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WEDNESDAY • DECEMBER 2, 2015

CHICAGOMAROON.COM

THE INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO SINCE 1892

ISSUE 17 • VOLUME 127

New vacancies in Student Government Exec Committee Wendy Lee Senior News Reporter On November 30, Student Government (SG) announced that a position on its Executive Committee, the Undergraduate Liaison to the Board of Trustees, is now vacant.

The vacancy comes after

The University cancelled classes and heightened security on campus on Monday, November 30 after an online threat was made against the students and faculty over the weekend.

COURTESY OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

University resumes classes Tuesday after closure due to gun threat Sarah Manhardt Deputy Editor-in-Chief Classes and activities resumed normally Tuesday, following an online threat of gun violence reported Sunday night that shut down the Hyde Park campus on Monday. There will be an increased security presence across campus through the end of the autumn quarter, according to an e-mail sent to the University community by President Robert J. Zimmer.

On Monday Jabari R. Dean was arrested in connection with the threat and charged in court with transmitting a threat in interstate commerce. Dean, 21, is a University of Illinois at Chicago

(UIC) student. If convicted, the charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

According to the criminal complaint filed by Special Agent Sean Burke, Dean admitted to posting the threat and said he removed it shortly after posting.

According to the Sun-Times, investigators found no guns in his off-campus apartment. Dean was released into his mother’s custody on Tuesday and ordered not to use the Internet, according to DNAInfo. Federal prosecutors stated in court Monday that he did not have the means to carry out the threat.

The online threat was posted to worldstarhiphop.com and threatened to “execute approxi-

mately 16 white male students and or staff ” in response to the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald last year by a white Chicago Police Department officer, according to a CPD report obtained by the Chicago Tribune. The threat was posted in response to a movie clip from the 1995 movie Panther, and was reported to the FBI on Sunday morning by a New York resident.

It read: “This is my only warning. At 10AM Monday morning, I’m going to the campus quad of the University of Chicago. I will be armed with an M-4 carbine and two desert eagles, all fully loaded. I will execute apTHREAT continued on page 3

New Metra budget to result in fare increases Emily Feigenbaum Maroon Contributor On November 11, the Metra Board of Directors approved a new budget that will result in a two percent fare increase on all tickets.

Next year’s budget totals at $945.5 million, covering $759.8 million in operating costs and $185.7 million in capital expenditures.

A consequence of the new budget will be fare increases for

Metra users beginning on February 1, 2016. Monthly passes will increase by $2.50, 10-ride tickets will increase by $1.75, and one-way tickets will increase by $0.25. The fare increases will affect all Metra lines regardless of the number of zones in each line.

According to a report released

by Metra, operating expenses are projected to grow by $40.1 million in the upcoming year, including obligated wage and benefit increases, higher maintenance costs, additional police

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surveillance, new equipment, and utility price augmentations.

However, due to lower fuel prices and expected efficiencies, the operating costs will grow only $15.1 million from the previous year.

The $185.7 million budget for capital expenditures will account for locomotive work, structural replacements, Positive Train Control (PTC) related work, facility and equipment costs, station and parking imMETRA continued on page 4

third-year Andrew Young’s resignation on November 27. As liaison, Young was responsible for representing the student body to the Board of Trustees and working to get students involved with the Board. Young will be resigning in order to pursue an internship with Morgan Stanley during the academic year.

“Since I was elected, it has been a privilege to serve the undergraduate population at the University of Chicago...I have accepted an internship for the coming quarters that asks me to devote more of my time than will reasonably allow for me to balance with my current comVACANT continued on page 4

Campus North house name chosen in honor of UChicago alumnus Adam Thorp Associate News Editor One of the nine houses in Campus North will be named after Robert Behar, a doctor, businessman and graduate of the College (‘83), the Pritzker Medical School (‘87), and the Booth School of Business (‘11).

The decision was first made public in an interview with Behar in the fall issue of the University of Chicago Magazine. In a meeting of the Special Housing Advisory committee in October, before the interview was published, student members of the committee were told by representatives of College housing that

the names of three Campus North houses had been chosen but will not be announced until Winter Quarter at the earliest, according to notes from the meeting. The Special Housing Advisory Committee includes representatives of each of the to-be-retired houses.

Behar House will be one of eight new houses in Campus North (two of the nine communities will merge). In April of last year, the College announced that the nine houses in five off-campus dorms would be “retired” after Campus North opened and those dorms closed. Members of those houses could then move together as a community into

Campus North.

Members of the committee were told that names of the retired houses would not be used as placeholder names until new names were assigned. None of the chosen names had yet been assigned to a specific group of students moving into Campus North.

At a more recent meeting of the committee a week ago, a representative of College Housing confirmed that Behar would be the name of a Campus North house.

In his interview with University of Chicago Magazine, Behar said the house would be renamed after his foundation made a $2 million donation BEHAR continued on page 3

Law professors sign letter urging Rauner to accept Syrian refugees Katherine Vega Senior News Reporter On November 19, 30 Chicago-based experts on immigration and refugee law issued a letter to Governor Bruce Rauner urging him to accept Syrian refugees.

Among these experts were several University of Chicago professors.

A few days before the release of the letter, Rauner had announced that Illinois would stop accepting refugees from Syria due to concerns about the thoroughness of federal screening procedures. Rauner is one of many governors to have announced an end to reset-

tlement of Syrian refugees, despite legal concerns about their ability to do so.

The letter describes the realities of the Syrian refugee crisis and the hardships the refugees face. It also addresses security concerns.

“Refugees are the most thoroughly vetted group of people who come to the United States,” the letter asserts. “Security screenings are rigorous and involve the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Department of Defense and multiple intelligence agencies.” The authors also call on Rauner “to demonstrate leadership by speaking out

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against the scapegoating of any group during this time of crisis and to ensure that our nation’s humanitarian efforts are robust.”

“Unlike most other resettlement nations, the U.S. does not select refugees for resettlement based on their educational or vocational backgrounds. Rather, our nation leads the world by resettling more refugees than any other nation and by offering a safe haven to the world’s most vulnerable,” Jessica Darrow, a signee of the letter and director of special projects for the International Social Welfare Program at UChicago’s School of Social REFUGEE continued on page 3

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THE CHICAGO MAROON | NEWS | December 2, 2015

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Uncommon Interview: Bernadine Warren, recipient of the Aramark Ring of Stars award Kaitlyn Akin Maroon Contributor Ms. Bernadine Warren has worked at Cathey Dining Commons since its opening in 2013, prior to which she worked at Pierce Dining Commons. She is often found swiping students into Cathey with a smile and her signature “Happy ___day!” In October, she received the Aramark Ring of Stars award in Phoenix, Arizona for her positivity and enthusiasm.

Chicago Maroon (CM): How did it feel when you won the Aramark Ring of Stars award?

Bernadine Warren (BW): Absolutely amazing, speechless, just completely humbled.

And I’m like, ‘Are you sure that’s me?’ Just really amazing and so grateful, totally surprised, I had no idea.

CM: How did you find out that you won the award?

BW: I was at home and I got a phone call and my boss was telling me to call, that the contest winners were trying to contact me. He gave me the number and I called them. From there, everything just pretty much fell in place. I contacted them and they gave me information, they told me I did win, and so they needed information to arrange the flight and to arrange the hotels and they told me where I was going, that I would be going to Phoenix, Arizona, which

Ms. Bernadine is awarded the honor of being inducted into Aramark’s Ring of Stars.

ALEXANDRA DAVIS | THE CHICAGO MAROON

was such a beautiful place, amazing. I’d never been there before. So from there it went, I guess you could say, accordingly!

CM: Did you just go to Phoenix recently?

BW: Yes, I went to Phoenix in October and I stayed for four days and it was the most beautiful place you would want to visit, I’m like “Wow, I could live here!” And the people were some of the most kindest, generous, heartwarming, loving people you could want to meet. It was so beautiful, it was fantastic.

CM: How long have you worked at Cathey Dining Commons?

BW: Well, I originally started in Pierce. Pierce used to be on 55th and University. Now, Pierce is torn down now, but it was one of the most loving, family-oriented dining rooms.

You would just want to come in and everybody felt like family because they were all family, that’s what we considered our family, and it was just a wonderful place. So, Pierce closed and I came over here in 2013.

I loved being at Pierce but then I love people wherever I go, so this is—it’s huge, but it’s very nice, it’s very nice, and I enjoy being here.

CM: What’s the best thing about working at the University dining halls? What do you enjoy about it?

BW: I enjoy everything. I enjoy the people, everything.

It’s just overall a great, wonderful dining experience. You might have felt a little bit more at home in Pierce. It was just whatever you needed, whatever we could get you—no problem. And this, it’s a little large, but it’s good. So everything, everything.

Elected Student Government (SG) members will be voting on new revisions to the Student Leadership Stipend program at SG’s upcoming General Assembly meeting.

The program was first unveiled in fall of 2014, and it received serious student backlash after Student Government announced that executive cabinet members would be receiving stipends for their work. 700 students signed a petition in favor of a referendum on the program.

There was no referendum, but the stipend policy has since undergone significant revision.

