Chicago Maroon PDF 060215

TUESDAY • JUNE 2, 2015

CHICAGOMAROON.COM

THE INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO SINCE 1892

ISSUE 51 • VOLUME 126

UCPD responds to uptick in robberies Katherine Vega News Staff In response to a recent spate of robberies that affected University students and staff, the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) is increasing its patrols in the recently targeted areas near Metra stops on South

Students gather at Hull Gate as part of the “Stand with Survivors at UChicago” rally last Friday, in order to protest University policies regarding sexual assault.

NATALIE FRIEDBERG | THE CHICAGO MAROON

Phoenix Survivors Alliance rallies for Title IX Natalie Friedberg News Editor Last Friday, May 29, a group of approximately 35 students gathered outside Hull Gate in the rain to protest the University’s policies regarding sexual assault at a rally called Stand With Survivors at UChicago: Rally for Title IX. The event, organized by Phoenix Sur-

vivors Alliance (PSA), was set to march from the gate to Levi Hall, where the Office of Campus and Student Life is located, in order to deliver a set of demands to Dean of Students Michele Rasmussen, Vice President for Campus Life and Student Services Karen Warren Coleman and Associate Dean of Students and Interim Title IX Coordinator

Belinda Cortez Vazquez.

The rain cleared up around 2:40 p.m. just as the group began to march through the main quad, holding signs and chanting slogans such as, “Rape culture is contagious, come on Admin be courageous.”

Outside Levi Hall, a few students spoke to the crowd PSA continued on page 3

Faculty and adminstration relations from Hutchins to Zimmer Wendy Lee & Hannah Edgar News Staff & AssociateArts Editor The year after his retirement in 1951, former University President Robert Maynard Hutchins stood before a select committee from the United States House of Representatives to declare that, “Education is a kind of continuing dialogue, and a dialogue assumes, in the nature of the case, different points of view.”

Though Hutchins was talking about the difference in opinion that often rears its head in the seminar room, his words could just as accurately summarize the continuing— and at times heated—dialogue between a university’s administration and its faculty.

At the University of Chicago, it was Hutchins’s presidency that would see greater faculty representation through the establishment of governing bodies like the Council of the University Senate and the Committee of the Council.

But the story of faculty representation has not been that simple. Rather, since these bodies’ inception during Hutchins’ presidency, the debate over faculty’s exact powers and limitations has only intensified.

To examine the powers of faculty, it is first necessary to understand the powers of the two other major governing powers at the University: the Board of Trustees and the administration. Divinity School

IN VIEWPOINTS

Public shaming at UChicago » Page 8

Analyzing the dynamics of the campus sexual assault community » Page 8

Professor Bruce Lincoln said that the president’s role has always been to reconcile the interests of both the faculty and the Board of Trustees. “The Board of Trustees has responsibility for all financial matters at the University and the faculty have all responsibility for academic matters at the University,” Lincoln said. “It’s implicit that sometimes these two bodies will see things differently, and it’s the Office of the President that is supposed to resolve those matters.”

For this reason, most American university presidents have held a large amount of power out of necessity. “You need a strong president to set an agenda,” said Dean of the ADMIN continued on page 4

Harper Avenue, according to a UCPD press release.

The uptick in crime is most likely related to the warmer weather, which often correlates with higher crime rates, according to the announcement.

“Officers will focus on these hotspot areas by increasing foot and bike patrols, especially in the

blocks surrounding the Metra stations. The prevention efforts will remain in place for several weeks and be adjusted as necessary to ensure that officers are being deployed in the right areas,” according to the press release.

Between May 21 and May 26, two students and UCPD continued on page 2

Life without an address: Perspectives from homeless in Hyde Park Brandon Lee News Staff Homelessness poses a significant burden on the South Side of Chicago and is a primarily socio-economic problem attributed to low wages and a lack of affordable housing. The high cost of living, coupled with high unemployment rates and low-wage jobs, forces indi-

viduals to choose amongst food, housing and other expenses. According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ 2015 guidelines, poverty line incomes are set at $11,770 for one person, and $28,410 for a family of five. Englewood, a neighborhood directly west of the University of Chicago’s campus, has a percapita income of $11,993.

It then surprises no one

when they are told that the South Side of Chicago is home to a large proportion of Chicago homeless. But who are the homeless, and what are their stories? *The Maroon* asked both former and currently homeless individuals about their experiences, and performed an investigation into what students are currently doing to combat homelessness.

HOMELESS continued on page 6

What “Fight for Fifteen” means for Hyde Park business owners Sonia Schlesinger News Staff On April 15, a group of UChicago students from groups such as Students Organizing United with Labor (SOUL), South Side Solidarity Network (SSN), and IIRON Students Network (ISN) joined fast food and retail workers in downtown Chicago at a “Fight for $15” rally. The group marched to demand an increase in Chicago’s minimum wage to $15 per hour.

Fight for $15, as the national movement is called, is not just a hot-button issue on campus.

Similar rallies took place across the country. This movement comes in light of increases to the minimum wage to $15 per hour in Seattle last June and more recently in Los Angeles.

While much of the talk surrounding the minimum wage issue at these rallies and in the

media involves McDonald’s and other large corporations, small businesses are heavily affected by proposed wage increases. While many small business managers in Hyde Park and Woodlawn support the concept of minimum wage

increases, several are concerned with the effects on their businesses and the changes that they would have to make should Chicago’s minimum wage increase to $15 an hour.

These managers are already WAGE ontinued on page 3

Employees Dylan Harris and Angel Elmore stand in front of Hyde Park Records, a local store that would potentially cut employee hours if the “Fight for Fifteen” campaign raised Chicago’s minimum wage to $15.

MARTA BAKULA | THE CHICAGO MAROON

IN ARTS

Senior looks back on years with Voices in Your Head » Page 12

IN SPORTS

Men’s tennis bids adieu to an extraordinary year » Backpage Senior Spotlight: Scott Mainquist cements his UChicago legacy » Page 15

THE CHICAGO MAROON | NEWS | June 2, 2015

2

The Grout Gatsby: UChicago’s notorious bathroom graffiti Isaac Stein Senior News Writer At the University of Chicago, some institutions are timeless. The mythos of the University seal in the Reynolds Club. Scav. Milkshake Wednesdays at C-Shop. And, of course, graffiti in oncampus bathrooms.

Be it tasteless depictions of genitalia or clever wordplay on the phrase “grout” scrawled on the tiling of the Bartlett men’s room, the content of UChicago graffiti is far from uniform.

However, editorial quality does not translate into permanence on the stall wall. Students may notice that as successive academic quarters and calendar years pass, the graffiti that they remember as existing in particular places may be painted over or whited out.

In order to better understand how this largely hidden process works, The Maroon interviewed Kevin Austin, the director of Building Services, a division of the University Facilities Ser-

vices department. According to Austin, University janitors remove graffiti from both the interior and exterior of campus buildings five times per week, at a labor and materials cost that adds up to more than $15,000 per year, of which $6,000 is attributable to graffiti that is particularly hard to remove.

“Our janitorial company indicates they spend an hour or two daily on graffiti removal across campus, which results in an approximate daily cost of around $50, which includes the cost of labor and required cleaning products. If our decorators (painters) get involved, as they do for particularly difficult-to-remove graffiti, they estimate the average removal costs about $200 per occurrence. Decorators are engaged about 10 times per quarter for this task,” Austin wrote in an email.

The technical process of removal varies based on the location of the graffiti—janitors use a multipurpose cleaner indoors, but may use a pressure

washer on building exteriors. But the University follows a uniform protocol for receiving reports of on-campus graffiti, and removes all reported graffiti irrespective of its content.

“Instances of graffiti come to our attention in two ways: Our custodial staff discovers it during our daily interior building checks or it is reported by students, faculty, staff or visitors.

Exterior graffiti reports follow that same pattern: It is spotted by our landscaping crews or reported to us. All graffiti is expected to be removed once discovered,” Austin said.

He also suggested that the frequency of on-campus graffiti is declining, and that it is not concentrated in or around any building in particular.

“While difficult to quantify, based on feedback from longtime staff members, there’s anecdotal suggestions that the frequency of occurrences has declined in recent years…. There is not a particular area that we would identify as a [graffiti] ‘hot spot.’”

“Location, time of day and number of suspects [involved in the incidents] suggest a possible pattern” UCPD continued from front

one staff member were robbed on South Harper Avenue between East 57th and East 58th Streets.

While none of the victims were injured, all had property, including the staff member’s car, stolen by the perpetrators. The crimes all took place at night between the hours of 9:20 p.m. and 10:15 p.m. In all three cases, the perpetrators implied possession of a weapon, but the victims did not see the weapon.

All of the incidents involved two suspects, but no description of these suspects is available. Although it is unknown whether or not the same two people committed all three of the crimes, a security alert released May 27

by Associate Vice President for Safety and Security and Chief of Police Marlon Lynch noted that the “location, time of day, and number of suspects [involved in

the incidents] suggest a possible pattern.” The security alert noted that the CPD was also bolstering its patrols and increasing “crime reduction activities” in the affected areas.

In the press release, security alert, and in an interview with NBC 5 News, the UCPD stressed that convenience should always come second to safety, noting that some practices that may seem inconvenient may help prevent or at least reduce the severity of the crime. University affiliates should opt to wait for a shuttle instead of walking alone at night, should avoid using cell phones, and should leave large amounts of cash and credit cards at home if possible. In addition, the security alert asserted that when walking alone at night, there is safety in numbers.

THE MAROON would like to congratulate the 2015 Student Leader Awards Recipients!

COLLEGE OUTSTANDING NEW LEADER AWARD: Stephanie Diaz and Brian Steiner RISE UP AWARD: Alison Fedoris, Tangela Feemster, and Jaime Sanchez HUMANITARIAN AWARD: Amelia Dmowska, Keiko Rose, and Oluwafikummi Sobowale BRIDGE BUILDER AWARD: Kyle Bullock, Rafia Khader, and Zelda Mayer UNSUNG HERO AWARD: Peter Herman, Cornelius Hubbard, and Elizabeth Porretto THE JANE MORTON AND HENRY C. MURPHY AWARD: Vincente Perez, Michael Schumer, and Sunil Yadav HOWELL MURRAY ALUMNI ASSOCIATION AWARD: Christian Adames, Yusef Al-Jarani, Nadia Alhadi, Tabbetha Bohac, Jeanne Chauffour, Jay Feldman, William Fernandez, Ashwin Ganti, Alexandra Halladay, Arlin Hill, Mallory Morse, Lauren Riensche, Isabella Rowe, Shaan Sapra, Aseal Tineh, and Steven Wendeborn CAMPUS LIFE AND LEADERSHIP AWARD: Elizabeth Bynum, Anthony Martinez, Samuel Neal, Stephen Richer, Christopher Rishel, Flora Roberts, Danielle Wilson, and Eve Zuckerman THE MAROON KEY SOCIETY: (2nd years) Jonathan Acevedo, Elizabeth Adeitba, Nicholas Antos, Anase Asom, Jake Mansoor, Kiran Misra, Evangeline Reid, William Rhee, Sammie Spector, Ala Tineh, and Katherine Zellner; (3rd years) Aneri Amin, Karen Anderson, Stephanie Bi, Caroline Bye, Jessica Covil, Benita Glamour, Michael Goodyear, Kevin Hasenfang, Russell Hathaway, Gracelyn Jennings-Newhouse, Kristin Lin, Maren Loe, Benjamin Lusamba, Samuel Maidman, Helen Petersen, Andrew Song, Julianna St. Onge, Tze Ern Teo, Justin Waney, and Paige Womack

THE CHICAGO MAROON | NEWS | June 2, 2015

3

Business owners in Hyde Park expressed support for minimum wage increases but worry about their economic effects WAGE continued from front

dealing with recent wage increases in Chicago: Last December the city council voted to raise the Chicago’s minimum wage to $13 per hour. This will be put into effect incrementally, increasing from the current $8.25 to $10 per hour by July, with the increase to $13 by 2019.

Local managers will respond to current and potential future wage increases by making significant changes in their stores, either affecting their employees or their customers.

Trushar Patel—manager of Rajun Cajun, an Indian restaurant—currently pays his eight employees within a $10–$12 per hour range. He explains that he would raise costs of his food, but would not change management practices. “You can’t change the hours because Indian restaurants require a lot of preparation,” he said.

“I wouldn’t look for different employees because they already need to be skilled, so we would have to raise our food’s prices.”

Other managers worry that

the size of their stores will be a hindrance if such changes are to take effect. “As an independent business like mine we are going to be walking a thin line,” said Bader El-Shareif, owner of Harper Foods. ElShareif currently employs only one person, and pays him more than $10 per hour, yet he’s concerned that if the minimum wage is increased to $15 per hour, “we already can’t compete with other stores, because they’re so big. We’ll just have to eat the extra cost.”

