preclude students from thoughtful participation in our greater community.

Though we must admit that we have different stakes and priorities in the neighborhood from lifelong

residents, we need to stop manufacturing such harsh disjunctures between Hyde Park residents and students. The dominant rhetoric I have noticed is that students are guests in Hyde Park—transient and itinerant consumers that should divorce themselves from participating in the economic and social composition of the neighborhood.

While referring to ourselves as “guests” may be an exercise in respect towards the constitution of the neighborhood, there is some fiction in this designation. If we see ourselves as “guests,” we are forced to treat the neighborhood with indifference and alienation.

Like it or not, the University is in Hyde Park, and we should stop seeing ourselves as guests.

First, though, I somewhat agree. You will likely only spend four years punishing the quad with angry stomping or spending long nights in Mansueto, the cyst of central campus. Despite this, it’s not difficult to see that the student

demographic is calcified in Hyde Park. Students will invariably reside in the neighborhood; students at UChicago alone contribute over 17,000 people to the community that is Hyde Park. Considering that according to recent census data from August 2021, Hyde Park’s permanent residency is only 29,456 residents, it’s worth recognizing UChicago’s student body as one of Hyde Park’s most enduring and significant sub-demographics.

That’s not to say that four years is an insignificant period of time.

Four years represents nearly twenty percent of our lives by the time we graduate. I’d argue that we do live in Hyde Park—we’re not just visitors. And I don’t know about you, but I do not want to feel like a visitor. As UChicago students, we have a ravenous appetite for activity and engagement. But we also crave inactivity. We crave stability, comfort, and a sense of community. That’s impossible to achieve CONTINUED ON PG. 9

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when you consider yourself a visitor, refusing to acknowledge your domestication in a new place and seeing our university as peripheral to an exciting and important neighborhood. By multiplying this “guest” designation, we continue to estrange ourselves from the possibility of broader community and engagement.

While we can dispute the semantics of “guest” or “resident,” I don’t think this is our biggest challenge. Let’s consider the attitude toward the University’s placement in Hyde Park. Many students prefer that our university act like scratchand-sniff stickers or lottery tickets: invisible, unpresuming, revealing itself only when the neighborhood feels like scratching. In my view, this attitude only serves to reproduce the difficult negotiations between the University and Hyde Park community. We need to first accept our university’s placement within the neighborhood in order to better make sense of its participation.

The University is inseparable from the neighborhood it exists within. The way I see it, to draw these boundaries is to gerrymander a pancake. In my dad’s words, you can’t say the arm isn’t a part of

the body. As I already mentioned, the student population is over half the population of Hyde Park, and nearly 60 percent of University faculty live in Hyde Park. It’s unreasonable to suggest that Hyde Park’s economy will ignore this demographic of disposable income and educated consumers.

While the University as an institution must be held accountable in the lineament of gentrification, we must also stop seeing ourselves as ineligible for participation in the neighborhood.

That said, we should absolutely be concerned about—and sensitive to—the displacement of low-income residents due to our university’s over-engagement in the neighborhood. However, when we argue on the grounds of gentrification, we need to separate the University’s deliberate and parasitic behavior from the behavior of a market economy, which unfortunately doesn’t have the same responsibilities to the neighborhood. We can’t schematize every new business by using the same standards we hold for our university. The dangers of rampant, college-spurred gentrification require more complicated analysis than that.

Ultimately, the arguments of whether we are guests or whether

the University is overbearing are only a part of a more important conversation. As a student body, I think our underlying disagreement grapples with one fundamental question: Who is Hyde Park for?

And while we must try our best to answer that question, I think that many of us don’t fully understand the complexities of Hyde Park. My impression is that students feel that our privileged population is taking away Hyde Park from a disadvantaged population. And while the discussion of “gentrification” is undoubtedly grounded in good intentions, it is unfair to reduce Hyde Park to a neighborhood of poor people and people of color.

Hyde Park is 47.9 percent white, 26.4 percent Black, 13.5 percent Asian, and 7.4 percent Hispanic or Latino, and nearly a third of households make over $100,000 a year.

Additionally, the total white population has only increased by 4.4 percentage points in the last twenty years. So, considering the arrival of new businesses, is it possible that Whole Foods, Sweetgreen, and Lululemon are targeting a population of affluent residents unconnected to UChicago? Can we redefine our conception of a South Side neighborhood as simultaneously

being wealthy, diverse, and culturally relevant? Can we accept that there are people of privilege that appreciate the arrival of new businesses, wait in line for a $48 Lululemon water bottle, and may not fit our image of a South Side neighborhood?

