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The Miscellany News

Volume CXLVII | Issue 19

April 16, 2015

Since 1866 | miscellanynews.org

Vassar College Poughkeepsie, NY

Thiong’o decolonizes Williams releases response video mind through activism O Rhys Johnson News Editor

Yifan Wang Reporter

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hat does it feel like to abandon one’s language for decades and turn to another one? Acclaimed author Ngugi Wa Thiong’o probably has an answer. Having famously discarded English and turning to Gikuyu in his fifties, Thiong’o will deliver the address “Decolonizing the Mind: Are We There Yet?” on Tuesday, April 21.

A recipient of the Nonino International Prize for his work and a nominee for the Nobel Prize in literature for several times, Thiong’o is a Kenyan writer, postcolonial theorist, and social activist. Some of his influential works include “A Grain of Wheat,” “Petals of Blood,” “Decolonizing the Mind:

The Politics of Language in African Literature” and “Globalectics,” his latest work on which the lecture will be largely based.

Thiong’o’s visit to Vassar started from a conversation between Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies Patricia-Pia Célérier and one of her students last semester, Noah Goldberg ’17.

Last summer, Goldberg interned at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

There, he worked extensively with Thiong’o’s son, Mukoma Wa Ngugi, who was writing a review for the magazine.

Goldberg said, “When Professor Célérier was talking in class about Ngugi, I decided to approach her to tell her See THIONG’O on page 17

n Sunday, April 8, the Vassar Student/Labor Dialogue (SLD) posted a video of recently-terminated Safety and Security officer Kemar Williams on their official Facebook page.

The video features Williams’ thoughts concerning his firing in late February and the possible racial motivation behind it, as well as his opinions on race within Vassar College as an institution.

The controversy surrounding Williams began when his dismissal

from Safety and Security was taken up as an issue by the SLD’s Student Organizing Team (SOT), who labeled the situation an incident of clear racial bias. The SLD asserted that Williams, who had allegedly faced individual and institutional discrimination during the time of his employment, had been unjustly targeted for his willingness to speak out against his experiences of racism in the workplace.

A protest was organized by the SOT at a Student Affairs Committee dinner on Feb. 26, an event which was attended by members

of the Board of Trustees, administrators, the Vassar Student Association (VSA) Executive Board and other community members.

At the event, while students held signs saying “Reinstate Kemar” and “Kemar spoke, now listen,” one of the students attending the dinner, Bailey Miller ’17, spoke on behalf of the organizers, calling on the College’s leadership to address the issue fairly (The Miscellany News, “Community demands officer reinstatement,” 03.04.15).

The Board of Trustees, however, See VIDEO on page 4

Humorist Saunders delivers Krieger talk “W

hen I was asked to introduce George, I said yes immediately,” began Professor of English Amitava Kumar, speaking of writer George Saunders with familiarity.

And rightly so: The two went to graduate school together. “I thought this would be a good opportunity to tell the person who borrowed my copy of ‘Tenth of December’ to return it to me. Do it; do the right thing,” Kumar joked.

Since no one came forward with Kumar’s book—a hard copy, no less— he continued with his introduction

of Saunders, this year’s Alex Krieger Memorial Lecture. The annual talk honors the memory of Krieger ’95, who died in a car accident the second semester of his freshman year.

On April 14 at 8 p.m., Saunders joined a prestigious cohort of humor writers, ranging from David Sedaris to Ira Glass and last year’s Gary Shteyngart, to deliver the talk.

“The last thing I taught of George’s was in my 9/11 class, a short story called ‘Home,’” Kumar recalled. “But the one marvelous piece of writing I try to teach in every class is called ‘Chicago Christmas, 1984.’ It’s about a See SAUNDERS on page 6

courtesy of Vassar Student/Labor Dialogue

Marie Solis

Contributing Editor

Former Safety and Security Officer Kemar Williams reignited controversy this week over the subject of his termination, declaring in an online video posted by the Student/Labor Dialogue that he would never consider working at Vassar again.

Men’s Rugby Wins Tri-State 7’s Amreen Bhasin Reporter

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his past weekend proved hot, busy and rewarding for both Vassar’s men and women’s rugby teams.

The men hosted the Tri-State Conference 7’s Tournament while the women traveled to Stony Brook’s Long Island campus to compete in the Women’s Collegiate 7s Championship. The

women had just moved up in the National Rankings, going from seventh to fifth in the country, putting them just one spot behind fellow Tri-State conference member, Rutgers University, ranked number four. The tournament featured a Semi-Final match up between the Brewers and the Scarlet Knights and the Brewers ended up falling to the defending champions

Sunday afternoon. But for the men, the weekend went off without a hitch.

They went 6-0 to claim the title of TriState Conference 7s Champions for the first time in Vassar history. This weekend was also a first for the rugby programs as there were three rugby fields simultaneously in use.

Looking back on the weekend, seSee RUGBY on page 18

courtesy of Vassar Athletics

The men’s rugby team showed guts and teamwork en route to winning the Tri-State Conference 7’s tournament this past Sunday, going 6-0 on the day. The men now look to travel to Denver, Colorado for the National Tournament in late May.

Inside this issue

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Food Truck Friday rolls onto FEATURES campus in May

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Starving seniors continue to beg for HUMOR meal swipes

Beneath the Loeb, hidden treasures Megan Forster

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Guest Reporter

hile the exhibits at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center are constantly changing, beneath the floor boards live some artworks and artifacts that have hung around for years. Some gather dust, while others find new life in curated collections of all kinds.

Matthew Woodard, an employee of the Loeb for 15 years, works alongside two other guards.

During his time, he has seen the Loeb’s collection grow to 14,000 works. He said, “The collection is both beautiful and historical.”

Some of the items not on the floor or hanging on the walls of the Loeb are often excavated from the depths of the basement at the request of professors. “Once, we had an Ethiopian scroll we knew nothing about. A class came in, studied it and researched it, and we were able to take it out of storage and use the class’s research for the description,” recalled Woodard.

For Benno Orlinsky ’15, one of the most surprising finds occurred when he was training for his job at

15 ARTS

the Art Center. “I was [in the basement] for some docent training and there’s a real mummy,” he said.

Shep-en-min has been a part of the collection for some time but was not studied until about ten years ago. Because Vassar does not have access to a proper case for Shep, the mummy has not been displayed. However, Woodard said the mummy has been X-Rayed recently at the Vassar Hospital.

Though the mummy is unable to be displayed due to the financial burden of an appropriate means of display, many anthropology students have had access and been able to view it.

Nonetheless, artworks that are more viable for display get recycled more often over the years.

“The whole XL exhibition came from the permanent collection,” explained Orlinsky. The largescale paintings, once standing on their own in the Loeb’s gallery or joining other works for different exhibits, came together for the XL display, which ran from Jan. 30 to March 29 and received recognition See LOEB on page 7

Spoken wordsmith Elhillo to perform at Vassar

The Miscellany News

Page 2

April 16, 2015

Attention Students!

The following Executive Board positions of The Miscellany News are now open for the Fall 2015 semester. Applications must be submitted by midnight on April 19 to misc@vassar.edu.

Senior Editor

The Senior Editor aids the EIC in all aspects of weekly production.

The Senior Editor will be responsible for proofreading all sections for grammar, clarity and design aspects.

If another editor is absent, the Senior Editor will assume the responsibilities of that position until it is filled.

Contributing Editor

The Contributing Editor shall actively contribute to a specified aspect of the newspaper, and will help to train new reporters and editors, along with an individual project. The responsibilities of this position will vary according to the needs of the paper and the individuals filling the position.

Editor-in-Chief Palak Patel

Senior Editor

Editor-in-Chief

Noble Ingram

The Editor-in-Chief is ultimately responsible for the paper’s content... including editorial content, production, business management and layout. The EIC represents The Miscellany News to the VSA Council, the Senior Officers of the College, the Vassar community and other organizations.

Contributing Editors Bethan Johnson Meaghan Hughes Marie Solis

News Opinions Arts Humor & Satire Sports

Executive Board positions are open to students who have served on the Editorial Board of The Miscellany News.

Photography Online Social Media Copy

Rhys Johnson Joshua Sherman Emma Rosenthal Chris Gonzalez Zach Rippe Erik Quinson Samantha Pianello Gwendolyn Frenzel Maddy Vogel Ashley Pecorelli

Crossword Editors Collin Knopp-Schwyn York Chen Alycia Beattie Assistant Features Julia Cunningham Claire Standaert Assistant Design Sarah Dolan Assistant Social Media Hannah Nice Assistant Copy Anika Lanser

Late start doesn’t stop Vargas in Argentina Eli Vargas

JYA Blogger

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courtesy of Eli Vargas

y program’s start date was February 24th.

That gave me a little over two months of down time before I had to start using my brain again. At first, I thought this was one of the best things that has ever happened in the history of world. I imagined that I would be sitting with my dog in the backyard just straight chillin’ for about two months. Of course, there would be the occasional doing of things like any normal person, but the main thing would be nothing.

After the stress of finals, I was ready to enjoy this much needed relaxation.

For the first month it was awesome. The occasional doing of things included some backpacking trips, whale watching, and visiting family. But then everything changed when extreme boredom attacked. The last month was filled with waiting, as I had already bought my flight to Buenos Aires, and everyone I knew was in school. I was getting antsy to get back into a schedule and start an adventure filled with mate and choripan.

Finally, the fateful day came. I flew out of LAX to Dallas. My flight had been delayed, but luckily my connecting flight to Buenos Aires was held for us. As I rushed into the plane, as it was already occupied, I encountered a buzz of Argentinean Spanish. I was tired from a long day of airport lines and traveling, so it was a bit of a culture shock. I had not been expecting to encounter people addressing me in Spanish, nor me having to spit out the measly Spanish that I could manage.

But I was happy to find myself on a new adventure in a new country, with a new language, and in another hemisphere I arrived at the airport tired, and with what felt like a ton of bricks in my bags. I bumbled around looking for my group that I was supposed to meet, eventually found a tired group of college students surrounded by bulky travel bags, and felt right at home. Everyone was exhausted, but not to the point where they couldn’t be excited…to take a nap at the orientation hotel.

After orientation and meeting the 18 other peo-

ple from all over the U.S., we were adopted by our homestay families. I was going to the bathroom, and so happened that I was the last one to come in to the room where we met our families. I guess you could say that I was the last one to be adopted. It’s no biggie though, because my homestay mother is a perfect fit. My program gave a lot of thought into matching up our families to the preference survey that we all filled out. So, I live in a middle-class neighborhood in the Belgrano

neighborhood of Buenos Aires. It’s just my mom, Maria, who only speaks Spanish, and me in an apartment. She has grandchildren of ages 3 and about 1, who come by to hang out every so often, and I’m sure that the 3 year old can destroy me when it comes to speaking Spanish.

To learn more about Eli’s travels, visit farandaway.miscellanynews.org!

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Reporters Amreen Bhasin Eloy Bleifuss Prados Emily Hoffman Ashley Hoyle Charles Lyons-Burt Connor McIllwain Yifan Wang Columnists Sophia Burns Delaney Fischer Sam Hammer Penina Remler Sarah Sandler Emily Sayer Design Sixing Xu Photography Cassady Bergevin Alec Ferretti Emily Lavieri-Scull Copy Hallie Ayres Claire Baker Antigone Delton Christa Guild Alessandra Muccio Kelsey Quinn Jessica Roden Emma Roellke Sophia Slater Rebecca Weir Laura Wigginton

LETTERS POLICY The Miscellany News is Vassar College’s weekly open forum for discussion of campus, local and national issues, and welcomes letters and opinions submissions from all readers.