Opponents of increasing the minimum wage to $15 argue that while it may benefit those able to obtain the higher pay, it increases unemployment for less skilled workers.

Allen Sanderson, a senior lecturer in economics who has publicly opposed minimum wage increases, says that large corporations are more likely to automate in the face of minimum wage increases, replacing workers with machines and thus increasing unemployment. He says that the concern is similar in small businesses:

“unskilled workers are going to be replaced by people like University of Chicago anthropology students looking for parttime or entry-level work with a higher skill level.”

Alexis Bouteville, manager of Hyde Park Records, confirmed this assessment in the case of his store, which employs three full-time employees and pays more than the current minimum wage but less than $15. “If the minimum wage were $15, I would certainly consider higher standards for hiring,” he said. “I wouldn’t change the way the business itself works,” he said of raising prices on the store’s items.

“But in terms of management, I would cut employees’ hours and try to get the best deal on who I hired.”

Activists involved in the Fight for $15 disagree with predictions of negative economic effects. Second-year Psalm Brown, head of SOUL, argues that “while it’s always economists’ concern that once you raise the cost of labor fewer people are employed, that’s not

Fellowship focusing on healthcare in Chicago awarded to four graduate students Tamar Honig News Staff Four graduate students at the University of Chicago will join the ranks of other exceptional health professions students awarded the prestigious Schweitzer Fellowship for projects to improve the health and wellbeing of underserved Chicago communities. Pritzker School of Medicine students Phillip Hsu, Amol Naik, and Katherine Palmer and Social Service Administration (SSA) student Tessa Garcia McEwen are among 30 fellows selected from nearly 100 applicants who will implement yearlong projects aimed at overcoming serious barriers to health care in Chicago.

“The program draws students who aren’t satisfied with the status quo and want to do something about it,” said Ray Wang, director of the Chicago Area Schweitzer Fellows Program. “They’re excited by the idea of getting out of the classroom for a while and helping people by meeting them where they are at, translating what they’ve learned at a technical level to something practical and meaningful that community members can understand and apply in their everyday lives.”

The Chicago Area Schweitzer Fellows Program encourages students to “make their lives their argument” by providing direct service to Chicago residents. It is one of 11 Schweitzer Fellows Programs nationwide, administered by the Health & Medicine Policy Research Group.

Hsu, a first-year medical student, plans to establish a free health clinic and offer health

education classes in Bridgeport, a community that is home to a large and rapidly growing population of underserved Asian immigrants.

“As a second-generation Taiwanese American, I am concerned about the challenges faced by many Asian immigrants, especially the challenge of attaining proper healthcare, which is made difficult due to limited English capacity or lack of insurance,” Hsu said. “I have become particularly invested in using my position as a medical student to work with underprivileged Asian-American populations with limited access to health care, a challenge that hinders both the possibility of employment and overall quality of life.”

McEwen is a second-year Extended Evening Program SSA student as well as a resident head for 75 undergraduates in Booth House in the College. She aims to implement a comprehensive perinatal loss support program for grieving parents on the South Side.

Furthermore, she will conduct a train-the-trainer module for medical providers and healthcare professionals in the fields of compassionate care and cultural competency.

McEwen discussed the need for increased support for those who, like her, have suffered the non-voluntary end of pregnancy.

“As a bereaved mother who experienced perinatal loss without adequate emotional and material support, I aim to walk with fellow grieving parents and help provide a space for support and access to resources that I never had,” McEwen said.

“I also aim to help medical pro-

fessionals and hospital staff acquire a deeper sense of compassion and educational awareness for perinatal loss at all stages of pregnancy.”

The remaining two Schweitzer Fellowship recipients will tackle other health challenges faced by Chicagoans.

Naik’s proposal focuses on the creation of a weekly health discussion group at the Interfaith House, an interim housing facility for homeless adults.

“Through the discussion group, I hope to help residents learn about health issues of interest to them, such as diabetes, infectious disease, exercise, nutrition,” said Naik, also a first-year medical student. “By providing me with insight into the health-related challenges faced by homeless adults, this experience will allow me to be a more empathetic and effective physician for this population in the future.”

Lastly, Palmer’s plan features the development of a health and wellness curriculum in the UChicago Woodlawn Charter School led by college and graduate student mentors.

Though their project goals are diverse, the fellows share a commitment to service and sustainable health improvements in the communities that most need them.

“In helping the underserved community, we as helpers are not swooping in as the ‘experts’ or the ones that will ‘fix’ and ‘save’ the community,” McEwen noted. “Our goal is to walk alongside, learn from the people as experts of their own communities, and use our talents to provide support in ways that can enrich their overall well-being.”

the case. In places with significant wage increases there hasn’t been a corresponding drop in people employed.” Some past studies support this, such as a 1990 UC Berkeley study on fast food chains before and after minimum wage increases, which found that effects on unemployment are minimal.

Calculations based on the current number of minimum wage workers in Chicago and the number of those marginally below the poverty line indicate that the most recent increase will affect 410,000 minimum wage workers and pull 70,000 out of poverty, according to the Chicago Tribune. Yet Brown and other organizers argue that it’s not enough. Brianna Tong (A.B. ’15), head of ISN, said, “I think it’s messed up that people make what they do working full time and are still in poverty, not having enough to feed themselves and their kids.”

Local business managers and employees support raising the minimum wage in principle, arguing as Tong does that cur-

rent wages are not high enough, but out of concern for their businesses, and because they aren’t sure what the effects will be, they support alternatives to raising the minimum wage.

Dylan Harris, who graduated from UChicago last year and now works full-time at Hyde Park Records, earns $14 an hour. He said that although “I can live pretty comfortably on what I’m making right now…if I have even a [single] kid it wouldn’t be enough at all. I think the minimum wage is way too low.” Still, he agreed with his manager that “for small businesses like these, it would be a tight squeeze….

Maybe we could have a lower minimum wage for someone younger without a lot of dependence…more of a needbased system.” El-Sharief from Harper Foods agreed that “we all know that you can’t live on $9 or even $11 an hour if you have a family, but you know, that’s the system. It cannot go unbalanced.”

Still, some local business managers are not too con-

cerned about the wage increase.

In fact, in some cases, the smaller sizes of these stores may help. Chris Willard, a manager at Blackstone Bicycle Works in Woodlawn, explained that most minimum wage increases, even to $15 per hour, would not be drastically harmful.

“We only have five employees,” he says, “so while an increase to $15 might change things, I don’t think it would put us out of business.”

The incremental increases will make the transition to $13 an hour easier as well, and many hope a potential increase to $15 would come about the same way. “We’re going to have to sit down and crunch some numbers to offset cost if it happens but if it’s incremental it will be much easier to absorb,” explained Chris Salmon, a manager at Powell’s independent bookstore, who pays most of the store’s eight employees the current minimum wage. “If it’s going to go up slowly each year there probably won’t be a lot of major changes at the store,” he said.

“The organizers of the event claimed that the administration had not been receptive to alternative attempts towards communication” PSA continued from front

about sexual assault and the University’s policy.

“Where’s the support for students who don’t fit the traditional narratives, not that students who do fit those don’t deserve support? ...

Where’s the support for male survivors, trans survivors, survivors of color, graduate students? Nowhere.” Matt Kellner, a fourth-year in the College, said.

Shortly afterwards, all of the protesters crowded into two elevators and went up to the second floor, where the Office of Campus and Student Life is located. Their intent was to meet with and personally deliver a list of demands to either Rasmussen, Coleman or Cortez-Vazquez, but were not able to secure a meeting with any of them. The organizers of the event claimed that the administration had not been receptive to alternative attempts towards communication and had not responded to calls or emails.

Phoenix Survivors Alliance had compiled a list of five demands: for the University to provide more comprehensive education on consent, Title IX rights and other sexual assault issues during O-week and for graduate students; for information regarding the rights sexual assault victims to be put up online in an easily accessible format, and for the University to release aggregate data semi-annually on disciplinary reporting. Additionally, the Phoenix Survivors Alliance demanded that the University create a coordinated community response

team to work towards ending sexual violence and for the inclusion of student advocates and victims of sexual assault on University committees designed to address sexual and gender-based violence. PSA demanded that the University agree to its demands by June 5 and that changes be made by the beginning of the 2015 academic year.

The official list of demands acknowledged recent steps that the University has taken in order to comply with Title IX requirements but maintains that these actions have not been sufficient. Some of these recent changes include last year’s consolidation and clarification of University Sexual Assault Policy and the establishment of a disciplinary committee to deal specifically with allegations of sexual assault.

Once on the second floor of the building, the group continued to chant outside the doors of the Office of Student Life. A staff member came out of the office and asked the students to leave, claiming that their presence in the building constituted a fire hazard.

“Well, it’s a hazard for you to have a shitty-ass [sexual assault] policy,” a person from the crowd said in response.

A few of the organizers asked the staff member to bring out a person of authority to address the group’s concerns or to bring someone out to publicly accept the list of demands. However, the staff member said that the intended recipients of the list were in meetings and that she did not have key card access to the of-

fice.

After a few minutes of tense negotiations and loud chanting, Lynda Daher, one of the sexual assault deans-on-call, arrived on the scene and made a call to Putnam, who refused to meet the protesters. Daher agreed to deliver the list of demands to its intended recipients, although she did not bring anyone from the rally into the office to witness her handing the paper over to Putnam, as the protesters had wanted.

The protesters left chanting “We’ll be back” and left their signs leaning against the walls of Levi.

Daher stressed that she respected the students’ passion and assured the crowd that the list would be delivered into Putnam’s hands and that she would point out the response deadline.

“We are committed to continuously finding ways to both increase and improve what we do around training for students, during new student orientation as well as over the entire academic year. In addition, our planning for 2015– 16 has been greatly informed by student input in meetings over the past academic year with individual students, advisory groups and RSOs, including the Phoenix Survivors Alliance,” Rasmussen wrote in a statement.

According to a statement from University spokesperson Mary Abowd, the list of demands will be reviewed by staff members, who will most likely set up a meeting with the PSA to further discuss these issues.

4

THE CHICAGO MAROON | NEWS | June 2, 2015

“Corporatization has continued to be a point of tension for faculty and the administration”

President Robert Maynard Hutchins, as pictured in a Board of Trustees portrait taken 1929, the year of his inauguration.

The Board of Trustees meets with President Hutchins in 1945. That year, the Board of Trustees would work with faculty to establish the Council of the University Senate and the Committee of the Council. Hutchins is the leftmost figure at the end of the table.

COURTESY OF UCHICAGO

COURTESY OF UCHICAGO

Students and faculty meet in February 1969 to discuss then-assistant professor Marlene Dixon’s dismissal by the sociology department, which had been announced the previous month. Students and some faculty suspected that Dixon, an outspoken Marxist and feminist, was being unfairly dismissed for her political views.

COURTESY OF UCHICAGO

ADMIN continued from front

College John W. Boyer, “to persuade the public, to defend our interests, to explain to people what a university is and what it’s not.”

When he was appointed president in 1929, Hutchins seemed to fit all of these criteria. Charismatic and dynamic, he was more than just a university president; he was an ideologue who wanted the University of Chicago to be at the forefront of educational innovation. But his idealistic educational theories were radical, and many of Hutchins’s most dramatic reforms were made without consulting the Board of Trustees and faculty. Most undesirably, Hutchins abolished majors at the University of Chicago, instead pushing a four-year general “Core” education curriculum that was open to qualified students of any age, including those still in high school.

Hutchins’s far-reaching reforms were unlike any previously seen in undergraduate education, and faculty members—many of whose Ph.D. programs were threatened—railed against them. “What Hutchins was doing was tampering with basic pedagogical structures,” Boyer said.

“Telling a department you can’t have a major, telling a department your Ph.D. students aren’t going to write doctoral dissertations—these are very deep, probing interventions.”

They were also interventions that, in the end, largely failed. Contrary to his expectations, Hutchins’s radical changes didn’t catch on at other elite universities, and his decision to eliminate majors repelled students in droves. “Our bachelor’s degree had become degraded,” Boyer explained.

“Students graduating from the College couldn’t get jobs. When they’d apply to medical school and law school, [those schools] would make them go for another couple of years at another college to get more training.”

In the mid 1940s, when most of these changes were being implemented despite popular outcry, the only vehicle for faculty governance was the University Senate, which had almost no direct representative power and was composed of only full-time professors. Hutchins’s rash flurry of autocratic decisions prompted the Board of Trustees and faculty to change this, and in 1945, they established both the Council of the University

Senate and the Committee of the Council. The Council of the Senate would act as a further representative body made up of elected members of the Senate, and the Committee of the Council, in turn, would be an even smaller group elected by the Council that would work directly with the President. Under the new organization of powers, enfranchisement in the University Senate was extended beyond those with full professorship to include associate and assistant professors.

