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MAY 5, 2022 SIXTH WEEK VOL. 134, ISSUE 23

Unionized UChicago Employees Reach Tentative Agreement for New Labor Contract

By EMMA JANSSEN | Senior News Reporter

Under the new agreement, the lowest pay grade of union members, which includes desk clerks at campus dormitories, will increase by 8 percent. nikhil jaiswal The University of Chicago and representatives from the Teamsters Local 743, a labor union that represents around 3,000 workers across the University and the University and the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC) reached a tentative agreement on their new labor contract last Tuesday, April 19. The tentative contract, which has been under negotiation since February, will face a ratification vote by the union’s membership next week.

“We got the best agreement in at least 26 years,” said Brandon Crowley, chief negotiator and staff attorney for Teamsters Local 743.

Under the new agreement, the lowest pay grade of union members, which includes desk clerks at campus dormitories, will increase by 8 percent, and the second

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lowest pay grade, which includes lead desk clerks and UChicago Press workers, will see a 10 percent increase. Additionally, for the first time, the union secured six weeks of paid parental leave for employees.

Gerald McSwiggan, associate director for public affairs for the University, relayed UChicago’s message following the tentative agreement: “Negotiations with Teamsters Local 743 reflected a spirit of collaboration and led to productive outcomes for all sides.

We are grateful for these constructive efforts.”

The Teamsters Local 743 Union represents 10,000 employees throughout Chicago and Illinois, ranging from healthcare workers to warehouse employees. The contract in question covers residence hall clerks, mail workers, medical coders, em-

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ployees at the Library and UChicago Press, and clerical workers within academic departments and at the Lab School.

Teamsters Local 743 represents six different groups of workers across the campus.

The group currently renewing its contract is just one of these six and consists of about 550 workers. The largest group of employees represented by the Teamsters Local 743 is at UCMC with about 2,000 union workers in administrative and support roles. UCMC employees’ contract was renegotiated and settled earlier this March.

The months of negotiations leading up to Tuesday’s agreement brought about a rise in labor activism across the University. In the first week of April, workers across campus wore bright yellow pins that read “We Want a Fair Contract!” On Wednesday, April 6, workers clocked in wearing all navy. The next day, they came to work in all black. The pins and coordinated colors were intended to be a subtle but clear show of solidarity, showing the unity of employees from the Regenstein Library to front desk clerks in the dorms.

Additionally, a petition and open letter addressed to President Alivisatos and the UChicago Board of Trustees circulated during April, garnering 2,424 signatures by the time of this article’s publication. The petition and letter were created by a group called “UChicago Union Supporters,” who

describe themselves as “academic staff, fellow union members, and community supporters.”

The current round of negotiations comes after a delay caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. “During the pandemic we agreed to an extension with a modest increase [in wages] because we didn’t necessarily know what was going on,” Crowley said. “That was a one-year extension; we had already started negotiating for our successor agreement that ended in February 2020, and then as we were in negotiations, the pandemic kind of hit.”

In an email interview with The Maroon, a University employee who spoke on behalf of UChicago Union Supporters discussed the impact of the pandemic on University employees.

“The pandemic [exacerbated] the hierarchical structure of units and departments in the University and the poor pay and benefits offered union workers,” wrote the employee, who remains anonymous for fear of retaliation. “Especially in large units, like the Library and Medical Center, union workers were far more likely to be required to work on site, even if their work could be done remotely. They were also more likely to have public facing jobs, like desk clerks, with no access to a private or semi-private office space.”

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Being Black at UChicago

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

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“Our focus this round is to bring up the bottom, to raise the floor.’”

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“Many employees (union, academic, University staff, medical staff) have retired or resigned due to a lack of support for those required to work on-site or a lack of flexibility for those able to continue to work from home. These were skilled workers, with vast institutional knowledge and we are worse off without them,” the employee wrote.

The anonymous employee also noted that the loss of workers impacts employees who have remained in their positions.

“There is no guarantee these positions will be filled and even when they are, the process takes months. The hiring process at the University is slow and cumbersome.

As a result, staff are doing the work of two or more positions.”

Crowley’s understanding of how the pandemic affected union members is similar. “Everything is different from where we were on March 1, 2020.… We had some layoffs as a result of the pandemic…and some people came to roles that pay less, so they’re not quite where they were [before the pandemic]. It’s been bad in that regard.

Unfortunately, our members bear a lot of the brunt because they don’t have the resources to insulate themselves the way that some other people do.”

In their petition and letter, UChicago Union Supporters said that “hundreds of these workers were infected by COVID and several are now permanently disabled.”

The anonymous worker who spoke for the group also noted that some of their colleagues now have long COVID, a set of chronic conditions that persist after one contracts COVID-19. As of July 2021, long COVID is classified as a disability under the

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

Speaking about union members that contracted the virus, Crowley said, “We’ve had members that we’ve had to bury. We’ve had [University of Chicago] Medical Center employees that we’ve had to deal with the deaths of…. They went in earning 17, 18 dollars an hour, and some of them lost their lives as a result. We had some people catch COVID during the early stages of the pandemic when the CDC was instructing us not to wear masks. Some of our members had the sense to wear masks, and the hospital instructed them to take them off, and they ultimately got sick. And some of our members hold resentment as a result of that.”

“Safety is a legitimate concern for us, and we’re always trying to make sure that our members leave work the way that they came in, standing on their own two legs, breathing,” added Crowley.

Crowley also discussed the union’s core goals for this round of negotiations with the University. “A lot of it is [about] being respected on the job…. That respect is oftentimes expressed in wages.… [Also, there are] additional benefits that were extended to non-union employees that were not extended to us when they were implemented—we want to get those applied to our membership.”

These benefits include paid parental leave, a winter recess, and bereavement leave. “We had some members that lost spouses, and they had to take less bereavement leave than [the University] would have extended to non-union employees,” Crowley said.

Crowley emphasized that the union’s main goal this round during negotiations

was to increase wages, specifically for those employees who are currently earning the lowest amounts. “Our focus this round is to bring up the bottom, to raise the floor.”

“These are the people that are earning 16, 17 [dollars] an hour and are working for an institution with tens of billions of dollars in their endowment,” Crowley said. According to a UChicago News article, UChicago’s endowment reached $11.6 billion at the end of the 2021 fiscal year. “I understand that there’s a limit to what the employer is willing to pay for this work, but on the other hand, these are the people that live in the communities surrounding Hyde Park, and that’s not the way that you treat your neighbors and the people that work for you. You need to give people a level of dignity that I think has been denied to them for a while.”

Though many University employees proudly wore their yellow pins and dressed in navy and black as a show of union solidarity, workers also expressed fears of retaliation for speaking out. Multiple workers only agreed to speak with The Maroon under guarantee of anonymity, citing concerns of retaliation from the University if they were to speak out publicly.

In their letter, UChicago Union Supporters cited the University’s past responses to labor organizing: “[The University is] an institution with a long history of anti-union and anti-worker activity; from refusing to bargain with the United Public Workers-CIO for not filing non-Communist affidavits in 1948, to refusing to bargain with the Student Library Employees Union in 2017, claiming they were ‘temporary’ workers. To date, the University refuses to acknowledge Graduate Students United,

despite encouraging the vote in 2017. This trend has continued during the pandemic.”

The National Labor Relations Board has ruled against the University, including in the case of the Student Library Employees Union, in which the NLRB found that the University should have agreed to bargain with the union. That particular case was then brought to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 2019. The Court of Appeals affirmed the National Labor Relations Board’s decision and affirmed that the University should have bargained with the union.

The anonymous employee also described a separation between union workers and other staff. “Many of us work in units or departments where union workers are discouraged from interacting with professional and academic staff and subject to much stricter, punitive rules. This hierarchical, inequitable work environment undermines union solidarity and obscures union labor.”

Before reaching Tuesday’s tentative agreement, Crowley expressed a sense of optimism for both the negotiations and the state of the labor movement as a whole: “Employees are starting to realize that fending for yourself isn’t the best way to make sure that you’re getting the best deal for your work. I think that [the University] sees that what’s been going on in the past is not going to be able to continue. That doesn’t mean that they’re going to give us everything that we want, but we’re going to make a lot of lives better in terms of what I think we’re going to accomplish this goaround.”

UChicago Reports a Rise in Student Cases in Forward Update

By GUSTAVO DELGADO | Senior News Reporter The University reported 347 new cases of COVID-19 and 395 close contacts between April 22 and April 28, according to an email sent Friday, April 29, by UChicago Forward. The email reported 114 students in isolation on campus and 217 off campus.

Between April 21 and April 27, 79 COVID-19 cases were found through the surveillance testing program, for a

9.25 percent positivity rate. Of the cases detected, 72 were students, while 7 were University faculty or staff.

The City of Chicago’s positivity rate for the past seven days was 3.7 percent, which was lower than the previous week’s rate of 5.9 percent.

Cook County, which includes Chicago, remains at a “low” COVID-19 rate this week, according to the Center for

Disease Control and Prevention.

The University noted that despite the increase in cases both on campus and in the city, hospitalizations at the University of Chicago Medical Center (UCMC) have not changed significantly.

“That is noteworthy because communities use COVID-19 hospital admissions as a factor in determining prevention strategies,” the email read. At the time the email was sent, there were 16 patients admitted to UCMC, an increase

of five patients since March 12.

UChicago has also made a decision to limit voluntary testing to twice a week as, according to the University, results typically are released within 48 hours, and there would be no benefit to frequent testing within such a short period. The email also reminded community members that they should not seek testing on successive days.

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UChicago/Community Relations Council Appointee Arsima Araya Wants to Share the Stories of the South Side

By PETER MAHERAS | Senior News Reporter The University and Undergraduate Student Government (USG) have appointed first-year Arsima Araya to serve as the first undergraduate member on the Council on UChicago/Community Relations: Historical, Contemporary, and Future. Araya joins graduate student Natalie “Jo” Griffin as the council’s inaugural student members; each will serve on the council for 18 months.

The council, announced by President Paul Alivisatos and Provost Ka Yee C. Lee in December, is tasked with examining the historical and current relationship between the University and South Side communities, studying the effectiveness of current programs to strengthen community relations, and recommending new ways to improve community engagement.

The council’s membership is split equally between community members and University faculty, staff, and students.

In an interview with The Maroon, Araya, a critical race and ethnic studies major from the Chicago suburbs, said she wanted to serve on the council in part because of an experience in her youth visiting Chicago with a family friend from Woodlawn, who told stories about the South Side.

“The funny thing is, he didn’t like UChicago, but he wanted me to go here,” Araya told The Maroon. “The University

was there and you drove by it, when you took the bus you ran by it, but it was never a space where students and community members could go. To this day, that remains. Our libraries remain closed.

Our facilities are not open to the public.

You have to be in some type of UChicago-sponsored program to access our resources.”