Calvin Cottrell, a Class of 2018 representative, said that the stipend controversy was mainly rooted in miscommunication between Student Government and the student body. “[The stipend program] was [originally] planned to be done

through Student Government by awarding these grants to people in the Cabinet, whose members are not elected but appointed [by the Executive Cabinet].

These members do a lot of administrative functions, and there are also several students [within Student Government] who put in a lot of outside time to help us….Because these administrative positions are so close to the elected student body, [students] didn’t think the stipend program was transparent enough. People thought if you won a seat on Student Government, you were…. getting paid for that work, and that was never the plan,” Cottrell said.

Since the controversy, the stipend program has been completely redesigned to award financial grants to student leaders in RSOs, rather than students within Student Government.

Fourth-year Tyler Kissinger, President of Student Government, proposed the revised pro-

UCMC bond rating affirmed; outlook rises to “stable” Moody’s Investors Service has affirmed the University of Chicago Medical Center’s (UCMC) bond ratings and raised its bond ratings outlook from “negative” to “stable.”

Moody’s affirmation of the UCMC’s Aa3 rating, its fourth-highest rating, and its revision of the rating outlook to “stable” come as good news to the UCMC after Moody’s threatened a rating downgrade in both its 2013 and 2014 reports.

The new report indicates that the investor service remains confident that the UCMC poses a very low credit risk despite its $693 million

gram in April, and it was passed in General Assembly at the end of spring quarter.

“We are going to be giving grants to students who do impactful and substantial work through their RSOs. We’re going to be paying them and giving them these grants in lieu of them having work-study hours. The idea is that [these grants] will replace some of their work-study hours so that they can devote themselves to planning more things on campus,” Cottrell said.

Fourth-year Lauren Culbertson, chair of Student Government’s Committee on Registered Student Organizations (CORSO), said that there will be a total of 40 stipends available for students this academic year, with each stipend being worth $250.

“We’re opening up applications to everybody, so you don’t have to be on work-study to apply for the stipend. We’re trying STIPEND continued on page 4

of rated outstanding debt.

The outlook revision to “stable” reflects UCMC’s improvements in operating margins in the 2014 and 2015 fiscal years and UCMC’s maintenance of a strong relationship with the University of Chicago, which holds Moody’s third-highest rating, Aa2.

Moody’s report states that the rating could rise if the University of Chicago gives the UCMC more “explicit support,” and that a weakening of the relationship could prompt a rating downgrade.

The report cited three key metrics for the UCMC’s upcoming fiscal years that will

determine future ratings: operating margins (income divided by costs of operation), liquidity ratios (cash assets divided by short-term debts), and debt pay downs (the difference between debts repaid and new loans taken out).

Ashley Heher, a spokeswoman for UCMC, said UCMC does not “comment on specific ratings or the assessment of our outlook from a rating agency” but remains “committed to providing the highest standards of quality and safety in the care we provide our patients.”

—Pete Grieve

Kenwood Academy rated one of two top public high schools in Chicago Kenwood Academy High School was one of only two open enrollment neighborhood public high schools in Chicago to receive the highest rating, level 1+, in the Chicago Public Schools’ 2015 School Rating Policy Report.

The rating is an improvement for the school from last year’s level 1, the second-highest rating. The only other open enrollment neighborhood high school to receive the level 1+ rating was Lincoln Park High School in Lincoln Park.

Principal Gregory Jones attributed the school’s high rating to steady improvement across several metrics, including ACT

performances, attendance rates, and early college credentials.

“I credit the gains to our focus on whole school improvement, not a particular area,” Jones said. “In addition to the academic shifts, the school has been intentional around building a culture that supports a well-rounded high school experience. As a whole, students have access to a broad range of high quality extracurricular programs and they enjoy coming to school.”

Jones sees the strong sense of community at Kenwood as a key to its success.

“As related to other Chicago public schools, I believe

Kenwood is quite unique. It is a place that effectively serves all students well. In the same vein, faculty and staff are fully engaged in developing positive and sustainable relationships with students. Consequently, students view Kenwood as a second home and often return after high school graduation,” Jones said. “As a school community, we have been successful at creating a space where students have the necessary wrap-around supports to ensure a successful academic and beyond-curriculum experience.”

—Emily Kramer

Washington Park veteran’s shelter threatened by closure Emily Kramer Maroon Contributor

BERNADINE continued on page 4

Student Government unveils newly revised Student Leadership Stipends Wendy Lee Senior News Reporter

NEWS IN BRIEF

The Remake the World (RTW) Veterans Center, an organization located across the street from Washington Park that feeds homeless veterans, is currently facing $16,000 in fines and the possibility of being shut down after over five years of service.

According to RTW’s mission statement, the organization seeks to promote American patriotism by supporting veterans in the local community in conjunction with its affiliate Veterans Service Organization (VSO).

The RTW Center, located on South Martin Luther King Drive between East 55th and East 56th streets, was cited by the City of Chicago for 32 different code violations.

Some of the code violations, such as for malfunctioning smoke detectors and exposed electrical wiring, have been found to pose safety issues for the RTW staff.

Other code violations, such as the requirement placed on the organization to acquire a licensed architect’s plans for the general revisions they

plan to make, are more longterm and complicated issues.

With an approaching court date of December 1, RTW has been trying to correct as many code violations as possible while soliciting money to cover the fines.

On November 6, RTW hosted a fundraising event at Pazzo’s, an Italian restaurant located near the organization’s center. Tickets were $100 each and all proceeds went towards repairs on the RTW building and paying down the organization’s debt.

“The turnout was okay, but the event did not raise the type of money that we would have liked to have raised,” said co-founder of RTW Arnetha GholstonHabeel. “We need more resources. We need a bigger building so that people won’t have to stand outside in the cold, waiting to eat.

We need a bigger facility, and we need sponsors. We need people to know that we’re here.”

The RTW is not funded by the government because its mission is to support all veterans regardless of their discharge status, according to Gholston-Habeel.

Funding from some federal

programs cannot be used to serve people who received a dishonorable discharge.

At the start of 2014, Student Government (SG) donated $1,500 out of the Student Life Fee funds to RTW to help cover the $4,000 in damages that the organization was facing due to freezing temperatures.

Although the SG’s donation to the organization allowed it to repair the damages to the RTW center, many of the organization’s programs, such as its hot meals programs, remained shut down. The $16,000 in fines that the organization is currently facing is a much larger obstacle than anything the organization has encountered before.

“We need support and we need finances to be able to eliminate the fines that we’re facing,” GholstonHabeel said. “We need the community to say, ‘we value what you do and we want to keep you here.’ We can’t survive without additional resources; we’ve already given all that we have.”

Donations can be made through the Go Fund Me page on the organization’s website.

THE CHICAGO MAROON | NEWS | December 2, 2015

Kenwood residents argue against commercial development Sonia Schlesinger News Staff Residents of the North Kenwood neighborhood have created an organization to protest a new commercial development in a mostly residential area of their neighborhood. They met for the first time on November 12 to discuss a plan of action.

Kenwood resident Douglas Jackson and his neighbors formed the organization, Hold Alderman Accountable and Responsible Coalition (HAARC), after 4th Ward Alderman Will Burns allowed spot-zoning, the rezoning of a specific piece of land of a different type from its neighboring property. The Quad City Development Corporation, a commercial organization that provides technical and managerial assistance to small businesses, was permitted to purchase office space in an abandoned residential building at 4200 South Berkeley Avenue. The Corporation also announced plans to rent part of the building to The Cara Program, an organization that fights homelessness. These changes would convert land originally zoned for residential use into a commercial property.

“It was kind of a careless move on the alderman’s part,” Jackson said of the re-zoning. “He was trying to

pull a zone change over on us for the property that’s connected to my alley, so we got together and formed an organization.” He explained that homeowners in the area are particularly worried about the potential increase in traffic due to the new office, as several have young children.

At the November 12 meeting, which was held in Kennicott Park on Lake Park Avenue, HAARC members explained to Burns that they wished he had consulted with the community before allowing the zone change. Legally, community members can question the zone change 30 days before the zone hearing and since the meeting, the zone change has been pulled by Burns. Before the building of the office proceeds, Burns will meet again with the community to discuss the use of the property.

Jackson clarified that the neighborhood’s opposition to the development was unrelated to the organizations in question. “A meeting like this could just as well have been a fundraiser for those organizations,” he said. “But the property in question is surrounded by half-million dollar homes and in no other neighborhood would you go right in and say we’re going to bring offices and homeless people into the community.”

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New stationery store opens in Harper Court Annie Guo Maroon Contributor On November 20, Noteworthy Notes, a Lakeview-based stationery store, opened a satellite location in Hyde Park at 5231 South Harper Court.

Owner of Noteworthy Notes, Cindy Rudman (M.B.A. ’97), founded the store 16 years ago in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago.

Noteworthy Notes sells everything from stationery products like wedding invitations to cosmetic bags and jewelry. A distinctive feature of the store is its ability to personalize over 50 percent of the products that are sold to customers. “Personalized, thoughtful gifts allow people to give something unique,” Rudman said.

While Noteworthy Notes’ primary store in Lakeview is still where all the intricate embroidery and personalization are done, Rudman decided to sign a six-month lease to expand into the Hyde Park neighborhood. She noted the lack of stationery and personalized gifts services in the area as a reason that she chose to open shop here. The new store is in Harper Court, a development on East 53rd Street that is financed by the University.