This recognition does not discredit or seek to disregard the underserved population in the neighborhood. My point in bringing awareness to the racial and economic diversity is to prompt a question we are not answering: Is there a vision of Hyde Park that works for everyone? Is there a Hyde Park where underserved populations have access to necessary goods and services, a fair housing market, and at the same time, students and wealthier populations can engage in other forms of inessential consumerism?

I believe in integration, not alienation, and improving students’ disjointed relationship with the community will better combat the dangers of gentrification. That said, I can only idealize what productive participation looks like in Hyde Park for University students.

But for now, I would encourage students to better understand the neighborhood we live in. Read the Hyde Park Herald, walk or run

through the neighborhood, support local businesses, and have conversations with residents or business owners. While we often jump right into action, I think we need to start with learning the mobile attitudes and anxieties of our broader community.

We need to reevaluate the responsibilities and privileges between ourselves, our university, and Hyde Park. Let’s stop nourishing our consciousness through unproductive rhetoric and denial of where we are. I’m not asking us to stop being critical of our university or of gentrification. But instead of ignoring where we are, let’s think about our situated position and what we can do about it.

To be frank, I’m not optimistic that the University will unanimously accept Hyde Park, at least not during our time here. But for the meantime, I challenge us all to consider, can we rethink how we fit into Hyde Park without the shadow of our institution?

Can we reimagine a Hyde Park that works for everyone?

Henry Cantor is a first-year in the College.

ARTS Fruit Bats and Neon Clouds

By JED WHALEN STEWART and SOFIA HRYCYSZYN | Arts Reporters The Fruit Bats have been around since the late ’90s, centered around lead singer-songwriter and only permanent member of the band Eric D. Johnson. On April 29, Fruit Bats performed in Thalia Hall, contrasting their neon lights with the Gothic architecture in a way that reflected their indie-folk style. That night, Frank LoCrasto played the keys, Josh Mease the guitar, and

David Dawda the bass, while Josh Adams was on the drums.

Thalia Hall stood out, complementing its neighboring buildings on Chicago’s 18th Street. The sharp steeple and elegant exterior moldings matched the interior’s domed ceiling and the intricate carvings flanking the stage. The Gothic architecture stood at odds with the modern neon lights onstage.

The backdrop depicted a circle of waves and mountains; in the top left corner was a sun with a calm face, and in the top right corner a cloud. The stage was dotted with neon clouds, a reference to Fruit Bats’s 2022 album Sometimes a Cloud Is Just a Cloud, a collection of their best songs from the past 20 years.

Johanna Samuels, a budding artist from Los Angeles, opened, performing her sweet indie melodies with a broad smile. Her songs’ lyrics are based on personal experience

while her instrumental and vocal style are reminiscent of Fruit Bats, whom she cited as an inspiration. The most memorable part of her performance was her banter.

She joked with the crowd while tuning her guitar, responding individually to audience members who shouted things like “That’s L.A. for you!”

After Johanna left, the crowd pushed forward in anticipation for Fruit Bats. Eric appeared first, followed by his instrumenCONTINUED ON PG. 10

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“Eric was constantly in motion, moving with guitar in hand, swinging his hair as he sang.”

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talists. His light brown hair flowed over his shoulders, drawing attention to his initials stamped on his leather guitar strap: EDJ. Much like the contradiction between Thalia Hall’s architecture and its neon lights that made the space intriguing, the offset between Eric’s warm, passionate stage presence and his heavy brow and dark eyes seemed to reflect the band’s melancholy messaging and sound.

Fruit Bats opened with three of their best songs, setting the tone for the night.

They started with “Cazadera,” whose most memorable lyric, “Sometimes a cloud is just a cloud,” was the inspiration for their 2022 album and tour. They moved onto “The Bottom of It,” their most-streamed track on Spotify, an upbeat song with catchy lyrics and verses that build off each other. Eric slowly built up to the chorus of the next song, telling a story of his love for his home, Chicago, in “My Sweet Midwest.” In talking about “Chicagoland,” Eric immediately connected with the audience, establishing a sense of familiarity by joking about his weird apartments in Logan Square and his experience recording music down the street.