In high school, Araya worked with Chicago-based community organizations such as My Block, My Hood, My City and interned with the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. She said both experiences taught her about the South Side and the challenges it faces, including those perpetuated by the University.

In her application for the council, Araya wrote, “Take the 4 bus and you’ll see the UChicago bubble burst in front of your eyes. The stories people share with me on these trips show the raw beauty and pain residents experience daily as South Side residents. The food deserts, gentrification, overpowering police presence, and lack of funding are all systemic issues that the University contributed to.”

USG announced open applications for the position in late January. According to a USG Instagram post, applicants from the Class of 2024 and 2025 with “deep roots in South Side communities” were preferred. Applicants submitted a

written application and participated in an interview with members of USG. Alivisatos and Lee described the council as “independent” in their email announcing its formation, but Araya said a more accurate description of the council is that it is an “independent but financially dependent” body. Although Araya applied for the position of undergraduate representative through USG, her appointment ultimately had to be confirmed by the president and provost. According to the council’s website, future members must also be approved by the president and provost.

Although the council has yet to define the specific scope of its work, Araya hopes the council will be able to document the full history of UChicago’s impact on the South Side.

“I really appreciated the emphasis on the past, present, and future because I feel like a lot of folks don’t know...the past of UChicago and how they’ve engaged in the South Side,” Araya said. “I know some folks want to focus on the good that’s been done, but there’s been a lot of harm and a lack of harm reduction.”

Araya plans to engage with South Side residents and community organizations to inform her work on the council; however, she is concerned that community members living near the University may be distrustful of the council because of its affiliation with the University.

“I would just be as honest with them as possible and ask them to take that leap of faith,” Araya said. “I can only come in with me being as empathetic as possible and letting them know that I will respect your story and I will do whatever is in my power to make sure that we tell your story in a way that is true to you.”

During her time on the council, Araya hopes to focus on policing, youth advocacy, and community engagement. She said the University has the resources to make significant differences in these areas. Araya cited existing University programs such as the Office of Civic Engagement and the University Community Service Center as positive examples of the University’s leveraging of resources to improve surrounding communities.

Araya encouraged students to engage with the council and learn about the history of the University’s impact on the South Side. She also hopes students will reach out to her with feedback and suggestions.

“I’m hopeful for this council,” Araya said. “I think hopeful is a good word to walk into. Hesitancy is also there. I don’t want to be naive.”

“This is going to be a long 18 months,” she said, “[but] I’m excited to see where it goes.”

University Cuts Funding for Competitive Prize Lectureships by More than Half

By NIEVE RODRIGUEZ | Senior News Reporter This spring, the University announced changes in funding to competitive prize lectureships in which graduate students can teach a class for pay in addition to their graduate stipend.

In previous years, the University offered $5,000 to teach a quarter-long class under the prize lectureship. In March, pay for prize lectureships was cut to $2,000.

Graduate student and co-president of Graduate Students United (GSU) Andrew Seber, who is in the history department, was applying for the Von Holst Prize lectureship when the University announced the change to lectureship funding 36 hours before the application was due. The lectureship was expected to pay $5,000.

“The University is disincentivizing people [from applying] to the prizes because it is no longer worth the amount of work that teaching the lectureship is.

It’s really embarrassing because this is exploitation. We should actually be getting paid more for these lectureships, but instead, the University has tried to say that any of this extra money that we used to be entitled to for our extra labor is now something that we should feel

lucky to have,” GSU communications director Laura Colaneri said.

This change has come to light at the same time as other modifications to graduate student funding. In October 2019, the University of Chicago announced a new framework for doctoral degree programs in the Division of Social Sciences, the Division of the Humanities, the Divinity School, and the CONTINUED ON PG. 4

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“The University is disincentivizing people [from applying] to the prizes…it is no longer worth the amount of work that teaching the lectureship is.”

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School of Social Service Administration.

Part of this framework included a policy that would designate teaching by Ph.D. students as Mentored Teaching Experiences (MTE) rather than paid labor.

“Over the past couple of years, the University has been trying really hard to insist that we are not employees of the University as a direct response to our unionization,” Colaneri said. “Instead of saying that we were being paid for these jobs, [the University] started saying it was a ‘mentored teaching experience,’ which is part of their legal argument that we’re being trained and that we aren’t doing labor.”

In June 2019, UChicago graduate students went on strike to protest the University’s refusal to negotiate a contract with GSU. In response to the protests, the University wrote in a letter addressed to all University students that “unionization would fundamen-

tally alter the decentralized, faculty-led approach to graduate education that has long been a hallmark of the University of Chicago.”

The letter also claimed that “doctoral education is most impactful when faculty work directly with students without a third-party mediating and defining those relationships.”

The new funding model was announced after thousands of graduate students went on strike nationwide, many bargaining for higher wages; graduate students at Columbia University recently ended a 10-week strike after they reached a tentative agreement that guaranteed an increase in pay for Ph.D. students. Stipends for graduate students in the United States range from approximately $9,000 to $60,000 yearly; a psychology stipend at Portland State University pays $9,220, while a computer science stipend at the University of Massachusetts Amherst pays $62,000.

The guaranteed minimum stipend for Ph.D. students at UChicago is $31,000 annually.

GSU believes that the new framework for the doctoral degree program is a direct response to the unionization effort of graduate students.

“In 2019, after the union went on strike, there was a movement by the University to severely limit the amount of teaching work that graduate students did in order to protect themselves against disgruntled workers who had too much labor, so they started calling them Mentored Teaching Experiences,” Seber said.

“I wouldn’t be shocked to find out if this entire change has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of graduate education, but [is] something advised by their lawyers in an attempt to quash our unionization effort,” Colaneri said.

The new Ph.D. funding model has also changed the number of hours that

graduate students are allowed to teach. “[The University] is really limiting our ability to personalize our experiences here. It means that we can’t pick up extra work in order to make extra money to help make ends meet and that we have less flexibility,” Colaneri said.

“And that’s explicitly because they don’t want us to be teaching extra. Any time that we teach extra, we’re doing work, not being trained.”

Seber noted that cuts to graduate funding make it more difficult for lower-income students to feel incentivized to teach college courses.

“The whole philosophy behind graduate student organizing in general is that when you actually have these jobs paying good salaries, you attract people who aren’t just rich to do the work,” Seber said.

New UChicago Study Measures How THC Affects Adolescents’ Cognition and Behavior

By SABRINA CHANG | Senior News Reporter As cannabis grows more commonplace among recreational drugs, uncertainties still surround its effect on the brain. Harriet de Wit, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, and her research team have sought to debunk cannabis myths.

In February, De Wit’s research laboratory, led by former UChicago postdoctoral fellow Conor Murray, published a paper showing that tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the principal psychoactive substance in cannabis, negatively affects adolescents’ performance on cognitive tasks compared to adults.

THC binds to the cannabinoid type 1 receptor (CB1R) in the forebrain, which is responsible for cognition. CB1R has been found to be at its highest level of

expression in individuals between 15 and 17 years of age. Murray wanted to find out if this would make adolescents more sensitive to cannabis. “It is important to study different demographics, as THC, like any drug, has risks and benefits, and these risks or benefits may be most pronounced in different demographics,” Murray said.

Murray found that the differences between the effects of THC on the brain in adults and its effects on adolescents were most evident during cognitive behavioral tasks. When adolescents consumed THC, they could not exit the synchronous alpha wave state, a trancelike state, as easily during tasks. Adolescents consistently performed worse than adults on the tasks, which tested skills such as reaction time and memo-

ry, and an increase in THC dosage only exacerbated this disparity.

Participants were also instructed to answer questions on their experience throughout the session, which resulted in similar remarks from both subject groups. This suggests that while adolescents may be more negatively affected by consumption of cannabis than adults, they may not necessarily feel this way.

“Next steps [for this research] may be to examine smoked cannabis, experiment with the amount of CBD within the cannabis to see how this might differentially affect adolescents relative to adults, and increase the sample size to determine if there are differences between adolescent boys and girls,” Murray said.

This study also connects the biochemical and cognitive levels of the brain, as the results showed that a high-

er concentration of the receptor CB1R in adolescents directly affected their cognitive performance. This heavier impact could explain the increased appeal, and danger, of cannabis to adolescents.

“The most significant conclusion drawn from this study is that adolescents are more sensitive to the cognitive and behavioral effects of THC relative to adults,” Murray said. “This means that they may be more at risk to intoxication, acute psychotic episodes, general impairment, abuse potential, et cetera.”

“I hope this research will benefit people by [making them realize] that there is a special tie between adolescents and cannabis use and that this drug naturally is not well suited for adults. There is a good reason why adults ‘grow out of’ cannabis use, which, in part, is to be able to do adult things.”

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UChicago Professors Weigh in on the War in Ukraine

By ARJUN MAZUMDAR | News Reporter On Thursday, February 24, President Vladimir Putin launched a multipronged invasion of Ukraine with the stated intention of “demilitarizing and denazifying” the country. This assault is the latest escalation of Russia’s longstanding conflict with Ukraine, dating back to the 2014 annexation of Crimea.

While estimates vary, conservative counts project that the recent invasion has claimed over 8,000 lives and displaced 6.5 million people.

UChicago has made efforts to aid faculty and students affected by the crisis, including full tuition scholarships and streamlined application processes for Ukrainian students. The Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian studies has also held charity fundraisers and lectures to raise awareness.

Several prominent members of UChicago’s faculty have commented on the ongoing crisis through op-eds, podcasts, interviews, and viral twitter posts. In exclusive interviews with The Maroon, these professors of politics, history, and international relations detailed their diverse and sometimes conflicting perspectives on the invasion of Ukraine.

NATO’s Responsibility The motivation behind Putin’s attack has been a point of significant scholarly debate. “Many people were of the opinion that Putin would not do this, that the costs of this invasion were so enormous that it would be irrational,” Scott Gehlbach, a professor at the Harris School and Department of Political Science, told The Maroon.

Faith Hillis, a professor of Russian history at the College, added that sanctions have hit Russian civilians the hardest. “They can’t get insulin. I can’t even pay my research assistant in Russia,” she said. The conflict has cost Russia the lives of roughly 7,000 troops, and sanctions have depreciated the Russian ruble’s value by 40 percent.

To John Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Political Science, Putin’s motivation is clear: Putin’s invasion is a response to provocation by Western

nations. Mearsheimer is a prominent international realist, meaning he believes that countries act in anticipation of conflicts from adversaries to secure regional dominance. Since 2014, he has argued that “the United States and its European Allies share most of the responsibility” for Ukraine’s troubles with Russia.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Mearsheimer explained that “If Ukraine becomes a pro-American liberal democracy, and a member of NATO…the Russians will consider that categorically unacceptable.” NATO has maintained friendly relations with Ukraine for decades and offered them membership in 2008, as they’ve done with 14 other ex-Soviet nations since the late ’90s.