According to Rudman, Noteworthy Notes’ second location will

The new store will sell stock as well as personalized cards and other stationery.

COURTESY OF NOTEWORTHY NOTES

provide a more convenient option for local college students while still supplying the same personalization options, just with more time needed to transport the items to and from their first location.

“I opened a second location of my store in Hyde Park in order to

offer a great selection of personalized gifts and special event invitations to the neighborhood. We love making our clients gift-giving superstars and hope the residents of Hyde Park will allow us the privilege of assisting them in that capacity.”

“There will be an increased security presence across campus through the end of the autumn quarter” THREAT continued from front

proximately 16 white male students and or staff, which is the same number of time McDonald was killed. I will then die killing any number of white policeman in the process. This is not a joke. I am to do my part and rid the world of white devils. I expect you do the same.”

Dean signed the post with the initials JRD and a Chicago Bulls logo, according to the police report.

The threat led to the closure of the Hyde Park campus on Monday. Classes and activities were cancelled, and campus facilities, libraries, gyms, cafes, the University bookstore, the Charter School campuses, and Laboratory schools were shut down.

“Based on the FBI’s assessment of this threat and recent tragic events at other campuses across the country, we have decided in consultation with federal and local law enforcement officials, to exercise caution by canceling all

classes and activities on the Hyde Park campus through midnight on Monday,” Zimmer wrote an the e-mail sent Sunday evening.

According to an e-mail sent by Jennifer Luttig-Komrosky, there was extra security staff outside dormitories and dining halls. Cathey Dining Commons was open on Monday for students living in the Renee Granville-Grossman Residential Commons and Burton-Judson Courts. Bartlett Dining Commons and all campus cafes were closed.

UChicago students’ responses were mixed when they learned of the threat on Sunday night.

“I was really surprised,” fourth-year Peter Boxley said. “We’ve had snow days and lockdowns but I’ve never had a time when school was cancelled because there was some kind of violence issue, like a terrorist threat or a gunman.

It was no school so I was excited but then I was like, ‘should I really be excited

about that?’”

Claire Roosien, a fourth-year history Ph.D. student, was largely unconcerned when she received the first email from Zimmer. “Honestly, I wasn’t that worried,” she said. “I mean, I stayed off campus and everything, but there were people who didn’t even want to leave their houses, and I figured it was being taken care of.”

For philosophy graduate student Daniel Rodriguez-Navas, the threat localized the racially-charged violence and protests taking place on campuses across the country. “In a sense it brings it closer to home, all of these events that are happening around the country.”

He added that Zimmer’s initial email left him with many questions. “What happens after Monday, after campus is shut down, if the threat doesn’t get caught? How serious is the threat? Is it just someone who happened to say something somewhere online or was

the person prepared? It was the kind of information not in the email that raised some concerns.”

Overall, however, students appeared pleased with the University’s decision to shut down campus and send periodic updates.

“I thought it was good. I mean, I didn’t have a huge amount of background–even afterwards when they kind of explained more, but it seemed like they did a good job of letting people know–not really what was going on–but enough to keep everyone safe, and being calm about the way it was handled. The Reg wasn’t open, but it seemed like they did a fine job,” Boxley said.

None of the students interviewed expressed concern for their continued safety, but Roosien said she is wary of the increased security presence promised by Zimmer.

“They were probably right to shut

down campus,” she said. “Given the nature of the threat, it seemed reasonable. I am a little concerned about the heightened police and security presence that they’re now promising to have for the rest of the quarter because I don’t like that kind of atmosphere, especially given issues with police brutality and racial profiling with the UCPD.” In his final e-mail on Monday, Zimmer wrote, “I want to express my great admiration for and appreciation of members of our community—including faculty, students, staff, and friends—for their mutually supportive and thoughtful approach in what has been a challenging day.”

Zeke Gillman and Raymond Fang contributed reporting

“Governors are saying [that] they don’t want to take people… but [they] don’t have a say...”

REFUGEE continued from front

Service Administration, said in an e-mail. “If the United States Congress were to vote to curtail the refugee resettlement program, the U.S. role as a principled leader in this regard would come to an end.”

Apart from the consequences the refugee crisis raises in foreign

policy, the battle over whether or not to accept refugees is also raising questions about the U.S. Constitution and the limits of state sovereignty.

“What the governors are saying is that they don’t want to take people…but governors don’t have a say to let in people into their states,”

said signee Susan Gzesh, lecturer and executive director of the University of Chicago Pozen Family Center for Human Rights.

Under the Constitution, the federal government is entrusted with the authority to institute laws regarding naturalization and immigration. Despite this, Governor

Rauner and nearly 30 other governors say they will stop accepting Syrian refugees.

“The money we provide for the resettlement of refugees is federal money, but it’s administered through the state government to social services agencies throughout the state…so [the state govern-

ment] can make it unpleasant or uncomfortable for those agencies, and, of course, they can make it politically difficult. And even if they don’t have the power to do it they can persuade the federal government,” Gzesh said. “But I don’t know what their leverage is exactly.”

One of nine houses in Campus North will be named after Robert Behar BEHAR continued from front

made a $2 million donation to the University. The Dr. Robert A. Behar Foundation was created a little more than four months ago, according to a filing with the Texas Secretary of

State.

Behar helped found a network of cancer treatment centers in Texas.

Behar is Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer for North Cypress Medical Center, a hospital

in the suburbs of Houston he founded in 2007. The son of Cuban refugees, Behar grew up in Chicago.

Behar and Cypress North Medical Center are the target of a lawsuit

by Aetna, a large insurance firm, that

claims the hospital used deceptive billing practices in order to overcharge it by as much as $120 million.

The suit was filed this February.

Behar started his time at the college living in Pierce Tower, a dorm

that stood on the site of the new Campus North until it was torn down in 2013.

THE CHICAGO MAROON | NEWS | December 2, 2015

“It is critical that we fill this position before the quarter ends so that the new liason can... represent the [undergrads] strongly come winter quarter.”

VACANT continued from front

mitment as Undergraduate Liaison. I soundly believe achieving my career goals post-graduation is incumbent upon me committing fully to this internship,” Young said in an official statement of resignation.

In an e-mail to College Council, second-year Eric Holmberg, chair of College Council, encouraged class representatives to reach out to anybody who might be interested in the position.

“It is critical that we fill this position before the quarter ends

so that the new liaison can be on-board and ready to represent the undergraduate student body strongly come winter quarter….

We have already received three applications, and I anticipate a few more will be submitted as we approach the deadline tonight at midnight,” Holmberg said in the e-mail.

SG also announced it will be accepting applications for the position of Community and Government Liaison, which has been vacant since third-year Alvina “Nina” Katemauswa resigned on September 13. The

Community and Government Liaison “represents the student body to members of the community, and works to get students more involved in Hyde Park, Woodlawn, and the South Side,” according to SG’s website.

SG will be accepting applications for the Undergraduate Liaison to the Board of Trustees until 11:59 p.m. on Monday, November 30. SG will also be accepting applications for the position of Community and Government Liaison through Wednesday, December 2.

Grants will be given to students who do affective and substantial work through their RSOs STIPEND continued from page 2

to keep somewhat of a ratio of work-study to non-work-study and financial aid to non–financial aid. Everyone is welcome to apply for the stipend,” Culbertson said.

Cottrell said that stipends will be awarded on a quarterly basis in order to accommodate the typical time commitments of RSO leaders.

“We reached out to the leaders of the largest RSOs on campus, [and] we did a survey on what the time commitments were.

We found that when running one of the largest RSOs, the average week comes up to around 10 hours, and that’s about how much time people put into their work-study jobs. So, for every hour that we’re paying [students] to not have a work-study job, they can put more time into their RSOs.” Each application will be reviewed by all 11 members of CORSO on a need-blind basis.

Applicants will be required to explain what type of work they do within their RSOs, what type of benefit they bring to the general student body through their RSO, and how having this grant would help them do more substantial work on campus.

Both Cottrell and Culbertson said they encourage all students to submit an application for the stipend, regardless of their leadership position.

“There are no prerequisites to apply. You can apply no matter what level you are in your RSO. You don’t have to be the RSO’s president. You don’t even have to be on the RSO’s board. You just have to show that you do really important and influential work

on campus to help bring new skills and information to the student body,” Cottrell said.

“RSOs are the lifeblood of campus, and they really contribute to student life and are a great place for students to build skills and have experiences outside of a regular academic environment.

We’d like to provide some kind of incentive [for students] to take on leadership positions and be able to compensate them for the work that they do on campus,” Culbertson said.

Both Culbertson and Cottrell, who are spearheading the program, decided to make transparency a primary goal of the stipend program this year after last year’s controversy. This is particularly evident in the fact that elected Student Government members will not be eligible to apply for these grants. “[Last year], students thought that Student Government had come up with a grant policy to pay itself, and that wasn’t what was happening. That’s why we went back to the drawing board to change the policy: we want to get across that we’re listening to people. We’re taking their concerns into account, and we’re trying to change things up. By going through RSOs and by having mechanisms in place to make sure that these grants are going to a variety of students, we get at the same idea [as last year’s policy] that Student Government wants to help people gain skills and have really impactful experiences here on campus,” Cottrell said.