Letters to the Editor should not exceed 350 words, and they usually respond to a particular item or debate from the previous week’s issue. Opinions articles are longer pieces, up to 800 words, and take the form of a longer column. No letter or opinions article may be printed anonymously. If you are interested in contributing, e-mail misc@vassar.edu.

April 16, 2015

NEWS

Page 3

“Human Oil Spill” envelops Admitted Students weekend Shelia Hu

Guest Reporter

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courtesy of Vassar Greens

n Sunday, April 12, DivestVC held another “Human Oil Spill” event for Admitted Students weekend in front of the All Campus Dining Center (ACDC) to raise awareness about their fossil fuel divestment campaign.

A group of students, dressed in black, lay on the steps to represent an oil spill and their effects on the environment. On their Facebook event page, they explain the purpose of holding the event during the weekend prospective students and their families are visiting. As it reads, “The administration pays more attention when [they] target admissions events. They see admitted students as a source of money and prestige for the College. Targeting such events makes them nervous about their bottom line and the school’s reputation, and consequently get their attention. Additionally, we will be raising awareness about our movement in a new generation of college students.”

DivestVC member Elise Ferguson ’17 explained her goals for the protest. She wrote in an emailed statement, “The goal was to get the attention of the administration. Past human oil spills have had that goal as well, but they were also oriented towards raising awareness on campus. The only oil spill that we really got any push back from the administration on was the one that we had during an open house.”

She continued, “It seems that the administration cares more about our events when admitted students see them too. Additionally, we had the opportunity to get divestment on the radar of soon-to-be college students. Hopefully, once made aware of the issue, they will be inclined to join a campaign at whatever college they attend next year.”

The previous Human Oil Spill happened in October, in the Retreat, in which participants demonstrated similarly while the Vassar College Board of Trustees met. The student demonstrators moved from the Retreat to the room where the Trustees’ meeting was happening.

They reportedly chanted, “What do we want?

Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!” Earlier in 2014, environmentalist protesters from across the country created the “Human Oil Spill” protest, demonstrating outside the White House in opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline. As DivestVC would emulate, the environmentalists lay a black sheet outside the White House gate and pretended to be dead.

The divestment campaigns in universities started a few years ago and quickly spread to hundreds of schools. So far, over two dozen schools around the world have committed to divesting from fossil fuel companies, including Stanford University, Pitzer College and The New School (Fossil Free, “Divestment Commitments”). Each of these institutions has not only chosen to divest from fossil fuel companies, but has also taken the opportunity to begin to cut down their carbon footprints as well.

DivestVC’s goal, as it is listed on their official Facebook page, reflects a similar set of goals. It reads, “The campaign’s current tasks include researching exactly which companies Vassar is currently invested in and to what extent, garnering support from the student body, faculty, and alumni, and building towards our goal of Vassar’s publically-announced divestment from twenty environmentally unsound companies.”

Ferguson reported that she joined the movement as a freshman, and explained her choice as well as her experiences with the group. “Initially, I will admit the whole thing was kind of confusing, but I learned more about the arguments and counterarguments over time and the big picture became clearer and clearer to me,” she explained. “Being a part of this campaign has been incredibly rewarding, though also frustrating at times. The nature of this movement is such that we don’t get a lot of concrete wins. However, I can see us inching closer and closer towards our goals at Vassar and also as a broader National movement.”

Despite the slow rate of progress for the movement, Ferguson and many of her fellow

Members of DivestVC organized another “Human Oil Spill” protest during Admitted Students Weekend on Sunday, April 12, demanding that the College divest its interests from fossil fuel companies. members remain steady in their resolve, and have suggested ways for students to get involved with the campaign, “First of all, we would just like people to be aware of this issue and to be discussing it. Part of the whole point of the divestment is to spark dialogues about environmental issues and thus raise awareness about them,” Ferguson remarked. “Whether or not people want to join us in our campaign efforts, we would love it if they took some time to do a little research and read up on divestment, and they can, of course, come to us if they need help finding resources. Within the campaign, there is a wide variety of things that people can do, from coming to our actions, to writing articles, to coming to meetings with administrators, etc.”

Many still wonder if the efforts of DivestVC have swayed any administrators on the issue,

however. “I believe that the protesters are aligning these actions with their beliefs, and these protests have no impact whatsoever on my actions or strategies,” commented Vice President for Finance and Administration Robert Walton in an emailed statement. “If anything, they make me review my own thinking about these issues and in this case, redouble my resolve to maintain our current investment strategy.”

Associate Vice President for Financial Services and Treasurer Stephen Dahnert echoed Walton’s sentiments. He wrote in an emailed statement, “We have examined the divestment question thoughtfully and at great length through the appropriate governing and advisory bodies of the College, consistent with our practices over many years, and I fully expect that this will continue to be our approach.”

Triennial celebration reunites African-American alumnae/i Meaghan Hughes

Contributing Editor

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’44 and Dr. June Jackson Christmas ’45-4,” she wrote. “Dr. Hamburg is the first self-identified Black student admitted to Vassar. Dr. Christmas was one of the only 2 Black students admitted one year later.”

After graduating from Vassar, Hamburg went on to become the first Black student accepted into the Yale School of Medicine. She has held many prestigious psychiatric positions and has received the National Institute of Mental Health Award for Outstanding Achievement.

Christmas also had a long career in medicine, where she served as Commissioner of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Alcoholism Services for the City of New York and in many other public policy positions. Her influence led the Africana Studies department to name its annual award to distinguished graduating seniors the June Jackson Christmas Prize.

The accomplishments of these alumnae were recognized at Triennial XI. “We dedicated the

courtesy of Karen Turner

his weekend, the African American Alumnae/i of Vassar College (AAAVC) hosted Triennial XI and celebrated the organization’s 30th anniversary. The focus of this year’s conference was the continuation of a history of Black activism at Vassar, and AAAVC members from across the country attended the events.

Founded in 1984, AAAVC brings together Black alumnae/i to advance the interests of both students and graduates. Every three years the group plans a weekend of events to reconnect and discuss issues relevant to the Black community at Vassar. Triennial IX included a documentary screening, an open-mic night organized by the Council of Black Seniors (CBS), a panel discussion and faculty-taught classes.

Associate Dean of the College for Campus Life and Diversity Ed Pittman ’82 was pleased with how the weekend went and described his participation: “All of the events were phenomenal,” he wrote in an emailed statement. “As a black alum (‘82) and dean, I was thrilled to be in the various spaces. I connected with fellow alums who pioneered before me, reminisced with those who were my classmates as well as those I advised and supported as a dean.”

Chief Administrative Law Judge in San Francisco Karen Clopton ’80 participated in a panel entitled “Activism Through the Ages.” In an emailed statement, she wrote, “We highlighted how we have addressed the same issues, racial profiling, racist incidents, a safe place to be together, and a strong Africana Studies Program since 1969 when we started to have a critical mass of black students.”

Tiffany Clunie ’15, a member of CBS, appreciated the focus on the history of activism at the event. “I really enjoyed the AAAVC Triennial and felt that the theme of reflecting on past and future activism was very well picked and so pertinent at this time in the U.S.,” she wrote in an emailed statement.

Co-Chair of the AAAVC Karen Roberts Turner ’86 spoke to Vassar’s history of Black activism, which she described as the central theme for the weekend. “Our theme was Activism

Through the Ages,” she wrote. “We wanted to share the stories of the struggles and triumphs of past generations and celebrate our successes in breaking down barriers. We also wanted to provide Black alums with a forum to discuss the recent racial profiling, bias, and campus climate issues with College administrators and the role AAAVC has played in bringing about change.”

Clopton herself has continued this activism after Vassar and throughout her career. “I have engaged in activism through long standing voting and civil rights organizations, including the League of Women Voters, the Children’s Defense Fund and the NAACP Legal and Education Defense Fund, registering voters, meeting with legislators, educating voters, advocating for good government,” she wrote.

Turner noted that for her the most important aspect of the weekend was the presence of two historic alumnae. “[M]ost of all, we welcomed back to campus Dr. Beatrix McCleary Hamburg

The AAAVC hosted events this weekend aimed at celebrating the organization’s 30-year history.

Members from around the United States attended, discussing the history of Black activism at Vassar.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

AAAVC award to their legacy,” Turner noted.

“We wanted to celebrate and honor our past, and address current issues so our future will be stronger. We accomplished that.”

Pittman also discussed the importance of the history of Black students’ legacies. “[C]ertainly sharing with alums what Vassar strives to do to support Black students in particular was rewarding while at sometimes challenging—because we must honestly face the shortcomings with respect to Black students,” he explained. “The element of history is so important to moving forward and alums who come back to campus contribute greatly to that narrative as they interact with students, administrators and faculty.”

Clunie acknowledged the importance of this legacy. “There was also a great sense of community throughout the weekend, and it was beautiful to see Vassar Alum[s] of color get together to celebrate the 30th year of AAAVC,” she wrote.

Continuing relationships between students and alumnae/i is a key point for Pittman. “The connections between black students and black alumni is particularly important,” he explained.

“The historic traditions and movements among black students, spanning more than 60 years, is integral to sustaining the diversity at Vassar.”

Clopton’s engagement with AAAVC and with this year’s Triennial is due in large part to her concern with addressing multiple forms of racism. “I am very concerned that we continue to reinvent responses to institutional racism instead of institutionalizing equity and inclusion,” she wrote. “Implicit bias recognition, education, and elimination must become part of the academy through the curriculum, student and faculty training and orientation, colloquia, and multi-disciplinary approaches. It has to be on-going and documenting and educating about the past is key to moving forward into the future and not be doomed to repeat failed policies or lack thereof.”

One highlight for Turner was a comment from Christmas which synthesized the experience at Triennial. “Dr. Christmas...upon reflecting on the weekend said ‘Thank God Vassar has been changed by us!’ That pretty much sums it up for me too.”

NEWS

Page 4 Outside the Bubble Iran Nuclear Negotiations Raise Concerns

Vassar awarded new Cooke Prize for Equity Emily Hoffman

On Thursday, April 2, American and Iranian authorities announced a framework agreement completed by several nations in regards to Iran’s nuclear capabilities that, despite its cooperative nature, has sparked controversy across several nations. The agreement is the product of almost two years of negotiations, finalized over the course of eight days.

The agreement’s terms would dramatically shrink Iran’s nuclear program, decreasing its number of centrifuges by over half, reducing its uranium enrichment capabilities and forcing the nation to give up 97 percent of its current enriched uranium stockpile. Additionally, known nuclear facilities will be scaled back or made into research centers, and will be monitored regularly by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors.

In return, many United Nations Security Council economic sanctions will be lifted.

American sanctions related to non-nuclear matters, such as Iran’s state sponsored terrorism, however, will remain.

The deal was announced amidst a recently combative climate surrounding the negotiations. Earlier this March, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was invited to speak at a joint session of Congress, in what some interpreted as a Republican attempt at undermining the presidents negotiation efforts.

The Prime Minister stated concerns that the deal at the time would not truly stop Iran in its attempts to build a nuclear weapon.