Structurally, these governmental bodies have essentially remained the same since their inception. In the end, it was Hutchins’s extreme reforms that lacked staying power: The faculty all but unanimously agreed to overturn his general education curriculum after he left the University in 1951.

For Boyer, the Hutchins crisis was, in many ways, similar to a conflict that he experienced firsthand as dean of the College in the late 1990s. During this period, then-President Hugo Sonnenschein called for a dramatic expansion of the undergraduate population, which had never entirely recovered from the shock of the

Hutchins era.

Not only was the College small, its retention rates were also dishearteningly poor. “They used to tell the students at the opening ceremony, ‘Look to the right, look to the left of you: By the time you graduate, one or both of the people next to you won’t be here anymore,’” Boyer recalled. “[Trying] to run a college on those terms was, in my view, a moral disaster.”

Presidents before Sonnenschein had increased the size of the College incrementally, but Sonnenschein’s call to accept as many as 1,000 more undergraduates met with considerable backlash. Many faculty members felt as though the selectivity, and thus the intellectual integrity, of the College would be compromised. Professor Emeritus of Mathematics Mel Rothenberg, who retired in 1999, agrees that there were parallels between the Hutchins conflict and Sonnenschein’s expansion plan. Whereas in the 1940s professors clashed with Hutchins on his total upheaval of traditional Ph.D. programs, under Sonnenschein the underlying fear was that faculty would be forced to teach more undergraduate courses, detracting from time otherwise spent mentoring graduate students or conducting independent research. In both cases, faculty felt as though the University’s reputation as a premier graduate and research-oriented institution was being compromised.

“When you start putting emphasis on the undergraduate program, it calls up memories of those days when there was this intense battle between researchers and the Hutchins–College crowd,” he explained. “There was a strong institutional memory [of that].”

As dean of the College at this time, Boyer found himself caught between two strongly divided camps: the anti-expansion position, pushed by a faculty contingent, and the pro-expansion position, advanced by Sonnenschein and a number of faculty leaders. To reach a decision, Boyer did what any historian would do: plenty of research.

Boyer kept returning to Hutchins’s story as a litmus test. “It actually turns out to be the only way you can operate a major university is to have a large, thriving college. Nobody planned it this way; Hutchins thought that his new general education college would be a big college, but [the students] didn’t come…I decided that Sonnenschein was right, and so I decided that I would publicly support him.”

But Rothenberg believes that there

was a “grubbier objective” for the College’s expansion, namely that it was representative of the University’s trend toward greater corporatization.

“People that go to graduate school to become professors don’t become really rich. It’s the undergraduates who go to business school and go out into the world who get rich and bring a lot of money to the University.”

Corporatization has continued to be a point of tension for faculty and the administration, particularly when it comes to the establishment of new academic institutions on campus. Recently, the establishment of the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics—now the Becker Friedman Institute—and the Grossman Institute for Quantitative Biology and Human Behavior polarized faculty and stirred intense debates within the governing bodies.

“It struck me that in both instances, the administration was launching major initiatives without adequate consultation of the faculty at large and its representative institutions, the Council in specific,” Lincoln said.

The problem for Rothenberg, Lincoln, and many faculty members was that the institutes threatened the well-being and integrity of the University, either politically or intellectually. Rothenberg viewed the Friedman Institute as an effort by conservative alumni to pass down the ideas of Milton Friedman to students at the University. “It was ‘one of those institutes,’” said Rothenberg.

“They functioned as lobby groups for certain economic and financial interests.”

The Grossman Institute faced similar backlash. Economist and University Trustee Sanford Grossman aspired to further the study of “quantitative biometrics,” in which researchers determine whether there are hardwired biological factors that correlate with certain kinds of personality structure and action decisions. While Grossman had originally envisioned building a neuroscience research center, he was later influenced to instead focus on the study of economic decision making.

Many faculty found these studies’ potential to be not only pseudoscientific, but morally offensive. “The neuroscientists [at the University] were unhappy and thought the proposal dubious. In Council, the discussion was sharply critical of the proposal,” said Lincoln.

Though years of negotiation led to the gradual reconstruction of the institute in 2011 to what the neuADMIN continued on Page 5

THE CHICAGO MAROON | NEWS | June 2, 2015

5

Lincoln believes relations have improved since the days of the Grossman, Friedman, and Confucius Institutes

President Sonnenschein and Dean of the College John W. Boyer in 1997. Under Sonnenschein’s presidency, the College increased enrollment by about a thousand students.

Incoming President Hugo Sonnenschein walks arm-and-arm with President Hanna Gray during his inauguration in 1993. Both administrators made calls to increase the size of the College.

COURTESY OF UCHICAGO

COURTESY OF UCHICAGO

ADMIN continued from page 4

roscientists had wanted in the first place, Lincoln states that the Council should have been able to intervene earlier without administrative interference. “In the face of strong opposition, the administration was prepared to railroad a proposal that they thought was financially advantageous.”

The faculty divide over the Friedman Institute further spurred debate on the true powers and limitations of the statutes. As debate intensified, there was a call among faculty members to defer to the statutes and bylaws that outlined the powers of the governing bodies on campus. All those involved knew that the statutes very clearly indicated that faculty approval is necessary for the establishment of new departments and schools, but the question was if this jurisdiction extended to the establishment of new research institutes.

Because no powers were explicitly granted by the statutes, the Council appointed a committee of faculty to analyze and interpret these documents.

The committee ended up splitting into two factions with completely different findings. “There was a majority [committee] that said the faculty really had serious powers here, and the other [committee] said, ‘No, the faculty really only has power to give advice and the decisions rest with the administration,’” Lincoln said.

Before the committee’s findings were announced, the president appointed his own committee to analyze the statutes, who interpreted them as solely granting jurisdictional power to the administration. Though one of the faculty-appointed groups had reached this conclusion independently, many members of the Council were baffled and disheartened by the administration’s brusque overruling of their own findings. “By my perception, [the faculty’s] argument was superior to the one posed by the administration, and structurally, they were given much less voice in the decisions that got made, and ultimately, less voice than the statutes mandated they should have had,” Lincoln said.

The critical faculty response, combined with the financial crash of 2008, reined in the scale of the Friedman Institute. “Eventually, we made a fuss about it, and there was enough bad publicity and conflict on campus that what they did was combine it with the Becker Institute,” Rothenberg said. “It became a much smallerscale operation, which I regard as kind of a victory.”

But for those vested in the issue, the actions of the administration left some lingering distrust, and it was in the wake of this that the University’s Confucius Institute was announced.

Like the Friedman Institute, some faculty members were concerned with the political implications of the University’s affiliation with the Confucius Institute, which is funded by the Chinese government and has been accused of academic censorship. “All of my instincts of the past came into play,” Lincoln recalled. “I thought, ‘Here we go again—this is a terrible thing for the integrity of the University.’ We were permitting the classroom to become a vehicle for state propaganda, and [the administration] was willing to turn a blind eye to that.”

Though Rothenberg had been retired for about a decade when the Confucius Institute was announced, he believed the principle of the issue should stand regardless of which country is funding the institute. “[The Confucius Institute] is not uniquely evil by any means,” he explained, “[but] … its interests are political power and maintaining it.”

After a staff petition and a rash of bad publicity, the University decided not to renew its five-year contract with the Confucius Institute in September 2014. Many members of the faculty acknowledged the dissociation as a victory, though other factors more publicly contributed to the decision: As reported by The Maroon that month, University officials were particularly dismayed by comments made by the Confucius Institute Headquarters’s chief executive on its relationship with the University in a Chinese publication.

But in retrospect, Lincoln believes that relations between faculty and the administration have improved since the days of the Grossman Institute, Friedman Institute, and Confucius Institute. “The battles were fought, and they were unpleasant.

People pounded the table, people got angry, and there were hurt feelings and there were accusations made back and forth [that] were probably overstated. But in the wake of it, I think the administration is less determined to have its way,” Lincoln said.

“The Confucius Institute resolved very nicely…. There was a serious discussion, and objections got heard.

Ultimately, the institution made a decision that wasn’t just based on finances. I think things are better than they were at the time of the Friedman Institute and the Grossman Institute, in part because of those struggles.”

While Lincoln has certainly seen an advance in the way in which the administration now handles controversial matters, he still believes that there is plenty of room for improvement with administration and faculty relations. In particular, he envisions a future in which the faculty and the Board of Trustees are two spheres of influence with mutual respect for one another.

“In recent decades, Boards of Trustees have been more activist than they’ve used to be. They’ve wanted to play a bigger role in shaping the institution,” said Lincoln. “My opinion is that the Trustees should make sure there is enough money for what the faculty want to do. That’s how a university ought to run. The Trustees run their corporations, and if they’re interested in academic matters, they should trust academics to tell them what’s important and what’s worth doing. We’re not a production line.

We’re not a corporate entity. Knowledge doesn’t work the way products do.”

That’s a point with which former President Hutchins would almost certainly agree. Though the battle for greater faculty representation began with his contentious, controlling presidency, there’s no question that Hutchins had the best academic interests of the University in mind throughout. “I remember 20 years ago when I just started [as dean of the College], I was talking to older faculty—who were young faculty in the ’30s and ’40s—and what they remember is the vibrancy of the place,” Boyer said of the Hutchins era. “[They had] a president who gave speeches on higher education, who believed in ideas, who was constantly talking about the ideas associated with the University, and when he resigned, they missed him, even though at the time some of them hated his guts.”

So it has been with all presidents since: In juggling the interests of both the faculty and the Board of Trustees, the Office of the President is certainly indebted to both bodies, but at the end of the day, decisions must be made for what is best for the University, and futures must be considered.

“Do I think presidents sometimes force things through? Yeah, sometimes,” said Boyer. “They should have a lot of prerogative, a lot of opportunities to influence the shaping of the university. But the best ones understand that they have to cooperate with at least a significant share of the faculty.”

In May 1979, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was selected by a faculty committee as the recipient of the first—and last—Albert Pick, Jr. Peace Award. Many faculty and students who were not involved with the decision were outraged, finding McNamara unfit for the award because of his role in escalating the Vietnam War. The May 4th issue of the Maroon broke the story.

THE CHICAGO MAROON ARCHIVES

President Robert J. Zimmer speaking at the UChicago Center in Beijing in March. Under President Zimmer, faculty-administration conflict has primarily stemmed from the association of high-budget institutes with the University.

COURTESY OF UCHICAGO

6

THE CHICAGO MAROON | NEWS | June 2, 2015

“Despite constant frostbite and hypothermia warnings, the number of homeless individuals remained high” HOMELESS continued from front

Who are the homeless?

“The happiest moment in my life? When my father, mother and sister passed away. I know that they’re in heaven now, and they’re comfortable. I’m not sad because I know in my heart that I’ll see them again, and they won’t be in debt.

They won’t be hungry next time.”

–Jeff, 59 years old, 53rd and Dorchester

“No, my children don’t know that I’m homeless and I don’t want to worry them.

But, you know, all I have to do is walk through that church door…I know that when I do, my life will change and I can get myself off the streets…things are different today and I think I can walk through that door. No one has asked me about myself in 5 months and I think that was all I needed: someone to care.”

–Georgia, 56 years old, 53rd and Blackstone

The City of Chicago, through the Department of Family and Support Services, conducted its latest Homeless Count & Survey on the night of January 22, 2014, during one of the most severe winters in the history of Chicago. Despite constant frostbite and hypothermia warnings, and subzero temperatures, the number of homeless individuals remained high, falling from 1,219 in 2013 to 965 in 2014.

According to a January 23, 2014 WBEZ article which covered the count, one explanation given was that some people consider their street space as their home and would rather weather harsh conditions to keep it.

Pierre Tatum, a 54-year-old black man and Chicago native who has been homeless since 2003, also expressed such feelings of ownership for his part of the street.

“I’m a street vendor, and I have a spot on 53rd and Blackstone where I sell stuff from down the alley or people that donate to the Second Faith Church.” Prior to 2003, he was an employee at a warehouse before the company moved to California.

After his father passed away, the building in which he lived was vacated due to structural damages which had not been addressed, and he has been without a home since. He filed a suit against the federal government, holding it liable for forcing him into homelessness.

However, he claims that, given his circumstances, it is more financially beneficial to remain on the streets. “My father’s attorney said ‘Me, personally? I would stay outside because you’ll get more money...if you’re working and over the poverty level, you’ll lose dividends from the court.’ By me not having a home, I could not get a steady job because I don’t have a permanent address.” The suit is still ongoing.

Tatum’s path from employment to chronic homelessness is a common one.