Culbertson echoed this sentiment, stating that the stipend program was rewritten to specifically address last year’s concerns.

“We really want to emphasize

that this is a brand new policy. It really has no attachment to last year’s policy, [and] we’re kind of open to anything right now, given the backlash we received with the stipend policy last year….The policy could always change based on the critique that we may get, and we want to make [the program] as accommodating to students as we can.”

Culbertson also noted that accountability measures were included in this year’s policy in order to ensure that stipend recipients were doing substantial work in their RSOs. “We’re going to require students who receive the stipends to submit meeting minutes so that we have an idea of the work that they’re doing. We’re also going to have CORSO members check in on one or two meetings and events per quarter to make sure that students are putting in the hours that they said they were going to put in.”

The stipend is going to be funded through the Student Life Fee, and a total of $10,000 has been budgeted for the program this year. Cottrell said he hopes that the program receives more funding as it solidifies its presence on campus.

“We want to help the broader student body and community do more work through their RSOs. We will really be looking to have each of the representatives on College Council advertise for this program because we want as many people as possible to apply….Hopefully, in the next two quarters, we will get this program up and running. I’m going to try to increase the funding [of the program] so that there can be [more grants] to distribute.”

“I enjoy everything [about working at the University]. I enjoy the people, everything. It’s just overall a great, wonderful dining experience.” ing people, learning how to be kind to people. So no motto, just gratefulness, thankfulness, and just helping me to be more appreciative. So, I guess I just love people and I guess it’s just being grateful and thankful.

BERNADINEcontinuedfrompage2

CM: What is the strangest thing you’ve seen happen in a dining hall in your years here?

Any fun anecdotes?

BW: Let’s see, nothing really strange. People do always have a really great sense of humor, so we get to laugh, we get the joy of laughter. I guess just the joy of seeing people everyday.

But nothing really strange, but like I said, people really have a great sense of humor, so we get to laugh, the joy of laughter.

CM: A lot of people right now are really stressed because finals are coming up. So, if you had a message to give the students who are freaking out, what would you tell them?

BW: Well, I always usually say, ‘Now, when you’re in grammar school, you’re dreaming of getting to high school.’ I would say most of us always have a dream. So that same dream, as a young boy or young girl, that you wanted to grow up to be—maybe a teacher, an astronaut, a doctor—[you have] that same dream till you graduate from grammar school to high school, and here you’re in college. So you’re right here;

CM: Around campus you are known for being so cheerful all the time—how do you maintain such a positive attitude? What’s your motto?

BW: There’s no motto—life itself is amazing. There’s no perfect life, but life is amazingly beautiful and just appreciating every day, not taking nothing for granted, appreciat-

The article entitled “Uncommon Interview: Foundtain Walker, new UCPD Chief of Police” in the November 24 issue, incorrectly stated that Marlon Lynch resigned from his position as chief of police, when he was in fact promoted to associative vice president for Safety, Security, and Civic Affairs.

The article entitled “Student Government announces a new vacancy in its Executive Committee” online on December 1, incorrectly stated that Young would resign to work as an incoming summer analyst at Goldman Sachs.

Though Young will be working at Goldman Sachs this summer, he cited a different internship with Morgan Stanley as his reason for leaving.

TO SUBMIT A CORRECTION , PLEASE EMAIL EDITOR @ CHICAGOMAROON . COM

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you’re living that dream! So you’ve come all the way from there, and you’re right here. So just taking that look around and seeing that there’s no barriers, nothing blocks you but you, and that same dream, that same aspiration, [is] just continuing, just being encouraged, and just knowing that you can make it from there— there’s nothing really to stop you. You can always make it.

And, I guess at times you just might need to, you just have to encourage your own self. So just encouraging yourself and be willing to—you have good days, you have bad days—but regardless, just be willing to just keep smiling. Regardless of whatever, you’re going to make it. You’re always going to make it. And just taking the steps to press forward and to do just that—to keep going, to make it.

CORRECTION

TW YM NL J // NSF ¹8 Q

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VIEWPOINTS

Editorial & Op-Ed DECEMBER 2, 2015

BLACKLIGHTxMAROON

When will my reflection show?

Kids of color need to grow up with books that reflect diversity When I was a kid, my parents would only buy me black dolls. There was Christie, the black Barbie with straight hair, and Maddison, the lightskinned “My Scene” doll with actual curly hair, and my “Addy American Girl” doll, which was my favorite thing in the world. I had a little dollhouse with a little black family that came with a little dog. At the time, I never understood why my parents were so determined for me to grow up surrounded by toys that had the same skin color as I do.

They tried to do the same thing with books, but I loved to read too much and soon ran out of books with black protagonists. A lot of the time, I could only find historical novels about slavery. I didn’t even realize how problematic it was that the only black “American Girl” doll with a background was a slave. In books where the author never explicitly mentioned a character’s race, I always pictured them as black.

I remember telling a friend that I thought Harry, Ron, and Hermione were all black

and she laughed at me. “How could they be black?” she said.

“They’re from England. And, besides, there’s a white kid on the cover.”

In the world of literature there’s this idea that stories about black people aren’t “relatable.” Books about black people don’t sell. But why does someone have to be white to be relatable? It’s not like black people never read. Every year, there are hundreds of children’s and young adult books with white main characters.

Over a 20-year period, from 1994 to 2014, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center found that only 10 percent of children’s books published featured a main character of color. Characters of color are also rarely ever depicted on book covers. And books that are written about black characters are often historical novels with slave narratives or “hood chronicles” filled with characters that are stereotypically ghetto.

Junot Díaz, who spoke recently at UChicago as a part of OMSA’s heritage series,

once said something extremely powerful: “If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.” Like me, he grew up as a kid of color and didn’t see himself reflected in books and on TV. His writing was a way to make a mirror so that kids like him could see themselves in popular culture. Kids of color need to see themselves in a position outside that of slavery. They need to learn that people of color can also be heroes—that heroes aren’t a role reserved for white people.

This is one of the reasons I also decided to start writing. I couldn’t find many stories with well-rounded black characters, so I decided to write my own.

We need more books with black, Latino, Indian, Asian, and Native American characters. We need more books that reflect the diverse range of lived experiences. We need books about black girls with strange scars and magical powers and books about Latino boys who love poetry and have girl troubles. We need books

SARAH KOMANAPALLI

about characters of color that aren’t just based on stereotypes. We need people to stop telling authors of color that their stories aren’t relatable because their characters aren’t

white. Because those stories, contrary to what white people say, are relatable; those voices are powerful. They matter.

They matter to all the kids of color looking for a mirror in

| THE CHICAGO

MAROON

what they read.

Adia Robinson is a secondyear in the College double majoring in English and political science.

Let us vote A contingent faculty member comments on the state of unionization at the University I have taught at U of C for eight years, and I love it. I love the students and how they ask me “don’t make the assignments easier, we want to learn!”

(True story.) I love my colleagues, who are fantastic professionals who create a

supportive work environment. I love the campus community, and I believe in the idealistic truth-seeking that this university stands for. I even love the grammar enthusiasts who will undoubtedly side-eye me for ending the previous sen-

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tence with a preposition (a silliness up with which I will not put).

Without false modesty, I think the faculty who teach here help bring these intellectual ideals to reality. But our students may not know that we are divided into two species: those with tenure (or possibility of tenure) and those without. As you may have guessed, I belong to the ranks of the non-tenured, contingent faculty. The distinction is not merely a matter of prestige: while tenure-track faculty enjoy a job for life, the contingent faculty at best have an appointment for a few years without a guarantee for renewal. There is no possibility for promotion in most positions.

Even if our contracts are renewed and we work for decades, our pay is still a fraction (considerably less than one) of what any tenure-track faculty member makes.

It’s true that the tenure-track faculty have a full plate: they write grant proposals, run their labs, supervise graduate students, sit on committees, publish mounds of papers and books, travel to give talks, and chair panels at conferences. Running the academic gauntlet is tough, and the tenure-track faculty who make it are fantastic scholars and deserve the remuneration and stability of tenure. But teaching, traditionally the central vocation of a professor, is often crowded out by the avalanche of other responsibilities. Tenure committees don’t seriously consider teaching quality when deciding on promotion. Deans are very concerned if a professor doesn’t bring in grants but they would rarely stir

if one isn’t doing well in the classroom.

The clear message is that teaching college students is not a paramount concern of the administration. This makes a big difference for both the faculty and the students.

Across the country, the task of molding young minds has been largely relegated to the care of temporary, replaceable employees. I’m an applied mathematician, so let me give you some numerical evidence: nationwide, twothirds of the faculty at all institutions of higher learning are contingent. At U of C, the situation is better, with the fraction of contingent faculty at around 40 percent, but the fraction of students we teach is likely far greater. Taking my department as an example: 13 contingent faculty teach or co-teach 60 percent of the approximately 1,700 students enrolled in biology courses this quarter.

Meanwhile, the hundreds of tenuretrack biology professors are responsible for less than half of the teaching load in our program. We are efficient at what we do!

Contingent faculty fill an essential niche in the modern university, but, despite this, we have little say in the decisions that affect us, and scant agency to negotiate for better compensation or a promotion. What’s more, when instructors are treated as second rate, the quality of education for the students suffers. Many of us feel that we deserve to have more influence on University governance and want our teaching to be treated with the respect it deserves.