Mearsheimer said of Russia, “if you take a stick and you poke them in the eye, they’re going to retaliate.”

Other professors disagree. “NATO as a monocausal explanation is problematic,” said Hillis. “It was Putin who decided to invade. It was Putin that decided to commit war crimes.” Similarly, Gehlbach mentioned that “We don’t give Hitler a pass just because there might have been some problems with the Treaty of Versailles.” Both place the ultimate blame on Putin and caution that portraying NATO’s expansion as the primary catalyst of the conflict absolves the autocrat from responsibility.

Putin’s Imperial Ambitions Assistant professor of political science Paul Poast believes the invasion is driven by Putin’s admiration for 19th century Russian imperialism and his desire to make Ukraine a part of Russia once more. “Putin invaded Ukraine because he wanted to recreate a version of the Russian empire,” he told The Maroon.

Hillis believes Putin’s aggression stems from a denial of Ukraine’s independence. “We see this very intense Russian nationalism that is driving this campaign, that sees Ukrainians as an integral part of Russia.” Under Poast and Hillis’ interpretation, Putin sees the conflict as a liberation of Ukraine, seeking to bring its people back under the rightful rule of Russia.

Mearsheimer believes this explanation to have little merit. In his interview with The New Yorker, he explained that when the conflict exploded, “we had to assign blame…so we invented this story.

Putin is interested in creating a greater Russia, or maybe even re-creating the Soviet Union.” He thinks that arguments which attribute Putin’s invasion to his imperial ambitions distract the public from NATO’s culpability.

Despite Mearsheimer’s dismissal, Poast thinks that the Russian expansionist explanation for the conflict actually agrees with Mearsheimer’s realist philosophy. “Mearsheimer explains that great powers want to dominate the region. Russia is doing exactly what you expect a great power to do. They want to influence neighboring countries, and eventually conquer them. That’s actually consistent with the early arguments of my colleague John Mearsheimer.”

Effects of Ukrainian Resistance and Sanctions Regardless of Putin’s motivations, the professors agreed that his goals have evolved as a response to the unexpectedly fierce resistance posed by the Ukrainians. “Putin was told this conflict would be over very fast,” said Hillis.

Gehlbach agreed, “It’s clear that Putin was poorly informed, and told Ukrainians would not fight for their country.”

The sweeping sanctions imposed upon Russia also took Putin by surprise.

Gehlbach thinks their effects are currently incalculable, but certainly devastating. “Russia and its people are going to suffer for a long, long time. Russia will be set back decades economically.”

Gehlbach noted that despite heavy losses and sanctions, there is a “rally around the flag effect” which is driving the war’s popularity. Recent polls estimate that as much as 71 percent of Russia’s population support the ongoing invasion. He also added that Putin’s disinformation and propaganda campaigns are likely misleading the public, minimizing losses, and embellishing victories. “The Kremlin has real control over the media. Censorship and propaganda are doing a lot of work at the moment.”

However, Poast explained that the sanctions and Ukrainian resistance

have alarmed Putin and altered his aims.

“The initial goal was regime change or annexation of the entire country. The new goal is the partial annexation of the eastern provinces.” Poast believes that Putin has settled for the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, two eastern Ukrainian regions controlled by pro-Russian separatists.

Deterrence and Concessions Eventually, Poast predicted, “the two sides will reach an agreement. There will be some sort of concession made on the part of Zelenskyy,” the current Ukrainian president. Likely, the concession will be a territorial one, where Zelenskyy agrees to recognize certain provinces as independent, pro-Russian regions. However, Poast worries about the long-term consequences of such a compromise. “What is stopping Putin from coming back every few years to try and seize more land?”

Hillis considered different paths available to prevent Russia from returning for more land. “We could arm Ukraine to the teeth, making them one of the most heavily armed nations on Earth. We could offer Ukraine security and economic protections by incorporating them into the EU.” Both options would provoke Russia even further and run the risk of future invasions. “Our deterrence capacity is a series of not great options,” said Hillis.

The Western Response The Russian invasion of Ukraine evoked significant attention and anger from the American public, a response Hillis expected. “Americans love to hate Russia, and it feels easy for Americans to hate Russia,” said Hillis. In her mind, it is impossible to separate old, Cold War era anxieties regarding Russia from the outpouring of media attention that the conflict has received.

Poast noted the difference in responses to the war in Ukraine and other global conflicts. “Part of the reason this conflict has gotten so much attention is because it is happening in Europe.

There are ongoing wars in Syria and Yemen. The University has held events on these, but they haven’t gotten the same attention.”

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In-Person Instruction Returns with Test Anxiety

By SOLANA ADEDOKUN | Senior News Reporter During these last two years, UChicago students and professors had to be prepared to switch between in-person and remote learning at a moment’s notice. However, the lifting of COVID-19 mandates on-campus, generally low positivity rates, and widespread vaccination rates allowed much of University life to remain in-person this past year. Yet after nearly two years of online testing, some students have found the transition back to traditional in-person testing anxiety-inducing and problematic.

Hayley Szymanek, a second-year computer science and creative writing student, shared how her anxiety heightens around a week before an exam and intensifies as her test nears. “[P]hysically, I start shaking and I get into a hyper-focused mode…which is one of the things where I’m so nervous about [the exam] happening, but I can’t really see the questions in front of me. I’m fully processing them,...but it just feels like [the exam] is the only thing that matters at the time and it’s this incredible stressor,” Szymanek said.

Prior to remote learning, Szymanek describes experiencing low levels of anxiety, “something that [was] present, but [could] be ignored.” Many tests were made open-

note or easier in response to the difficulties of online learning, which had helped alleviate Szymanek’s stress.

Sanjna Narayan, another second-year, described her anxiety as more of a feeling of frustration. Specifically, that she knows the material but struggles to recall it because of the stressful environment tests create.

In a written statement, Narayan told The Maroon, “[O]nline learning provided an environment where we were able to actually apply our learning in a familiar environment. It’s been difficult transitioning back to in-person exams because they create such a stressful vacuum-like environment where applying my knowledge isn’t first nature.”

While Szymanek felt like her anxiety levels did not vary over the transition back to in-person exams, Narayan saw her anxiety levels worsen. However, both students shared that they felt wary of using Student Wellness for their anxiety issues.

“I went to Student Wellness a long time ago, for a separate thing…and [they were] not super helpful. [T]hey generally don’t have a great reputation,” Szymanek said. “[T]heir whole thing is they’ll see you once and then they’ll pretty immediately refer

you out…I could have just looked for that myself.”

Meeta Kumar, the Director of Counseling for UChicago Student Wellness for over two years, has tried to improve the relationship between students and Student Wellness by disseminating more information about the services and support systems it offers.

In an interview with The Maroon, Kumar noted that besides psychiatry services, Student Wellness runs programs like Academic Skills Assessment Program (ASAP) that has workshops for students to better manage issues and/or triggers that would increase anxiety in order to improve students’ academic performance. Additionally, Kumar shared how Student Wellness continually reaches out and connects with students through their Instagram, email announcements, newsletters, and through events like Orientation.

However, in regards to the shift from asynchronous and online exams to in-person exams, Kumar believes that the problem is less of an uptick in students’ test-related anxiety, but rather lies in “adjustment issues.”

“Anxiety during tests is a normal experience…but test anxiety impairs a person’s ability to perform during a test,” Kumar

said. This is when a professional can be helpful in understanding the roots of a person’s anxiety and developing treatments.

Kumar recommends students try to maintain good study and time management habits to minimize anxiety around tests.

Additionally, she said that activities like journaling about worries, incorporating breathing exercises in one’s daily routine, and talking to a trusted individual can help minimize a person’s anxiety.

However, Szymanek’s comment on UChicago’s academic culture highlights the perpetuating feelings of stress that exacerbate the new feelings of anxiety experienced by students.

“So much of academics around the school focus on, ‘How many elements of stress can we put you under?’ And have you still perform and demonstrate knowledge that way,” said Szymanek. “I think that’s also part of why [the University is] so annoying about accommodations, because they see it almost as a weakness, and ‘Oh, we’re not putting you through the same levels of rigor,’ when the rigor in question is just how little sleep can you get over the specific two week period and do this much work and cram as much as possible.”

Being Black at UChicago Black History Month is a time to reflect and honor the legacy of Black people in every facet of American Society, but how has UChicago treated its Black students in the past and present?

By SOLANA ADEDOKUN | Grey City Reporter One of my fondest moments at UChicago was the day my class finally got to walk through Hull Gate, officially welcoming us as full members of the University community. The sky was a bright blue, but every-

one’s faces were brighter, and there wasn’t a person you could find that wasn’t decked out from head to toe with UChicago merch.

As I looked around trying to find my friends, and later as I walked down the quad, I no-

ticed something that stuck out to me more than it had before: There were barely any Black people there.

When I accepted my offer of admission to UChicago, I was well aware that it was a predominantly white institution (PWI), but that fact had never hit me as hard as it did in that moment. From then on, I looked

more closely in my classes, campus cafés, and common areas to see if I could find any Black people, but, more often than not, I was one of few Black people—or any people of color—in an overflowing sea of white people.

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UChicago? Had other Black students felt this way before me? Was my experience not unique? So I went digging.

The story of Black students at the University begins not at its founding, but rather before the University of Chicago was even conceived. It starts at the University’s precursor, the Old University of Chicago, which was founded in 1856 by Baptists and located on 35th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. It initially was not an integrated school, but it slowly started enrolling small numbers of Black students and women directly after the end of the Civil War. Because of the financial problems that plagued the Old University of Chicago, the present UChicago was founded as a different legal entity to avoid further complications, though UChicago did accept some of the old university’s alumni as its own.

Something that did cross over from the Old University of Chicago to UChicago was the allowance of women and people of all races to enroll. The Baptist leaders of the Old University held a strong commitment to human equality. Moreover, the Old University was relatively supportive of abolitionist ideals, hosting a speech by Union general S. A. Hurlbut arguing that everyone, even former slaves, should be educated. These two factors allowed small numbers of Black students to enroll in the Old University.

It is difficult to pinpoint exactly who the first Black students at the University were and when they enrolled because UChicago did not organize student lists by race until sometime between 1908 and 1915, around 20 years after the University was founded. The earliest Black undergraduates found from the University Registrar include Cora Jackson (1896), James Garfield Lemon (1904), and Georgiana Simpson (1911).

Despite the progressiveness of the University, social life for Black students was difficult. Danielle Allen, the curator of the exhibit Integrating the Life of the Mind: African Americans at the University of Chicago, 1870–1940, aptly wrote that “African American students at the University of Chicago… were integrated into the intellectual but not the social life of the institution.”

For example, a Black student, Cecilia Johnson, was falsely accused of attempting to pass as white to join a sorority, but was outed by another student for being Black and temporarily left the University. An-

other student, Georgiana Simpson, had her permission to stay in campus dorms revoked by then–University president Harry Pratt Judson after protests by white, Southern students.