“Prior to becoming homeless, I had my own business. I was making ten million dollars a year in sales, selling clothes, jewelry, cologne, you name it,” said Gerald Casey, the director of outreach and volunteer coordinator for Pacific Garden Mission, which is an emergency shelter located in East Pilsen. While a student at Olive-Harvey College, Casey was a business and accounting major. He opened a successful sales business that took a turn for the worst in July of 2005, when his life spiraled out of control. “I lost everything I had…my marriage went south on me, my teenagers were acting up, and I had fallen into a state of depression.”

Casey’s grandmother and first wife also passed away during that time. He describes the experience as lonely, as his family and children kept their distance from him after trying numerous times to help. Resorting to drinking, marijuana and crack cocaine, Casey said that substance use is a culturally ingrained form of coping. Furthermore, Casey emphasized how experiences with physical and sexual abuse, particularly abuse of an incestuous nature, are shared among many that come to the shelter.

“I was sexually molested as an infant by my auntie, my female cousin and my uncle.

Furthermore, beer was placed in my baby bottle to put me to sleep at times. So, you know, by the time I was 10 years old…as a kid growing up you see your adult peers drinking…and you want to be grown and like them.” He said that many utilize sub-

stances as a means to escape the hardships of the past and present.

Casey was homeless for a year before finding a home at Pacific Garden Mission.

The transition from business owner to shelter-seeker was excruciating, and Casey said that most homeless individuals are almost never seen in public areas because they are embarrassed by their situation. “I didn’t want to be [at Pacific Garden Mission], because my view of Pacific Garden Mission was that it was a place for bums.

My pride ran so strongly in me, telling me ‘I’m not a bum’, but I was one…I just couldn’t lower myself to coming there,” Casey said. Though he was able to climb out of his depression with the help of Pacific Garden Mission, many at the shelter have more debilitating mental diseases that confine them in perpetual homelessness.

“Out of about 850 homeless at our shelter, about 300 have severe mental illness… bipolar, schizophrenic, manic depression,” Casey said. “And that’s because our previous Governor, Pat Quinn, closed down all the facilities. So where are they to go?”

Arlene Roberts, a current resident at Pacific Garden Mission, is a 52-year-old former nursing home assistant who has been homeless for 3 years following a domestic dispute with her husband. Originally from Rockford, Illinois, Roberts says that even though she does not have a history of substance abuse or mental illness, her lack of a state identification resulted in her chronic unemployment.

“In the summer, I used to stay at my bench at Harold Washington Park, but I’ve been staying at the Mission because it’s safer for a woman, because there’s a lot of rape and crime here,” Roberts said.

“I’ve been robbed and everything, but I can’t let that stop me. I got to live on, and I feel like something good’s about to happen.” She said that she recently acquired a social worker who will be helping her find a studio apartment as well as employment.

When asked about other homeless individuals that *the Maroon* interviewed, such as Jeff and Georgia, her face lit up as if beloved family members were mentioned. “Georgia! Yeah, and Jeff !” Roberts said. “I know all of them.”

“The happiest moment in my life? When my father, mother and sister passed away.

I know that they’re in heaven now, and they’re comfortable. I’m not sad because I know in my heart that I’ll see them again, and they won’t be in debt. They won’t be hungry next time.”

“No, my children don’t know that I’m homeless and I don’t want to worry them.

But, you know, all I have to do is walk through that church door…I know that when I do, my life will change and I can get myself off the streets…things are different today and I think I can walk through that door. No one has asked me about myself in 5 months and I think that was all I needed: someone to care.”

What help have students provided?

Of the homeless individuals interviewed, none could recall a student group that provided consistent help to the homeless population. *The Maroon* spoke with Elizabeth Weigel, who is the associate director of Calvert House and adviser for The Homeless Food Run, which appears to be the only student organization HOMELESS continued on page 7

THE CHICAGO MAROON | NEWS | June 2, 2015

Sheltered & Unsheltered Population

HOMELESS continued from page 6

dedicated solely to helping the homeless.

Founded in 2002, The Homeless Food Run delivers food to various locations via a service truck on Tuesday evenings each week. “On average [we have about] 10 students a week [volunteering ], and [each week there are] different students. There are maybe 2 students there, all the time, running it…and sometimes they do extra runs when fraternities and sororities contact us to do service projects,” Weigel said.

She said that The Homeless Food Run, as well as other groups such as the oncampus Christian InterVarsity, which does food runs, Hyde Park Food Pantry, and The Living Room Café address not only homelessness but also food insecurity in general: a problem relevant to both those who are homeless and impoverished.

“There’s a lot of people who are food insecure, and there’s a lot of resources for people like that,” Weigel said.

Despite some student involvement in food runs, Weigel feels that there may not be as big of a culture of service on campus. “We do get surges of people, but it’s typically to fulfill hours either for their fraternity or sorority…it isn’t something that’s like ‘all my c lassmates are doing it, and we feel compelled to do it,’” Weigel said, though she recognizes that there are many programs which students are actively involved in, such as Summer Links, which works with non-profits over the summer, and Neighborhood Schools Program.

However, she feels there could be more

ALL PHOTOS BY BRANDON LEE

|

community-centered involvement from students, especially since the campus is situated so closely to the poorest south side neighborhoods.

“Students could help us with bus passes or clothes during the winter, so we can change our clothes. And toiletries,” Roberts said, suggesting that these could be more useful than the occasional dollar, and can be acquired from donations to shelters.

“One of my dreams is to have a student soup kitchen or whatever the need is in the neighborhood…like a student run shelter.”

Weigel said. “Some of the SSA [Social Service Administration] students could help with people who need housing or [solving ] questions that may be difficult to answer. Some of the funding could come from the University and donations come from students. Think of all the dorms, old apartments or stuff that people don’t want!” She believes that there are churches in Hyde Park that are looking for ways to serve the community, and could be close enough for students to open a shelter.

Casey agreed that there are plenty of volunteer and service opportunities for students at the University to initiate, and emphasized the importance and gratification inherent to giving back to his community.

“For me, this is not a job it is a joy. It is so pleasurable and rewarding,” Casey said.

“To be able to give back, to encourage others and let them know that there’s a way out of your dilemma, your struggles.”

THE CHICAGO MAROON

7

Use of Mental Health Services

Substance Use

GRAPHS COURTESY OF

2014 HOMELESS

POINT-IN-TIME COUNT

&

SURVEY REPORT

VIEWPOINTS

Editorial & Op-Ed JUNE 2, 2015

Shame on you An in-depth look at UChicago’s recent history of public shaming Will Dart Maroon Contributor “At low points,” said first-year Derek Caquelin, “I think that everything is deserved.”

Caquelin wasn’t talking about the three-quarter suspension they received in the wake of fall quarter’s much-publicized hacking hoax. That, they say, was well warranted.

It’s the other level of punishment that Caquelin is not so sure about: the barrage of threats and verbal attacks on Facebook and anonymous forums like Yik Yak. The two letters sent to their home—“I don’t know how they found my address,” Caquelin said mildly—each promising death for them and their family. But the nastiness started long before they left campus; it was commonplace even before the details of the hoax came to light.

“Most of them would include, like, ‘F*** you, n*****,’ ‘You’re like a scourge to our campus,’ ‘You don’t belong here,’” Caquelin recalled. “There were a couple ones that were like, ‘If you don’t leave, I’ll make you leave.’” Some of these were delivered anonymously; many were shouted at them in public. Caquelin goes back and forth on whether this extra level of abuse was warranted; they empathize with the anger and the pain, although the verbal harassment—still going strong on Yik Yak, even six months later—certainly hurts.

“It’s like, on some level, I can understand where it’s coming from, and I think it’s certainly warranted,” Caquelin said. “But

let’s be honest: emotionally, it’s been rough.”

Caquelin presents a fairly extreme case of public shaming at the University of Chicago. Their crime was relatively severe, and their punishment has been harsh.

Others have been crucified for far less.

Case in point: third-year Jenny Lee. Last year, she wrote a less-than-stellar column in the Viewpoints section of The Maroon—on the ladder of sins, this is at least a couple rungs down from a fake rape threat—and subsequently became the subject of ridicule on the popular student Facebook group Overheard at UChicago. Lee readily admits that the piece in question was not her strongest work. Still, the public nature of the shaming stung her.

“It didn’t put me in a great place,” Lee said of the incident. “I wore a hat for a week afterward because I felt like everybody on campus was staring at me.” The author of the Overheard post apologized a few months later, long after his smear campaign had done its work. That much-maligned article would be Lee’s last.

“I ultimately just kind of quit. I didn’t want that to happen again.”

Kayleigh Voss, another Viewpoints columnist, got it even worse on a similarly derisive Overheard post. Her only sin was the misfortune of being published while another contributor was not. The attack had been directed at the Viewpoints editors; Voss was simply collateral damage. But it hurt.

“I was waiting for class to start when I saw it,” Voss recalled. “I

went home and cried.”

It was a similar situation, minus the tears, for Matt Jeong. You may remember Jeong ; he was one of the students called out for dressing up as a “cholo” last Halloween. A picture of Jeong in costume was widely circulated on Facebook; he, like Voss, had been merely a tool in a much bigger agenda (this one was a campaign to end microaggressions on campus). It’s probable that the poster didn’t take Jeong’s feelings into consideration, or the consequences it would have for him. And there were consequences.

“I was surprised at how fast it escalated,” Jeong recalled. “It was posted to Overheard, and then my R.A. called me that night, and then my R.H. called me. I talked to Housing the next day. Eventually it got all the way to the dean of students.”

Jeong had not violated the University’s Diversity Policy and couldn’t be punished by the administration. But now he had a bigger problem: The issue had been taken onto social media and out of his hands. His image was on thousands of screens; it was like an evil spirit had been let loose.

He couldn’t control it anymore.

“The fact that it was posted so publicly meant that I harmed a lot more people,” he said. “If I’d offended one or two people, I could’ve handled it. Ultimately I just didn’t know who to apologize to.”

In the end, Jeong had to take his apology onto Overheard, trying futilely to chase down a sin that had now taken on a life of its own.

“Is this the world that we want?

SARAH LARSON

Where you’re swallowed up by the worst thing you ever did?” asks Jon Ronson, author of the very excellent So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. In the book, Ronson explores the myriad ways in which people can make mistakes and subsequently find themselves the target of our collective ire.

He talks to people whose lives

|

THE CHICAGO MAROON

have been destroyed by runaway shaming. By the end of his book he’s discovered something kind of terrifying : Public shaming has turned into a habit for us, a new kind of American pastime. We’ve always on the lookout for transgressions and missteps, minor deviances from the status quo. We’re SHAME continued on page 9

Walking on eggshells The student newspaper of the University of Chicago since 1892.

Eleanor Hyun, Editor-in-Chief Sarah Manhardt, Deputy Editor-in-Chief Stephen Moreland, Managing Editor The Maroon Editorial Board consists of Alan Hassler, Eleanor Hyun, and Lear Jiang.

News Natalie Friedberg, editor Alec Goodwin, editor Marta Bakula, deputy editor Isaac Easton, associate editor Raymond Fang, associate editor Shelby Lohr, associate editor Maggie Loughran, associate editor Annie Nazzaro, associate editor Isaac Stein, senior writer Viewpoints Sarah Zimmerman, editor Nina Katemauswa, associate editor Patricia Nyawga, associate editor Kayleigh Voss, associate editor Arts Andrew McVea, editor Evangeline Reid, editor Ellen Rodnianski, editor Hannah Edgar, associate editor Grace Hauck, associate editor James Mackenzie, senior editor Sports Helen Petersen, editor Zachary Themer, editor Ahmad Allaw, associate editor Katie Anderson, associate editor Tatiana Fields, senior editor Sarah Langs, senior editor Grey City Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Editor-in-Chief Kristin Lin, Editor-in-Chief Design Annie Cantara, head designer Copy Sophie Downes, head editor Alan Hassler, head editor Sherry He, head editor Morganne Ramsey, head editor

Multimedia Forrest Sill, editor Kay Li, director of data analysis Photo Marta Bakula, editor Yeo Bi Choi, associate editor Liana Sonenclar, associate editor Video Amber Love, editor Social Media Emily Harwell, editor Online Ryan McDowell, web developer Business Nicolas Lukac, chief financial officer Ananya Pillutla, vice chief financial officer Andrew Ahn, co-director of marketing Eitan Rude, co-director of marketing Ben Veres, director of operations Patrick Quinn, director of strategy Lenise Lee, business manager Harry Backlund, distributor This issue: Copy: Megan Daknis, Lauren Scott Design: Kyra Martin, Michelle Zhao Editor-in-Chief E-mail: Editor@ChicagoMaroon.com Newsroom Phone: (773) 702-1403 Business Phone: (773) 702-9555 Fax: (773) 702-3032 For advertising inquiries, please contact Ads@ChicagoMaroon.com or (773) 702-9555 Circulation: 6,800. © 2015 The Chicago Maroon Ida Noyes Hall, 1212 East 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637

Analyzing the dynamics of the campus sexual assault community Michaela Cross Maroon Contributor It was the closing ceremony of the Clothesline Project and I was trying not to laugh. I have this awful dark sense of humor—at the worst times it shows its face.