Just weeks after the session, 47 Republican senators signed a letter to Iran’s leaders, asserting that any agreement reached could be undone by future administrations or Congress. Secretary of State John Kerry condemned the letter for being, as he claimed, of a calculated and unprecedented nature. He stated, “During my 29 years here in the Senate, I have never heard of—nor even heard of it being proposed—anything comparable to this” (Mediaite, “John Kerry’s Reaction to GOP’s Iran Letter: ‘Utter Disbelief,’” 03.11.15).

The current proposal, while it has been granted significant praise in both countries, has also generated significant controversy.

To some Iranian constituents, there is uncertainty as to the fairness of a gradual lifting of the existing sanctions as opposed to an immediate end to them.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has continued to insist that a better deal could be reached, one that forces Iran to accept more compromises in return for lifted sanctions. House Speaker John Boehner remarked, “It would be naive to suggest the Iranian regime will not continue to use its nuclear [program], and any economic relief, to further destabili[ze] the region” (Al Jazeera, “Obama hails ‘historic’ Iran nuclear deal,” 04.03.15).

President Obama has come out in strong defense of the preliminary agreement, declaring it a unique significantly scale back the Iranian nuclear program. “This is our best bet by far to make sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon,” he said in a recent New York Times interview (The New York Times, “President Obama Calls Preliminary Iran Nuclear Deal ‘Our Best Bet,’” 04.05.15).

In Tehran, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani emphasized Iran’s desire to fully adhere to the plans guidelines. “Cooperation and interaction would be in the interest of everyone,” he commented.

While the framework has been widely lauded as a sign of significant achievement in American-Iranian relations, it will not be finalized until June 30, and many details have yet to be worked out. Currently many questions about the plan remain unanswered, and some details are even contested. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif commented, “We have taken a major step but are still some way away from where we want to be” (The Daily Mail, “‘We will not cheat’: Iran’s president vows to abide by nuclear pact, as thousands take to streets of country to celebrate ‘historic’ deal,” 04.03.15).

The future of the deal is still uncertain, though the framework’s historical significance is far more clear.

– Matt Kolbert, Guest Reporter

April 16, 2015

Reporter

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n Tuesday, April 7, Vassar was rewarded for its nationally-recognized financial aid efforts, becoming the inaugural winner of the $1 million Jack Kent Cooke Foundation’s Cooke Prize for Equity in Educational Excellence.

The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation is an organization dedicated to advancing the education of promising students stricken with financial need. It offers the largest scholarships in the country, academic counseling and other direct services to help high-performing, low-income students develop their talents and receive appropriate educational opportunities. The Cooke Prize for Equity in Educational Excellence is the largest award in the United States that recognizes a college for making noteworthy strides in enrolling and supporting low-income students.

Under the leadership of President Catharine Hill, whose tenure began in 2006, Vassar underwent significant efforts to become a more socioeconomically diverse college campus. Since Hill’s arrival, the College’s financial aid budget has more than doubled to over $60 million, with approximately 60 percent of current Vassar students receiving some scholarship aid. Nearly 25 percent of Vassar’s current first-year students are eligible for a federal Pell Grant, which is available to students whose annual family income is $40,000 or less. Vassar has also steadily increased its enrollment of first generation students, with 70 or more in each Vassar first-year class since the 2011-2012 academic year. After taking scholarships into account, the average annual cost of attending Vassar for lower-income students is about $6,000, a figure many students cover much of that cost through campus jobs and loans.

One of the ways in which Vassar was able to prioritize financial aid was its return to a need blind admissions policy in 2008. According to Director of Student Financial Services Jessica Bernier, “Our goal with returning to a needblind admissions policy was to help encourage all students to apply, and we didn’t want students to not apply because they could not afford Vassar or be afraid that they would not

be admitted because they were unable to pay.”

President Hill also weighed in on the importance of creating a socioeconomically diverse student body. “It contributes to our country’s commitment to equal opportunity and social mobility,” she remarked. “A BA is more important now than ever, and in America, access to higher education depends on race and income, and not just merit. Also, our students learn more when diverse perspectives are represented on campus. If all our students had similar backgrounds and life experiences, the learning opportunities in class and outside class would be diminished. And, also, our graduates will be entering a world after Vassar that is very diverse. Learning how to navigate a diverse community while at Vassar contributes to our students being prepared for life beyond Vassar.”

Colleges have neglected to enroll low-income students for several reasons. Economically, financial aid strains the budget of colleges and many have small endowments so they are further restricted. Furthermore, low-income students often have lower SAT and ACT scores which can hurt the rankings of schools.

The Cooke Foundation hopes to generate more momentum around issues of socioeconomic diversity in institutions of higher education. Vassar, Amherst, Harvard, Pomona and state universities of North Carolina and California are leaders in enrolling top students regardless of economic background. However, the Cooke Foundation and its supporters agree that there is still much work to be done at most top schools.

Vassar reportedly plans to use the funds from the prize in three ways: increasing support for undocumented students, providing resources for funding internships for lower income students and contributing to the Transitions pre-orientation program, which strives to ease the cultural transition many students experience upon arriving at Vassar.

President Hill elaborated on these projects: “The Committee on Inclusion and Excellence (CIE) has been spending some time this year on how to continue to strengthen the Transitions program, and some of the resources will

be used to support those initiatives. We started admitting ‘Dreamers’ about seven or eight years ago. For any given level of need (we meet the full need of all admitted students), there is a greater cost to Vassar because they are not eligible for federal aid, such as Pell grants.”

She continued, “So, we’ll also use some of the resources to help with these greater expenses. And, finally, we have been trying to expand our internship opportunities for all students, as we focus more on helping students transition to life beyond Vassar. Some of the resources will be used for internships for lower income students, who aren’t in a position to accept unpaid internships.”

Director of the Career Development Office (CDO) Stacy Bingham expressed her excitement that the Cooke Prize will support internship opportunities for lower-income students.

Bingham said, “Internships are critical for experiential learning, clarification of career goals and marketability in the hiring process.

Robust support for internship funding is a natural extension of financial aid at Vassar.

Thanks to support from the Internship Grant Fund and now the Cooke Prize, we are making real headway at addressing this great need.”

Despite the efforts to which Vassar’s prize money will go, however, leadership of the Students’ Class Issues Alliance (SCIA) organization on campus believes that there is still work left to do. According to Leela Stalzer ’17: “Many students come to Vassar not completely understanding their statements of financial aid, and the Financial Aid part of the Vassar College website seems to be primarily geared toward applicants, rather than current students. I also think that if we want to be seen as an inclusive campus, we should be doing more to improve our attitudes about and behavior toward the Poughkeepsie community. ” Stalzer did, however, remain hopeful for the future. She commented, “Campus groups are working to make the campus more accessible for undocumented students. SCIA is working on ‘Navigating Vassar,’ a guide for lower-income students that aims to provide a realistic picture of college costs and help them identify and use campus resources.”

Call of Security’s racial bias sounds off again VIDEO continued from page 1

opted to respond directly to the student organizers in a letter published on The Miscellany News website. The letter communicated a confidence in the integrity of the Administration’s decision to terminate Williams’ employment at the College.

The video serves as Williams’ response to the Administration’s unwillingness to recognize what many students sight as racial bias and discrimination.

In the description of the video, the SLD maintained that the College’s handling of the situation was not only problematic, but indicative of larger underlying problems with Vassar as an institution.

It read, “The college justified Kemar’s termination with embellished and racialized language to avoid confronting the continued racism within the security department and senior administration. The college must be held accountable for its continuing negligence and silencing of those addressing abuse on this campus. The administration has an obligation to rectify this injustice. Kemar has shared his story, and it is one that must be heard.”

In the video, Williams criticizes the method and reasoning behind both the College’s treatment of him as an employee and its decision to fire him. He remarked, “To people I work with, to some people I’ve never met, to some people I hear about, it’s 100 percent that there is racism at Vassar College.”

The SLD refused to comment any further on the subject for the purposes of this article.

Despite the rallying point that the subject of his reinstatement has been to many members of the community, Williams now maintains that he no longer wishes to work at Vassar.

“I wanted to get reinstated before, but then I came to the conclusion: Why put myself in the same predicament that I just came out of?” he asked.

“It doesn’t seem intelligent, it doesn’t seem

smart and it doesn’t seem like the best thing for me to do, to come back here and work for a college [where] I know a big factor [is] based on the color of my skin,” he continued. “It’s hard to explain, but I would really say...I would never come back here to work.”

According to Williams, his situation was by no means an isolated incident for minority employees at Vassar, and the only way to prevent future problems like his would have to come through substantial structural change to the College. “It will happen again, and it will keep happening again,” he said into the camera.

In the video, Williams goes on to posit, “The only thing that’s going to change that is changing the faculty, changing the Administration, getting people with common knowledge, common sense…”

He continued, “[T]hat’s the only way that there’s never going to be any more racial profiling, no racial slurs, no racial comment[s], no discrimination based on what color you are.”

The SLD video featuring Williams’ remarks has already received almost 3,500 views, and has been shared by a number of student organizations who have echoed his concerns about institutional prejudices within the College, including the Vassar Transparency Coalition, The Vassar Activist and the Vassar Animal Rights Coalition (VARC).

VARC Co-President and Event Coordinator Alessandra Seiter ’16 spoke to the importance of Williams’ case to groups like VARC. “I think it’s really important that all activist-oriented groups on campus work in solidarity on issues most affecting campus climate, since collective liberation for all beings won’t happen unless we’re all working in intersectional ways,” she wrote in an emailed statement.

The controversy surrounding Williams’ employment status at the College comes at the same time as when many admitted students make visits to campus and, in the case of Regular Decision applicants, the time in which

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

hundreds of students must decide if they will enroll at Vassar or not.

Anecdotally, some campus tour groups have even been stopped by students wishing to pass out information explaining Williams’ situation to prospective students.

Although Williams’ comments about Vassar have evoked outspoken reactions both in support and in contention, there has been little responding action from the Administration so far. Despite, SLD’s public campaign, the Office of Admission has communicated no sign of alarm in response.

Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Art Rodriguez commented in an emailed statement, “We haven’t heard concerns from prospective students and their parents about the issues Mr. Williams raises in the video. Although the Vassar [SLD] has been stopping tours and sharing information with them, we have found that families have not responded to the information.”

He continued, “Additionally, the concerns Mr. Williams raises are a personnel matter, and I trust that my colleagues in Safety and Security and Human Resources have handled this matter appropriately.”

Although where Williams plans to move on to remains unclear, the SLD and many students have wished him well in his future endeavors elsewhere. Williams maintains that he hopes that students will continue to press for racial and social equity in their time at Vassar as well as after they graduate.

“Don’t make these people do this to you.

Don’t be another statistic…” Williams remarked. “Stand up for what you believe in. I feel like that’s one of the biggest things that [students] are supposed to do, to just stand up and say, ‘This is what we’re going to do and we’re strongly going to do this. As students, we believe that there should be a stand and a stop to racial profiling [and] racial discrimination.’”

FEATURES

April 16, 2015

Page 5

On the record: Alums recall path to success in journalism 2

010 was, to put it bluntly, one of the worst years to graduate. The job market was lacking, and prospects were looking grim. Emma Carmichael ’10 joked that she was literally the poster-child for unemployment: A Getty photographer captured Carmichael at Commencement and news sources used the image to accompany their articles about the hopelessness of job opportunities for the recent grads. Since then, Carmichael and her fellow Vassar alums have come a long way. On Friday, April 10, The Miscellany News hosted a panel discussion for five recent graduates who had found careers in different fields of journalism, from print to broadcast to online. The success the panelists have found for themselves made journalism seem like a viable career path even for people like me, who have only hopes for the future.