However, the following decade brought a change to the University. After taking office in 1923, the new president, Ernest DeWitt Burton, started to consider the possibility of integration. He led the development of a new policy on campus that allowed Black students to stay in the dorms. Because of this, attitudes towards integration began to warm. Black and white students took part in clubs together and even created a club called the “Interracial Group.”

This pro-integration sentiment continued through the 1940s, and by 1943, at least 45 Black students earned Ph.D.’s from the University, more than any other university in the world. After hiring Allison Davis (Ph.D. ’42) in 1948, Black faculty became increasingly normalized at non-Black colleges.

Many Black alumni would later encourage students to attend the University for graduate school.

Michael Dawson, the John D. MacArthur professor of political science and the College at UChicago, shared in an interview what it was like to be a Black student at an elite university in the latter half of the 20th century.

Having moved from the South Side of Chicago to Stanford for school, which at the time had fewer than 20 Black students, Dawson found the nearly all-white campus very difficult to adjust to.

“When I reached Palo Alto, I asked my father to go home because I had never been to a place that was that white,” Dawson said.

The difficulties of studying at a PWI were not only isolating, but also extremely dangerous for Black students. Across the country, the zeitgeist in the 1970s and early 1980s was one of hostility and fear directed towards Black students. Dawson shared how Black women’s dormitories were burned down (with no injuries), a car that he was in was almost run over on the street while trying to attend a party, and a Black male student was beaten up for dating a white woman.

“The stories sound almost apocryphal, but they were [a] part of our experiences we had to deal with…there was hostility and occasional violence, but it was also a period where there’s a lot of intense interactions between student protesters and police as well,” Dawson said.

Though Dawson has been in higher education for several decades, becoming a member of the campus community in 1992 as a faculty member, he believes that being Black in higher education is difficult, but not as difficult as it used to be.

“For example, I was taking courses in computer programming in computer science, and I didn’t have any problems with the professor, but other students want to know why I was there. I think it’s the experience of many students of color and probably many women as well…that you have to prove you belong to a significant degree,” Dawson said.

In short, though the late 20th century saw many violent reactions to integrating Black students into higher education, American universities’ relationships with Black students improved somewhat by the turn of the century, leading to a better environment for Black students to learn, including at UChicago.

Now that I was more familiar with the University’s past relationship with Black students, I wanted to answer a few questions: What is it like to be Black at UChicago today? Has the treatment of Black students changed?

For many Black students, UChicago at times can still feel like an isolating experience. However, students like Marla Anderson, a fourth-year in the College and president of the Georgiana Rose Organization (GRO)—named after alum Georgiana Simpson, who was the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in the U.S.—have carved out spaces not just for Black students, but for those at the intersection of being Black and being a woman.

GRO was founded last year as an RSO that focuses on the well-being of Black women as well as giving Black women a space to be themselves. The organization grew out of Anderson’s love and appreciation for the community of Black women she met when she came to UChicago.

As a first-generation Jamaican-American undergrad, Anderson noted how “my life has always been full of Black people. So regardless of [what] I really understood or knew, these tended to be the people that were in my support system.”

“There’s never been a lack of amazing Black people and Black women at UChicago…I would love for the [rest of the] University to see more of the amazing things that Black women are doing here. And some-

times that gets overshadowed because with so many people in the room…. A lot of times when we’re the only ones in the room, higher chances for our voices to get heard,” Anderson said.

Second-year Daisy Okoye is a part of Women+ In Law (WIL) as the Chair of the Service Committee. Though WIL is not a RSO that focuses solely on Black women, Okoye actively works to make the organization a more welcoming space for Black-identifying individuals.

“It is really important that we continue to not just bring in Black individuals during Black History Month. We should be seeing Black women every month. Making [WIL] more inclusive and accessible [will be] continuing to bring that life in that joy and that humor through the personalities and lived experiences of Black lawyers,” Okoye said.

Similar to the struggles Okoye noticed that Black lawyers face, Noah Tesfaye, thirdyear student and writer for The Maroon and South Side Weekly, described being Black at UChicago as dealing with “a whole host of contradictions.”

“You are a Black student at a university that has had a history…[of] exploiting and gentrifying neighborhoods surrounding the university…. There’s the second [type of racism] that you have to deal with…like, professors not thinking you’re that smart or that bright like that. You also deal with racism from my peers and in terms of people doubting your intelligence, but also saying pretty awful things to you or about you,” Tesfaye said.

Tesfaye often covers issues of race in his articles, deriving many of his beliefs from radical Black thinkers. In other words, he prefers to tackle problems in terms of addressing the material and physical issues of Black people. This approach informs Tesfaye’s work as a journalist. For example, Tesfaye has covered issues relating to housing displacement of Black people, over-policing, and, currently, radical and revolutionary organizations like the Black Panther Party.

Though many Black students have tried to carve out spaces for themselves through RSOs or writing, the Organization for Black Students’ (OBS) presidents Esi Koomson and Jackson Overton-Clark are also calling on the University to truly make UChicago a welcoming campus for Black students. The first step, they say, is listening to Black UChicago CONTINUED ON PG. 8

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students themselves.

“I think the university loves [to] push that idea of being diverse, [b]ut when it comes to the inclusion, part of diversity inclusion, that’s where they lack.… I know there are certain places on campus that are trying to provide spaces for us, [b]ut sometimes we seem to be treated almost like an afterthought,” Overton-Clark said.

Ultimately, there is not just one experience of Black students on campus. But across my interviews, a common theme emerged: Black students at UChicago face difficult,

unique pressures. Not only do many of us face pressure from our parents at home, but we have to constantly challenge and push ourselves to be as good as or exceed our peers just to feel like we deserve to be here. On top of all that, we constantly have to work against the fact that the University only wants us here to look diverse, but not necessarily to integrate us into the life of the mind.

Yet despite all this strife, a proud, strong, and tight-knit community has emerged stronger than before.

When I finished walking through the

gate during my class walk day, the first set of arms that came up to me were my parents who hugged me, took pictures, and told me how proud they were of me. Like my parents, UChicago’s Black community is exciting and vibrant, and most of all, welcoming.

For any future Black students: This journey is a tough one, but there is a space for you, a community and home where you can feel accepted and heard.

“You have a community. I know sometimes it might feel lonely coming into Chicago as a PWI. It might feel like you’re the only Black person on campus.… [J]ust look

for your community. Because there is a community, whatever it is that you want to do, whether it’s Black students in STEM, whether it’s OBS events, whether it’s ACSA [African and Caribbean Student Association], whether it’s [the] Black Law Students [Association], there is a community for you, so don’t be afraid to reach out,” Koomson said.

“We grew up hearing it takes a village and it really does. I’ve been very lucky to have a lot of really amazing Black people in that village. And when I came to UChicago, my village also was Black people,” said Anderson.

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, and 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 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 student groups 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 court-

ship with both.” But, of course, he changed his mind—when his wife Susan, herself a University 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 largerthan-life figure. His physical prominence— six-foot-two and broad-shouldered even into his sixties—is a reminder that largerthan-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 sixfoot-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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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 over 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 enabled students to intern with political campaigns during the crucial Iowa Caucus presidential campaign season. Another flagship project has been Bridging the Divide, an interinstitutional initiative led by students at the University of Chicago, Eureka College, and Arrupe College at Loyola University Chicago, which examined the political differences in voting behavior between rural and urban Illinoisians. The three schools collaborated 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 will-

ing to risk everything for the right to govern themselves.”

Axelrod remains a firm believer in 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 political spectrum that Axelrod is most proud of, and he believes it’s a commitment whose 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, sorrow, even, when Axelrod speaks about the ramifications of polarization, particularly in the context of the IOP. “The world is different than it was ten years ago,” he said. “Ten 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.

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erwise—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.”

To the students and other community members, Axelrod offered reassurances that 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 jour-

nalists, 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 most 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.”

A Thing That Can Ignite: Christine Cardoza Feature Front desk staffer by day and writer by night, Christine Cardoza shares her story of survival and hope.

By RACHEL LIU | Grey City Reporter Content warning: This article contains descriptions of depression, physical and sexual abuse, and attempted suicide.

“You cannot put a Fire out—” begins one of Emily Dickinson’s poems. “A Thing that can ignite/ Can go, itself, without a Fan—/ Upon the slowest Night—” I thought of these lines while I was chatting with Christine Cardoza on Zoom last week. Christine is one of those magical people who seem to have cracked the code on joy and are preternaturally good at sharing that joy with others. Talking with her, even from within the deep, seemingly bottomless pit of despair that is winter quarter at the University of Chicago, I felt a surge of warmth.

During the day, Christine is a front desk worker at the University’s 1155 East 60th Street building, home to the National Opinion Research Center offices. By night, she’s a writer. Over Thanksgiving of last year, she self-published an autobiography

on Amazon that grapples with, among other things, abuse, survival, religion, and tending quietly to a flame of faith.

Titled The Face Of Another Woman: The Stranger Within, the book deals with her own experiences of trauma as a teenager and her journey towards healing through her faith.

Growing up in balmy Kingston, Jamaica, Christine immigrated to New York City in 1972 with her father George when she was seven. Life operated on a different frequency in the new city. The weather was colder, and it seemed like the people were, too. At school, Christine was bullied for being different; her accent and dark skin made her a target for kids her age.

“I was like a lamb among wolves,” she said, laughing. “How do you fit into a world that excludes you?”

Her answer to this question was writing. Christine would use a flashlight at night to write—secretly and feverishly— under the covers. She wrote about her

depression and anguish. They were dark words, she said, but they were cathartic and exorcised some of her pain.

When she was 15, Christine started a relationship with a boyfriend who she said raped and physically abused her. When she tried to break off the relationship, she said, he tied her down onto a bed. When she tried to escape, he chased her onto the roof.

Crouched on the roof tiles and wracked with fear, Christine recalled being angry at God for abandoning her.

“Lord, what about me? Where’s my Red Sea?” she cried out in indignation. “If you’re who you say you are, prove it!” She wanted God to lead her out of the maze of her despair like Moses parting the Red Sea. She wanted a miracle; she wanted an escape.

At that moment, a strong gust of wind came, impeding her ex and giving her the precious second she needed to escape before he was finally detained by kind bystanders.

But the storm was far from over.

Christine escaped but found herself distraught and unable to quiet her pain. She recalled walking aimlessly around the city and eventually making her way onto the Hudson Bridge. She thought about suicide, how final it was, how quiet. Standing over the bridge, Christine closed her eyes and was about to jump when the same gust of wind came and knocked her back from the edge. It was God, she told me, her voice choked, who had saved her.

She went home in shock. Showered. It didn’t feel real enough. It felt too real.

“When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t even know who I was,” she said. This was where she took inspiration for the subtitle of her book, The Stranger Within.