Driven by these considerations, my

colleagues have filed for an election to form a union, which will represent the contingent faculty at this University.

Unfortunately, during the negotiations on the composition of the bargaining unit, the University administration used legal nitpicking to exclude some of my colleagues from voting, even though they do the same work as the rest of us, and succeeded in cutting the size of the bargaining unit in half. It is highly disappointing for an institution that professes a belief in intellectual freedom and social justice to bar some of its employees from voting in a union election.

It shows that the administration would rather maintain control than give its contingent faculty a chance to have a collective voice.

The contingent faculty of this University are privileged to be a part of the life of the young minds on our campus.

We teach, we learn from our students, we mentor and get to know them as junior colleagues and as human beings.

Every June we experience the bittersweet thrill of watching them take the next step in life, and sometimes even develop long-term friendships with them (I was once honored to attend a former student’s wedding). All we’re asking, to paraphrase the great singer, is for a little respect when we go to work. It would mean a lot to have our students support us in our struggle to have a voice and to be heard.

Dmitry Kondrashov is a senior lecturer in the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division.

6

THE CHICAGO MAROON | VIEWPOINTS | December 2, 2015

(Grid)locked out By educating voters, we can affect meaningful change in Congress

Nick Aldridge

The skunk at the lawn party Many Americans view Congress as extremely inefficient. Legislation languishes on the floor for years, without any real progress.

Overall, we have a government riddled with gridlock. But why?

The answer has to do with a fundamental reality of American democracy.

The primary job of a politician is not to legislate; it is to get reelected. And contrary to popular belief, getting reelected is not about convincing everyone that your policies are earth-shattering or even correct. In fact, getting reelected does not entail convincing voters of much of anything. A 40-year veteran of political campaigns, Dave Fleischer, claims that campaigning is simply about getting people who already agree with you to show up to vote. He told Ira Glass of This American Life, “Conventional wisdom among political practitioners is you don’t talk to the people who are against you… You spend your time and energy talking first to people who completely agree with you to make sure they vote.” Glass notes, “it had never occurred to me that all the billions of dollars spent on politics in this country is mostly making messages that say, you already love this or you already fear that. So here’s how you should vote.”

In other words, campaigns don’t spend money to change your mind; they spend money to get you off the couch on Election Day. This mindset defines the motives of the self-interested politician. So, if an angry mass of factory workers advocates fervently against free trade, for example, politicians choose to appease this special interest in order to secure their votes, instead of advocating for free trade, whatever their true opinion of free trade might be. Politicians are slaves to special interests. They aren’t terribly conniving or purely power hungry, just interested in maintaining

their livelihood.

Teachers unions unflaggingly support tenure for educators despite the fact that there has been no conclusive evidence in favor of the hypothesis that tenure improves teacher quality. Tenure has enormous significance for teachers as a whole, but less significance to parents whose kids will have teachers one way or the other.

Teachers unions advocate aggressively for tenure, encouraging politicians to support it at a cost to the average constituent. In other words tenure may be the defining factor in the votes of thousands of individuals (teachers), but insignificant to the votes of a large majority of others. The politician is then faced with choosing between appeasing the teachers at a cost to apathetic taxpayers or eliminating tenure to promote competition in the education sector at the cost of thousands of votes. Their choice is obvious.

In his book Naked Economics, economist Charlie Wheelan notes how corn farmers, who support an ethanol tax subsidy which increases demand for corn, have been a key component in Iowa presidential campaigns. Politicians discovered that one of the keys to winning Iowa was supporting this ethanol tax, which has fundamental repercussions for farmers, but negligible repercussions to the 98 percent of people who were footing the bill. If politics were just about the money, the majority of individuals could undoubtedly muster the funds to defeat the three percent of the population that are farmers, but that’s not what happens because the majority of people simply don’t care.

Select groups of farmers or workmen can exert a great deal of force on Capitol Hill primarily because, as Wheelan puts it, “the costs of whatever favors they wrangle out of the system are spread over a large, unorganized segment of the population.”

WEI YI OW

If a special interest group is willing to donate large sums of money to a political campaign, it may give them a louder voice, but the integral fact is that some people care about the ethanol tax subsidy and others do not; some people care about teacher tenure while others do not. Even if special interest groups couldn’t wield money as a tool, they would have a wide variety of tactics at their disposal to exert influence on politics, and one of these is the threat of withholding their votes.

The issue here is not the fact that there is money in politics, nor that special interest groups exist. The issue is that the larger voice of the public or the general will does not drown out the voices of these select few. Some

| THE CHICAGO

MAROON

individuals may think somewhat pompously that they are not part of the pervasive issue in American politics—the perceived lack of progress that takes place in Congress—believing instead that it is those apathetic, uneducated voters that are the problem. But no, it is all of us. It is all of us who are fundamentally self-interested when legislation threatens our status quo, but apathetic when larger events could conspire to improve living standards across the nation by something like a few percentage points over the next decade.

Improving politics is not about convincing people to act in opposition to their best interests. It is instead about educating individuals about what is and is not in their best interests. It is about

creating reasonable voters who weigh the issues based upon their pros and cons instead of their ingrained political ideologies. It’s about inspiring politicians to run “on the issues” by subjecting them to a smart, questioning voter base. The public must endeavor to do more to learn about the facts and to spark productive national debates. We have a responsibility as a society to attempt to better educate voters. But, politicians must also assume responsibility as they have the legislative tools to actually solve problems. While the problem may arise from voter ignorance and indifference, it ultimately cannot be solved without action in Washington.

Nicholas Aldridge is a first-year in the College.

er importance. A warming planet spells a range of health problems resulting from an unstable food and water supply, massive migratory upheavals, increased armed conflict, and other disruptions to the essential infrastructure of society. Climate change threatens basic human needs, risking the stability required for good health.

As medical students and future physicians, we will spend much of our time and this nation’s resources treating and managing diseases already affecting our patients. The cost-effective and lifesaving power of preventive medicine reminds us that taking action early in the course of a disease often allows for greater quality of life at a reduced

cost. Our perspective on climate change should be the same. With catastrophe looming on the horizon, we need to take action as soon as possible.

If no substantial agreement emerges at COP 21, we will continue down a path that forces us to reactively treat the consequences of our short-sighted actions. But, if we instead forge a comprehensive emissions reduction plan, we have the opportunity to prevent climate change from defining the next generation of medicine.

An inconvenient medical truth Global warming can create serious health problems unless we act now With the start of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21), environmentalists, journalists, and policymakers turn their eyes to Le Bourget, France, anticipating a plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions and curb warming. As medical students, we too turn our eyes to Le Bourget. The approaching negotiations will have a profound impact on human health, and as a result, on our futures as clinicians.

Projections from the World Health Organization, World Bank, and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggest that climate change will affect billions of people and present a major public health crisis in the com-

ing decades. Reports from The Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change have echoed these concerns, concluding that climate change is the “biggest global health threat of the 21st century.”

Many of the health impacts of climate change are direct. Warming can increase transmission rates and broaden ranges of vectorborne diseases like malaria, dengue fever, tick-borne encephalitis, Lyme disease, and schistosomiasis.

With malaria, for example, higher temperatures allow the parasite to mature exponentially more rapidly. Even with modest warming, tens of millions more people will be exposed to malaria. Nota-

bly, dengue fever stands to spread even more widely than malaria.

Increased humidity and mosquito prevalence may put billions more at risk for contracting the virus.

Climate change also has a direct impact on the extremity of weather events. Droughts, heat waves, floods, and storms all stand to increase in severity and frequency.

Without major changes to our energy system, the new norm will include “unprecedented” disasters time and again. These events may lead to acute medical problems that can be especially devastating to developing health systems.

The indirect consequences of climate change on health are less obvious but perhaps of even great-

Riley Brian, Cheyenne Smith, and Andrew Wilmington are firstyears at the Pritzker School of Medicine.

THE CHICAGO MAROON | VIEWPOINTS | December 2, 2015

7

Turkey and mashed P-sets Life will always be hard, but Thanksgiving reminds us to be thankful for what we do have

Sophia Chen

PhiloSophia This Thanksgiving, my friend and I, both home from college, made the mutual agreement to bring our homework to the potluck dinner that night. Please believe me when I say that we thought we were lame as well.

That evening, after we had finished our food, we miserably plopped ourselves onto a couch and attempted to swim out of the pile of work we were drowning in.

Before you fixate your judgment upon our poor, humorless souls, I assure you that our other friend already did that while witnessing the two of us stare at code or try to decipher math problems. His serene drawl mocked our collegiate efforts while cheerfully reminding us that, as someone in an engineering co-op with a real job, he didn’t have homework or finals to worry about this semester.

Thanksgiving break has always been hilariously fraught for college students. Even for those who dare to travel home, the impending doom of finals still tugs at our na-

vels while we’re trying to have some fun and relaxation. We probably spend about 5 percent of our time trying to actually do work during break, and the rest of our time flipping out about how much stuff we need to finish.

I had never done homework at a party before, so sitting there on that couch scrambling for my misplaced eraser made me yearn for an easygoing Thanksgiving. I would glance jealously at the younger kids there who were still in middle school, and even at the parents who were laughing around the dining table. But as I listened more closely to both groups, I realized that even though they didn’t have homework, the holiday wasn’t exactly carefree for them either.