The band moved through the bulk of their show with high energy. Eric was constantly in motion, moving with guitar in hand, swinging his hair as he sang. “Homie was hard to photograph,” as Jed Whalen Stewart, taking photos, put it. The band played some of their most memorable tracks: “The Balcony,” “Lingering Love,” and “Absolute Loser,” pulling from numerous albums. They tactically interspersed some lesser-known songs between those that the audience sang along with, performing every number to its full extent.

Eric’s dynamic expressions added to his animated stage presence. He often contorted

On April 29, Fruit Bats performed in Thalia Hall, contrasting their neon lights with the Gothic architecture in a way that reflected their indie-folk style. sofia hrycyszyn and jed whalen stewart his face while singing out of the side of his mouth to hit the desired notes and sounds.

His range was incredible. While he visibly grew tired throughout the show, he turned his energy back up for the final stretch, the power of his later vocals indistinguishable from that of his opening songs. Towards the end of the performance, it was clear he didn’t want to leave, and he reassured the audience that he would be back for an encore.

The band began to close the night with one

of their “golden oldies,” as Eric put it: “When You Love Someone.” The song, while beautiful, was subdued, but the energy was turned up for “Shane” before the band walked off the stage with the audience left wanting more.

The cheering began as soon as the band disappeared. After a minute of anticipation, much to the audience’s and Eric’s delight, the band returned to their instruments. The audience sang along to the encore, “You’re Too Weird,” a perfect example of the Fruit

Bats’s distinctive style and sound. With the opening bars of “Humbug Mountain Song,” heads bobbed to the rhythm, those iconic neon clouds pulsing as Eric brought the show full circle, singing about love and looking up at the sky. His love of Chicago was clear in his melancholy smile as he waved goodbye to the audience for a final time.

Samantha Rose Hill Talks with The Maroon About Her New Biography, Hannah Arendt

By SUZANNA MURAWSKI | Arts Reporter Samantha Rose Hill is an associate

faculty member at the Brooklyn Insti-

tute for Social Research and the author of a recent biography of philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt. She

recently sat down with The Chicago Maroon to discuss the biography, titled CONTINUED ON PG. 11

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Hannah Arendt.

The Chicago Maroon (CM): How did you come to study Arendt and write this biography?

Samantha Rose Hill (SRH): I stumbled across Arendt’s work one afternoon my freshman year of college when I was wandering through the [book]stacks looking for a copy of Erich Fromm’s Marxist Concept of Man. I found [Arendt’s] The Human Condition, and I sat down on a leather sofa in a reading room and started reading Hannah Arendt’s beautiful poetic preface, which is a meditation on the launch of Sputnik. It was unlike any political philosophy that I had encountered, and I had been reading political philosophy for quite a while—I fell in love with Nietzsche when I was thirteen years old, and then Freud and Marx, as one does when they’re a teenager in the Midwest.

Arendt was doing something radically different, and I was keenly aware of the fact that I didn’t understand anything she was talking about. But I really wanted to understand, so I took nine [courses] in college to study Hannah Arendt and her antecedents—Plato, Aristotle, Hegel.

When I got to graduate school, I wrote my dissertation on Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno. At this point, I’ve been working on Arendt for the last 20 years.

CM: What is your biography doing differently than your political theory/philosophical investigation of Arendt? How does biography enlighten philosophy, and how is it different?

SRH: I wrote an introductory biography to Hannah Arendt’s life and work. I hope it will invite newcomers to Arendt’s work, to The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem and some of her wonderful essays.

For people who know Arendt and already have a familiarity with her work, I’ve tried to do a couple of things in the book.

I went to the archives where Arendt’s papers are—the German literature archive in Marbach, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the New York Public Library in New York City—and I was able to incorporate some letters, material details, facts about her life that had not been included in previous biographies, simply because the archives weren’t open or those

papers weren’t available, or because of the decisions we make as authors—which are always difficult. I was also able to piece together an account of her time in exile and her internment in Gurs and her escape. That’s the first time that’s been done in a biography of Arendt. I wanted to give readers a sense of what she went through before she arrived in the United States on May 22, 1941.

CM: There’s a phrase you use throughout the book to describe one of Arendt’s conceptual categories as “lived experience.” I hear this phrase a lot today, and I wanted to ask if this is a phrase she uses, or if this is language you’re using to draw the connection between our contemporary concept of lived experience and her German terminology?