In a fit of despair, she tried again to kill herself by taking some pills from the bathroom medicine cabinet. She could feel her heartbeat slowing down, then stopping entirely. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Bum. She described having an out-of-body experience. “It looked like I was sleeping— my spirit was somewhere else,” she said. It CONTINUED ON PG. 11

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“[W]riting and spirituality have been the pillars that have propped Christine up.”

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was then that she realized how much she wanted to keep living.

“Like a mother hugging a child to her bosom, I felt a rocking back and forth,” she said. And with that spiritual experience, she returned to her body. Since then, she has understood and tried to use her experiences with depression to uplift and inspire others.

“It doesn’t disappear just because you tell it to,” she said, referring to depression.

“You have to replace your thoughts with something stronger.”

After that harrowing experience, Christine found her healing in Christianity. Though she wasn’t religious, she attended a Pentecostal revival meeting at a friend’s insistence. Typically led by

preachers, revival meetings were meant to bring new converts to the Church. The meeting was immensely transformative for her, Christine said, because it had met her pain with a promise of hope. Finally, she felt a little bit of warmth. She remembers the preacher saying: “This is your time—the depression that you’re fighting, God is about to bring you out. The only thing he needs is an invitation.”

And invite him she did.

“I felt a fire burning on the inside—it was like a match, [like] someone lit my soul on fire,” she marveled. What struck her was a religious vision, the likes of which she described in mystical, transcendental terms. “I spoke Hebrew, I spoke Swahili,” she said, having known neither of the two languages before.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, writing and spirituality have been the pillars that have propped Christine up.

Even though she began writing because she struggled to connect with the people around her, she’s since then met people who have accepted her and encouraged her to share her writing.

“My writing is coming from a place of rejection in a different country, but [since then] I have crossed paths with amazing people, both religious and political. They really encouraged me to put my experience on paper so it can be a lifesaver for someone looking for hope,” Christine said.

When The Face of Another Woman was published last year the day before Thanksgiving, Christine said that she had cried from gratitude.

Now, once a month, Christine is an inspirational speaker at the Apostolic Assembly Church. She always keeps an eye out for those in the congregation who need help and endeavors to give them the support she needed when she was young.

She also said that she is continuing to look for opportunities to speak about her experience at women’s domestic violence shelters.

“The world will [not] be denied of such an amazing gift we all have to offer each other. Someone is depending on us to carry them through,” she told me emphatically toward the end of our conversation.

“Great things come out of darkness.”

After all, great fires can endure through the slowest—and darkest—of nights.

VIEWPOINTS

The Future of the Stephen A. Douglas Relics These relics provide an opportunity for community empowerment and reparative justice, but only if we begin a community-wide discussion and demand the University take accountability for its enrichment from slavery.

By ANNE KNAFL, CAINE JORDAN, and NANCY SPIEGEL For over 119 years, the University of Chicago community has passed through Reynolds Club largely unaware of the presence of the U.S. Senator, enslaver, and founder of the Old University of Chicago, Stephen A. Douglas, looking out at them from a bronze plaque. Whenever they walked southwest toward Ellis Avenue and 59th Street, they would have pass a stone from Douglas Hall at the Old University of Chicago, which was installed in the outside wall of the Classics building sometime between 1928 and 1931.

On July 7, 2020, then-president Robert Zimmer announced the stone and plaque had been removed from campus and would be relocated to the archives of the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center. The removal came as a surprise to many, since no community or campus group had called for their removal and no information had been shared with library staff before the announcement. Zimmer asserted in his email that the relics were removed because “Douglas does not deserve to be honored on our campus.” President Zimmer presented this act as an end in itself “toward building a stronger, more inclusive University of Chicago,”

while at the same time denying any accountability for Douglas’s crimes against humanity. This begs the question: What has their removal accomplished?

Removing these relics without campus or community involvement was an attempt to shut down conversation about them, creating confusion and feelings of alienation. What could have been an opportunity to address the history of racism at the University instead was an attempt to erase that history. This history must be confronted and addressed as a community. We spoke with several archivists, organizers, University staff, and instructors to gain a broader perspective. Through

this article, we hope to spark the conversation Zimmer suppressed: a community-wide discussion about the future of the Stephen A. Douglas relics.

As a member of the original Reparations at UChicago (RAUC) working group, a Black graduate student, and an archivist, history Ph.D. candidate Caine Jordan maintains that the relics of Douglas hold a great deal of meaning to him. “As a member of RAUC, the group that uncovered and publicized the ties between Stephen A. Douglas, the University of Chicago, and slavery, the Douglas relics mean both truth and pain: Truth in the sense that the people who made the University of Chicago

possible can have their stories told, and pain in the sense that the brutality of slavery—hidden in plain sight—must be unearthed to adequately and completely repair its harms.” The relics of Douglas hold remnants of one of the most consequential and excruciating periods in American history and serve as a reminder that the blood of slavery invisibly runs through many institutional bricks. “As an archivist at the Special Collections Research Center, the relics of Douglas existing at my workplace, with little acknowledgement from the UChicago administration on their legacy, is troubling. The relics of Douglas should have a CONTINUED ON PG. 12

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“This begs the question: What has their removal accomplished?”

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description that accurately documents this history and the events leading to its accession in the archives. Archival description and access [are] essential, but University administration is responsible for acknowledging this history and events as well.”

Starting in 2016, RAUC drew attention to the presence of these memorials to Douglas on campus.

Their research connects Douglas to the current University of Chicago and thus establishes a line of enrichment from Douglas’s enslavement of Black people on his plantation to the wealth and prestige of the present University.

RAUC’s work grew from the research done by Sherry Williams of the Bronzeville Historical Society.

Williams and researchers transcribed the Register of Enslaved People in Douglas’s papers to read aloud before events and honor the labor of these people, such as performing a libation ceremony

at the Stephen A. Douglas Tomb in honor of the enslaved peoples of the Douglas Plantation. Williams does not agree with the decision to place these objects in the University archives. “I believe deaccession to another location should be considered. Descendant communities of the enslaved Africans are likely to not see, touch or experience the relics. Don’t forget the paywalls and restrictions to access of UChicago’s libraries and spaces is real…. Possibly the plaques could ‘rest’ inside of Douglas’s Tomb… just a thought.”

The RAUC has argued: “Central to the process of reparatory justice is community involvement, community repair, and transforming the institution itself to prevent future harm.” Because these relics represent immeasurable harm, what we do with them holds the potential for reparative justice.

The University announced the formation of the Council on UChicago/Community Relations on De-

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cember 17, 2021, with the charge of “researching and preparing a report that reflects upon and illuminates the history and relationship between the University and the city’s South Side neighborhoods.”

We asked Guy Emerson Mount, a founding member of the RAUC, to comment. “With the formation of the Council on UChicago/Community Relations, the University’s administration has opened the door to undoing the horribly cynical blunder enacted by the previous administration that brought these objects to Special Collections in the first place. That council, not the upper administration, should now decide through a wide process of community engagement (with Black Chicago at the center) what should happen to these objects. If the community wants them displayed, they should be displayed.

If the community decides to smash the stone to rubble and melt the plaque down and create a monument to the enslaved, the administration should not only facilitate that but fund it.”

Mount sees significant issues with the makeup of the council that could undermine its charge.

“The membership of that council needs to expand dramatically to reflect the wide ideological diversity of Black Chicago and must include organizations familiar with reparations and transformative justice as it relates to this particular case including the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA), Black Lives Matter, Good Kids Mad City, the Chicago Association of Black Psychologists, and the Bronzeville Historical Society. All these organizations have been actively participating in the reparative process that has already been happening for years now without the administration’s sanction. These organizations have been quite clear in their previous statements regarding what would constitute repair for the University’s historical ties to slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing

acts of anti-Blackness. To cut them out of this process now (when this new administration seems open to some kind of a reparative process) would be a horrible mistake.”

President Zimmer removed these objects in response to the uprisings against policing in the spring and summer of 2020. But why these objects? Who removed them and when? Who decided to deposit them in the archives and why? We spoke to multiple administrative staff and faculty members across campus and were unable to find answers to these questions.

The More Than Diversity campaign quoted President Zimmer’s email in their demand for reparations, as part of their larger fivepart Call to Action. Paul Rand, Vice President for Communications, informed us that the University has not shared anything besides the details in their original announcement. It seems that the decision to remove these objects was made unilaterally and the vast majority of us learned about it when it was announced.

We don’t know the details around the removal of the relics, but we have learned quite a bit about where they are now and future plans for them. We spoke to Kathleen Feeney and Ashley Locke Gosselar in the University archives, who explained that “the plaque and stone were delivered to the Library in summer 2021 by Facilities Services after their removal, and they were received by two now-retired staff members at the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center.” The objects are available to anyone. “When we are not under pandemic restrictions, the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center is open to all researchers, and does not require affiliation with the University of Chicago. Like all materials in Special Collections, these items have to be viewed here at the Center and cannot be checked out of the Library. They are too large and

heavy to bring into the center’s reading room, but we can unpack the crates in one of our classrooms for patrons to see them.”

The research center is open to all researchers, but most library and campus spaces are highly restricted to members of the public.

The ubiquitous presence of University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) officers on campus sends the message that members of the public are not welcome.

Black men especially are disproportionally stopped by UCPD. While these celebrations of an enslaver are no longer openly displayed on campus for any and all to see, they have received the honor of accession into the University archives, along with the papers of all past University presidents, prominent faculty papers, and a copy of most books published by the University of Chicago Press.

And whereas these relics were once mostly accessible to anyone who wished to see them (to the extent that our campus is accessible to the public), they are now only accessible through the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center. How can we as a community begin to address the harm these objects represent, when realistically, community members do not even have access to them?

While the plaque and stone have been accessioned into the University archives, Feeney and Gosselar note that they are still deciding which collection within the archives is most appropriate for them: “Archival collections are usually named for their creators, in this case the Old University of Chicago and the University of Chicago’s Class of 1901. We are considering if this is the best way to identify these artifacts or if their discoverability might be improved by identifying them as records of the University of Chicago Facilities Services, the department which administers the care, renCONTINUED ON PG. 13

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“They are physical manifestations of the University’s enrichment from slavery.”

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ovation, and construction of campus buildings.”

Since the center is shortstaffed, the work may take some time.

Discussions about how to describe documents and artifacts related to atrocities and historical trauma responsibly and sensitively are taking place throughout the archival and museum community.

According to Feeney and Gosse-

lar, approaches to this work vary: “Some institutions use content warnings and other statements about potentially harmful language, and some include information about mental health resources in their guides or exhibitions.

What all information professionals agree upon is the importance of thinking critically about the ways in which our policies and practices facilitate or hinder our efforts to document and contextualize

difficult histories.”