The room was packed with students and professors alike, hoping to hear words of advice and encouragement as well as insights on how journalism is evolving as a medium. The panelists seemed equally eager to share their experiences getting to where they are now. While a couple of them wrote and edited for The Miscellany News, not all paths to journalism were straight or smooth: Some opted for day jobs right after Vassar, while others went to grad school. And, what’s more, their stories of internships, successes, failures, near-firings, were not, in fact, from that long ago. They could vividly recall what it was like to be fresh out of school, just starting out, balancing minimum-wage jobs with freelance writing. Still, even after breaking into journalism one way or another, they still laughed about the mistakes, missteps and particular challenges that come along with careers in writing and editing. But at the end of the day, they agreed—the byline is worth it.

—Julia Cunningham, Assistant Features Editor

Emma Carmichael ’10

Jeremy Kaplan ’96

mma Carmichael ’10 had no initial intentions of going into the field of journalism.

She is currently the Editor-in-Chief at Jezebel, but she started at Vassar as an urban studies major and also worked at The Miscellany News as a Sports writer. As she mentioned during the panel, Sports was the way to get short blurbs out, and she wanted to write about the Aikido club and cover her basketball games. “No one else wanted to cover us at the time. We were really bad,” she explained.

She moved up as a Sports writer to a columnist and went on to become a Features editor alongside fellow panelist, Kelly Stout ’10.

“At some point my senior year, I thought I wanted to be a teacher, and I spent a summer student-teaching in the city, and I kind of thought that would be something I would return to when I had a little bit more life experience and confidence,” she said.

“I had a chat with a professor, Kiese Laymon, who encouraged me to be selfish in my year after Vassar, to go after what I wanted to do, which was journalism. And I’m really glad I did that.”

Many of the internships she held during her summers did revolve around journalism.

“The most interesting article I ever worked

eremy Kaplan ’96 started at Vassar as a double major in English and psychology, or, as he put it: “Twice the fun!” He came to the panel as the Editor-in-Chief at Digital Trends, which is a technology lifestyle website. During his time in academia, he was especially impressed with the Stanford Prison Experiment. “Everything about the Stanford Prison Experiment still blows me away -the fact that someone conducted such a test, what it says about human nature, and how little most people know

E

J

emmacarmichael.com smashdawg.com

on was, my editor at DeadSpin at the time was about to fire me because he thought I wasn’t pulling my weight and he challenged me to go undercover to the Gathering of the Juggalos, which is interesting,” she said. “And I had clown makeup on and I hung out at the Gathering of the Juggalos for 24 hours, and that was a weird one. But also, not out of character for Gawker.”

about something that speaks so deeply to who we are as people,” Kaplan wrote in an emailed statement.

From his early stages, however, Kaplan was not as easily impressed with every piece of work that passed in front of him.

During his freshman year, one of his literature professors arranged to bring the New Yorker reporter Jane Kramer in to read from her book, “The Last Cowboy.” “We met Ms. Kramer as part of the class, and she asked me what I thought of her book,” Kramer wrote. “Taken by surprise, I answered honestly: I really didn’t like it. She autographed the book for me: ‘I’ll try harder next time.”

One of Kaplan’s biggest mistakes occurred during his time at Ziff Davis, a publisher of PC magazine. A larger assignment of his involved a piece about multi-million dollar printer companies. “It sounds horrible, but it was a really big deal,” He said.

“The magazine comes out and we start getting these phone calls. And it turns out that the 800 number for Cannon’s help line is exactly one digit off from a sex line. So you think we would have checked that, right?

But we didn’t. And the worst part was that we reprinted the error in a ‘Best Of ’ issue, and it was still a sex line!”

Max Kutner ’11 Kelly Stout ’10 M

K

elly Stout ’10 never would have guessed it, but writing her senior thesis became an unforgettable experience, and not in a negative way. While at Vassar, she double majored in English and political science.

For her thesis, she said in an emailed statement, “I would have punched anyone who said this to me when I was working on it, but the chance to do sustained research and thinking on my senior thesis was an immense gift.”

Her time at Vassar was full of intensive writing, between her majors and also her time spent as an editor for the Humor and Satire section and later the Features section of the Misc.

Emma Carmichael ’10 was her partnerin-crime in editing Features. “We were disorganized as hell and often ended up just typing articles directly into InCopy at 3 a.m.,” Stout wrote. “We were so tired by the end of closing night, that we sometimes actually got in [Carmichael]’s car and drove

home to the THs.” She went on, “We pretty much always listened to ‘Upgrade U’ on the four-minute drive home, feeling awesome and so tired that we were basically hallucinating. It’s one of my favorite college memories, and I still listen to that song when a closing night at The New Yorker is getting especially rough.”

Stout was able to transition smoothly into the New Yorker after graduation. As the A-Issue Editor at The New Yorker, Stout oversees the close of the magazine each week. “We have a managing editor who works on long-term planning, and I’m in charge of the short-term,” she wrote.

Each issue has about 10 nonfiction pieces, a piece of fiction, a cultural listing section and the ‘Talk of the Town’ section. Additionally, there are at least 15 pieces of art and around 16 or 17 cartoons. “There’s an art and a science to making sure all of those fit together to make a coherent whole, and that’s my job.” Stout said.

Courtesy of Kelly Stout

ax Kutner ’11 was able to take his work straight from the Vassar Bubble into the real world to clinch his first Newsweek cover story. As a freshman, Kutner was the creator of Mads Vassar, the first place students could go to get their regularly-updated campus news. As a film major, Kutner spent more of his time behind a camera at Vassar and didn’t get into written journalism until he went to grad school. The summer of ’09 was when he became interested in the topic that would become his debut piece.

“Farmer’s markets were becoming more popular, now obviously they’re everywhere, but five or six years ago it was still kind of a new, interesting thing,” he said. “And there was this really wet summer and the recession had just happened, and I thought, ‘I wonder how these things all affected farmers?’ So I just drove out east on Long Island where I’m from, and just spent a couple of days with them and did this documentary.”

He continued “And then, I think, a few months later at Vassar, when I read about this farmer’s suicide, which was he killed 51 of his cows before killing himself, which is a really traumatic incident; that story stuck with me.” This news snippet would turn into “Death on a Farm,” his first Newsweek cover story, which he wrote while at Columbia School of Journalism. He went on to write another follow-up regarding sex trafficking on farms. “My favorite thing is when I have a story idea and then I go to Google it and no one’s ever done it before, which has happened with a lot of stories,” Kutner said.

Jasmine Brown ’10 J

jasminebrown.net

maxwellkutner.com

asmine Brown ‘10 only worked for the Misc for half a semester before she had to quit to focus more on her other studies. Not working on the Misc didn’t stop her from having a career in journalism, however. While at Vassar, she was a double major in drama and American culture before she moved on after Vassar to become the producer for “ABC News Nightline.” She has worked on many stories for “20/20,” as well. “Nightline,” Brown explained, puts out content every single night, ranging from the serious, more in-depth investigative type to the obscure.

“So I was shooting a story, a union of a birth mom and a birth daughter, which was actually going to ‘20/20,’” Brown said. “But then my senior producer came to me and was like ‘Hey! We want you to book this pregnant model who doesn’t look pregnant!’ And I was like ‘OK!’ So I sent her an email, went through her agent, booked her, and basically went on an overnight flight to L.A.”

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

She went on to say, “And turned out ‘Good Morning America’ also wanted this story, so we shot with her working out all day and talking about ‘No! I’m in lingerie and I’m taking this photo and I just look great!’” Laughing, she added, “But I went out to L.A., shot it in a day, took a red eye back, and then wound up editing it the entire day and then it went on air and then it was crazy.” She added that the model was so fit that their lawyer wanted them to make sure she was actually pregnant.

“He was like, ‘Are we positive?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, we went to the doctors and saw the ultrasound.’”

As far as her advice went, Brown said, “At least for me I find that we have to know a lot of things. One night, I could be working on a court case that I know nothing about that will be going on that night, and the next day I could be doing a pregnant model. If you’re interested in everything, you can be interested in everything.”

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April 16, 2015

The low, lowdown: Yik Yak captures campus undercurrent Claire Standaert

Assistant Features Editor

Y

ik Yak is what any anonymous app is: untamed and anarchic. You can say what you want and no individual has monopoly over the cyberspace it creates. Instead, a community of yakkers can use the upvote/downvote feature to either catapult a yak into stardom or make it disappear entirely.

As the app has become more popular, discussion over the constructive and destructive chatter it creates has grown on college campuses, with different controversies sprouting up at institutions across the nation. At Eastern Michigan University, students yakked sexually explicit comments about their professor during a lecture, which the professor screenshotted and sent to university officials. Her efforts resulted in little because the app is anonymous and to reveal identities would require a subpoena. At Clemson University, a student claimed the app is usually wielded as a tool for Greek life to “trash talk” other organizations.

Colleges might disable the app in certain parts of campus, but it’s still available nearly everywhere else. At its best, Yik Yak can spur community building: At the University of Alabama, students rallied behind a girl who shaved her head for a sorority sister who had cancer.

With the app, good and bad often come in equal measure, and Vassar is no exception.

And, at a college where irony abounds, Yik Yak can produce rare moments of genuineness.

“It’s a good platform to just say what you’re really thinking when you would never really actually have a chance to say it,” said Rory Chipman ’17.

Often, this leads to moments of emotional simultaneity. Chipman said, “It can be really sad because sometimes if you want to check Yik Yak, you see all of these sad posts because it is very much a gauge of how the campus is feeling—to see that, is just kind of a bummer.”

James Falino ’17 added, “It’s like that time of year when your teacher says ‘How is everyone

feeling?’ and nobody answers.” Chipman said, “All the students should do is say ‘Check Yik Yak.’” This is especially apparent during midterm and finals week, when the app becomes a space for communal commiserating.

The anonymous forum has also become a place prospective students look to for the inside scoop on the colleges they’re visiting. In these moments, Yik Yak cuts through a foggy realm of tour guides reciting facts and presenting visitors with only Vassar’s best side. This past weekend, an accepted student attending Focus weekend yakked, “Best/worst part about Vassar?” Answers ranged from the quality of food to the quality of social life. On the other side of the spectrum, a Vassar student yakked, “Feeling reminiscent about the days before Yik Yak when I was a prospie and just guessed what Vassar kids’ thoughts were.” In this sense, Yik Yak is the best place to go for an honest answer, no strings attached—an alternative narrative out of Admissions’ hands.

Though Yik Yak can be used to affirm and advise others, it often becomes about self-affirmation. Feelings of isolation can often be sublimated into a single yak. “It’s interesting because since it’s anonymous, it’s more about your own self-gratification,” said Chipman.

Falino added, “I’ve found myself many times being like ‘Am I the only one who thinks this?’ and get a significant response on Yik Yak.” But not everything is constructive. Falino said, “For the bad, it’s almost like a vicious cycle of people feeding off of each other’s energy. I’ve noticed, for example, on a controversial topic, some people will say, ‘Doesn’t everybody think this?’ and it will get a ton of likes and up until then you will have heard a lot of negative opinions on it.” He continued, “It takes not as loud of an opinion to be heard on Yik Yak.” Bullying, racism and breaches of privacy often happen on Yik Yak—like all other social media sites. The difference is that on Yik Yak, the aggressors aren’t likely to get caught because their name and contact information are

anonymous. In the app’s privacy policy, it says, “We may disclose the information we collect about you in order to comply with the law, a judicial proceeding, court order, subpoena, or other legal process.” But the waters become murky when legal processes become involved, thereby weakening this statement’s power as a deterrent.

