The sun disappeared for 10 days at the beginning of the year, yet most people didn’t notice until it finally returned. Read about the phenomenon in Focus, pages 14-15.
DePaulia
The
Volume #104 | Issue #15 | Feb. 17, 2020 | depauliaonline.com
Enrollment doesn’t reflect environment
Analysis:
2019 Preventing Sexual Violence in Higher Education Act Report
By Mackenzie Murtaugh News Editor
By Ella Lee Arts & Life Editor
When Jasmine Boubas was a freshman at DePaul, she and a group of friends were followed and verbally harassed by a group of male students while walking back to their dorms from a party. “It was uncomfortable and quite scary witnessing such aggressiveness from a large group of boys,” she said. Reports of stalking, made by or about DePaul students to the Title IX coordinator, have been on the rise for the past three years, according to the annual Preventing Sexual Violence in Higher Education Act report. Eleven reports of stalking were made in 2016. In the most recent report, released in 2019, 26 reports were made. Most of these reports were filed directly with DePaul’s Title IX Coordinator. Only seven have been made anonymously since DePaul began aggregating the information for the 2017 report, which details reports made in 2016.
RYAN GILROY | THE DEPAULIA
Jake Bolger looks up in the locker room during the second intermission against the Concordia Falcons on Friday, Feb. 14, 2020. DePaul’s hockey team traveled to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin for the Northern Collegiate Hockey League playoffs, where their chances were cut short with a 4-1 loss in the quarterfinals.
See ANALYSIS, page 4
Down and out
Paula Bluff, the interim vice president of enrollment management, makes a simple yet telling statement on the first page of 2019’s Enrollment Summary, released last week. “Strong student outcomes were not enough to offset an overall decrease in continuing undergraduates,” she said. In the autumn quarter of 2019, DePaul’s undergraduate enrollment totaled 14,214, according to the summary. The university is experiencing a slow decline in undergraduate enrollment, as Bluff put candidly. In the summary, Bluff does note that DePaul is not alone in this decline. In a report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, a nonprofit higher-education research organization, national enrollment in universities and colleges declined by 1.7 percent, approximately 300,000 students, within the last year. The summary compares the enrolled undergraduates from this year, 14,214, to last year’s 14,507, a 2.1 percent drop in enrollment. DePaul stands at only slightly above the average decline in enrollment as compared with other universities nationwide. The data that the summary highlights is the size of this
See ENROLLMENT, page 7
From red hot to ice cold, this season is officially dead By Lawrence Kreymer Sports Editor
Commentary DePaul’s season has officially hit rock bottom. The Blue Demons were on life support heading into Saturday’s game against Creighton at the Chi Health Center. After a 40-minute beatdown, the Bluejays pulled the plug on DePaul’s miserable conference season. It’s over. It’s done. The Blue Demons had a week to prepare for their game against No. 23 Creighton, and the performance they put on the court was flat out embarrassing with the end result being 93-64, the third worst loss of Dave Leitao’s second tenure. DePaul’s slim NCAA and NIT hopes were hanging on by a thread entering Saturday’s game, so the reasonable expectation was they would take every remaining game as a must-win. Instead, the Blue Demons looked disinterested and
unprepared from the tip and, as a result, got handed a humiliating defeat against a team that looked like they were playing for its season. Creighton, on the other hand, played like a team possessed and took a 4228 halftime lead and turned that into a 25-point lead two minutes into the second half. Their coach, Greg McDermott, had his team ready and fired up to face the Blue Demons, a game the Bluejays went into as a nine-point favorite. Leitao, on the other hand, looked lost and a coach who has ran out of answers in a season that has taken a turn for the worst. His star junior forward, Paul Reed, came out flat and with not a lot of energy in the first half, scoring no points and only playing nine minutes. Reed finished the game with only three points in 12 minutes of action, both season lows for the Florida native. The rest of the team, besides Romeo Weems and Charlie Moore, seemed like they have tuned out their head coach
See BASKETBALL, page 27
NATI HARNIK | ASSOCIATED PRESS
Oscar Lopez Jr. watches Creighton’s Ty-Shon Alexander celebrate a dunk on Feb. 15, 2020.