Feeney and Gosselar also characterize archival description as an evolving and iterative process. “As time and resources permit,” they explain, “we try to provide full descriptions of collections and we practice reparative description work. For instance, we recently redescribed our Slavery in North America Collection. The finding aid now includes all available names of persons described in the

The plaque and stone were delivered to the library in summer 2021. anne knafl

documents, as well as their roles (enslaver, enslaved person, etc.).

Exposing these names on the internet will greatly aid researchers, especially genealogists.”

The University of Chicago Library is a member of two Chicago-area consortiums that help archivists collaborate: the Chicago Collections Consortium and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC). The BMRC’s offices are located in the Regenstein Library. In addition to maintaining consortial partnerships, the archives collaborate with community-based organizations on a variety of initiatives including the conservation and preservation of collections. “At the same time, it is important that community-based archives maintain their autonomy,” says Marcia Walker-McWilliams of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium.

“Engaging community partners requires time and effort to build equitable relationships. Unfortunately, archives and libraries are not usually funded and supported to the levels that they should be to support meaningful and equitable community engagement.”

According to Walker-McWilliams, “statements on harmful content as mentioned above are often a part of interpretations and exhibition of controversial objects.

Archivists and exhibition curators often consult subject experts to determine what language, terms, or analysis are best to use in an exhibition. And often, more information, context, and analytical tools are provided for the objects. This can help people understand why the objects are on display and…to make their own meaning out of the objects.”

Addressing harm and decolonizing collections requires time, resources, and the will to invest in these projects. There are no shortcuts to do this work. Marcia Walker-McWilliams told us, “sometimes, archivists and collection professionals decide not

to display controversial objects out of concern for the public, because their institutions direct them not to, or because they don’t have the staff capacity or knowledge to interpret the objects.”

The University of Chicago Library has long been ranked well below its peers for staffing levels.

In 2019, we had the ninth largest collection in North America but ranked 46th in total wages and salaries expenditures. This situation has been exasperated by the pandemic. While the Library has posted a number of positions over the past year, the archival staff has been reduced by 75 percent over the last six years. Feeney and Gosselar explained, “when our unit rebuilds, outreach and collaboration with the community will be a core component of what we hope our staff can do. In the meantime, we were glad to see the president’s announcement on December 17, 2021 about a new Council on UChicago/Community Relations: Historical, Contemporary, and Future. As the council conducts its research about the historical relationship between the University and the surrounding community, we hope that they will make use of the wealth of information available to them in the University archives, and we look forward to helping them find the resources they need.”

Without community involvement and financial and material resources from the University, we cannot adequately address the harm these relics represent. They are physical manifestations of the University’s enrichment from slavery. This reality demands reparations. As Guy Mount explains: “Reparations are not something given unilaterally by the person, nation, or institution responsible for the harm. Reparations are something demanded by those who have been harmed and represent a willingness to work collaboratively with the offending party CONTINUED ON PG. 14

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“Addressing harm and decolonizing collections requires time, resources, and the will to invest in these projects.”

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to meet the needs arising from that harm. This is because reparations are a permanent revolution—a new way of being in the world. They are not a project but an ongoing praxis.

In this way, reparations are a du-

rable argument that will continue to be made by survivors as long as those survivors survive. It is true that the harms of UChicago’s ties to slavery can never fully be made right. But justice now demands that the entire campus commu-

nity commit to a process and embrace a seemingly paradoxical principle: that even the most irreparable harms must be repaired.”

Placing them in a box in the basement doesn’t change that.

What do you think should hap-

pen to the Stephen A. Douglas Relics? Please share your comments.

Caine Jordan is a Ph.D. candidate in history and a co-founder of the Reparations at UChicago Working Group (RAUC). Anne K. Knafl

Obama Makes a Visit

For five dollars, it’s the closest you’ll get to shaking his hand. annabelle chan

is the Bibliographer for Religion, Philosophy, and Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago Library.

Nancy Spiegel is the Bibliographer for History, Art History, and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago Library.

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ARTS Got Voices in Your Head? Send a Ransom Note…

Arts reporter Sophie Pope McCright sits down with The Ransom Notes and Voices in Your Head to reflect on both groups’ successful competition season.

By SOPHIE POPE McCRIGHT | Arts Reporter It’s been a rewarding year for two of UChicago’s seven a cappella RSOs. This winter quarter, student-run groups The Ransom Notes and Voices in Your Head both competed in the annual International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella (ICCA), held in person for the first time in two years. After placing first and second respectively in their quarterfinal competition, both groups performed their 10-minute sets at the semifinal competition on March 19, and Voices in Your Head went on to perform at finals on April 23.

While first-place groups at the ICCA semifinals automatically advance to finals, second- and third-place groups also have a chance to nab a spot, competing against one another in a “wildcard” round. The winners of this sub-competition then advance, along with the first-place groups, to the final round of the competition. After placing third at semifinals, Voices in Your Head won the wildcard round and competed at finals in New York City. While The Ransom Notes did not place at semifinals, the group was nevertheless recognized with an award for Outstanding Arrangement, credited to their Music Director at the time, Wonyoung Jang.

Considering their competitive achievements this year, it is impressive that both groups feature a significant number of younger members. Katie Ko, the music director for Voices in Your Head, is a second-year, as is her leadership partner Lina Klak, the group’s creative director.

“We have no graduating members, and the bulk of our members are first-years,” Ko told The Maroon, adding that the group took in four new members at the end of fall quarter.

This demographic skew may be in part due to the pandemic. Remote competitions and rehearsals led to reduced activity for Voices in Your Head, leaving them with a

smaller group of singers at the start of this school year.

“I didn’t really know what this group was [about] because we didn’t have any meetings last year,” Klak said. “But it definitely has gotten a lot easier [this year] because everyone in the group is really excited to learn and willing to help.”

After working to incorporate their new members at the beginning of winter quarter, Voices in Your Head found their stride at semifinals.

“I think by semis [all of our members] were really on the same wavelength of ‘we

know exactly why we’re here, we know exactly what the set means to us,’ and I think that [mindset] honestly carried us a long way,” Ko said.

Similarly, The Ransom Notes welcomed eight new members this school year—a circumstance that Jang, a fourthyear, sees as an opportunity for growth.

“I’m living vicariously, I think, through a lot of the younger members of the group,” he said. “They have so much to offer to this group [in the] years to come, so for me that’s probably the best part of this year, just seeing them really grow and enjoy themselves.”

Fourth-year Achu Menon, former

president of The Ransom Notes, likewise weighed in on the group’s accomplishments.

“I think this is a really successful time in the group’s history—we won our ICCA quarterfinal for the first time in our history,” Menon said. “We’ve worked harder than we have in previous years, but I wouldn’t say that we’ve lost the fun aspect of it.”

When asked about what they think has contributed to their successes this year, both groups credit the importance of building relationships between members.

“It wouldn’t be possible for us to be CONTINUED ON PG. 16

This winter quarter, student-run groups The Ransom Notes and Voices in Your Head both competed in the annual International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella (ICCA). eric fang

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“We love what we do, and we love each other, and at the end of the day it’s about just lifting each other up and working hard to do that.”

CONTINUED FROM PG. 15

OK with working so hard and spending so much time together on something that isn’t academic at college if we weren’t really tight with each other,” Menon said.

Jang recognized the importance of this social aspect as well. “Obviously we’ve got a lot of great talent in this group, but every group’s got a lot of great talent,” he said.

“We love what we do, and we love each other, and at the end of the day it’s about just lifting each other up and working hard to do that.”

“It’s so cheesy, but I don’t know how I got so lucky to end up with this specific group of people. I just feel very lucky to be in a group with these people who are so talented but also just amazing individuals,” Ko said.

Klak added, “Everyone in the group is just so happy to be there all the time and excited to learn and to sing.”

These connections also build trust, which paid off for Jang and The Ransom Notes at semifinals this year. In reference to his Outstanding Arrangement award, Jang noted that he had actually changed the intro for the group’s set between quarterfinals and semifinals. According to Jang, the new intro was “very, very experimental.… It was a really big risk. But after I saw the way that this group performed at quarterfinals and everything, I felt like I could trust this group to execute something so difficult.”

In addition to competing in the ICCA, The Ransom Notes recently went on their biannual Spring Tour, visiting Cleveland, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston over spring break. Part of the tour involves visiting high schools, where “we do workshops with those schools, teach them some arrangements and answer any questions that they have about a cappella or college in general,” Menon said. “I think that’s a really good opportunity for us to give back.”

Menon believes that as musical artists, the group has a responsibility to give younger singers access and exposure to music.

Jang, who is an Education and Society minor, finds the educational aspects of the group’s tours particularly rewarding.

When describing the high school students

he has met, he notes that “they’re just as passionate—if not more passionate—about singing than we are.” To him, this passion “is a reminder of why we do this and what we do this for…these are the people that, one day, we hope can join our a cappella groups and have the same experiences that we do. And [we hope] that they can come away with it feeling as amazed and as inspired as we were.”

While hard work and engagement clearly factor into the talent of these two groups, they both understand that it’s not all about the hustle.

“A lot of times, I think, people forget not to take themselves too seriously,” Jang said.

Similarly, Ko acknowledged that competitions sometimes come down to luck.

“A lot of things have to click into place.

First of all, the set has to have that something which is really indescribable, and part of it is just how much the members latch onto it—which is, again, truly luck,” she said.

Perhaps this understanding contributed to the shock felt by the members of

Voices in Your Head on learning that they’d won the wildcard round and would be advancing to finals.

“That was truly mind-boggling,” Ko said.

The group received the news directly from the Executive Director of the ICCA, Amanda Newman, who FaceTimed them during a rehearsal.

“She was like, ‘Hey! How would you guys like to go to New York?’… It was so, so great. It was just something we really did not expect,” Klak told The Maroon.

The winner of the ICCA final competition this year was Pitches and Notes (University of Wisconsin), followed by The Opportunes (Harvard) in second place and ScatterTones (UCLA) in third.

Despite having not placed at finals, Voices in Your Head members hoped to make the most of their experience and ultimately just have fun.

Ko explained, “It’s just kind of like, ‘Wow, we did it, we made it to finals. Let’s just enjoy each other, enjoy the set, enjoy this opportunity.’ And so, I really hope that…we all really enjoy this time and re-

member to be grateful for it.”

The group has other plans besides competition. When not competing in the ICCA, Voices in Your Head holds concerts, collaborates with other groups both on and off campus, and records their arrangements for Spotify, among other pursuits. The group released their most recent single, “My Day Will Come,” in 2021, and their most recent album, Begin Again, came out in 2019.

The Ransom Notes are also continuing to work on their music. Their newest EP, quit, dropped on Spotify on April 22. They are currently working on a new album tentatively set to debut next year and are preparing for their 25th anniversary concert planned for the end of the school year.

If you want to keep up with these groups, be sure to follow their social media!