I was sitting there and listening to stories of tragedy. But behind the speaker was a line of frat boys, with dolled-up ladies by their sides.

They were on their way to a formal, unable to hear our stories of sexual assault at frats. Their numbers were far greater; they stared at us curiously. And it struck me as ridiculous because it was not us but they who should have been the audience. We had literally turned our backs to exactly the people who really needed to hear.

We were there to speak to our allies and not to our enemies. We were rallying the troops of our imaginary war.

That was 2014, and I was there because I’d written an article. An article about India and the sexual

assault I’d faced. The year before had been hard for me: I’d been suicidal, traumatized, depressed.

That was when I met the allies, the only ones who seemed to care.

Who are the “allies?” you might ask: You’ve seen it all before. They say words like “cis-gender” and “POC,” “survivor” and “intersectionality.” They’re queer and angry and fighting for good, with an arsenal of sympathy.

I felt in need of sympathy—I learned which boxes to check.

I was braless and queerish and liked to fuck my friends. I was unhappy and angry and hated hiding truths. So I checked “feminist,” “pansexual,” and “polyamorist.” I checked “triggers,” “Bipolar II,” “catatonia,” and “PTSD.” No longer had I just been fondled as a child by a boy in a basement. Now I was called a “survivor.” Now I was called “brave.”

All these words were made to help me but I only crippled myself. I entered a world of opposites, where powerlessness was power and strength sent you plummeting

down.

We allies offered a morbid sympathy, and so with relish we counted our cuts. I picked mine until I was scarred, until I was lost in personal pain. I longed to write about this new world, and yet it was a world too littered with eggshells. It was a world made up of whispers, where no one would even speak.

On every campus there lays this faction, this underground, whispering world. One that disagrees with the world, but won’t stand up and tell it—one that hides in the cobwebby corners of the Left.

There, my bad stories of India languished, fermenting in stagnant waters with other tales. And there I languished too, lying on a bed of eggshells, covered in the cuts I’d made myself.

It was silence and self-pity that was killing me, far more than the assaults I’d faced. We were lost in our darkness, agreeing ourselves to death.

Those days, people agreed so ALLIES continued on page 9

THE CHICAGO MAROON | VIEWPOINTS | June 2, 2015

9

“We’re relieved when someone else’s head is on the chopping block, and we gleefully swing the axe” SHAME continued from page 8

tearing each other apart for sport.

One way to read cases like Caquelin, Jeong, Lee, and Voss’s is that they were not just arbitrary victims of our bloodlust, but instead had it coming—Caquelin and Jeong for serious offenses against the student body, Lee and Voss for apparently failing to be excellent at what they do. But even a cursory examination of social media on campus proves that this just isn’t true. You see people taken down for risqué jokes, for being mildly annoying, for failing to follow the ever-more-complex scripture of political correctness on campus, and for voicing an unpopular opinion at the wrong time. People are always tiptoeing on Facebook; they run in terror from the crucible of Yik Yak. Watching the way students behave in situations like these, talking to those who have been at the mercy of public scrutiny in ways

big and small, a portrait slowly begins to emerge of a college population living in fear of their flaws being exposed to the world.

I’m not smart enough, we think.

I’m not good enough. I shouldn’t be here. We’re relieved when someone else’s head is on the chopping block, and we gleefully swing the axe. We’re safe for another day.

During the most recent in an endless string of sexual assault allegations started on Yik Yak, several commentators compared the current atmosphere on campus to that of Salem, Massachusetts circa 1692, an analogy that at first seems completely stupid, and then sensational, and then, after some consideration, spot-on.

Think about it: We’re living in a small, isolated community, cordoned off by tuition fees and a selective admissions office. The winters are brutal, the stress is intense. General malaise runs rampant (according to Salem State

University historian Tad Baker, “the higher the misery quotient, the more likely you are to be seeing witches”). Presiding over the whole thing is an administration so deaf to students’ needs that it might as well be ruling from across the Atlantic, checking in every six months with letters on a spice cog. Add the virtual whipping post of Yik Yak (which often provides its own kind of spectral evidence against the accused), plus our newfound Puritan aversion to unpopular ideas and frivolity, and you’ve got all the makings of a good witch-hunt.

I heard that the South Side Weekly is brewing occult potions in the steam tunnels below the quads. Grab your torch and pitchfork!

Writing this article, I couldn’t help but ruminate on my own boatloads of private shame (an act which mostly entails listening to sappy Avett Brothers songs and

crying in the shower). My sins are certainly equal to those who have garnered public shaming here. The only difference is that those acts were committed in the broad daylight of a Facebook wall, while mine are still secreted away in the pages of my journal. It’s bad enough to know the cruelties you’ve committed; I can’t imagine the pain of having that guilt shouted back at you by the world.

Derek Caquelin will be back in October to begin their second year. They’ve learned from the experience—about the power of words and how they affect people. “Seeing the way people responded, it really made me aware of how my actions really had an effect on other people. Our actions and our words, they have serious repercussions for others,” Caquelin said. “Sometimes you can brush it off. And sometimes it sticks to you.”

Still, they’re attempting to put

the incident behind them. They hope that the people they’ve hurt can do the same. They hope that the rest won’t feed off of the controversy any longer than necessary. But they understand the situation.

“I definitely think there’s gonna be a lot of negativity when I come back, but I’m kind of accepting of it,” they said. “I mean—what I did was really, really bad. But I’m going to try to be positive, and really be a better part of the community than before. I don’t want to fight anyone.”

I won’t be around next year to see whatever ugliness might ensue. But I have some parting advice: Look to your Good Book, ye Puritans. Let he who is without sin post the first snarky comment.

Will Dart is a fourth-year in the College majoring in English.

“We were there to speak to our allies and not to our enemies. We were rallying the troops of our imaginary war” ALLIES continued from page 8

much with me, but those relationships didn’t last. The ones that did were contentious—they were the people who challenged me and cared about me far more. It was one of the challengers who told me to write an article, and that article opened up the world of those who disagreed. That air was fresh and full of energy, electric and full of change.

The college liberal movement is stultifying, and it’s easy enough to see. We’re afraid to face the ones we call rapists, afraid of the disabilities we’ve imagined into our minds. We teach ourselves trig-

gers, trade our flesh for porcelain, and learn to shatter at the slightest touch. We confuse alliances with friendships, and peace for an imaginary war.

Am I victim-blaming? No—I simply believe we’re greater than we think. I could only heal by leaving the world of allies and my own poisonous self-pity. And behind me I left my sense of false bravery—this is the first thing I’ve been scared to write.

Because I’ve passed the T-shirts on the quad; I’ve read the stories of those 50 rapes. I’ve seen the deadened eyes of friends and the numb eyes of my mother. I’ve read

the comments on the internet, heard the jokes at parties dropped.

I’ve seen hundreds of kids come into this school, and knew some of them would soon be rapists, some of them would soon be raped.

But the problem is that when you launch a war, you turn civilians into enemies. The problem is that when we launch a war, we close our eyes and stuff our ears.

We fuel our just causes with hatred and see ourselves as warriors.

And warriors see no one as human, not even themselves.

We will not learn our lessons from those who won’t disagree.

We will learn from the questioners

and the listeners, and we all have a lot to learn. We must learn to stand up and listen. We must learn to crush eggshells and speak.

So call me racist, call me a liar, call me anything but a “survivor.”

It’s your goddamn right to do so, and it’s my right to love it when you do. It keeps me on my toes and makes me stronger than being called “brave.”

When people call you brave you stop needing to prove to yourself that you are.

It’s the duty of college liberals to prepare for a war outside these walls. It’s a war whose survivors are on respirators and whose trig-

gers aren’t made of words. It’s a war we have the power to face, if only we give it to ourselves.

And if we don’t heal our personal problems, we’ll not be able to fight for something greater. It is not enough to fight only for people who are just like you.

The war is real and it’s out there, waiting for strong people to join it. And I intend to do everything to make myself to be of some use.

So lower your weapons and open your eyes—go out and face the real war.

Michaela Cross is a student in the College.

Letter: The Maroon needs to revise online comment policy Dear Editor, This quarter, online comments on Maroon Viewpoints pieces about sexual assault have called women such degrading names as “bitch” and “fool.” The Maroon’s Viewpoints editor’s email response to my request to remove the comments was: “We can only remove when a comment threatens to physically harm a user.”

In my opinion, rude comments shouldn’t need to escalate to threatening physical violence in order to be removed. I have written four op-eds for The Maroon from my perspective as an alumna sexual assault survivor, but unless the policy changes, I won’t be writing any more.

If The Maroon is going to live up to the preamble of the student handbook—that members of the

University strive for personal integrity and treat others with dignity and respect—it needs to be willing to sanction people who do not act with basic human decency.

Sexual assault isn’t an anomaly arising out of an otherwise respectful society. It fits its context. A society that accepts microaggressions such as name-calling signals to rapists and bullies that they have unfettered reign.

I urge The Maroon to revise and publish its policy for online comments to make it clear that ad hominem attacks will not be tolerated. At a minimum, such comments should be removed. In addition, only allowing people with uchicago.edu email addresses to participate might enable the University community to have its own constructive conversations without

the interference of Internet trolls.

But then again, it might not.

Those policies are currently in place in the university-sponsored UChicago Alumni LinkedIn group where I naively posted about sexual assault. At first, I enjoyed the opportunity to dialogue with alumni with whom I vehemently disagreed in what I assumed would be a civil forum.

Unfortunately, it was not. As we’ve learned with rape, threats do not always come from strangers outside our ivory tower. Members of our university community commit verbal and sexual assaults.

An alumnus made several inappropriate comments to me, one of which the University administrator removed. The man continued commenting as if nothing happened.

Justice had been done, but I still

felt uncomfortable: he had not acknowledged wrongdoing.

The University process paralleled the criminal justice system: The university and the state punish, and victims are simply witnesses. Fortunately, there’s another model, one that restores power to victims. In keeping with the preamble guidelines, which state that University members need to take responsibility for their behavior, I suggest that the authors of ad hominem attacks be required to apologize before being allowed to comment again.

Apologies require perpetrators to take personal responsibility for their actions. They provide an opportunity for the powerful to experience vulnerability, and in so doing, empower the offended.

As psychologist Aaron Lazare explains, in apologies, violators and

their victims exchange power and shame.

Like the many rape survivors who drop out of school and watch perpetrators graduate, I no longer participate in the LinkedIn group and will no longer write op-eds for The Maroon When freedom of expression extends to personal attacks, it silences voices within our community.

I urge the University of Chicago Committee on Freedom of Expression to reconvene to provide guidance for maintaining civility in highly contentious discussions, a crucial issue its recent report did not address. I look forward to rejoining University discussion forums when I can be assured of civility.

—Michele Beaulieux A.B. ’82

10

THE CHICAGO MAROON | VIEWPOINTS | June 2, 2015

The weight of cultural differences Misdiagnoses of eating disorders can be the result of physicians using a single standard of healthy for all body types Angela Qian Maroon Contributor I’m five-foot-one and weigh somewhere in the low nineties. I’m not bony, but I would agree with anyone who said I was thin. I’ve been underweight ever since I was born—but for many Asians, that’s not unusual.

The other day I went into Student Health Services for a physical, in order to get a certificate of health signed so I could start a year-long teaching program in Japan—a job I had really wanted and was extremely excited about. The nurse weighed me, took my height and blood pressure, and then did a quick vision test. When the attending physician, a tall Caucasian woman, came in, she looked at my chart and said, “You’re wildly underweight.”

She reweighed me. Then she made me change out of my street clothes into a hospital gown, and weighed me on a different scale.

This time the number was a pound lower.

“It says on your chart you have a history of mental illness?”

I had a bad feeling about this.

“Second year, I was really stressed out about some things and paid some visits to Student Counseling,” I said. “But that was two years ago.”

“Did you leave with their approval?”

I frowned. “I guess. They never gave me a formal diagnosis.”

At the end of the exam the physician said, “I’m really concerned about you. You have a history of mental illness and you’re really underweight. Do you have an eating disorder?”

I’d sort of seen this coming. “No,” I said, trying to be patient. “I eat plenty. My mom is like this too. It’s more normal for Asian people—” “No, no it isn’t,” she said.

“I know so many friends who have similar body types to me,” I said. “It’s genetic. My mom is the same—” and my brother, and grandma, and two of my aunts, and an uncle.

“Well, maybe your mom has an eating disorder too.”

I was stunned. Now she was questioning my mother, too? I looked at the form and reminded myself I had to get her to sign it. I tried to be reasonable.

“How much weight do you think I should gain?”

The physician did some calculations. “Fifteen pounds. If you gain fifteen pounds, you’ll be normal.”