Like other colleges, Vassar is not immune to the negatives of anonymity, which can be seen in destructive yakking. Falino said, “I don’t like when people get individually called out. That’s just not cool. People post people’s initials, and yeah, it’s not the same thing, but if you know the person, you can figure it out. It’s a breach of privacy. I’ve also heard about people complaining about people posting people’s TH numbers for parties on Yik Yak and random people end up coming to those parties.”

However, anonymity does have its benefits when it comes to humor. The app offers a place to externalize strange thoughts and absurd jokes. Especially at the place like Vassar, which can become competitive as students try to outdo other yakkers. Chipman noted, “Some people want a lot of [upvotes]. But just don’t even worry about the [upvotes] and detach yourself from it. Some people are obsessed with finding ways to get a lot of ups. That will drive you crazy.” Falino agrees, but also said, “I feel like at Vassar, kids compete to be the funniest, so it makes sense. And especially in social media, trying to get a lot of ups is the nature of it.”

Many wonder, “What if Yik Yak became un-anonymous?” Some might get a lawyer; some might bask in pride. Chipman said, “I’d be horrified. One of my yaks was, ‘Nothing beats being able to pull out a large massive booger from your nose in private…’ On the day after Halloween, I yakked, ‘When your mom texts you asking to see photos of your costume last night.’ That was one of my top yaks.”

One of Falino’s popular yaks was “Sending cryptic VPrint messages to random 999 num-

bers.” Chipman turned to him and exclaimed, “That was you?”

This moment of ‘That was you?’ is for many the best part of Yik Yak. Falino said, “I have found that the most satisfying moment is when everyone in a room is like ‘Read your top yak’ and then everyone is like ‘Oh my god, that was you?!’ It does have some social significance that people across campus read the same thought.”

Many college campuses, including Vassar, have begun to mold Yik Yak into what it should be: a place of comfort, discussion, humor and communication. People use it to share personal woes and receive encouragement in return.

Some yaks of this sort: “That moment of panic where you feel yourself falling into a pit of depression.” “I laugh so I don’t cry.” “Mom, dad— why can’t you get along for me?” Chipman said, “I just wonder, when someone is feeling down and you reach out to them anonymously, who is that person who I reached out to and tried to help feel better? And I have no idea. It could literally be anyone.”

Though previously Vassar has had anonymous forums like SayAnything and VCpost. me, Yik Yak was absent from campus until this year. Chloe Wheeler ’15 reflected on this development, saying, “The conversations have changed. I think private issues have become more public. You hear all these conversations about students you haven’t even met.”

Falino and Chipman agreed that the explosive popularity of the app has been somewhat of an unconventional means to campus unity.

Falino said, “Vassar’s Yik Yak is a good social survey of what the Vassar campus is thinking.

Like what we think is funny. What kind of humor we value.” To feel as if you know someone without a name when you haven’t met them seems mystical, but Yik Yak has made it possible to the extent that cyberspace can.

Chipman echoed this thought, saying, “It’s kind of weird, because you’ve connected before, but you don’t realize it.”

How one writer overcame ‘Hemingway boner’ to find voice SAUNDERS continued from page 1

ders, “We’re sitting on a gold mine.”

In a fit of creative energy, Saunders wrote a 700-page novel over the course of a year.

But when he gave it to Paula, a writer herself, Saunders realized his lengthy work was a dud.

“I know if she likes it, I’m good. If she doesn’t, I’ve got work to do. She had maybe gotten to page six and she was sitting like this—” Saunders put his head in his hands. “It was a train wreck because I was still using the Hemingway fixation.”

Later, during the question-and-answer session, when a student asked how Saunders came to trust the criticisms of readers and editors, he drew on advice he gives his students at Syracuse University. “I tell them that when someone makes a comment and you say, ‘That’s crazy!’ you should throw that away,” explained Saunders, “But if someone says something and you say, ‘Thank God!’ and it feels like it came from you, keep that. I’ve always felt that way with my wife.”

Saunders said that he realized the problems in the early stages of his writing stemmed from his belief that artists needed to keep their real selves out of their art. “[I thought] you had to be a better, bigger, smarter person than you actual were…In my case it meant sort of trying to fight back against my fast-talking nature I had and leaving out pop culture references because Hemingway never had any Walmarts in his writing,” he said.

Debbie Altman ’16 thought this insight was key as she thought back to times she aspired to imitate a particular writer whom she admires.

“I’ve been told over and over again to find my own voice and write with my own style but I still find myself looking to my favorite authors as inspiration. I appreciate Saunders making it clear that holding yourself to those standards doesn’t help you develop your own voice; it smothers it,” she said.

Later, Saunders realized he had a hit on his hands when he heard Paula genuinely laughing at something he had written. “Humor, frankness, self-effacing energy—as soon as I dropped that scrim I knew what I was doing.

Humor is just telling the truth a little quicker

Sam Pianello/The Miscellany News

man who got cheated out of Christmas, but it’s also tremendously funny,” he said, hitting on Saunder’s ability to mingle the tragedies of the human experience with humor. “‘Having courted and won a girl I had courted but never come close to winning in high school, I was now losing her via my pathetically dwindling prospects. One night she said, ‘I’m not saying I’m great or anything, but still I think I deserve better than this,’” read Kumar from the piece. He admitted, “I read that line and it struck an echo in my heart.”

Saunders told the audience, with tongue in cheek, “Before we get to the humor, I want to start with a serious piece about a poetic form.”

Saunders dove into an exploration of the haiku.

As compared to the villanelle, for example, he said, “The haiku by contrast just needs a frog: Frog croaks in the marsh. I run wildly in the marsh. Frog gives me this look,” read Saunders.

Saunders read another haiku, noting that they often have to do with observations of nature: “I observe nature. I closely observe nature.

Wow—it is boring.”

After reading a couple more experimental haikus, Saunders said, “That’s one form of humor: light, cheap, satirizing the haiku—that’s low-hanging fruit.” Though Saunders is widely recognized for his masterful writing, receiving accolades for his accomplishments including the MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships, like many just starting out, he struggled at first.

Saunders said he never considered himself a humor writer until 1989. “Before that I had this kind of medical condition called the ‘Hemingway boner,’” said Saunders. “I had the idea that what an artist did, what a writer did, was find a hero, study them closely and try to do the same thing. In Hemingway’s case, I thought the job might be to know the effect I’m going to have on the reader and then trick the reader.”

Saunders found the first opportunity to implement this approach when he and his wife got invited to a wedding in Mexico. He remembered meeting an assortment of characters and taking detailed notes on all of their experiences while on the trip. He told his wife, Paula Saun-

Writer George Saunders delivered this year’s Alex Krieger ’95 Memorial Lecture, a series dedicated to bringing humor writers to campus. Saunders talked about the journey to finding his voice as a humorist. and more rudely than you usually would.” It was then that Saunders found his voice.

After 9/11, Saunders wrote many humor pieces with political agendas, fashioning villains and enemies for him to push up against.

Fiction, on the other hand, allowed Saunders to be less rude and more generous.

But much of Saunders’ writing style came from an unlikely place. Working as a tech writer for seven years to pay the bills, Saunders found an approach to prose that still proves useful.

“There was no patience for adjectives,” said Saunders. “I learned you could create beauty through an accumulation of short sentences.”

Though Saunders had found his stride, revising is a part of the writing praocess that can remain daunting. Nonetheless, Saunders has developed a simple strategy: Just read the first sentence. “You’ll have an immediate reaction to it,” he said. “Keep a needle in your head that’s just ‘positive’ and ‘negative.’”

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

David Finger ’15 said he found this advice helpful. “I don’t write creatively, but, having just turned in a thesis, I found a lot of what he said about not trying to solve a problem headon to be applicable. Likewise, I liked what he had to say about easing into the process of rereading your own work and making it better,” wrote Finger in an emailed statement.

When re-reading writing, Saunders said, eventually, the writing will talk back. “The story will start talking to you: ‘I’m boring!’ A good writer will say, ‘Can I help you? You suck.’”

Most, importantly, Saunders said that over his career, he’s learned that there is no one way to be a writer, no one lifestyle a writer need have and no environment that couldn’t be a creative one.

Said Saunders, “It would be weird if you got a group of 20 people together and no literature came out of it. Wherever there’s human desire and suffering there will be literature.”

April 16, 2015

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Page 7

Tasty Tuesday’s cousin, Food Truck Friday to test run in May Sarah Sandler Reporter

F

courtesy of Vassar College Media Relations

or many, Tasty Tuesday is the high point of the week for obvious reasons: Monday is over, and Tuesday brings with it the promise of some of Raymond Avenue’s tastiest offerings.

With that in mind, Food Truck Friday may be added as a new food-related day soon. With Munchy Monday, Chili Wednesday and Farmers Market Thursday in tow, Food Truck Friday would make for five straight days of culinary treats allowing for some substantial respite from the ACDC. On May 1, the food truck vendors will visit campus and sell their goods to students, an initiative organized by the VSA. Class of 2016 President Stephanie Zhu said, “The VSA has never tried Food Truck Friday in the past; this is its first time venturing out.” Fall Fest in October was a semi-trial, but, Zhu added, “Fall Fest struggled a little to bring in all the vendors they wanted, because two of them canceled last minute, so I hope that this will not be the case for Food Truck Friday!”

A pre-existing food day, Munchy Monday, emerged as a result of the Vassar Haiti Project (VHP) idea to raise money to fund their annual March trip to Haiti. Sarah Oliver ’15, who runs Munchy Monday for VHP said, “Vassar Haiti Project partners with a village called Chermaitre in rural Northwest Haiti, and we do our best to travel to the village at least once a year to maintain a personal relationship with the people.” Because VHP is a smaller non-profit, fundraising is very critical, and Munchy Monday is a really useful way to do it. In this sense, Munchy Monday has a charitable aspect to it.

Oliver went on to say, “My freshman year, the trippers were looking for a new and creative way to make money but also have lots of fun in the process. We saw how successful Tasty Tuesday was and knew how much students complained about the Deece, so we thought creating a ‘Munchy Monday,’ where we could sell homemade dishes, would be a great

Munchy Monday, Tasty Tuesday, Chili Wednesday, Farmers Market Thursday and now Food Truck Friday will mean five days of non-ACDC eats. This new food-related event will a trial run on May 1. addition to Vassar food life.”

Unlike Tasty Tuesday, where vendors in the area come to campus, food at Munchy Monday is made by the students selling it. Oliver added, “Many of us enjoyed cooking and looked forward to sharing recipes from home with Vassar students. Our first Munchy Monday was so successful that it’s been a tradition ever since.”

Although Munchy Monday doesn’t take place as regularly as Tasty Tuesday, Oliver continued, “Planning for Munchy Monday can be really exhausting, so while we’d like to have them every week, sometimes our schedules are just too busy!”

The VHP members fundraising for their trip put in a lot of effort to make the event happen.

Each time they hold the event, Oliver said, they make sure to plan out everything carefully. “We

Art Center’s basement home to prominent artworks LOEB continued from page 1

through a review from The New York Times.

Currently, the center is hosting an exhibit titled “Through the Looking Glass: Daguerreotype Masterworks from the Dawn of Photography.”