The Ransom Notes: @uchicagoransomnotes Voices in Your Head: @uchicagovoices

The former president of The Ransom Notes, fourth-year Achu Menon, pictured right. eric fang

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This House is Bob Thompson’s

By BELLE NAHOOM | Arts Reporter The Smart Museum of Art’s newest exhibit, This House is Mine, is a collection of Bob Thompson’s greatest works. It is an awe-inspiring sight, especially since it is the first survey of Bob Thompson’s art in Chicago in over twenty years. The Smart Museum truly made an incredible choice in its design of the exhibit. Having sections dedicated to each theme Thompson focused on—his personal life, his reflection of 1960s societal norms, jazz, and his homages to artists such as Poussin and Goya—facilitate a guiding path for one to follow when visiting the museum. With little prior knowledge of Thompson, this guide sparked my interest in his career and the themes he focused on.

Bob Thompson (1937–1966) was a Black figurative painter who spent much of his career reworking masterworks of art history. He specifically spent much of his early career making colorful abstract reinterpretations of Nicolas Poussin’s classical Baroque pieces. These pieces are brightly colored and emphasize the shape of bodies, lacking a sense of emotion from the figures. There is an understanding through these pieces that the body is symbolic; the body is all one needs to understand context. It is notable that Thompson is very focused on French art-

ist Poussin’s work, as his own works drew upon Renaissance and Antique traditions.

Knowing this, it’s clear that Thompson’s work makes a similar statement as Poussin’s: “The past is the present.” Thompson’s artwork may depict a scene of antiquity, but the artist has brought it to us in the present, in a new form with a new meaning. In pieces that once had the context of humankind’s natural beauty, Thompson’s reworkings bring forth themes such as racism, the oversexualization of women, and the hypocritical nature of society.

Alongside the reworkings of old masters, Thompson was inspired by the abstract jazz movements that surrounded him in New York City. In fact, the exhibition has an entire gallery space dedicated to his work on jazz. I enjoyed that the Smart Museum had jazz playing in the background of this part of the exhibition to set the audience in the context of the work. One of my favorites from this section was “Homage to Nina Simone” (1965) which puts Blues singer Nina Simone in an almost classical lens. The painting is set up in a similar structure as paintings from the age of antiquity like those of Poussin. In the piece, Simone is depicted as a figure from an antique painting.

There were two pieces that stood out

to me as an onlooker due to the stories they seem to be telling: “Black Monster” (1959) and “Self-Portrait in the Studio” (1960). The former has four central figures in the composition: two women and a man engaged in a sexually suggestive activity alongside an approaching black monster, watching the three others. This piece reflects Thompson’s style, featuring minimal detail. A specific detail would be the eyes of the black monster, who resembles a cat, that is looming like a shadow.

Even with this shadowlike appearance, its eyes are quite detailed and its mouth is wide open as if to swallow the three individuals. According to the descriptive placard at the Smart Museum, the black monster is meant to symbolize the sexuality of Black men. Though the monster is not actively engaging in sexual action, it is still villainized. The fact that the monster is portrayed as an evildoer despite not actually engaging in any inappropriate behavior makes it look as if it is a scapegoat for what is actually going on in the scene.

The sexual action is being done by someone else, but the individual is pinning the blame on the monster. “Black Monster” references false rape accusations against Black men in 1950s Mississippi that led to lynchings. The piece also references the idea of interracial marriage, which was a matter of controversy in the 1950s. The

colors are vibrant and bring light to the piece which is a drastic comparison to the subject matter.

In comparison, “Self-Portrait in the Studio” is a shift from Thompson’s usual brightly colored abstract works. We see Thompson sitting in a chair at his studio, characterized by dark colors and a single, lonely figure. Thompson is slumped down as if sleeping. He is in the forefront of the image, giving us an insider look in his studio. There is something very introspective about this painting. Why is Thompson sitting in the chair at his studio? Are we seeing him at a hard moment in his life, perhaps with little motivation to work? Is he merely relaxing? One is left with many questions after merely gazing at this image for a short period of time.

Overall, the Smart Museum outdid itself with this wonderful exhibition. I recommend a visit in the near future, as the exhibit closes on May 15. For those interested in some of the nitty-gritty details of Thompson’s work, the Smart Museum has a number of interesting video chats which offer symbolic and stylistic insights on the motivation behind Thompson’s work. The resources provided ensure that onlookers are truly engrossed and awe-inspired by the artwork. I think the display was truly one you couldn’t help but feel entranced by.

An Evening with Meriem Bennani: CAPS Trilogy

By KINA TAKAHASHI | Associate Arts Editor CAPS trilogy: Party on the CAPS (2018) 2 Lizards (2020) Life on the CAPS (2021) In a room filled with students, I sat in the back row of the Gene Siskel Film Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) for the screening of two films from Meriem Bennani’s CAPS trilogy: Party on the CAPS (2018) and 2 Lizards (2020), paired with An Evening with Meriem Bennani—a Q&A session with the artist herself. The event was presented in partnership with the Renaissance Society, The University of Chicago’s contemporary art museum.

The first film, Party on the CAPS, and the third film of the trilogy, Life on the CAPS, take place in Bennani’s inventive creation: the CAPS. On the CAPS, a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean, teleportation has replaced air travel, and displaced populations use a portal to cross oceans and borders. What started as a detention camp for immigrants, imprisoned

by American “troopers,” forms into a bustling megalopolis housing descendants of families who “illegally teleported”—as narrated by the gigantic cartoon crocodile. For readers who found the preceding sentence hard to fathom, be warned for an even more surreal experience while watching Bennani’s film.

The second film of the trilogy, 2 Lizards, is Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki’s collaborative film. Originally intended to be an interlude, 2 Lizards chronicles the early days of the pandemic as it unfolds in real-time. During the height of the pandemic in March 2020, Bennani felt the urge to make a film. Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki spent lockdown together in their Brooklyn apartments, so the lizards in the films represent their conception of the pandemic in real time. Bennani and Barki reflected on their observations and feelings each day and put these details into a short story about their experiences.

Bennani used a file of 3-D animal models she had bought for a different project and chose two lizards for their avatars. The similarly animal supporting cast, voiced

by their various friends and comprising a hummingbird, a cheetah, a mouse, a cat, and a raccoon, did not stop the audience from empathizing with the anguish felt by each character. Who would’ve thought that watching Anthony Fauci as an animated snake was what it would take to finally give me closure to the general disorder of March 2020? March 2020 was an Orwellian nightmare, truly leading me to believe the world had come to an end.

Now, two years later, I can attend class in person and walk through the main quad to see people having a picnic or tossing a frisbee to one another.

Although 2 Lizards is not currently being exhibited, the full version is available on Orian Barki’s page, and snippets can CONTINUED ON PG. 18

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“In the phantasm of it all, the truth of our world becomes realized.”

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be found on Meriem Bennani’s Instagram (@meriembennani). The film is segmented into one- to two-minute episodes.

The experience at the Gene Siskel Film Center was not only aesthetically unique but thought-provoking from a political and existential scope. The movement between the 3-D animation and documentary footage immerses the audience so effectively that there were moments when I felt teleported to the setting of the film. Between animation and documentary, the film fluidly moves from the imaginary to the geopolitical, delving into ideas about global surveillance and the power of the collective, all the while placing an emphasis on emotion. During the Q&A session, Bennani explained how in her world, music is part of world-building; she sources Moroccan and Algerian music for her films, creating not only a visual but also a sonic way to experience her work. Bennani’s masterful layering of animation, documentative film, and North African beats was one of the wildest cinematic sequences I have ever witnessed.

How does one even come up with a film

series with a crocodile narrator swimming in electric-wired film water near a fictional island in the Atlantic populated by detained migrants? At the event, Bennani spoke about the fantasia sequence in the film: “The fantasia sequence came from different places as I built the world.

The CAPS world is original yet based on personal research around transportation.” Bennani has always been interested in teleportation as a real concept. She questions how countries such as the United States would react to teleportation and how immigration policies would shift as a result. This curiosity surrounding biopolitics and teleportation is highly evident in her creation of the CAPS world.

At the event, Bennani also revealed that the idea of the crocodile as the crest and embodiment of the CAPS was inspired by her time in Morocco. While in Morocco, Bennani noticed a lot of people wearing the clothing brand Lacoste S.A., which displays an iconic crocodile as their logo. After observing this crocodile logo everywhere, she began creating a narrative around the urban legend of crocodiles and drew a map of an island sur-

The poster for Meriem Bennani’s Life on the CAPS (2022). courtesy of meriem bennani

rounded by a swamp of crocodiles. These threads of thought and observation led to the making of the CAPS. At one point a SAIC member in the audience asked, “How did you come up with the idea of the United States as a megalomaniac capitalist state?”

“I can’t take credit for that idea,” said Bennani, which the audience responded to with laughter—a realization manifested by humor.

The humorous absurdity encapsulated in reality is part of what Bennani depicts in her work. In the phantasm of it all, the truth of our world becomes realized. The humorous deliverance of Bennani’s dystopian work was one of the most eye-opening things I have experienced. Day-to-day, laughter is what relieves pain, and for me, laughter is what got me through the dark days of the pandemic—watching Bennani’s film brought solace and perspective to the darkness of our world.

Bennani believes her work acts similarly to a documentary but with a different concept: documentary as a creative form. If one really ponders it, a lot of

documentaries undergo editing to build a certain narrative, shaping it to be manufactured and contrived. In this sense, Bennani’s world of talking animated lizards conveys more truth than the average documentary. All documentaries have some kind of lens or angle as a filter, and instead of failing to acknowledge the existence of the filter, Bennani embraces and challenges it in the most creatively nuanced way possible.

At the end of the evening, I left the Gene Siskel Film Center at the SAIC feeling unexpectedly satiated. Since the pandemic hit, museums and exhibitions have had limited hours or closures, and it was only after Bennani’s screening that I came to realize how long it has been since I’ve experienced art in a room filled with people. The collective experience of watching this film, Bennani’s magnificence in capturing individual experiences, and her collage assemblage of humorous animations took an unbearable weight off my soul.

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SPORTS Humans vs. Zombies Strikes Again From custom-built Nerf guns to data-driven strategizing, the week-long event is a surreal, magical experience.

By RACHEL LIU | Sports Reporter Pandemonium on the quad. Shouts.

Screams. Just a tiny sprinkle of brains. Is it a bird? Or perhaps a plane? No, it’s Humans vs.

Zombies (HvZ), the University of Chicago’s quarterly live-action role-playing tag game, which took place between April 5 and April 12 this spring and featured 174 total players.

Open to all affiliated with the University, the game recruits intrepid human players who face off against their fearsome foes, the zombies. During the game, the main goal for the zombies is to “turn” the humans into zombies by tagging them. The goal for the humans is to survive by any means possible.