I had never weighed that much in my entire life.

I tried again. “I don’t think I can gain fifteen pounds by the time it’s time to go to Japan—” “Yes, that’s true.”

“But… I need you to sign the form.”

“I can’t if I have these concerns.”

“But that means I can’t go!”

“Well, I’m not sure that you should!”

I froze. The air seemed to thicken with tension. Was she kidding me?

“I’m normal,” I protested. “I have so many friends who are a similar height, a similar weight—” “You’re in denial,” the physician said, shaking her head. “You’re being very resistant to the idea.” Her tone implied my attitude wasn’t

SEAN WHANG

helping things. Well, I didn’t like her attitude, either.

She made me sign me up for weight management visits. I walked out of the hospital and called my dad. Halfway through explaining what had happened (“She said I was too underweight. She won’t let me go to Japan.”) I started crying—she’d accused me of so much, hadn’t listened at all, and had even made me doubt myself. Maybe I was abnormal. Maybe I did have a problem.

My dad was furious.

“That’s ridiculous!” he said. “Fly home. Right now. I’ll find you a doctor. Fly home this weekend.”

When he calmed down a little, he said, “Find an Asian doctor. You have to go to an Asian doctor.”

After I found a Chinese doctor at Northwestern who would give me a physical, I started looking at WHO statistics for Asian BMIs. For Asian populations, one study found, some BMIs under 25 (considered obese) still put Asians at higher risk for diseases related to obesity, such as hypertension, high blood pressure, or cardiovascular issues. In other words, this study suggested that some Asian people should naturally weigh a little less than the American norm to be healthy.

I talked to a few Asian friends who were about my height. They too, fell in my weight range. My old roommate, a spunky and athletic dancer who was a major foodie, also weighed in the nineties and was five feet tall. I had a friend in high school, an ex-gymnast, 5’4” and ninety pounds—lots of people were jealous of her fit body, but she ate like a truck driver. We worked in an ice cream shop together and always took home huge milkshakes and sundaes.

“That’s ridiculous,” these friends

all said. “What, does she think half the people in Japan or Korea have eating disorders?”

Though the physician I saw accused me of being resistant to the idea that I was underweight, she was resistant to the idea that I really might just have been born this way. Aside from my weight, I was in perfect health, and had no symptoms of having a disordered relationship with food. I eat when I’m hungry, and I stop when I’m full. I don’t binge, purge, control, restrict, or count calories. But when I’d told her—angrily—“I’ve been like this for 21 years. I know my own body!,” she immediately assumed I was ignorant or lying, and invalidated my personal experience by replying, “I don’t think you do!” She demonstrated a complete lack of cultural awareness, bringing her rigid notions of what “normal” bodies should be like to bear on not only me, but also my mother, whom she hadn’t even seen.

She didn’t listen to anything I said.

And she isn’t the first. A few months earlier, I’d gone to Student Health to get treatment for a kitchen burn. The attending physician spent more time asking me about my weight, asking if I had an eating disorder, and trying to get me to come in for weight consultations than she did treating my red, throbbing, and blistered finger.

For the careless way in which “mental health” was entered into my chart without further elaboration and tests, for the way both physicians at SHS took that note and twisted it to apply their own unbending stereotypes and expectations on to me, and for the complete and utter failure of cultural competency they demonstrated in making accusations about my body and as-

sumptions about my relationship with food,I am appalled. My visit with SHS shook my self-confidence so much that I forced myself to eat four meals that day, not stopping even when I was full, even when my stomach started to protest. I made twice my usual portion of rice, poured twice the normal amount of oil into the frying pan. Even after I finished my last meal I thought: “Should I keep going?”

They should not have made me doubt myself so much.

When I started talking to my other small-framed Asian friends, their stories started coming out too— of times non-Asian doctors had looked at them with very concerned faces and asked, “Do you have an eating disorder?” Those doctors didn’t believe my friends when they said no, either.

I, and thousands of other girls out

|

THE CHICAGO MAROON

there, shouldn’t have to find a special Asian doctor just to get a physical. Medical professionals should understand that different people have different body types. Diagnosing solely based on looks is harmful and even negligent on the part of the doctor, especially since our idea of healthy weight is based on norms for Caucasians. To properly address, and even prevent, eating disorders, physicians should gain a more fundamental understanding of all the symptoms an eating disorder entails—not just weight. Otherwise, some people who really need help will fall through the cracks and some who aren’t sick will be incorrectly diagnosed.

Angela Qian is a fourthyear in the College double majoring in English and political science.

Letter: Update on re-installing stained glass in Bartlett I want to thank The Maroon and especially journalist Maggie Loughran for the outstanding recent article on the plight of the Edward Sperry stained glass that once adorned Bartlett Commons (“Bartlett Stained Glass Still in Storage After 15 Years,” 5/15/15). It is my hope that the article, together with a major effort by alumni, current students, and others, will spur the University administration to finally take the glass out of storage, where it has been sitting since 2001, and re-install it in its rightful place.

To this end, I have created a closed Facebook group called

“Friends of Edward Sperry” which will serve as a resource for discussion and planning a strateg y.

Ideally, we can meet periodically in the coming months in order to build dialogue with the University regarding this neglected architectural treasure.

—Karl Rahder A.M. ’89

THE CHICAGO MAROON | VIEWPOINTS | June 2, 2015

11

An ego trip down memory lane The consequences of harboring egotism within acts of service

Sophia Chen

PhiloSophia “No, stop! We’re running this scene one more time.”

My shrill voice, laced with derision and frustration, bounced around the echoing exercise room of South Campus. It was Saturday night—ninth week of winter quarter, when the darkened halls were silenced with the impending doom of finals—and there were 10 of us in that fluorescently lit chamber of dinky colored mats, surrounded by shabby props.

We, the first-year girls of a Christian fellowship on campus called AAIV, were practicing our play for Brothers’ Appreciation Day. It was a day that was supposed to be dedicated to honoring the guys of our fellowship. But the good intentions of the event took background to a chorus of other motivations in my head. Brandishing the overly long script, I stomped around the exercise room, emitting death glares and interrupting people.

The satirical screenplay for the performance was my precious offspring that I had nurtured over the past quarter. In addition to being the writer, I was also the de facto director (surprise!). To properly describe what I was like during this period of time, words like tyrant, perfectionist, and megalomaniac come to mind. I was being absolutely ridiculous—this was just a 10-person, 30-minute skit for a tiny audience. I thought I was Martin Scorsese as a director but I was

actually just M. Night Shyamalan, ruiner of children’s dreams.

At this school, no extracurricular activity ever goes as planned, not with our constant stream of midterms, not with our lightning fast 10-week courses. But for me, the fact that work caused people to miss rehearsals, show up late or leave early, or ask to switch roles was unacceptable. I hounded and stalked the cast like Ms. Darbus of High School Musical (my spirit animal), to the point that I don’t think anyone was having fun anymore.

Eventually, a member of the cast pulled me aside to confront me and say that the guys in our fellowship would still feel loved even if the skit wasn’t perfect. I realized then that my need for this performance to be flawless wasn’t merely so that the brothers felt loved.

In fact, most of the pretty and inspirational words I had said in regard to this skit were empty. When I complained to others about having to do most of the work for this project, I painted myself as someone who was sacrificing her academics and her time in order to make others feel appreciated. I hope that some of these pure motivations were true, but I also know that I would not have “sacrificed” myself to this degree if it weren’t for my own pursuit of recognition.

A big part of why I put aside academics for Brothers’ Appreciation Day, why I spent hours fiddling

with lines and props, was because I wanted to validate myself as a writer. In the new environment of college, I wanted people to know that my reasons for pursuing English as one of my majors, a less pre-professional decision, weren’t unfounded and delusional. I wanted the audience that watched this performance to be impressed with me, and to understand that maybe my strings of sentences had something to them. And to achieve this, I was making the cast of this performance, my fellow AAIV sisters, my friends, miserable.

It’s natural for all our decisions to be colored with some self-interest, but that becomes a problem when we act like they’re not and that they’re fully in service of others. For me, I hope to acknowledge this selfishness more so in the future, while also seeking to reach the pure motivations that I claimed to have during Brothers’ Appreciation Day preparation.

Though I try my best to mean well, I can name countless instances in the past where I comforted someone else partly to make myself feel wise and important, where a gift for a friend also served as invisible currency to purchase affection.

Even in the practice of my faith, I recently realized that I used to sing worship songs without total sincerity. These songs have lyrics like, “For the honor of the Father,” but what mattered to me more was the way the music swelled, the comfort that it brought to me instead of,

WEI YI OW

well, honoring the Father. Beauty and comfort are, in their own right, important, but I mostly thought about those things instead of honoring and appreciating another— the purpose of worship.

It wasn’t until I recently started going to Holy Trinity Church in Hyde Park, which sang songs I was completely unfamiliar with, that I was rattled out of just going through the motions. I started thinking about the words again, what it meant to honor another in-

| THE CHICAGO

MAROON

stead of the self. And how that sentiment pertains to the rest of my life, especially that winter night rehearsal in a basement.

This year has been an adventure in confronting my own ego. It’s still a big, ugly thing, but maybe next year, it’ll learn to hurt others a little less.

Sophia Chen is a firstyear in the College double majoring in biology and English

Panty politics The increasing popularity of “granny panties” indexes a shift in what we consider sexy

Eliora Katz

Katzenjammer After Bridget Jones, the protagonist of Bridget Jones’s Diary, has dinner with her perilously charming boss Daniel Cleaver, she accepts a not-so-innocent offer for drinks at his place. In no time we see the two rolling around on the couch, making their way to the floor. We see Daniel’s hands caressing Bridget as smoothly as a pianist’s against the keys. We hear him begin to undress her. “Now, these are very silly little boots, Jones. And this is a very silly little dress. And, um, these are, uh—” We wait. “Fuck me, absolutely enormous panties.” But Daniel playfully reassures Bridget that the large knickers are no turn off.

“Don’t apologize,” he insists. “I like them. Hello, Mummy.”

This is not your average movie sex scene; it’s quietly revolutionary. In this quirky sequence, Bridget elegantly subverts the classic formula of a steamy atmosphere of seductive chatter followed by a scene where the heroine’s “sexy” underwear is revealed, and exchanges it for something much more real. In doing so, our heroine redefines what makes a woman attractive in the bedroom.

Jones is able to wield her “wanton goddess” charm irrespective of her larger-than-life knickers, dispelling the notion that more coverage means less action.

I, too, am a granny panties kind of gal, and I can’t deny that seeing Bridget Jones’s Diary with my mom at a very young age had something

to do with it. In fact, it was my favorite movie growing up.

I like my briefs like I like my lattes: tall and full. I enjoy the broad comfort of cotton instead of a string rubbing against me, and I enjoy those moments where the top of my panties and my belly button meet. And if that ever is to deter a man, then that clearly that says more about him than it does about me. Even when I tried buying sexy undies, the best I could manage was a high-waisted mesh boyshort—basically lace granny panties. After all, isn’t it what’s on the inside that counts?

We’re constantly told by the media and girlfriends alike that “your ginormous underwear choice also likely means you aren’t getting laid often.” But luckily for those of us with the wide panty predilection,

things are starting to change— the masses are catching on. The New York Times reported this past Wednesday that young women are to an increasing extent espousing “granny panties” and jettisoning thongs, demonstrating that women are finally dressing and shopping for women.

What is sexy, after all, if not an incredible myriad of properties relative to a time and place?

A big question that would make for a scintillating fundamentals B.A. Sexiness is an incredibly subjective and whimsical property which women are now taking by the horns and I hope it’s just one of many more revolutions women have in store.

According to The Times, the sale of thongs has seen a 7 percent drop in the past year, in contrast to a 17

SUBMISSIONS

The Chicago Maroon welcomes opinions and responses from its readers.

The Chicago Maroon Attn: Viewpoints 1212 East 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637 E-mail: viewpoints@chicagomaroon.com

percent rise in the sales of full-coverage underwear. “In the end, it is about options,” the author says.

More options, and the resulting greater variety of panties women can choose from, signals the beginning of the lingerie industry’s recognition that there is more than one way to be sexy. Women should wear whatever underwear they like—be it G-string, thong, or nothing at all—as long as they feel comfortable in it.

Behind this point is an even more exciting notion: The shift in the undies we wear signals a shift in our very perception of what concepts like “sexy” and “beautiful” actually mean today.

Eliora Katz is a secondyear in the College majoring in philosophy.

ARTS

What is art?

JUNE 2, 2015

Senior looks back on years with Voices in Your Head The group took second in the world among collegiate a cappella teams this spring Evangeline Reid Arts Editor If Pitch Perfect was nonfiction, it totally could have been filmed on UChicago’s campus. Voices in Your Head placed second at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella (ICCAs) this spring, and first-year member Shubha Vedual took home the Outstanding Soloist Award.