Thanksgiving is a happy time of reuniting with distant family and old friends. But part of what accompanies that is the litany of shared complaints and vocalized comparisons that pick at our hidden insecurities. From across the family room, I could see the

middle schoolers on the other couch, flipping through their yearbooks and discussing who was cool and who wasn’t.

It took me back to that age and even to just a few years ago in high school, when being “cool” was so important.

Even though schoolwork may not have been inflicting pain on those middle schoolers at this point, their social lives seemed to have been.

Over at the grown-up table, I could hear our parents talking about their most recent home repairs and various work complaints. It made me a little sad when I thought about how even though I would eventually graduate from having to do homework on Thanksgiving, I would only be moving on to the next stage of life in which I would fixate on the aforementioned middle-aged topics that I currently had little interest in. The middle schoolers had this same reaction of disgust toward us college kids when they saw us doing homework and freaking out about internships.

For both younger generations, the general vibe at the potluck seemed to be: “This is all I have to look forward to?”

And that’s rightly worrisome. It seems that whatever age we are, Thanksgiving will

always present a few hurdles to overcome when we feel obligated to talk about what is going on in our lives. Due to all the comparisons that accompany catching up with those we haven’t seen in a while, we are forced to confront our insecurities, which are present at any point in life.

Despite initially feeling bummed out about this while observing people at the potluck, I eventually realized that I was missing the point of Thanksgiving. It isn’t about the difficulties of whatever position of life we’re in—even

though that’s often what we talk about during the holiday—but about being thankful for all the good things that we’ve been blessed with.

By changing my mindset, I’ll be okay even when I’m middle-aged and comparing my plumbing with peers. And the middle schoolers will be okay when they reach college and get saddled with mind-numbing amounts of pre-finals homework.

Actually, having all this work right now isn’t so bad when I think about how lucky I am to even attend college.

Many people don’t have such a luxury. And, doing homework at a party meant that I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by loved ones during the short holiday. Even the annual chance to complain and compare means getting a warm place to gather and have full bellies. Once I stopped working for a second to think about that, it started to feel like Thanksgiving again.

Sophia Chen is a second-year in the College double majoring in economics and English.

THE CHICAGO MAROON | ADVERTISEMENT | December 02, 2015

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ARTS

What is art?

DECEMBER 02, 2015

The Underground Collective presents exposé with pain, healing, and apple cider Grace Hauck Associate Arts Editor We need to fuck more. We need to eat our food slower and chew every morsel. We need to curse more expressively, stressing every single syllable.

And we need to do so, if possible, in Italian.

Such was the advice of first-year Daniele Becker, whose stand-up performance at the Underground Collective’s debut showcase last Saturday provided a breath of lighthearted humor to an evening of raw, provocative student performances.

“Come As You Are,” a four-act showcase, featured 11 students performing spoken word poetry, stand-up, skits, song, and dance. Cobb Café was dressed like you’ve never seen it; strung with a haze of multicolored lights, the subterranean space was transformed into an elegant grotto packed to the brim with expectant ears. The tables were full, the walls lined with viewers.

As emcee and second-year Atrician Lumumba—a self-proclaimed “visionary” who goes by stage name Trish the Tyrant—advised the audience at the beginning of the show, “If you hear some shit you like, snap.” While the packed lounge often echoed with the sound of a hundred simultaneous snaps, the greater part of the night was charged with a complete and attentive silence.

The evening began with an invocation in Spanish, followed by French, Italian, and, finally, English: “Citizens of the world, come as you are. Citizens of the world, showcase your scars.”

Undergraduates Claire Moore, Lucas Mathieu, Bryan Waterhouse, and Becker stood before a row of mics, taking turns to speak in their respective tongues and invite the audience into their world of the word. They called for unabashed vulnerability. They called for respect. They introduced the audience to the tone and expectations of spoken word poetry, joining hands at the end of the piece.

Third-year Payal Kumar took the floor next, alone at the mic to perform a spoken word poem called “facebook status poetry.” She attacked technophobic cynicism, encouraging the listener to acknowledge the momentous advantages of social media. Fourth-year Maira Khwaja followed Kumar with her fierce rendition of Margaret Atwood’s “The Female Body” before Becker and Mathieu broke the building tensions with a theatrical interlude; the script, the acting, and, above all, the pairing, were simple yet brilliant. The audience was too busy laughing to snap.

The laughter turned to sympathetic murmurs, however, when Ben Glover, donning a “Jesus was Black” T-shirt, concluded Act I with his rap “Black Skin White Skeleton,” dropping lines like “Black people get stopped and checked like my Nikes” and “If a bitch-nigga ever question my tenacity I track ‘em down and kill ‘em like the nigga from Assassin’s Creed.”

Act II came on strong with perhaps the most intense performance of the night. Chase Woods, sharply dressed in a suit and tie, dominated as Khwaja’s boss in a skit entitled “The Suitcase.” The audience watched in terror as a suffocating power struggle played out between a manipulative business executive and his 20-something intern. At the climax, the boss commands, “You should be thanking me, along with Jesus, for giving you another day!”

The bone-chilling vignette was uncomfortable and, for many UChicago students, perhaps too relatable. Now, at the audience’s moment of need, our funny Italian stepped in. Despite the tension still clinging to the air, Becker casually paced about the floor, shrugged his shoulders, and asked: Why do we work? Is this a direct quotation or the title of a piece?

Mathieu followed Becker’s stand-up with a much more serious piece—a glorification of spoken word poetry called “The Medium is the Message”—before turning the mic over to Moore and Glover to perform “(Please) Remember Me,” a haunting gospel rap prefaced by trigger warnings of violence, murder, police brutality, and sexism.

A wave of snaps faded into intermission, which served as a welcome break from the heat of the performance. Attendees stocked up on hot apple cider and carrot cupcakes while recharging their human batteries for part two.

At last, to the cheers of the crowd and a grand introduction by the Tyrant, the Underground Collective’s two founders, third-year Natalie Richardson and second-year Maddie “Bars” Anderson, graced the stage. They performed “Love Poem to Ourselves”—an endearing exploration of their own journeys through objectification and selfdoubt to discover the meaning of womanhood.

Ultimately, they declared in unison that “a woman is someone who isn’t afraid to write a love poem to herself.”

The rest of Act III explored the themes of doubt and mental illness, featuring performances

by Moore, Anderson, and Kumar. In her second

poem of the night, “Self & Self Doubt,” Kumar likened herself to a phoenix more often burned than rebirthed, clinging to a self-worth founded on GPA: “Being a three-point someone never feels enough.”

The fourth and final act reflected on the themes of violence and memory, featuring performances

by Mathieu, Moore, Waterhouse, and Richardson.

Mathieu opened his French poem, “TIC (technologies de l’information et de la communication),” by expressing his sympathy for the victims of the Paris

matzah ball soup, and pet pythons, delivering one of the most touching lines of the night: “I’ve learned that love is a wide-mouthed snake, and I’ve got the pinpricks to prove it.”

Anderson, Waterhouse, and Woods joined Richardson on stage to close the showcase with a poem called “Misunderstandings,” speaking in unison, in pairs, shouting, cooing, and, at times, mechanically echoing one another as if they were one voice.

Within the low-lying confines of Cobb Café,

Third-year Lucas Mathieu performs before a rapt audience in Cobb Café.

GRACE HAUCK | THE CHICAGO MAROON

attacks, practically spitting with passion throughout the piece. Moore matched Mathieu’s words with movement, pacing her leaps and bends to his skillful manipulation of intensity.

Then, Waterhouse, a thin white redhead, stepped onstage. In his poem “Family,” Waterhouse highlighted the hypocritical nature of open mics, telling of how his physical appearance initially made him afraid to identify as Latino or explore the spoken word world. He told of his mom from Brazil, his drunken father, and his cousin— who doesn’t check the closet for monsters but for her mom—explaining his evolution as a poet through the lens of family hardship.

Richardson had the honor of performing the final solo of the night, “Poem for Jacob, First Crush.” She wove a nostalgic tale of Halloween,

the Underground Collective expressed pain, sparked change, and reaffirmed the beauty of free speech. While the individual topics of “Come As You Are” varied, many of the evening’s performances centered on themes that were hyperaware—performers capitalizing yet meditating on the vehicle of spoken word poetry and language itself. The performers exhibited confident, professional showmanship, and the show itself, from marketing to final act, was expertly executed.

As Mathieu said in “The Medium is the Message,” “I know what I want to say, and I know what to do to say it. How about you?”

Stop by the Underground Collective’s open mic this Friday at 7 p.m. at the Center for Identity + Inclusion, and stay tuned for their winter showcase.

One man’s trash is a musical community’s treasure Rebecca Julie Arts Contributor What do a fork, a wooden artist’s palette, and a shoe brush all have in common?

Well, at first glance, nothing.

However, on November 22, audience members were forced to rethink that question while listening to the Recycled Instruments Orchestra of Cateura at DePaul University’s Merle Reskin Theatre. The ensemble, a youth orchestra from the small village of Cateura in Paraguay, uses the aforementioned items, along with bottle caps, old coins, and water pipes, to make its musical instruments.