Registration Registration for HvZ this year began on Tuesday, April 5 at 8:15 p.m. in Hutchinson Commons. Traditionally, registration marks the beginning of the game— as soon as a registered player steps outside of Hutch, they run the risk of being tagged and “turned” into a zombie — and it is an impressive event in and of itself. As Hutch is closed to accommodate the 200 or so prospective players as well as the HvZ moderators (affectionately referred to as “the mods”), the space is converted into something resembling a surrealist blackbox theater. Walking through the doors marked “HvZ registration,” one gets the sense they’ve stumbled into a cosplay conference, or perhaps a laser tag game.

The sheer range of players’ styles is mind-boggling. Some have put on the full get-up: makeup, gear, big Nerf guns. Some have shown up in their daily jeans and coats.

Others, thinking tactically, have donned workout clothes and sneakers. The registration line snakes across the main dining room tables, nearly long enough to reach the doors. The air crackles with electricity. For the last two years, in-person HvZ was put on hold due to COVID-19. For most of the players, and a few of the mods, HvZ will be an entirely new experience this year.

Registration costs $3 and renting an optional Nerf gun costs $10. As the players

register, neon green bandanas are put onto their arms, signaling their official status as human players in the game. When they’re “turned,” the players must switch the bandanas to their foreheads.

A slightly trigger-happy human player strides about holding a Nerf gun outfitted with a flashlight, shooting foam bullets at the walls of Hutch. Someone with a huge Nerf gun waves me down at the nearest table to brag about how she bought it for a dollar at the flea market. “I’m hoping to nail some zombies out there,” she said. I ask another player whether or not HvZ has a cult following, and he tells me that he’s a fourth-year now and has been participating since his first year: “It’s not as big as Scav, but it has the [same] kind of cult following,” he said. Those waiting in the registration line tell me that in years past, there have been people who—in true apocalyptic fashion—stopped going to class during the event to minimize their time outdoors.

I hear through the grapevine that both

the zombies and the humans have their own Discord channels, and that individual text group chats have also spawned on a groupby-group basis. In the spirit of discovery, I ask around for specific strategies to use during the event and receive only vague shrugs and shifty eyes. The game gets brutal as valuable intelligence from both sides trickles down from friend-group to friend-group—as an outsider, I clearly cannot be trusted.

Later, though, I am granted an audience with HvZ President Noah Klowden, who is presiding over the registration desk with competent hyperactiveness, directing new players this way and that.

“Hello!” he calls out to a wandering player. “Are you here to register?”

As I pull up a chair next to Klowden’s spot at the registration desk, we’re frequently interrupted by registering players and nervous newbies asking about the rules. Someone walks up to us; “Are Rifle Blasters allowed?” he asks. A Rifle Blaster, if you don’t know, is the name of a specific model of Nerf gun: a small break-open, pump-action blaster featuring a single barrel and a removable scope.

Klowden provides the answer after checking the official HvZ website: only the flywheel system blasters are banned; all other models are fair game. The Nerf Connoisseur walks off, scheming.

The game has officially begun.

The Game The rules of HvZ are deceptively simple: the game starts with only one zombie player (the “lead zombie”). Once the game officially begins, human players use either balled-up socks (clean ones!) or Nerf guns to defend themselves from attacking zombies. Human players can stun for five minutes with one sock or bullet hit (the honor system).

With the exception of certain special events, zombies are unarmed. However, the game is limited within certain areas: indoor buildings such as dorms and other educational, dining, and administrative buildings are all non-game “safe zones.” The great outdoors, on the other hand, is the wild west; ambush is fair game, and anarchy prevails.

Every year, HvZ has a different theme.

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Liz Franson (A.B. ’19) scales a lamppost as the players they “turned” to zombies over the course of the game look on. rachel liu

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“How wonderful, to be swept up in the simple earthly thirst for blood, brains, joy, and connection.”

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This year, it’s “magical-apocalyptic.” According to the HvZ website, the “plot” of the spring 2022 game reads as follows: “In a magical world not too unlike our own, society descends into an apocalyptic hellscape.

A powerful necromancer emerges, raising an army of sentient undead soldiers! This zombie army is fully devoted to their leader—he gave them all a second shot at life and a high-ranking job in the undead army corps! The zombies may be hard at work helping the necromancer craft his newest spells for world domination, but squads of human survivors roam the earth hunting down the undead hordes while their own numbers dwindle…”

After a week of busting brains and draining skulls, HvZ culminates in an event called “extraction,” which is held from 5:50–6:00 p.m. on the final day of the game. Extraction is a fast-paced, final push of the surviving humans to the center of the main quad, the “safe zone,” after which the game ends and the safe-zoned humans are declared the winners of the game, earning glory and bragging rights forevermore. Last year, around 20 human players survived extraction, but the circumstances of each game are different, and infection rates are as fickle as the wind.

Apart from the main game, HvZ also offers optional higher-risk side missions, which rack up points for players who choose to participate in them.

“Each mission is meant to have a reward for either side if they win. For humans, this can be an extended timer. But to earn this award, players have to complete the mission.

Points are designed as a way to encourage players to put themselves at risk and have something game-related to do before extraction,” Klowden said.

These game mechanics encourage team coordination and more active playing from both sides.

After he runs through the rules, I ask Klowden my burning question: Why HvZ? It’s fun, high-energy, raw, and a pretty good distraction from your daily 100 pages of reading, but most of all, as Klowden told me, the event is communal. “It’s a weird thing that mainly exists on college campuses and it can be massive. It gives you an opportunity

to be able to do something unlike anything you’d get to do normally.”

HvZ and Me Klowden is right.

Even for me, a non-playing observer, HvZ is unlike anything I’ve had an opportunity to be a part of. Throughout the week, I become…slightly obsessed with HvZ. HvZ as a game. HvZ as a concept. HvZ as a lifestyle.

12:12 p.m., Wednesday, April 6: I am in class and intermittently sneaking looks at the UChicago HvZ website, whose meticulous analytics tell me that eight percent of players (nine people) are zombies, while the humans are sticking it out at an impressive 92 percent of total players (102 people).

Throughout the week, I see their numbers steadily decline. The “Human Survival” chart plunges and plateaus, plunges and plateaus.

At dinner, Friday, April 8: I am wondering how the humans will proceed this year at extraction.

The strategies of extraction are varied: some are tactically genius, others are as dumb as the day is long. There’s guerilla warfare, plots, schemes, and false intelligence. Seasoned HvZ player and linguistics professor Jason Riggle (self-proclaimed “patron saint of the zombie people”) told me at registration that in the past, the surviving human crew had banded together to cram themselves into recycling bins, which began to shuffle suspiciously towards the center of the quad at approximately 5:50 p.m. on extraction day. This rudimentary Trojan Horse plan, however, was quickly sussed out by the zombies, and the humans that year suffered a bitter end.

12:41 p.m., Sunday, April 10: “Are you guys still alive?” I yell to a group of HvZ players who pass by where I’m standing with my friends on the curb of Woodlawn Street.

One of them does a double-take. Is he alive? I practically see the existential dread flash before his eyes—that is, before he realizes that I had spotted the neon green bandana that had marked him as an HvZ player. “No,” he answered, perhaps a little ironic, “I’m dead.”

Extraction By the time extraction rolls around on

Tuesday, April 12, I’m ready to see some more action.

It’s 5:25 p.m., and I am hurrying to the quad, where I will hopefully witness a triumphant takedown of the last dwindling dregs of the human forces (50 people) by their bloodthirsty zombie counterparts.

In the narrow walkway between the Social Sciences Research Building and Foster Hall, I see Trigger-happy Flashlight Guy from registration, who’s apparently been converted into a zombie and is now on reconnaissance. He tells me that he’s been posted here by the zombie contingent, hoping to catch people who are walking from Woodlawn Residential Commons to the center of the quad. Armed with the analytics from UChicago HvZ, which inform him of the significant proportion of human players from Woodlawn, he hopes that he can catch a fair bit of Woodlawn humans. I wish him good luck.

When I arrive at the center of the quad where the zombies have gathered, I catch a few names and a few stories. Next to me, high on adrenaline, a zombie dives into a pile of leaves. Later, I discover that they are the infamous Liz Franson (A.B. ’19), this game’s top zombie by kill count, killer of one-fourth of total humans (33 players!) and feared by all.

“How do you do it?” I asked.

“Enthusiasm,” they said.

And hard work, apparently. For this HvZ game, Liz has created a web scraper that scrapes the UChicago HvZ website for data and creates a map of predicted human locations for optimal hunting. With their engineering skills, they’ve modified Nerf guns — the Rival Hera Nerf gun, in particular.

“I’ve ripped up all the internals [of the Nerf gun] and replaced the motors. It sounds like a lawnmower,” they said, smirking. The modded device can shoot a bullet all the way across Hutch.

New zombies join us, bearing pool noodles as reinforcements. Apparently, the pool noodles can be used by zombies to tag and “freeze” humans during extraction, immobilizing them temporarily. By 5:45 p.m., a crowd of zombies is gathered in the center of the quad. They number about 30 and are all cloistered in blockade formation around the safe zone: the circle of bushes in the cen-

ter of the quad where the humans will try to reach. T-minus five minutes. The excitement is palpable.

At 5:50 p.m., extraction begins, and the humans start sprinting. They strike haggardly in fits and bursts, one from the side of Saieh Hall, and another two from Ryerson.

The humans will have to make it to the safe zone to win. And from the looks of it, they face pretty improbable odds.

It’s chaos in the best possible way. The well-oiled machinery of the zombie collective moves like a colossal tide around the safe zone, initiating madcap dashes in various directions as the hive-mind of the horde senses an approaching human. There’s yelling, groans, exclamations of triumph and defeat, and a lot of frantic Go! Go! Go! -ing.

In the corner of my eye, one human player is in the process of losing his dignity to win it all. As he catapults himself into the bushes of the safe zone, he chucks away his gun, half his body gets covered in dirt, and he lands ribs-first. Simultaneously, another player lands alongside him within the safe zone, albeit much more gracefully.

As far as victories go, this one is pretty epic.

These two players are roommates, I find out later, Jon Rositas and Collin Polasky, both first-years at the College. They signed up for HvZ on a lark and now they’re here, at the center of it all, winning the thing. Along with Squid Tamar-Mattis (A.B. ’19), they are the only three human winners of this year’s game.

Jon recommends HvZ to every student at the college. “Lots of paranoia’s good for the heart,” he tells me as he dusts himself off, beaming.

With two minutes left on the clock: Liz leads the final, resounding chant: “What do we want?” “Brains!” The zombies yell.

“When do we want it?” “Brains!” they respond, having not heard correctly. Cue even more laughing and running.

All around me is the sound, I realize, of happiness. How wonderful, to be swept up in the simple earthly thirst for blood, brains, joy, and connection. To be reminded that we are here with each other, us living animals, zombies and humans and all.