Docent Kryzel Bonifacio ’17 said, “Daguerreotype was the first successful type of photography.”

Daguerre was a French photographer and a friend of Samuel Morse. Morse helped bring the art to New York City and eventually larger America. “This made portraiture accessible to the middle class and became incredibly popular,” she said.

However, years ago, deaccessioning became a reality and possibility for the Loeb. Through these new regulations, curators are able to sell works from the collection in order to buy new.

In addition to purchasing works, the College

receives a steady stream of donations of works from the private collections of alumnae/i.

“I think what is so special about the gallery is that the pieces we have aren’t always what people think of when they think of the artist. They’re off the beaten path,” said Bonifacio.

These works are sometimes restored before they are put on display, particularly those that weren’t as carefully protected and preserved as the ones that currently reside in the Frances Lehman Loeb basement.

“This piece,” said Bonifacio of a Joan Miró work, “was being stored in a garage, used as a dartboard. You can see the holes right there.”

Though popular pieces such as Miró’s geometric surrealist works draw in visitors, only a few are privy to the underground art scene below their feet.

start by thinking up a menu, which entirely depends on what the trippers are comfortable cooking, then organize a shopping trip, purchase sternos and trays to heat the food, book tables and VCash machines, create a Facebook event and put up posters, cook all the food, transport the food to the College Center, then table all morning.”

As a more regular treat, Tasty Tuesday began in the 2008-2009 school year and has drawn many vendors from the Poughkeepsie area over the years. VP for Operations Ramy Abbady ’16 said, “We have some vendors that come every year, and they take up most of the spots. These include Twisted Soul, Kismat, Reggae Boy and Ku-Yah.” Every week’s vendor combination is different. Possible vendors include Julie’s, Savan’s Hot Dogs, Zorona’s, Grasshopper, Aroma

Spice and others. The north atrium of the College Center offers limited spaces, but to fill the other spots, Abbady added, “It is a combination of the VSA reaching out to vendors and them reaching out to us. I reached out to approximately six new vendors this year, which were a combination of those that had asked to join in the past and those that students have expressed interest. Only two of them ended up joining, Gino’s and Love Feast.”

During the colder months, the Arlington Farmer’s Market occupies the same space as the Tasty Tuesday vendors all day on Thursday. With the addition of Munchy Monday, the College Center is the place to be when hunger calls. The availability of different types of home-style and cultural foods is only offset by the waiting times. Lines for the Farmer’s Market vendors are usually much shorter than those on Tuesday, meaning that students can more easily pick up lunch or a snack quickly while passing through the College Center on the way to their next class.

For Food Truck Friday to be successful, it must diverge from Tasty Tuesday and Munchy Monday to provide something the other two don’t. With the idea of serving food from food trucks, a unique particularity is found. Since Food Truck Friday is a new event, the VSA does not yet have vendors reaching out to them asking to come. Therefore, Zhu said, “I looked on a local Hudson Valley food truck page, as well as did some Google searching. I have to seek the vendors out, because Food Truck Friday has not yet been advertised on any form of social media.”

During the event on May 1, Zhu said, “I think you can expect a good blend of foods, with an American food truck, a foreign cuisine, as well as some dessert truck.” Food trucks are becoming a trend all over the country, one that will hopefully catch on at Vassar. Zhu concluded, “I believe it will be a success, and if it proves to be, then depending on the next Vice President for Operations, we can see it again in the fall!”

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Pictured above, a student restores the sarcophagus of the mummy that lives in the basement of the Loeb.

While the Loeb displays ever-changing exhibits, down below these artifacts hang around for years.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Email Marie Solis masolis@vassar.edu

FEATURES

Page 8

April 16, 2015

A Raymond Ave. staple, My Market considers student needs Claire Standaert

Assistant Features Editor

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manoff ’18 goes there for the candy. “I go there for Bark Thins Snacking Chocolate. I like to buy these really expensive candies when I have money.”

Amirhosseini said, “I like to provide everything that a student at Vassar would like. That’s what we did when we came here. We started seeing what they need here and brought in those items...We ask students what they like here.”

Once, when white lighters weren’t selling, Minoo used her background in art to help sell them. “We had some white lighters and we were not selling them. They were the last ones, and we had a bunch left, so I started painting them.

I was drawing on them for every occasion. For Valentines, for Easter.” Minoo laughed, “And they turned out really good. The students liked them. I enjoyed it very much.”

Not only a place for peaceful shopping, My Market also provides a certain amount of freshness that on-campus dining can’t provide. Every once in a while, Safari or another worker goes

Jacob Brody/The Miscellany News

early 15 years ago, Alli Safari came to America as an Iranian refugee; today, he owns My Market and calls Vassar students his family. He stands behind the deli counter in his green apron and greets customers with a smile and slight nod. The store is usually silent except for the hum of refrigerators, occasional hellos, beeping scanned items, crinkling plastic bags and an intangible aura of family.

Safari came to the United States alone and hasn’t gone home since. “I am from northern Iran close to the Caspian Sea and by the border of Russia. The borders have changed,” he said.

Having been a pharmacist in Iran, Safari compared Iranian and American shops and their ways of business. “The people are all the same and very friendly. In Iran, the government is a problem. We don’t talk about that...It’s kinda political.”

Safari’s extended family still lives in Iran and it isn’t easy to visit them. He said, “They can’t come here because America and Iran are not friendly together. They don’t have an embassy here and they don’t have an embassy over there.”

He misses his family, but is realistic: “Maybe I can go over there, but it is not granted that I can come back.” So he and his family use Skype and computers to communicate. This helps, he noted, “I feel like I am still home.” Not ideal, but a viable option.

My Market’s staff of four, including Safari, is Iranian and speaks Farsi with one another. They switch stations effortlessly from cash registrar, deli maestro and shelf stocker with the strategy to create an energetic, friendly feel to the place.

Safari said, “When deliveries come, we all help stock the shelves. We do everything. The manager, Minoo Amirhosseini, who is in charge of ordering items and running the store, said, “The business has been growing, which is really nice.

And I want it to get better because I like it here.

It is very nice. I’m very comfortable here.”

Amirhosseini began college at New Paltz in 1990 after having come to the United States from Iran that year. She ended with a Bachelors

degree in art and loves to paint, although she said, ”I don’t paint anymore. Too busy.” But from the look of the grocery store, she has turned the space into a different type of canvas with which she can be creative. She often rearranges parts of the store to make it more visually interesting.

The color scheme is pleasant to the eye, just as the items themselves range from the simple to the complex: ramen noodles to gourmet curry power, Bud Light to white California wine. Not a thing is out of place, and if it were, it is no doubt a deliberate effort on the worker’s part to draw attention to it.

Vassar students are the store’s driving force.

Every year, the products change as the students change. For example, Amirhosseini said, “Last year we had a student who bought lots of one type of yogurt and I got it every week for her.

And now she is gone. So nobody else buys it.

So every year it is really different.” By trial and error, Amirhosseini has developed a store full of items that attract Vassar students. Kim Ro-

The My Market employees have become fixtures of the Vassar and Poughkeepsie community. Over the years, they have formed bonds with students and often take their needs into account when stocking the store.

into the back room to chop up some fresh Angus beef to package for sale.

Emily Krebs ’17, a frequent shopper, said, “You can go there and get a sandwich with fresh meat. And it’s nice to just walk there.”

The store is on the corner of Raymond Avenue, close enough for a brisk walk over after class for some fresh fruit, or close enough for a quick run for some beverages on a Friday evening. Most, if not all, Vassar students would agree that My Market is a friendly place to shop. Krebs said, “Every time I walk in, I say hi, and everyone says hi back. They act like they recognize me.”

She laughed, “Or I feel like they know me. It’s a nice and welcoming feeling. And when I leave, they say ‘Have a nice day’ and it seems really sincere.” This lines up perfectly with Alli’s philosophy: “Our customers are like family. If you love someone, they love you back.”

Kiran Kawolics ’15 went to My Market almost every day her freshman and sophomore year for cigarettes. She said, “Before I came to Vassar, I used to joke that it was my dream to be able to walk into a store or restaurant and order the usual.”

She continued, “Sometime during my freshman year, whoever was behind the counter when I went into My Market would put a pack of Marlboro 27s on the counter for me before I even asked for it. Now, even though I don’t go there quite as often, they still get me my favorite cigarettes before I even ask for them, or they’ll ask ‘27s?’ when I reach the counter. It’s kind of a small thing I guess, but it makes me so happy whenever this happens. I think it’s awesome that they go out of their way to give individual attention to their customers, and that it has the potential to make such an impact on people’s moods.”

Kowalics’ experience resonates with what Alli said: “Our customers are like our family. We try to be friendly with everyone.” Thus, away from their Iranian homeland, the workers at My Market do their best to combine business and family which can be heard at the front register through the crinkling of plastic bags and a friendly, “Goodbye, have a nice day. See you soon.”

That’s a wrap! Meatballs find a carb-free friend in lettuce Penina Remler columnist

T

Courtesy of Vino Girl via food.com

here is nothing better than indulging in a dish that not only tastes good, but promises to leave you feeling good too. Consider the lettuce wrap phenomenon—by replacing a taco shell or tortilla with a fresh lettuce wrap, one can allow themselves to enjoy more than one serving and not have to worry about filling the meal with unnecessary carbs. More over, this culinary concept completely transforms the way we look at a typical salad yet still allows oneself to reap the same nutritional value and benefits. However, don’t be scared away by the healthy eating—if you find yourself intimidated by the idea of replacing lettuce over carbs, just think about how much room you’ll be saving later on for dessert—clearly a winwin exchange.

This brings us to Vietnamese meatball lettuce wraps. While it surely sounds like a lot is happening with this particular dish, this savory recipe combines a variety of fresh ingredients and food groups. The crunch of the lettuce is an excellent addition to the spicy meatballs while being coupled with a jungle mango salad and cilantro-basil cashew sauce.

Trust me, you won’t want to miss out on this culinary decadence.

While appropriate for any season, this dish makes a perfect segue into the spring with an emphasis on fresh and natural produce. We can finally stop struggling to find the freshest ingredients in the grocery store!

This recipe also does not require any intense culinary skill set but at the same time promises an impressive and substantial meal without any use of cheese or carbs.

The lettuce wraps will require at least a half hour between the actual preparation and cooking, but fair warning, once these wraps are finished and ready to be served, they will likely disappear in no time!

The Vietnamese meatball lettuce wraps

revolve around three major components: the mango salad, green cashew sauce and wraps.

Start by preparing the salad which consists of mangoes, carrots, cucumbers, red onion, red Fresno pepper and fresh lime juice.

Once these ingredients are well prepared in their proper form, toss them together in a bowl and allow them to chill separately in the fridge until the rest of the dish is ready to be served (and eaten).

The green cashew sauce combines a variety of flavors which together, form a pleasantly surprising concoction. Gather cilantro, basil, cashews, coconut milk lime juice, Thai red curry paste and sweet Thai chile sauce into a blender or food processor.

Once all the crucial components are in order, blend this mix until it appears to be smooth and creamy (this usually takes around three to five minutes). Feel free to test out your sauce along the way (many people tend to add in additional sweet Thai chile sauce for an extra kick).

Lastly, in preparation for the wraps and their filling, season the pork with salt and pepper and distribute the meat into 20-30 tablespoon sized meatballs. As you work, transfer each meatball onto a tray and separately combine the sesame oil, soy sauce, fish sauce and honey, which will later become the dipping sauce. Next, locate a large skillet and place it over medium heat to cook the meatballs for approximately five minutes. To ensure that the pork is entirely cooked through, be sure to turn the meatballs over at least two to three times. Right before the pork is finished cooking, pour the sauce into the pan so that each meatball is completely smothered within the savory marinade.