Cateura is home to a large landfill, which yields all of the materials used to make the orchestra’s instruments. Without the funds to buy professionally manufactured instruments, music director Favio Chávez saw the potential to use the landfill items to create a youth orchestra. At the performance, musicians ranging in age from eight to 21 years old played cellos with oilcan bodies, saxophones with bottle cap keys, and violins made of pizza trays.

The orchestra, which has achieved global fame in recent years, has been featured on 60 Minutes and is the subject of a new documentary, Landfill Harmonic. The ensemble has also traveled worldwide, performing in various countries and even going on tour with the heavy-metal group Metallica.

The ensemble’s pre-Thanksgiving performance was the finale of Chicago’s 10th annual Latino Music Festival, which is run each year by the International Latino Cultural Center. The festival was founded by Chicago-based musicians Elbio Rodríguez Barilari, Gustavo Leone, and Pepe Vargas. It opened in early September and featured performances in venues throughout the Chicago area, including the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts.

While the Recycled Instruments Orchestra is by no means a professional ensemble, the group held the audience’s attention with its remarkable character, enthusiasm, and drive to create music.

“If you want to hear an orchestra that sounds perfect, don’t listen to us,” Chávez said to audience members at the concert. “But if you want to hear an orchestra that changes lives, then choose us.”

For many members of the orchestra, playing music is an alternative to joining gangs. Chávez also remarked that because the orchestra is such a life changing experience for its participants, its roster is constantly cycling to give the most children the opportunity to play in the ensemble.

A number of the orchestra members had never left Paraguay before, and coming to Chicago for this performance marked the first time they had traveled on an airplane or registered for a passport.

The repertoire varied widely, featuring classical

music staples like Pachelbel’s Canon in D, as well as less traditional selections like Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” and John Lennon’s “Imagine.” During the second half of the concert, the Recycled Instruments Orchestra was joined by eight members of the Oistrakh Symphony of Chicago, an orchestra devoted to making classical music more accessible to modern audiences. Together, they played pieces from countries where the Recycled Instruments Orchestra has traveled, such as Norway and Israel.

“We are learning from them,” said Mina Zikri, the music director of the Oistrakh Symphony and one of the violinists who joined the Recycled Instruments in performance. “Classically trained musicians think about perfection in everything, but, at the end, the real meaning of music is the effort you put behind it.”

Zikri’s words rang true at the performance, which was not only a concert but also the formal award ceremony for the Gloria Lifetime Achievement award. According to the International Latino Cultural Center’s website, the award is given out annually to “recognize individuals and institutions that have significantly contributed to the development of the Latino community, both in Chicago and across the globe.”

This year’s winner was legendary jazz pianist Danilo Pérez. Born in Panama, Pérez went on to found the Panama Jazz Festival and currently

serves as the Artistic Director of the Berklee Global Jazz Institute in Boston, in addition to teaching at the New England Conservatory. He also started a foundation that offers educational opportunities to disadvantaged Panamanian youth.

“Music erases all the differences we have. Music is the antidote to violence in the world,” Pérez said while accepting his award. He turned and pointed to the members of the Recycled Instruments Orchestra, who shared the stage with him as he spoke. “How do we take a kid away from a gun?” he asked. “Give him a violin, give him a piano.”

The orchestra members, despite not understanding English, seemed to understand his message, and many smiled knowingly.

“These kids come from a place where they fight to survive,” Zikri said in a pre-concert interview. “You could send them portable hospitals, you could send them food, you could them send clothes. But what you can do to make people feel like real humans is that you can give them music.

Music is what a human being needs to feel like a human being.”

“There are people who are destroying everything,” he said, referring to the recent tragedy in Paris. “And then there are people who are making something out of nothing.”

10

THE CHICAGO MAROON | ARTS | December 02, 2015

CSO and UChicago plan daylong Bach party on South Side

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma and artist Theaster Gates, in a conversation moderated by Logan Center for the Arts Executive Director Bill Michel.

COURTESY OF JOEL WINTERMANTLE

Hannah Edgar Associate Arts Editor At most times of the day, the area around Washington Park’s Garfield Green Line station is characterized by a heavy-lidded stillness. Lined with boarded-up storefronts, the streets boast few pedestrians, save for those shuffling off a sporadic stream of buses. Only whizzing cars and, occasionally, the tectonic rumble of trains overhead break the quietude.

Thanks to a collaboration between the University of Chicago and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO), however, another sound—albeit an unlikely one—will soon pierce the silence of this unassuming place: the stately strains of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.

The music will be part of this Thursday’s Bach marathon, in which small ensembles from the CSO’s pre-professional Civic Orchestra will perform all six concertos and selections from The Art of Fugue in various community locations around the South Side of Chicago. UChicago’s Arts Incubator and the KLEO Community Family Life Center, both on Garfield Street, are just two of 10 community spaces that will be transformed into concert halls for the free daylong event.

Last month, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the CSO’s Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant, and conceptual artist Theaster Gates, the University’s director of arts and public life, met in the Arts Incubator before an audience of Civic Orchestra musicians, reporters, and local representatives to discuss their hopes for the marathon.

“There’s this [misconception] that different kinds of music need to live in different kinds of places—that classical music is white music and doesn’t have a place in black neighborhoods,” Gates explained. “What I’m interested in is: How does excellence happen everywhere? We can try to create these moments of interruption from whatever we imagine as normal.”

Both Gates and Ma know a thing or two about interruption. A potter-turned-urban planner, Gates is prone to speaking about social change in terms of pottery. (“I believe that things can be shaped and reshaped. Nothing’s absolute. Everything’s plastic; just heat it up.”) His ambitious projects take neglected buildings in Chicago’s South Side and reimagine them as creative spaces, the Arts Incubator being one such project. Ma himself is something of an outlier in the classical world for his blend of genre-bending curiosity and down-to-earth accessibility. During the public conversation and subsequent social hour, he often broke off in the middle of a thought to enthusiastically greet Civic musicians.

Though the marathon marks Ma and Gates’ first collaboration, the two men bantered like old friends. When Ma mentioned that Bach was

“one of the greatest improvisers the world’s ever known,” Gates deadpanned, without missing a beat: “It’s ’cause he was black.” Later, an impromptu take on the famous “Flower Duet” from Léo Delibes’ Lakmé sent the men into childlike paroxysms, Ma playing air cello and Gates theatrically gesticulating.

Despite these antics, their conversation was permeated with a deep thread of seriousness about the upcoming event, and, more generally, the need for an artistic dialogue between entities like the CSO and surrounding communities.

“It’s a big trek—both psychologically as well as physically,” Ma said, referring to the distance between the South Side and downtown Chicago.

“But we want great things to happen in this great city, in every neighborhood.”

At one point, Gates asked Ma how he “hacked the system”—what made someone of his stature and fame deviate from the well-worn path of concertizing to found, for instance, The Silk Road Ensemble, or to collaborate with a street dancer for a 21st-century take on choreographer Mikhail Fokine’s The Dying Swan.

“I wasn’t necessarily aware that I was ‘hacking the system,’” Ma confessed. “But I did see a lot of things in the classical world that displeased me.”

Gates nodded appreciatively. “See, I use the word ‘hack’ when some values should be implicit, but they’re not,” he said. “[For example], why do we have to work so hard at diversifying our ensemble? It’s like how we have to bill this event as ‘Bach on the South Side,’ ’cause it ain’t already happening.”

Though just one brief “interruption,” Gates and Ma expressed hope that the Bach marathon will be the first step in establishing a symbiotic guesthost relationship between the Civic musicians and young people living in the mid-South Side.

“How often do you know the community you’re playing for?” Ma asked the musicians.

“Relationships are key to any creation. You may be guests in these venues, but when you begin to perform, you become a host.”

Gates agreed, and pointed out that the event’s success would be best gauged by its very immeasurability.

“My hope is that we’ll never be able to measure the impact of our presence in young people’s lives.

I hope we’ll never be able to measure its impact in our own lives,” Gates mused. “Anything might happen; any new relationship could be discovered.”

The performance schedule for December 3’s Bach Marathon is as follows: 11:30 a.m.–2 p.m.: Brandenburg Concertos No. 1–6 and selections from The Art of Fugue, Christkindlmarket, 50 West Washington Street 2–3 p.m.: Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, Kenwood Academy High School, 5015 South Black-

stone Avenue 2–3 p.m.: The Art of Fugue (brass quintet arrangement), DuSable Leadership Academy 4934 South Wabash Avenue 2:30–3:30 p.m.: Brandenburg Concerto No. 1, Green Line Coffee, 501 East 61st Street 3–4 p.m.: The Art of Fugue (woodwind quintet arrangement), Rebuild Foundation’s Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 South Stony Island Avenue 4–5 p.m.: Brandenburg Concerto No. 6, Blackstone Library, 4904 South Lake Park Avenue 4:15–5:30 p.m.: Brandenburg Concerto No. 2,

Hamilton Park Cultural Center, 513 West 72nd Street 4:30–5:30 p.m.: Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, UChicago’s Arts Incubator, 301 East Garfield Boulevard 4:30–5:30 p.m.: Brandenburg Concerto No. 4, KLEO Community Family Life Center, 119 East Garfield Boulevard 7–10 p.m.: Brandenburg Concertos No. 1-6 and selections from The Art of Fugue, Fourth Presbyterian Church, 126 East Chestnut Street.