SRH: This is a phrase that’s taken on a new meaning in our contemporary era—it’s a very weighty political phrase associated with woke politics. But in German, etymologically, there are two different terms for experience that are used: There’s erfahrung and erlebnis, and erleben is an experience in relation to something, whereas erfahrungen is inner experience. When Arendt talks about experience, she’s talking about experience in relation to the world of things. This is “lived experience” in the sense that we experience the world around us, the actual materiality of people and things. It’s not the inner experience in the mind that doesn’t appear in the world. “Lived experience” relates to the realm of human appearances. The “ex” in experience literally means to stand out, so if you look at the beginning of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, for example, he talks about this in terms of taking up space. We actually exist in the world, and so we can see each other, and there’s a ground of recognition there.

CM: You mention in the book how there’s a strain of scholarship that looks at Arendt and race. Perhaps it’s impossible to answer this question, but what might she think about [this response to her work]?

SRH: I cannot speak for Arendt— sometimes when I teach, I joke about shaking my magic Arendt eight ball. But Arendt talks about race in a couple of different places in her work, most notably in The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she talks about a fundamental shift between

race-thinking and racism, where racism becomes an ideology, inseparable from the rise of imperialism and colonialism.

She argues that racism, along with classism, is one of the most defining diseases of our world—she argues it might cause the collapse of Western civilization. In Origins she argues that racism becomes so pervasive that people aren’t consciously aware of the extent to which they are racist. She’s not hopeful that this is something that can be fixed or repaired. In Reflections on Little Rock, which remains her most contentious essay, she argues against the Brown v. Board decision which overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and the statute of “separate but equal.” She argues against it on two grounds: She’s worried about the expansionism of the federal government—she puts a lot of emphasis on states’ rights throughout her writing on politics—and she argues that schoolchildren should not be mobilized by adults to fight political battles. There’s been a lot of wonderful scholarship done on Arendt’s writing on race—on judgment, on thinking, on imagination—and I include some of those critiques in the biography. So if you want to read further, I’d look at Fred Moten’s recent work on Black and Blur, and Kathryn Sophia Belle’s work. Also, I just did an eight-episode podcast on Hannah Arendt’s work launching next month, including an episode with philosophy professor Anita L. Allen, who talks about the public/private distinction and race in Hannah Arendt’s work. Arendt isn’t somebody to think through—she’s not giving us a framework for things, she’s not telling us what to think—she’s somebody to think with and against, to kind of rub up against her work in your thinking, and it can be thought-provoking. I certainly don’t always find myself in agreement with everything Arendt writes.

CM: It seems that Arendt’s thinking on race, or in general, could be useful to current political movements, and in other ways could be in a lot of tension with them. Are there any ways you see her being appropriated for or against by contemporary thinkers or political movements?

SRH: I think people are always trying to put Arendt in a political box. They want to say she is a conservative or a liberal or a great defender of free speech or this or that—and the hardest thing to under-

stand about Arendt’s work, which I emphasize in the biography, is that she was a profoundly anti-ideological thinker. So you can’t really put her into any of these boxes. I’m very interested in the way poet and philosopher Fred Moten thinks with Hannah Arendt. He’s critiquing her work, including her work on race, in a very powerful way, thinking about Kantian imagination, the ways in which we judge, the expansion of the imagination. But it’s not just against, it’s thinking with her in a way that’s expansive to the ways in which we think about these things today.

CM: In your book, you write, “Our century is not Arendt’s, and this is part of her challenge to us.” You also describe her as not minding disagreement but hating bad faith.

SRH: We see that in her own biography, most clearly around the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. And she wrote her essay Truth and Politics as a response to the response she received to publishing those [Eichmann] essays in The New Yorker.

She argues that people had not actually even read her book, but that they were responding to critiques of the book. They weren’t engaging her in good faith…so she wanted to understand that phenomenon: What happens to political conversation in the public realm when we don’t have good-faith engagement with ideas. When she published Eichmann in Jerusalem, she was essentially canceled by all of New York literary society. Lionel Abel and Irving Trilling gathered a hundred people at the Hotel Diplomat in Manhattan, and one person after the other got up on stage and disavowed Hannah Arendt and the book—I recount this in the biography.

In that sense, she is certainly someone we can think with today about the integrity of public discourse, digital technology and social media having reshaped the ways in which we engage with one another. She did not predict the extent to which that would happen, but she talks about the rise of the social and the specter of technology in the human condition.