The secret to lettuce wraps is doubling up the lettuce leaves and cutting up the meatballs before hand so they do not “over-stuff ” the lettuce and break the wrapping. Top each lettuce sandwich with the jungle mango salad, cashew sauce and enjoy.

The Ingredients Mango Salad: 1 mango (peeled into thin strips) 1 carrot (cut into small slices) 1 cucumber (cut into small slices) 1 red onion (thinly sliced) 1 red Fresno chile pepper (chopped) 1 lime (squeezed into juice) 1/2 cup of roasted cashews (chopped) Green Cashew Sauce: 1/4 cup fresh cilantro 1/4 cup fresh basil 3/4 cups roasted cashews

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

1/3 cup coconut milk 2 limes (squeezed into juice) 1 teaspoon Thai red curry paste 2-4 tablespoons sweet Thai chili sauce Meatballs: 1 pound ground pork sausage 2 tablespoons sesame oil 2 tablespoons low sodium soy sauce 2 tablespoons fish sauce 2 tablespoons honey 1 head butter lettuce 1/2 cup sweet Thai chill sauce

April 16, 2015

OPINIONS

Page 9

The Miscellany News Staff Editorial

College needs to prioritize water conservation, sustainability

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ast Saturday, April 11, Sustainable Hudson Valley met at Vassar for its Spring Conference to discuss building the region’s “blue economy,” addressing questions about how to make the Hudson Valley’s water system more sustainable through improving efficiency, reducing usage, reduced contamination, and increasing access to waterways. This conference was timely, given California’s Governor Brown Executive Order B-29-15, issued on April 1, limiting water consumption because of the state’s severe ongoing drought.

Due to the low prices of water and the lack of concern about water conservation in the Northeast, Vassar’s sustainability efforts have focused little on these topics.

We at The Miscellany News believe that Vassar needs to improve consciousness about water usage and increase its efforts, particularly those related to water conservation and quality, through increased financing from the College.

With limited funding, the Office of Sustainability has been working with B&G to accomplish some water efficiency measures. These include the replacement of toilets with dual flush toilets, fixing leaking underground pipes, installing soil moisture monitors on athletic fields to incorporate smarter irrigation, using native plantings to reduce irrigation needs, and creating rain gardens. Through these efforts, Vassar has been able to halve water consumption from 2004-2005 to 2012-2013.

Even though New York’s climate is not nearly as dry as California’s, drought could still happen here, especially as temperatures continue to rise

and the population continues to increase. Of course, the College will also be saving money on its water bill with improved water efficiency measures.

We at The Miscellany News believe that there are numerous additional improvements Vassar could make to decrease its water consumption.

The new science building will include a rainwater catchment system that will provide irrigation water for surrounding areas. More of these systems should be installed, as they decrease the amount of water running off into waterways, which carry chemicals from lawns, as well as reduce the amount of potable water used for irrigation.

Another vital upgrade the College should implement is installing meters to check water usage within different buildings. These meters would allow B&G to monitor water usage around campus, allowing them to quickly identify possible leaks, and seeing where improvements can be made. If Raymond and Strong, two similarly sized and occupied dorms, had significantly different water usage, for example, it would be noted and the source of these differences located, permitting increased efficiency where applicable.

As with all sustainability efforts, improving water efficiency will require participation from members of the community and behavioral changes. A few years ago, low flow shower heads were installed in some dorms. These shower heads can halve water use in showers.

However, students were resistant to this change, and the shower heads were removed.

Survey strengthens voices from survivors of assault Hannah Matsunaga Guest Columnist

Trigger warning: This article depicts sexual assault.

Disclaimer: The opinions are expressed in this article as a student, not as the official stance of the Campus Climate Survey Group. The names have been changed to protect the identity of those within.

T

he confessions started in high school. One Saturday morning, Jess called me early— earlier than she ever got up—and told me she needed to tell me something. She had woken up to a stranger screaming at her to get out of a bed she didn’t recognize. She didn’t remember anything after going out to a party Friday night. She had been taken to the hospital for a rape kit. That Saturday morning, I was the first person she ever told, mostly because we were best friends, but also because I had made my own confession to her the year earlier in the late-night quiet of a sleepover. Mine involved no hospital and no screaming— just a boy I thought of as my friend and a deep well of shame.

Since high school, eleven of my closest friends have confessed to me they’ve been sexually assaulted. Some days it feels good to know I am not alone. Other days, I am crushed by the weight of knowing how many of us there are in the world who have gone through this ordeal. Even when I don’t know how to feel, I know this is the truth, and the truth is worth fighting for. There are statistics floating around that tell the same stories my friends do. The biggest—that one in four women will be sexually assaulted in college— always feels eerily impersonal. Perhaps I’m just wary of statements about “women” as if we are a monolithic group with the same feelings and `experiences. Even “women in college” seems too big for me to even fathom. Which college? Is the number of women assaulted at Vassar the same as the number of women assaulted elsewhere?

What about women of color? Are we at greater risk? What of men? How many people are hurting on the other sides of these thin dorm walls? I do like to imagine there are clusters of people healing each other out beyond what I can see, closed circuits of friends who know each other’s trauma, but I want to connect all of the circuits to reveal how much power there is in so many of us.

The hope is to do that with the Vassar Sexual Misconduct Campus Survey. Since the beginning of this year, I’ve been working on it with David Davis-Van Atta, our Director of Institutional Research; Kelly Grab, one of our Title IX Investigators (who also has a million other job titles); Renee Pabst, our Director of Health Education; Charlotte Strauss-Swanson, our SAVP Coordinator; and Julian Williams, our Director of Equal Opportunity and Title IX Officer. The survey we’ve crafted is not perfect, but it’s good. At the very least, it’s much better than the surveys other colleges and universities are currently running.

The administration of a survey about sexual assault on college campuses is legally required by Title IX, but the content of the survey is ours, not the federal government’s. The goal of the survey is to find out the rates of sexual assault, interpersonal violence and stalking at Vassar College. In other words, the goal is to find out what happens here. Those of us who have been the voice at the other end of the telephone, whispering, “It’s not your fault,” and, “I love you,” already know what happens here. We know this plague of uninvited hands, of non-consent, of rape, is an epidemic. We know what happens here, and in a better world our stories alone would be enough to batter down the doors of an institution that has struggled to find justice for survivors. In a better world, our stories alone would be all we needed to seek and receive justice. But in the fight to create that world, we must use the sharpest tool available: our collective truth.

My hope is that every Vassar student who feels able to do so will take the survey, emailed out by David Davis-Van Atta on April 10th with the subject headline: “Vassar Sexual Misconduct Survey—your invitation and link.” The survey is completely anonymous using the link in your email, and links are personalized so that the survey may not be taken twice. 1500 responses mean more than 1000. 1000 responses mean more than 500. The results of this survey will be a sword in the hand of those who advocate for change. We will use the statistical language of power, the dozens of silent survivors per every one who comes forward, to shame Vassar into admitting change is necessary. To do that, we need your help.

—Hannah Matsunaga ’16 is the VSA VP for Student Life.

Students need to be more conscious of their consumption to allow for these changes, measures to decrease not just consumption, but also the amount of wastewater being sent to treatment facilities. This can be accomplished by handling some wastewater on site through natural systems. Oberlin College has a constructed wetland that cleans wastewater for greywater reuse by replicating the water cleansing power of a wetland using a variety of cleansing plants, bacteria, protozoa, and other organisms. Vassar could install such a system and develop a system for reuse of greywater on campus for toilets and irrigation.

We feel that Vassar’s lack of investment in greater water conservation efforts is reflective of a general lack of investment in sustainability.

Sustainability is often an afterthought in planning decisions, when it must be made a priority throughout all projects the College pursues.

Many of these projects will save Vassar money in the long run, and will contribute to diminishing the ecological footprint of the College.

There are, of course, other areas of sustainability in addition to water conservation where the College can make large improvements.

One such area is energy. Measures for energy efficiency are vast, including sensored lighting retrofits, LED lighting, improved insulation, and building level energy metering. Vassar could invest in renewable energy sources by installing rooftop solar panels on campus, purchasing land near campus for a solar farm to power campus, or perform similar measures with wind power.

These projects would pay themselves off and

would allow for stability in the energy market, meaning energy prices would not be dependant on fossil fuel prices.

Another area where improvements can be made is with waste. Vassar struggles with consistently being able to properly dispose of compost and recycling, and different educational campaigns and infrastructure changes could help remedy this issue. Paper purchased by the College is required to be only 30% recycled content, and increasing this amount would have a large impact. Changing the campus waste stream would involve changes in purchasing of products as well as behavioral changes for proper disposal and waste minimization.

Now is an important time for the College to take sustainability efforts seriously, as the campus master planning process is underway and the current timeline hopes to have final recommendations for the Administration and Board of Trustees by December 2015. We believe that incorporating water conservation and other sustainability initiatives in this master plan would show the community that Vassar takes these issues seriously and is taking action. As an educational institution, Vassar, and other colleges, must help to lead the way in the country for improved sustainability efforts. Places of higher learning have been the sites of change throughout time, and by showing a commitment to these issues, Vassar can continue to be a model for other institutions.

—The Staff Editorial represents the opinions of at least 2/3 of our Editorial Board.

Honor Codes offer students policy, philosophy to follow Sarah Sandler Columnist

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few years ago, when I was going on college tours all over the East Coast, dorms, the gym and the dining hall were things I wanted to see on tours. Professors, course requirements and class sizes were topics I wanted to hear about during the information sessions.

After five, 10, 15 college tours, all of these factors mixed together and lost distinction. One thing that stood out from school to school was whether or not the tour guides mentioned an honor code. Coming from a public high school, an academic integrity policy was not very instrumental in students’ academic lives. We had rules against cheating, but an honor code wasn’t mentioned much at all. While punishment was inevitable if someone got caught cheating, I think more often than not students got away with it.

Kids wrote notes on their palms, typed things into their TI-Nspire calculators and discreetly whispered to each other during assessments.

Because cheating felt so common and socially acceptable in my high school, hearing so much about honor codes at various schools was unexpected. Davidson College in particular had a strict and widely advertised honor code. A simple web search revealed entire webpages dedicated to explaining its intricacies and philosophies.

When I searched for a Vassar College Honor Code, nothing came up. What I instead found was our Student Handbook and its “academic integrity” policy. Discussions on academic integrity exist at Vassar more for the purpose of rule enforcement and less for encouraging students to internalize these principles to promote honesty.

Superficially, an honor code or policy on academic integrity should be something that is found on every college campus so that all work produced is genuine and assessments are completed without any sort of assistance. Their implementation can also replace many trivial rules and regulations, too. Since it is widely recognized that each student is well aware of the strict rules and consequences associated with academic integrity, students at Davidson College, for example, can self-schedule exams, take tests home and take unproctored exams. This makes completing these assignments simpler and more convenient for both students and professors.

Having an honor code or similar policy inte-

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

grated into a college’s philosophy also means that the school will not have to resort to cheating prevention methods that are invasive and excessive.