All performances are free and open to the public.

Large 3-Topping Pizza only

$10!

Hyde Park Location 1418 E. 53rd Street (773) 752-7272

THE CHICAGO MAROON | CROSSWORD | December 02, 2015

11

THE CHICAGO MAROON | SPORTS | December 02, 2015

12

SPORTS

IN QUOTES

“Blast from the past watching Kobe put on early show [...] score 16 in 1st half in Philly. But also took vintage 16 shots.”

-@SkipBayless reacts to the first half performance of Kobe Bryant vs the 76ers.

South Siders suffer first loss to Carthage WOMEN’S BASKETBALL Michael Hinkley Sports Staff Last week, the Maroons defeated No. 23 UT Dallas before suffering their first loss of the season against Carthage on Sunday at the Ratner Center. Chicago now stands at 4–1 overall. Despite the loss, the team’s exceptional start to the year is the best debut it has seen since the 2011– 2012 regular season campaign, during which it went undefeated.

Before taking some time off for the Thanksgiving holiday, the squad defeated the Comets of UT Dallas by a score of 75–46.

With a couple of starters in foul trouble, the Maroons looked to the bench for some increased output. Remarkably, Chicago’s bench doubled the scoring output of their opponent’s supporting cast, amassing 42 points to the Comets’ 21.

The South Siders dominated on both sides of the ball, converting on more than half of their field goal attempts, while holding their opponents to 32.7 percent.

Furthermore, Chicago was deadly from long-range, sinking nine three-pointers over the course of the game. Their adversaries, on the other hand, missed all ten of their long-range attempts.

Second-year guard Madison Dunbar led the offensive charge with 16 points. In addition, her energy on defense propelled the Maroons forward as she snagged three steals and forced a slew of other turnovers. Second-year Katie Anderson and first-year Olariche Obi were also big contributors, scoring eight and 11 points, respectively.

“I think we prepared well for a style of play that we don’t see a lot. We kept our composure against their run-and-jump press and made sure to get good looks on offense,” Dunbar said after the game.

Following the short holiday break, Chicago returned to action on Sunday facing Carthage College. Despite holding a 13-point lead at halftime, the Maroons were unable to seal the deal and eventually fell to the Lady

Reds by a margin of 64–57. With this result, Carthage improved to 4–0 on the year, while Chicago fell to 4–1.

Against Carthage, the Maroons jetted off to a fast start, scoring 21 first quarter points.

Then, in the second quarter, Chicago accumulated another 16 points, while holding the opponent to just nine. Third-year forward Britta Nordstrom shone during that span, recording 10 points and four assists.

However, coming out of halftime, the Reds found a spark.

They scored 20 points in each of the final two quarters, while holding the Maroons to half that number. Notwithstanding a strong push in the final minutes, Chicago ultimately suffered a seven-point loss.

“We came out very strong against Carthage. When we played our game and bought into who we are as a team, we dominated,” Dunbar said. “However, we went away from that in the third quarter and never gained the momentum back.”

Nordstrom finished the game with 16 points and eight rebounds. Obi, who found herself in the starting lineup for the first time this season, managed to grab 13 boards while also scoring eight points. Starting guards, secondyear Elizabeth Nye and third-year Stephanie Anderson, dropped seven points each while Dunbar added nine off the bench.

Ultlmately, the squad will be looking to bounce back when they take on Illinois Wesleyan on Saturday. The Titans currently stand at 3–2 and will take on Rose–Hulman prior to their clash with the Maroons. This weekend, Chicago will look to channel the consistency that they played with in the first four games of the season.

Looking ahead to the weekend, Dunbar said, “We need to get back to who we are as a team.

We pride ourselves on things like toughness and rebounding, so we need to refocus on that for this Saturday.”

Echoing a similar testament, Nye added, “We need to focus

Third-year Stephanie Anderson dribbles the ball.

COURTESY OF UCHICAGO ATHLETICS

on what makes us so good. We have to buy into our principles and stick to them for the full 40 minutes.”

Chicago is set to face Illinois Wesleyan at 1 p.m. on Saturday, December 5. This match will

conclude the Maroons’ six-game opening home stand; the squad will then hit the road for eight consecutive away contests.

No. 17 squad snatches two road wins

Milwaukee School of Engineering on Maroons’s docket

MENS BASKETBALL

WRESTLING

Frances McDonald Sports Staff

Thanksgiving break was filled with good basketball and victory for the No. 17 Chicago squad as it traveled to Washington for the weekend to take part in the Pacific Lutheran Thanksgiving Tournament. The Maroons kicked off the holiday weekend by beating Pacific Lutheran on Friday 62–58, and Puget Sound the next day 75–46.

On Friday, the Maroons came out to a strong start in the first half against Pacific Lutheran, ending the period up by five points (31–26). Chicago gained a larger lead in the beginning of the second half on the back of a barrage of three-pointers by second-year Jake Fenlon.

Despite Chicago’s increasing lead at the beginning of the half, the Lutes stormed back to cut Chicago’s advantage to just one point (57–56) with two minutes remaining.

In the final minutes, free throws were the deciding factor of the game: Fourth-year Jordan Smith and third-year Waller Perez converted two each, and third-year Tyler Howard chipped in one more for Chicago.

Perez led the squad with 15 points and six rebounds while second-year Collin Barthel put up seven points and grabbed

10 rebounds. Fenlon made four three-pointers off the bench to give the team a much-needed boost. While the Maroons just barely edged out the Lutes in field goal percentage, they dominated in both rebounds (46–31) and assists (11–8).

The following day, the South Siders won their third straight game with a convincing victory over Puget Sound. With the team shooting a solid 49.1 percent from the field, four Chicago players scored in double digits on the day.

After going into halftime up 34–23, Chicago really put the pedal to the metal in the second half, coming out of the locker room to hit three straight threepointers. After that, the squad was unstoppable.

The Maroons held the Loggers to a 27.3 percent field goal percentage while Chicago almost hit 50 percent. The South Siders continued their dominance on the glass (47–34), which added to their effective defense. They also held their opponent’s assists to three, while they had an impressive 22 assists.

Howard, third-year Blaine Crawford, fourth-year Nate Brooks, and Perez all had points in the double digits. Howard also led the team in assists at six, while also tying Brooks in rebounds with eight.

The Maroons will face Wheaton College at 7 p.m. on

Wednesday.

The remainder of nonconference play for the Maroons will take place through winter break with two home games, one including No. 24 Illinois Wesleyan (IWU). Chicago will be looking to improve its all-time record against the Titans, which now stands at an underwhelming 7–16.

The matchup between these two nationally ranked teams will be an exciting one, as the Titans are currently 3–2 and the Maroons stand at 4–2. IWU is currently scoring 98.2 points per game with a field goal percentage of 53.6. The squad has five players that average in the double digits for scoring. It will no doubt be a tough game, but the Maroons are feeling confident and determined, especially after their play this weekend.

Brooks believes defense is the way they can continue to win.

“This weekend we really came together as a team and played great defense, which helped us pull off two victories,” he said.

“If we can stay tuned in on defense over the last half of nonconference play we’ll be really hard to beat.”

The Maroons will face Kalamazoo and IWU at home before traveling to Wheaton, Illinois Institute of Technology, and Albion over the next month before conference play kicks off in January.

David Kerr Sports Staff

Chicago will continue its season this Saturday in Milwaukee at the 11th annual Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) Invitational.

The Maroons are coming into the invitational with a little momentum off of their success two weekends ago, when the team split up to simultaneously compete in two meets: the Concordia (Wisconsin) Open and the Millikan University Duals. Splitting between two meets allowed every member of the squad to gain experience by competing in different levels of wrestling.

Third-year Paul Papoutsis believes that the development of the first-years early in the season has been paramount to the team’s success. “I think our freshmen have adjusted to college

wrestling well. It is much faster paced and higher intensity than high school wrestling. They have been doing a good job incorporating new techniques, taught by coach Kocher, into their own wrestling styles,” he said.

The Maroons’ upcoming opponents, the MSOE Raiders, are coming into this Saturday’s bout with similar results on their season. The Raiders have only competed in one match other than their open, a 29–14 loss to Concordia Wisconsin. The Raiders are starting six rookies in their lineup, but are buoyed by plenty of veteran leadership including fourth-year Captain Russell Carey, and second-years Austin Bellile and Colin Kenyon. Carey was limited by injury last year but won 13 matches as a second-year. Bellile was very successful in his rookie season, winning 31 matches, indicating that he should be a force in the match

this Saturday.

However, the South Siders will not be focusing too much on their opponent, and instead will be focusing on what they will need to do to be successful.

Papoutsis has found this method of preparation to be successful in his career.

“To be honest I don’t like to do research on my upcoming opponents, I just like to wrestle as hard as I can regardless of who I’m facing. I’m sure there will be several tough guys at the tournament, so I’ll have to work hard this week to prepare,” he said.

Look for the Maroons to be successful in the invitational this weekend and to continue their momentum for the season.

This invitational will be the last match for the Maroons until December 29 when they go to Evanston, IL to compete in the Midlands Championships.