Since fourth grade, violin professor Brandi Berry Benson knew she wanted a career in music. Read our profile in Arts & Life, pages 16.
DePaulia
Love is a curious thing; we can all feel it, but nobody really understands it. Explore the dynamics of love in Focus, page 13-14.
The
Volume #104 | Issue #14 | Feb. 10, 2020 | depauliaonline.com
Little white lie
On a campus that promotes diversity, faculty demographics say different By Lacey Latch Print Managing Editor
A report released Wednesday indicates a staggering lack of diversity among fulltime faculty at DePaul, despite the university maintaining that it offers students a campus with diversity at all levels. DePaul uses diversity of students, staff and faculty as a recruiting tool to attract prospective students, using its location in Chicago as a way of supporting the claim – yet neither the faculty nor student body
reflect the demographics of the city. According to the Census Bureau, Chicago’s population is 30 percent black and 29 percent Hispanic compared to DePaul’s student body which the university reports is 9.2 percent black and 15.8 percent Hispanic. Of the 870 full-time faculty, black and Hispanic professors only comprise about 6 percent each of the total faculty, according to the Institutional Research and Market Analytics (IRMA) Faculty Database. “Diversity is a core value at DePaul and
has been since our founding … At DePaul we understand that a diverse workforce and educational environment is directly related to our success,” states the mission statement for the Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity. The actual data on full-time faculty trends over the past decade indicates a failure to achieve that reality. The combined share of all full-time faculty at DePaul comprised of African American, Hispanic and Asian faculty members has remained unchanged, according to the report.
The report also looked at students and faculty of the same race finding that on average for each white full-time faculty, there are 21 white students, 36 black students per one black faculty, 37 for Asian faculty and a shocking 57 students for every one Hispanic faculty member. According to the report, “an upward trend of students of color per faculty of color ratio makes it increasingly more difficult to attain racial equity.” It concludes that “we are compelled by
Democratic debacle
See FACULTY COUNCIL, page 9
Men’s basketball is a joke Leitao is the punchline By Lawrence Kreymer Sports Editor
Commentary
XAVIER ORTEGA | THE DEPAULIA
Jay Willems, a volunteer at the Mt. Vernon South precinct at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa fuels up for a long night of caucusing Monday Feb. 3, 2020.
A messy Iowa caucus leaves more questions than answers By Bianca Cseke Online Managing Editor
The sounds of basketballs dribbling in the Mount Vernon High School gym fade as people trickle into the nearby cafeteria. The high school is one of Iowa’s 1,678 caucus precincts, at which attendees will help choose which presidential candidates will receive Iowa’s 41 state delegates. The precinct’s results would be made clear when attendees aligned themselves with candidates – or chose to remain uncommitted – and snippets of results from other precincts would pop up on Twitter throughout the night. It would be a long night waiting for results, but everyone would know before the morning. At least, that was the expectation. It took almost 24 hours for the first re-
sults, with 62 percent of precincts reporting, to be released. Final results still weren’t in nearly 48 hours after the caucuses ended; 92 percent of precincts had reported results at that point. The Associated Press eventually announced Feb. 6 that it could not declare a winner because the leading candidates, Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders, were so close together. Buttigieg received 13 of the state’s delegates and Sanders 12; both declared themselves the victors, Buttigieg saying so before any results had been reported. Officials blamed the delay on coding issues with a new smartphone app, created by Shadow, Inc., that caused it to report out only partial data even though people were able to enter accurate results. Technology flaws were compounded by user error, as some precinct captains responsible for reporting results to the state party — many
of whom are senior citizens — struggled to navigate the software. As precinct captains abandoned the app to call in results manually, phone lines at the Iowa Democratic Party headquarters overloaded, delaying results further. Calling what had happened “unacceptable,” Troy Price, chair of the Iowa Democratic party, told reporters before the first set of results were announced Feb. 4 that the party “took the necessary steps” to ensure the data was accurate. He said this was done “out of an abundance of caution.” Despite circulating conspiracy theories, there is no concrete evidence the Iowa Democratic Party purposely withheld results, pushed any candidate’s campaign to victory or otherwise encouraged the chaos and uncertainty that followed the Iowa caucuses.
See IOWA, page 5
Albert Einstein is famously credited with coining the phrase, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Welcome to the world of DePaul men’s basketball, where the opponents change, the final scoreline is different, but each performance is a replica of the previous game. And without fail, the season ends in a familiar place: the bottom of the Big East. This season, however, there was real hope that the Blue Demons would escape from the cellar and emerge as a contender for the NCAA Tournament – which they haven’t participated in since 2004. DePaul jumped out to a 12-1 record in their non-conference games, knocking off Texas Tech, Iowa and Minnesota and rose all the way to No. 27 in the AP Poll in late December. The groundwork was laid by the Blue Demons to make a run for an at-large bid in the NCAA Tournament, and all they needed to do was channel their non-conference success into conference play. The talent was there for DePaul to compete with the best Big East teams — and it still is. The head coach, however, is not in place for the Blue Demons to make any noise in such a deep conference. We’ve seen enough. Five years of disastrous basketball
See LEITAO, page 27