The finals were held at Beacon Theatre in New York after months of prep work and a long series of qualifying competitions.

(The Midwest Quarterfinal was hosted by the A Cappella Council in Mandel Hall in January, which also brought film crews to campus for Sing It On, a new reality TV show that follows collegiate a cappella groups.) Their winning set—a mix of “Show Me How You Burlesque,” “Heroes Listen,” and “Band My Head”— was arranged by group members and featured tight choreography, microphone tricks, and stellar solos.

Since then, the group has reached new audiences in an NPR special about collegiate a cappella and had a brief moment of glory on the Today show.

Voices in Your Head was just one of many collegiate vocal groups—there are eight on this campus alone—until 2012 when the group suddenly drew national attention by placing fourth at the ICCAs. Four years later, they proved it was not a fluke by being only six points short of first place at the Finals.

Kevin Qian, a graduating fourth-year and the group’s business manager for the past three years, has been along for the whole journey. He’s one of only two fourth-years—the other, Mason Heller, is the group’s president—who remain in the group, despite coming in with nine other students in the fall of 2011. Kevin is an award winning vocal percussionist—a cappella jargon for beatboxer—and tenor who also produces recordings for the group and on his own. In high school in Massachusetts he was a “music geek.” He arrived on campus at an opportune time, just after the group’s beatboxer graduated. “I

had learned to beatbox from my high school a cappella group so it was just a skill I kept refining, and [I] made sure I had that ready to give me an edge in auditions.”

That helped buy him a ticket into the group at the beginning of their breakthrough season. This year’s success seems to bring it full circle.

Chicago Maroon: Did you see your success this year coming?

Kevin Qian: It’s kinda hard to see it coming because you never know. There are a lot of great a cappella groups across the U.S. and throughout the world, in the collegiate world….We never really achieved that high of a level in ICCAs before 2012…. People were like, “ Wow, this is Voices in Your Head.” A lot of groups really come out of nowhere…. But this year we had a really great talent pool.

We have one member [Shubha Vedual] who was a former contestant on American Idol. We have a championship beatboxer, who’s also a first-year. We have a really great bass, and we have a great whistler, a great baritone, a great alto who [also] arranges a lot for us. That combination worked really well for us, but ultimately it’s what you do with the raw talent that helps you achieve success.

CM: Tell me about rehearsals.

KQ: Our normal rehearsal schedule is three days a week for two hours each—so six hours of rehearsal a week—typically Sunday and two other days in the week, although do tend to ramp up before concerts or competitions…. [At rehearsals] we warmup first. We rehearse any songs either we need to do for a gig that’s coming up or learn new material.

Sometimes we rehearse with our sound system, which is awesome.

We have a really good sound system for the entire a cappella community: It’s 14 wireless mics and subwoofers and speakers and everything.

CM: How have you seen the group grow and change in your four years?

KQ: Well, one thing that hasn’t changed…is that I think the group has always been really passion-

ate…. The biggest thing that’s changed is obviously membership.

We cycle through new members every year with new auditions, and I think with every coming year the group just becomes more of a family. We still are really close…even with alumni and people who are no longer in the group.

[And] just like UChica-go—every year [it] gets progres-sively better on paper with SAT scores or whatever—I feel like with Voices, the talent, every year it gets better and better… which is also great to have an upward trend in that.

CM: Have you been able to pursue your pa-sion for music more seriously in college?

KQ: [The] U n i v e r s i t y of Chicago… it’s not like Northwestern or Berkeley where people come to study music and yet there’s such an awesome and growing talent pool here. I love c o l l a b o r a t i n g with musicians here, either with people in my a cappella group or just random friends that I make. I have a home bedroom studio and…I do have a Sound-cloud, and I like to record and produce my own covers in my spare time. I’ve also gotten in songwriting. Everything for right now is just a hobby, but I’m hoping to pursue that a bit more seriously after graduation.

CM: Do you feel like Pitch Perfect is representative of what it’s really like?

KQ: Obviously there’s a lot of exaggeration. There aren’t announcers in the ICCA and none that make terrible comments during the performances. Also I don’t think accabattles are a thing that happens…. There may be rivalry at other schools but I think at least among the UChicago a capella community we’re all really great friends…. I’m going to all the other a cappella group’s concerts this coming week and next week. It’s fun to see Pitch Perfect and Pitch Perfect 2 and see what appeals to other people about a cappella and [seeing how it makes] it super mainstream. [But] I didn’t treat it like, “Oh this is a docu-series on my life.”

Kevin Qian has been with Voices since the time of their first break through into the big leagues of collegiate a capella.

PHOTO COURTESY OF MIKE NEENAN

CM: Glee and the reality TV show the Sing Off first started grabbing attention for a cappella in 2009 and since then the hype has taken off with Pentatonix and the Pitch Perfect movies. What’s it like being around at this prime time for a cappella?

KQ: Getting the mainstream attention that it deserves has been great for our group. We’ve definitely gotten a lot of great exposure for it and also a lot of gigs— people getting married, getting engaged will hire us—or we even got the chance to sing with one of the members of Pentatonix who was on The Sing Off, Avi Kaplan, back in 2013. I watch Pitch Perfect 2, and I’m like, “Oh I know that guy.”

CM: And as for seeing the group come so far?

KQ: When I got in as a firstyear I knew they were great…but

I had no idea that you know that four years later I’d be performing in the Beacon Theatre in New York. It’s incredible. I can’t say I expected that. I just auditioned for an a cappella group because I love music and so did everyone else in our group. So it’s just great to see what we’ve accomplished.

And I’m really proud, a really proud senior.

Kevin hinted the spring concert might include a cool light show accompanying a new song, along with a live performance of the ICCA set, his senior solo, and a loud crowd of alumni cheering the whole way.

Voices in Your Head's spring concert will be held Friday, June 5, at 8 p.m. in Logan Performance Hall. $7 with UCID

Voices in Your Head, an RSO on campus, has been featured in an NPR special this year after their big win. The group missed first place by only six points.

PHOTO COURTESY OF MIKE NEENAN

THE CHICAGO MAROON | ARTS | June 2, 2015

13

Plants for poems: arts collective brings project to campus

For two days last week, a Pilsen-based arts collective called Cream Co. brought a unique exhibit to the Logan Center’s patio: It allowed members of the community to trade a poem for a tomato plant. “We feel like the value of one plant equals the value of someone taking the time to write a poem,” said Patrick Thornton, a member of the group. The project, General Economy Exquisite Exchange, offered several unique tomato varieties for the event. (For example, the Jaune Flamme promised to be round, apricot-colored, and both sweet and tart.) Thornton called the initiative a social practice art project. “It’s not an object, it’s not a performance, but it always seems to be about engaging with the community.” The group brought an almost identical project to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art last year. One of the members of Cream Co. lives on the South Side, and the group has brought projects to the Hyde Park Art Center, as well as other communities around Chicago. A previous project documented the color of tomato plants through their life cycle and then painted the colors in squares on a large canvas. “As part of our practice we collect data and then we figure out how to use it,” he explained. “So I don’t know what we’re going to do with the poems we get today.” They found another short-term purpose at the conclusion of the project on Wednesday evening, when poetry students read from the collected poems outside Logan.

PHOTOS BY EVANGELINE REID

|

THE CHICAGO MAROON

Jamie xx's In Colour toes the line between celebration and melancholy Andrew Yang Arts Contributor Jamie Smith has a tendency to look back. Raised on his parents’ soul records in the early ’90s before delving into the sounds of his native British dance music, his music captures the feeling of discovering and inhabiting an era after it has already passed.

Smith, better known as Jamie xx, is one third of the English trio The xx and also has producing credits with Alicia Keys and Drake, including the smash hit “Take Care,” featuring Rihanna. In Colour, which hit stores yesterday, is his first solo project. It was made available for streaming from iTunes as a “visual album” last week.

The accompanying video features 42 minutes of colored, dancing rectangles and triangles that are surprisingly cinematic and mesmerizing to watch alongside the music.

Known for his reserved demeanor and unconventional live DJ sets—in which Otis Redding tracks are equally at home with contemporary electronic dance music—Smith’s sensibilities are delightfully nerdy. He is the solitary dude that goes to live shows and stands at the front of the venue, quietly nodding his head to the music while the crowd around him raves. On In Colour, his influences come primarily from ’90s British dance music, especially on the opening track “Gosh,” with its aggressive breakbeat and a

pitch-lowered vocal sample from a pirate-radio show. These influences give the album a distinctly nostalgic feel, looking back on a once-vibrant culture that is now fading from London, club by shuttered club. Indeed, much of Smith’s exposure to British dance music came after the era had already passed, from videos he watched while feeling homesick on a world tour with The xx.

Despite the dance beats and synths, much of the music has the same subdued, melancholic quality of The xx’s first two albums. Oliver Sim and Romy Madley Croft, the other two members of The xx, both make appearances, and there are a few moments in “Loud Places” and “Stranger

in a Room” that would feel right at home on a full-band album.

But Smith has no trouble carving out his own identity for his solo project. Steel drums, which are fast becoming a Jamie xx staple, lend tracks like “Obvs” and “I Know There’s Gonna Be Good Times” a splash of bright, beachy sunlight. Indeed, “Good Times” is an early candidate for song of the summer, featuring a chorus from Jamaican dancehall artist Popcaan and plenty of quotable verses from a particularly chirpy Young Thug. As the title suggests, this album is a jolt of color to The xx’s black and white. The tension between joy and sadness is what makes the music so compelling, giving its happier moments a bittersweet

edge and its more reflective moments a sweeping, grandiose sense of tragedy.

These moments are best exemplified by the album’s closing tracks. “The Rest Is Noise” is the album’s highlight, a gorgeous, sprawling effort that builds uncertainty with moody piano notes and disembodied sirens, then pushes deeper into the night with a solemn, pulsing beat. “Girl” recalls past heartache, layering muted guitar and synths with an insistent snare and a distant, ominous brass swell. Both of these tracks create a sense of sadness and solitude, and then proceed to embrace it. They turn inward to find peace and beat on, and amidst the ’90’s samples and breakbeats, it is this that turns out to be timeless.

Lake Street Dive's talent underappreciated at Thalia Hall gig Lily Gordon Arts Contributor

In Lake Street Dive’s most viewed video on YouTube, the four-person jazzy pop band performs a slow, bassheavy version of The Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” on a sunny Boston street corner. At one point, a couple passes by in the background, glancing at the performers with curiosity, but— to my surprise—not stopping to listen.

If I were to happen upon lead singer Rachael Price’s voice performing the remarkably fresh cover of “I Want You Back,” I wouldn’t be able to keep walking; it’s powerfully low and patient, holding notes until her sound has made its full impact.

Despite not being widely recognized, Lake Street Dive is one of the

most exciting and talented bands playing today. Trumpet player and guitarist Mike “McDuck” Olson, bassist Bridget Kearney, drummer Mike Calabrese, and Price all met while students at Boston’s New England Conservatory.

Since its formation in 2004, the band has since relocated to Brooklyn.

When Lake Street Dive performed its second of two sold-out shows at Thalia Hall in Pilsen on Sunday night, Price said early in the evening, “The Sunday night crowd is rowdier than Saturday’s! This is gonna be really fun.

Thank you for coming out.”

But it didn’t feel like a sold-out show; it wasn’t rowdy. The crowd, for the most part, was politely curious about the band—like the passersby in the YouTube clip—swaying and moving, bobbing their heads, but never

dancing. Couples limply held each other by the hips. Audience members seated on the second floor balcony didn’t even stand to dance during fast songs like “You Go Down Smooth” from Bad Self Portraits, the band’s most recent album from February 2014.

Perhaps the audience was disappointed that they didn’t perform any of their most-loved covers, including, of course, the aforementioned “I Want You Back,” “Rich Girl” by Daryl Hall and John Oates, and “Faith” by George Michael, all featured on 2012’s Fun Machine. I know I was, but that didn’t stop me from dancing. Perhaps the audience didn’t know how to dance to the songs, with their shifting and unpredictable rhythms. Perhaps they were stunned by Price’s shaking hips

and resinous vibrato, or intimidated by the drummer who sat barefoot, wearing a striped t-shirt, rolled-up khakis, and a bandana on his head.

Whatever the reason, it was bizarre.

And yet Price called us an exceptional crowd! What does this say about contemporary audiences of this genre?

On Sunday night, they performed songs from their self-titled 2010 album, including “Hello? Goodbye!,” “Elijah,” and “Got Me Fooled,” inviting audience members to participate in a call-and-response for the latter: “drinks in the bar room” and “tapes and some thai food,” they asked us to yell. (The four musicians write the lyrics together.)

The band also performed “You Go Down Smooth” and “Rabid Animal” from February 2014’s Bad Self Por-

traits, and Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass,” breaking the night’s no-cover trend.