And you can think with her, but we have to go beyond her.

Those interested in reading more about Samantha Rose Hill and her work can visit her website.

THE CHICAGO MAROON — MAY 19, 2022

12

Hiss Golden Messenger Is Quietly Blowing It, but They’re Still Great

By ZACHARY LEITER | Arts Reporter In March at Thalia Hall, Alexa Rose opened for Hiss Golden Messenger.

From small-town western Virginia, Rose is a little-known but up-and-coming Americana singer. With a soft-spoken, swooning voice conveying sadness and a little shyness, Rose twirled ballads of Appalachian life. She sang about wild peppermint, snow days, and staying up late at night eating cereal. “Most of my songs are kinda sad,” she said at one point in the night, “but my life is pretty good.”

Hiss Golden Messenger, by contrast, burst at the seams with energy. Their music rang and shone. Band members danced across the stage, kicking, bending, and conversing. The crowd bounced lightly, shaking along with the music. As their set progressed, the band grew louder, and their long midsong solos became more technical and diverse. But mostly, they just got louder and more energetic, and the crowd with them. Fans occasionally sang along, but mostly seemed caught in awe.

Hiss Golden Messenger is unquestionably centered on lead singer M. C. Taylor, whose folksy style of roots rock has brought the band from their humble origins in Durham, North Carolina, to national prominence. Their 2019 album Terms of Surrender was Grammy-nominated for Best Americana Album. M. C. Taylor has become something of a musician’s musician, trying to lay a path for roots rockers back to Americans’ hearts decades after the roots-rock boom faded.

Their music—at times haunting, at times hallowed—is constantly inviting and sometimes thrilling. It is warm, smooth, and intentional. Taylor’s voice is at once soothing and on-edge, and his sense of vocal emphasis is highly engaging. The entire band is talented, but Taylor’s vocals and guitar solos are especially strong. In many ways, the concert felt like a long, intimate demonstration of Taylor’s skill as a musician, punctuated on occasion by blaring rock solos and the band’s most popular songs.

The problem with Hiss Golden Messenger is that the band’s off-kilter tonal qualities, outdoorsy sounds, and uplift-

ing political messages—which drove its initial popularity—now feel repetitive rather than innovative. Since 2013, Hiss Golden Messenger has released nine full-length albums, and the most recent—the 2021 album Quietly Blowing It—feels more populist than powerful. Taylor’s politics continue to shine through: The songs raise awareness of income inequality and support public educators, in particular. However, his lyrics are at their best when they are questioning and bittersweet; the songs in Quietly Blowing It are too uplifting and positive.

Still, stagnation is not all bad if you’re stuck somewhere pretty good.

The band’s energy remains joyful, hopeful, and optimistic. To see a Hiss Golden Messenger concert is to transport yourself for a few hours to a warm

summer night in the park, watching the stars twinkle above as Taylor recalls his childhood. In the ornate Thalia Hall, craft beer, popcorn, and cowboy hats were everywhere. Caught in warm showers of light, Hiss Golden Messenger is both rootsy and rocking. There’s only one adjective that fully encapsulates the band’s half-manic, half-homey energy: alive. Even if many of the band’s songs sound similar, it is still not always disappointing, purely because their songs are so entertaining.

The set, which included songs from eight different albums, was well constructed. “Sanctuary” and “I Need a Teacher” were particularly well-received by an audience mostly composed of casual fans. “I Need a Teacher” remains the band’s most well-known song—Terms of Surrender’s front-andcenter ballad of gratitude to public school teachers. “We’re big fans of pub-

Hiss Golden Messenger on tour at Thalia Hall. zachary leiter

lic educators,” said Taylor to the audience before the song. “It’s a hard job.

Both of my parents were public school teachers, so it’s in my blood.” “I Need a Teacher” is among the band’s boldest and most throbbing songs, and it’s rather catchy.

“Sanctuary” stands out as Quietly Blowing It’s biggest success. “Feeling bad / Feeling blue / Can’t get out of my own mind / I know how to sing about it” opens the song as gentle plucking gives way to more exuberant strumming.

Taylor and Hiss Golden Messenger do not have all the answers, and their music is better when they remember that. However, “Sanctuary” is entirely correct in one regard: Taylor certainly knows how to sing. Only time will tell if Hiss Golden Messenger has indeed plateaued. But even if they have, that plateau is much higher than the hills of North Carolina where they began.