Loyola University • New Orleans • Volume 95 • Issue 24 • April 21, 2017
THE MAROON FOR A GREATER LOYOLA
Loyola gets green for Earth Week
Loup Garou, where are you?
By John Casey jecasey@loyno.edu @J_E_CASEY
Students will be looking at an empty stage this year, as the biennial concert series Loup Garou was canceled By Jessica Molina jgmolina@loyno.edu @jmolina217
Loup Garou, Loyola’s annual Spring concert, has been canceled this year. Loup Garou began in 1998 and ran annually until 2014. The name comes from the mythical French werewolf, and was meant to mirror Loyola’s mascot. According to a previous Maroon article, the 2014 cancellation was due to overspending in previous years by the Student Government Association. Ron Palmer, marketing senior and SGA vice president of communication in 2014, told The Maroon that they hope to increase the amount of allocated funds for Loup Garou by making the event every other year, which will allow them to roll over the allocated funds from the off years and provide a larger budget. Elisa Diaz, SGA president, contributes the decision to end the concert series to a lack of funding. According to Diaz, SGA receives their money from student allocations and uses that money throughout the year for things like organi-
zation allocations, graduation exam reimbursements and SGA’s Third Friday events. “In 2015, we were able to have rapper Wale as our performing artist, but we spent more on that concert than we received for all of this semester’s student allocations,” Diaz said. “We also allocated funds to this year’s, Fools Fest, the Loyola Family Fair.” According to Ronald Chavis, SGA advisor, SGA receives funding from students, and since the university has less students, there is less money to spend. “Loup Garou is simply too expensive,” Chavis said. Some students, like Arianda Martinez, psychology senior, are upset about the cancellation. “It’s a little unfair that they gave up instead of providing alternate options. It’s a tradition, and as the 2017 graduating class, we’ve consistently been handed the short end of the stick with registration, events and now this.” More than just Loup Garou, previous traditions have been terminated on campus, such as 100th Night, a celebration for
See LOUP GAROU, page 3
Photo illustration by MARISABEL RODRIGUEZ
Loyola alumnus goes for the top prize By Jessica Molina jgmolina@loyno.edu @jmolina217
Two Loyola alumni made history in the journalism world: Eric Eyre, A’87, won the Pulitzer Prize, and Jonathan Bachman, A’12, was a finalist. The Pulitzer Prize is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine and online journalism, litera-
ture and musical composition and only has 13 recipients each year. Eyre won the prize for his investigative reporting of the opioid epidemic that was taking place in West Virginia. The Pulitzer judges said Eyre won the prize “for courageous reporting, performed in the face of powerful opposition, to expose the flood of opioids flowing into depressed West Virginia counties with the highest
overdose death rates in the country.” Eric Eyre graduated from Loyola in 1987 with a communication degree. He lives in Charleston, West Virginia working at the Charleston Gazette-Mail. Eyre’s award-winning series focused on the rising opioid-related death’s occurring in West Virginia. Even though people were dying at an alarming rate, the local pharma-
cies continued to distribute over 700 million opioids. “This is an issue that’s devastated our state,” Eyre told the Gazette-Mail. “We wanted to put the focus on the root causes and costs of the epidemic. By doing so, we hope we are part of the solution.”
See PULITZER, page 3
Loyola kicked off Earth Week celebrations on Tuesday with live music and science at the greenhouse atop Monroe Hall. The “Greenhouse Party” was the first event planned for the week leading up to Earth Day on Saturday. Earth Day was first celebrated in 1970. Spurred by United States politician Gaylord Nelson, the holiday led to the rise of an environmental activism movement. Anthony Rizzi, event organizer and environmental studies sophomore, hopes that events like the greenhouse party will bring attention to Loyola’s facilities dedicated to scientific research and environmental awareness. “This event is an introduction event. It’s to get students to really see what we have up here at the greenhouse. It’s a facility that we put a lot of money into and a lot of time and a lot of effort. Students do research up here, professors do research up here, but not a lot of the rest of the student body knows that. This is an event to really get this place and what we do up here out to the rest of the Loyola community,” Rizzi said. Student artists Tristin and Jana Sanders performed live for the event, followed up by DJ Derek Taylor. The local musicians, New Orleans sunset and physics experiments attracted students to the rooftop for the event. Andrew Eddins, physics senior, organized the physics display. “So we went and we performed some demonstrations on topics like angular momentum, adiabatic compression, forces and electric fields,” Eddins said. “I thought it was great, and we brought telescopes too. So we saw Saturn and we saw all the four Galilean moves.” The greenhouse party is just the kick off for the week long celebration leading up to Earth Day on Saturday, April 22. On Wednesday, the Holly Grove Farmer’s Market came to the Peace Quad, followed by an appearance by state lawmaker Foster Campbell. “He’s going to speak about how students can be more involved in politics, mostly about the environmental aspects of it,” Rizzi said. Environmental studies seniors presented their year-long capstone projects on the third floor of Monroe Hall at 12:30 p.m. on Thursday. Later that evening at 6 p.m., Josh Fox’s “How to Let Go of the World” was screened in the Whitney Room in Thomas Hall. Rizzi said that the biggest event will take place on Friday from 2-6 p.m. in the Peace Quad. “We’re going to have Bagel Boy and his new bagels, a sand pit, arts and crafts, yoga, open mic and a bunch of organizations are going to come out and talk about the environment,” Rizzi said.