They were quirky. They sang about life in Brooklyn and the philosophizing provoked by hearing neighbors having sex in “Neighbor Song”: “’Cause we’re all stacked in rows and columns / And if one of them should fall on me / My neighbors making love upstairs would crush me / I’m down on the ground floor.” They also performed a new song called “Poster” from a forthcoming album.

“She’s perfect. I love her,” I overheard a woman near me say to her friend. While this comment, along with the fact that the show was sold out, suggests that Price and Lake Street Dive have a huge following, perhaps Chicago isn’t ready for the band yet.

14

THE CHICAGO MAROON | ADVERTISEMENTS | June 2, 2015

Beautiful & spacious 2 bedroom apartments at 54th & Woodlawn These rarely available units will be ready for moving in on June 15th 2015.

Rents start at $1,450. Heat & Water included.

Please call Annie from Blackstone Management at 773-667-1568 to schedule a visit.

THE CHICAGO MAROON | SPORTS | June 2, 2015

15

SENIOR SPOTLIGHT

SCOTT MAINQUIST FOOTBALL: MAINQUIST SHINES ON

AND OFF THE FIELD Katie Anderson Associate Sports Editor

Fourth-year Scott Mainquist evolving into his final form against Concordia in a fall game.

Fourth-year defensive lineman and California-native Scott Mainquist finished his career as a Maroon in dominating fashion. In his senior season, he earned First Team All-American honors from USA College Football, UAA Defensive Player of the Year, and First Team All-UAA. In the nine games of his final campaign, he made an impressive 43 tackles with three sacks and one fumble recovery, and led the team with eight quarterback hurries.

Looking back at his career, Mainquist said, “The best part about being an athlete at UChicago was that I could play football and use it as an outlet to not think about school and stress. But at the same time it never felt like a job or that I was overworked because of being an athlete.”

Clearly, having such an outlet benefited Mainquist greatly: many of his most impressive accomplishments came off of the field. As a public policy studies major with a specialization in environmental policy, he received UAA All-Academic honors in his first, second, and third years. Additionally, he was a National Football Foundation Hampshire Honor Society member his fourth year.

Outside of football, he is a member of an organization called Chi-

cago Youth Philanthropy Group.

With this group, he works once a week with high school juniors and seniors at King College Prep High School, teaching them about philanthropy. The program allows the students to donate $1,000 to an area in their community that they would like to see improved.

Mainquist emphasized his appreciation of UChicago’s balance between academics and athletics, saying, “Coach Wilkerson and the other football coaches always supported us as players and made sure we could get our schoolwork done and encouraged us to not let football get in the way of taking classes we wanted to take.”

After graduation, Mainquist will be moving back to San Diego to work at a law firm before applying to law school. Athletics, though, will remain an important part of his life. He will continue his involvement by coaching high school football.

As he prepares to leave Hyde Park in just a couple short weeks, the former co-captain leaves his peers with one last piece of advice.

“I guess the best piece of advice I can give to student athletes is to make sure you are playing your sport for the right reasons. Basically play your sport because you love to play your sport and not for any other reason. Division III athletics isn’t glamorous but if you have the right attitude it can be a truly rewarding experience.”

COURTESY OF UCHICAGO ATHLETICS

G R ADUATE STU DE NTAT-L ARG E INFORMATION SESSIONS Join us to learn how you

UPCOMING DATES

can take one or more undergraduate or grad-

MONDAY, MAY 11, 2015 12–1 PM; HM 151

uate courses across campus as a GSAL student

CLASSIFIEDS ASSISTANCE NEEDED Would Serve as Companion to an 85yo Gentleman Graduate of Harvard Law & Univ. of Michigan Knowledge of History & Classical Music Pref.

Love of Baseball Required Must be Willing to Drive Schedule and Salary Negotiable bgeorgegold@gmail or text/call 312-218-1067 Beautiful & spacious 2 bedroom apartments at 54th & Woodlawn.

These rarely available units will be ready for moving in on June 15th 2015.

Rents start at $1,450. Heat & Water included.

Please call Annie from Blackstone Management at 773-667-1568 to schedule a visit.

to bridge your undergraduate experience to a graduate or professional degree program.

TUESDAY, MAY 12, 2015 4–5 PM; CL 111 MONDAY, MAY 18, 2015 12–1 PM; HM 151 TUESDAY, MAY 19, 2015 4–5 PM; CL 111 TUESDAY, MAY 26, 2015 4–5 PM; CL 111

RSVP to gsalinfo@uchicago.edu Please indicate which session you would like to attend. Pizza and soft drinks will be served.

SPORTS

IN QUOTES “In A-Town with a fitted cap. I’m so hot, I think I need a thermostat. I gotta go to work.”

– Sports analyst Jay Bilas dishes a sneak-peek to his latest mixtape which will surely be fire

Chicago bids adieu to an extraordinary year Men’s Tennis

Ahmad Allaw Associate Sports Editor It’s February 14, just two weeks after season’s start. Chicago is about to begin the first game of its doubleheader, also its sixth match of the year. Each Maroon player, whether on the singles or doubles court, takes his position.

The pregame nerves soon give way to a familiar, comforting sensation. They’ve been through it so many times before, seen an incredible number of balls and returned an even greater count with shots of their own. And soon enough, after the starting signal, the past repeats itself. Chicago dominates.

On one court, first-year Nick Chua loops a forehand winner just inside the outer edge. On another, second-year Sven Kranz paints the midline with an ace. And so it is for each Chicago player: a crushing overhead volley, an unreturnable drop shot, an exquisite backhand stroke, and on and on and on. The Maroon players aren’t just playing tennis, they’re playing tennis the way only great teams can. That day, Chicago would go on to win both of its matches 9–0.

But the final product hadn’t always been so pleasing. In fact, just a year ago, the South Siders finished 11–9 and failed to earn a spot in the DIII NCAA tournament. It wasn’t a bad season, of course. But it wasn’t much better than average either. The team lacked what so many other great ones had: instead of poise and assurance, there had been uncertainty and doubt. Instead of a lion’s will, there had been an insipid, uninspired malaise. Things look destined to remain unchanged. But among the dying embers, there were brilliant sparks.

Along with some of the great returning players, including fourthyear leaders Deepak Sabada and Ankur Bhargava, many talented first-years were added to the squad.

Immediately, things changed.

That offseason, ambition mixed with experience, confidence with a renewed edge. Day after day, the

players pushed themselves and each other. Week after week, the players put in extra time honing their skills and perfecting their strokes.

As weeks turned into months, the team looked entirely different than it had looked before.

As Head Coach Jay Tee explained, “The…thing that really stands out is the team’s work ethic and their drive to be a great team.

They completely changed the culture of the team from one where we made excuses and looked for an easy way out to one where guys are continuously striving to improve to be the best.”

And the incessant practice immediately translated into results. By the end of the regular season, Chicago held a 14–4 record. Three of their losses, moreover, were narrow 5–4 defeats and all came against ranked opponents. Soon enough, Chicago had found unmatched confidence. As Leung explained, “with the close matches we lost to top ranked teams, we realized that we in fact could compete and beat every single team in the country.

There is no team in the country that can utterly destroy us with peace of mind. If someone does beat us, we will give them a couple shots to the gut while going down.”

Entering UAA competition, however, Chicago’s DIII Tournament hopes weren’t yet sealed. Each game was being played with the highest of stakes on the line: “I knew from the first day that we had a team that could make a run in the NCAA Tournament, the real challenge was getting there. We play in an extremely competitive conference and this year the NCAA only took five at-large selections, which meant there was a possibility that a top-10 team would get left out of the tournament. We knew going into the UAA Tournament that we had to finish third to give ourselves a chance,” Tee said.

And sure enough, Chicago did just that. They knocked off No. 12 Case Western and then—after losing 5–4 against No. 2 Emory in the semifinals match—beat No. 10

The men’s tennis team gets in a call before an earlier season match.

COURTESY OF UCHICAGO ATHLETICS

Carnegie Mellon to take third place in the UAA Championship. Chicago had punched its ticket to a DIII NCAA Tournament.

The Maroons, though, weren’t satisfied yet. Making the tournament was great, no doubt. But they had their sights set on something far greater. “We were honestly expecting to win the whole NCAA tournament, with very little competition,” said Leung.

In the first two rounds, Chicago was well on its way to accomplishing its goal. They easily defeated No. 36 Coe and No. 18 Gustavus Adolphus (5–1 and 5–2, respectively).

In the quarterfinals, though, Chicago faced a daunting opponent: current No. 2 Amherst College.

In an up-and-down affair, with shifting momentum and expectation, the Maroons pulled out possibly its gutsiest win of the year. They had knocked off the defending na-

tional champions 5-4 to advance to the semifinals match against Middlebury. Unfortunately, though, Chicago’s run of success ran out.

They lost their next two matches to finish fourth in the DIII Tournament.

Despite the Maroons’ disappointment, their season can’t be viewed as anything but a success.

Never before had Chicago tennis reached the DIII Semifinals. Never before had they shown such quality and skill. Chicago had proven itself a worthy opponent and a deserving threat for the NCAA title.

With the season over, though, Coach Tee is already focused on the year to come. He has seen how much the team has grown, both mentally and physically, and he is confidently optimistic that next season will be the same. He said, “It’s going to be tough to replace what Ankur and Deepak provided

us in terms of leadership and ability but I’m confident that we have some very good leaders already on the team. They saw what it means to lead and they’re ready to step into that role. This team has always had the talent to compete at the highest level but now everyone realizes that it takes more than that to be a good team. I think right now everyone is motivated to work had over the summer and come back next year ready to make another run.”

For the returning players, it isn’t much different. The sting of defeat still burns, of course. But that is what motivates their play. Leung concluded, “I look back and realized that we accomplished a big goal this year but it is nowhere near what we can do in the future. Our goals are to win the tournament, simple as that. I look forward to being part of the first team to win the NCAA title for UChicago.”

BLACKHAWKS: Four wins. That’s all that stands between the Blackhawks and Lord Stanley’s Cup. After winning Game 7 on the road in Anaheim on Saturday, the Hawks are preparing to face the Tampa Bay Lightning in the Stanley Cup Finals beginning Wednesday. Chicago beat the Ducks 5–3 in the decisive game, paced by two first period goals by captain Jonathan Toews. The Hawks will play in the Stanley Cup Finals for the third time in six years.

The Western Conference representative in the finals for each of the past four years has been either the Hawks or the L.A. Kings, alternat-

ing each year. Puck drops for Game 1 at 7 p.m. CST on Wednesday.

This Week in Sports: Chicago Special with Sarah Langs

CUBS: The Cubs had an even weekend, going 1–1 with a rainout in-between. In a home series against interleague foes in the Royals, the Cubs dropped the Friday game 8–4, but won on Sunday 2–1. Jorge Soler hit his fourth homer of the season in the sixth inning, and Addison Russell hit his fourth of the year as well, in the seventh. Saturday’s game was called after some unseasonably cold, in other words, seasonably Chicago, weather. On Sunday, in throwback Chicago Whales jerseys, the Cubs pulled out a 2–1 victory in eleven innings. Starter Tsyuoshi Wada gave up a run over 5.2 innings, and seven relievers combined to shut

out the Royals for the rest of the game. Chicago won it on David Ross’ 11th-inning single. The Cubs remain in second place in the N.L. Central, six games behind the Cardinals, entering Monday. This week, the Cubs will take on the Marlins and then the Nationals on the road.

WHITE SOX: The White Sox took two out of three from the A.L.–West–leading Astros this weekend in Houston. On Friday, the Sox won 6–3 in 11 innings.

After Carlos Rodon gave up three runs, one earned, over 6.1 innings, the bullpen kept the Astros scoreless.

Gordon Beckham hit an eighth in-

ning home run to tie the game at three apiece, and then the floodgates opened for the ’Stros pitching in the top of the eleventh. On Saturday, Dallas Keuchel pitched a four-hit shutout, notching 11 strikeouts en route to a 3–0 Astros victory. But the Sox were able to reign supreme in the rubber game, winning 6–0 behind John Danks’s 10-hit shutout. Perhaps not as dominating in the box score as Keuchel’s, but the shutout still got the job done. The Sox remain in last place in the A.L. Central, seven games out of the division-leading Twins, entering Monday. This week, they’ll take on the Texas Rangers on the road before returning home to face the Detroit Tigers.

BULLS: The Bulls fired head coach Tom Thibodeau on Thursday, reliving him of his coaching duties after five seasons at the helm. The Bulls made the playoffs each year under Thibodeau. There’s been no official announcement entering Monday morning, but the team is expected to announce Iowa State head coach Fred Hoiberg their new head coach. Hoiberg played for the Bulls form 1999–2003 and has been coaching at Iowa State since 2010.