On April 5, The New York Times published an article about software at Rutgers University called Proctortrack. The testing software ensures students taking exams online are not using additional resources or people to help them. Proctortrack confirms a student’s identity before testing by using their facial features and an image of their knuckles. It goes even further to make sure that a student, once their identity is confirmed, isn’t cheating while the exam is taking place. The software does this by monitoring facial expressions and movements, though even movements as simple as stretching can cause a violation. Methods such as Proctortrack may help prevent cheating, but a webcam monitoring you in your own home or dorm room is invasive and threatening. Taking an important exam is already stressful enough.

If Rutgers and other universities that use methods and programs similar to Proctortrack relied on a strict honor code, they would not have to go to such great lengths to prevent cheating and instead focus on building a positive atmosphere and philosophy.

While I was always pleasantly surprised when a school mentioned their strict honor code during an information session on the college tour, it was not something I took into account when deciding which school to attend. I don’t remember if the tour or information session at Vassar mentioned an honor code. Any search for information about Vassar’s honor code ends up in the Student Handbook with content about the college’s policies on academic integrity. Students very rarely read the Handbook in its entirety, meaning that they will rarely come into contact with these policies. A web search at many peer schools, including Middlebury, Colgate and Bowdoin, reveals a webpage with information about an honor code or similar such philosophy. Why doesn’t Vassar’s website have a section dedicated to an honor code? Not only would it aid in preventing students from engaging in various types of cheating and plagiarism, but also it would instill a trust in the community that would make academic integrity a philosophy as well as a policy.

—Sarah Sandler ’18 is a student at Vassar College.

OPINIONS

Page 10

April 16, 2015

Millennials have less sex, cellphones supposedly to blame Sophia Burns Columnist

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nce again, Baby Boomers are pointing out how millennials just cannot seem to get things right. Generation X and the older generations are constantly lamenting about our lack of jobs, our overwhelming debt and our apparent inability to grow up. While the generation gap is nothing new, it seems as though any article you read with the word “millennial” in the headline will have a judgmental, “things just aren’t what they used to be” overtone. Time and time again, I read about how over-sexualized our generation is, as judged by the clothing, television programming and music that we consume (read: that is marketed to us by members of these previous generations). This may be true, but regardless of its verity, this latest accusation on our lifestyles has come as a bit of a shock to me.

A recent article in The Guardian cites a study, the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles conducted by University College London, concluding that millennials are having less sex than other generations (“Why is Generation Y having less sex?” 03.18.14). According to the study, “women were having sex an average of 4.8 times a month and men, 4.9. Ten years ago this was 6.3 and 6.2, and 10 years before that, 6.1 and 6.4.” So now, not only can millennials not get a job after graduation, but they also can’t get any.

It is nearly impossible to argue with numbers, and that is not the intention. The issue here is with The Guardian’s reasoning for these figures. Their conclusion is predictable and trite, citing a reason that pervades all of the millennial critiques. According to the article, “It’s not as simple as getting into bed, turning the lights out, and getting it on.

These days, there’s always something better to do—checking your emails, going through your sister’s holiday photo album on Face-

book or even reading a sex feature on the Guardian’s website...”

The fact that they use this overplayed argument discredits a lot of their ultimate conclusion: that because of this technological overload, millennials overanalyze sex and, therefore, would prefer to refrain than provoke their widespread “sexual anxieties,” a term that is used here so lightly that it demeans the true definition of a condition.

While technology has had huge effects on the way that this generation has developed, this finding appears under-researched and overly critical of how we use our technology and our personal time.

“The issue here is with The Guardian’s reasoning for these figures.”

Although our generation is tech-savvy, that does not imply that we are tech-addicted. I do not know of anyone who would prefer to have an online interaction with friends to an in-person one, and I find it hard to believe that our generation finds it more entertaining to check email and read the news than to have sex. The Internet, conversely, seems to make it easier to communicate with people that one might be nervous to approach in person, and Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter do just this.

For those who find social situations especially nerve-wracking, the Internet can provide a way to make friends and form a community. These methods of communication can at times make romancing even easier.

Although there are definitely problems with

this, too, it still stands that meeting a romantic partner is actually easier than it was ever before.

This article fails to even mention online dating, which has evolved over the years and has now taken the form of quick and easy apps like Tinder, Grindr and Friendsy. When those products are taken into consideration, it seems that technology has the potential to boost a person’s prospects for whatever type of interaction for which they are searching.

The article assumes that millennials solely use technology to scroll through Facebook and Instagram, which is not even close to the truth.

In terms of “overthinking” sexual activity, this may be for the best. Millennials are doing a lot of things smarter than their elders, like eschewing smoking and avoiding teen pregnancy, the latter of which hit an all time low in 2011 and has dropped six percent since then, according to the CDC (“Reproductive Health: Teen Pregnancy”). With more information available to us thanks to technology, perhaps millennials are Being informed is a priority to millennials, as 68% support abortion and 88 percent support comprehensive sex education (Advocates For Youth, “Comprehensive Sex Education“).

It can be gathered from these statistics that this generation would rather have less sex than bear unpleasant and potentially life-changing outcomes. Even those who have not had comprehensive sex-ed and live in sex-negative communities have access to information at the touch of their smartphone, and any questions or concerns can be answered in a matter of seconds, at that very moment, from multiple sources. Millennials, it appears, would be more likely to delay having sex because they’re using their phones to Google reviews of contraceptives than due to browsing Twitter. Economic conditions may also have effects on the de-

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cision to hold off sex, as our lack of funds usually are not due to an absent work ethic, but the dearth of jobs. Millennials know their situation, and would likely rather forgo fooling around than risk STDs or pregnancy, especially considering the alarming percentage that live without healthcare due to the financial strain. It seems that this generation deserves a pat on the back, rather than a scolding, for this level of self-control and self-education.

“Economic conditions may also have effects on the decision to hold off sex” Having less sex seems like an odd and counterproductive reason to critique millennials. This type of “embarrassing” information comes off as more of a desperate attempt to present yet another thing wrong with “kids these days” than actually useful and productive data. If anything, this information should make millennials proud that they have more discerning and informed perspectives, and that this could lead to incredible advances in sexual health and education as we grow older and gain more power in the world.

Millennials, ultimately, have more to worry about (many of those things are direct results of the actions of the “wiser” generations) than getting it on, and are clearly well educated in the potential repercussions. After all, didn’t they tell us that being smart is sexy?

—Sophia Burns ’18 is a student at Vassar College.

The 14th annual:

Haitian Art Auction & Sale April 17, 18, & 19 http://thehaitiproject.org 845.797.2123 Friday, April 17 12:00pm 4:30pm 6:00pm 7:30pm

12:00pm - 9:00pm

Sale of Haitian Paintings & Handcraft Reception / Auction Registration Live Auction of Haitian Art Dinner celebrating women here and in Haiti. Tickets $65

For more info and to purchase dinner tickets: http://www.thehaitiproject.org

Saturday, April 18 10:00am 3:30pm 5:00pm

Sale of Haitian Paintings & Handcraft Nik Srinivasan Senior Recital Reception Haiti trip: Student presentation

Sunday, April 19 10:00am

12:00pm - 6:00pm

10:00am - 2:00pm

Sale of Haitian Paintings & Handcraft

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

April 16, 2015

OPINIONS

Struver’s grievances excessive, misguided Marie Solis

Contributing Editor

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ast week, The Vassar Chronicle’s Editor-in-Chief Zack Struver ’15 submitted a letter to the editor addressing instances of misrepresentation concerning his quotes for the article on our commencement speaker Ariana Huffington (The Miscellany News, “Ariana Huffington to speak at 151st Commencement,” 04.01.15). Struver asserted that Editor-in-Chief Palak Patel and Senior Editor Noble Ingram took his critical statements about The Huffington Post out of context, wrongly framing them as declarations of praise for the publication he deems largely devoid of value.

While I cannot speak to what led to this oversight, I can say with certainty, in agreement with Struver, that these mistakes were innocent and not intended to create a biased or misleading article. That being said, a simple email to Patel or Ingram requesting a correction would have surely sufficed in lieu of a letter to the editor, especially from someone who sees himself as a colleague. Though this space is meant for readers to both air their grievances and engage in dialogue with The Miscellany News staff, I believe Struver’s letter was fueled by a certain degree of ill will.

Struver makes it clear that he doesn’t “take pleasure in publicly shaming the work of [his] colleagues,” a sentiment that strikes a discord when he later finishes, stating that he hopes we at The Miscellany News use “this public embarrassment and condemnation of [our] flawed practices to reflect upon [our] problems and commit to fixing them.”

Struver seems to have allowed himself this pleasure, though he claims it is for a noble cause: He “cannot sit by as one of Vassar’s beloved institutions publishes blatant falsities.”

Firstly, I’d like to make it clear that the misstep of which Struver speaks is not as humiliating as Struver would hope: Errors of this variety happen all of the time, and none are

immune. During The Miscellany News’ journalism panel this past Friday, Editor-in-Chief of Digital Trends Jeremy Kaplan ’96 recalled a time he ran a story about Canon printers, mistakenly printing the incorrect phone number—a number to a telephone sex line— instead of the computer company’s sales line.

For avid readers of The New York Times, an institution with greater resources and abilities than The Miscellany News, it doesn’t take long to notice the corrections at the end of many articles. And, as someone who has made errors in her own pieces, I can attest that finding out that I’ve made a mistake produces a pang of panic and a feeling that I’ve betrayed the trust of sources who have put their trust in me to do their stories justice. However, it’s not always so dramatic.

The error that Struver bemoans results in a singular, isolated consequence: Students and faculty reading the Ariana Huffington article may falsely believe Struver likes The Huffington Post, when in fact he does not.

Again, with consequences as arguably lowstakes as these, a note to Patel would have functioned perfectly—she would have fixed the error online and published a correction in the following edition of the Misc.

Yet Struver goes on to point to his misrepresentation as being commensurate to the mistakes of Rolling Stone, a false and hyperbolic analogy if I’ve ever seen one. Struver ventures that many of the problems the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism pinpointed “have also plagued The Miscellany News for years.” Yet the fact of the matter is journalistic ethics and fact-checking could not have saved Rolling Stone, a publication that threw not just a source but a rape victim under the bus, to the end of further trauma. With that being said, no, Struver, The Miscellany News does not suffer from these same ailments in the journalistic process.

Still, I must acknowledge that while The

Miscellany News always does its best to prevent mistakes, misquotations and misrepresentations, they will continue to occur. However, it’s not for lack of caring or dedication: When all is said and done, the Misc is a student-run paper. Putting out a weekly publication requires between 30 and 40 hours of work from our executive editors who are, of course, full-time students on top of their writing and editing duties. While this alone does not excuse us from any mistakes, this caveat should be taken into account. We have limited time and resources, working at an institution that has few journalism classes and no major or program to guide us. Controversies, misunderstandings, structural problems and questions of ethics are all things we must figure out among the members of our editorial board. We’re learning as we go, something the editors of The Chronicle surely feel as well.

Nonetheless, Struver fails to acknowledge the difference between the operations of our publications. The Chronicle has an entire month (or often much longer) to ensure that everything is in order before going to print.

The Miscellany News has a week. This time crunch is further compounded by the fact that many articles happen at the last minute, allowing for far less time to fact-check every detail of a piece.

The truth of the matter is The Miscellany News is always trying to do better, and while we continue to learn and grow, we hope the Vassar community always assumes we have the best intentions when publishing our news and stories. We never mean to cast classmates, professors or faculty, whose relationships and readership we value so, in an unfairly negative light. However, Zack Struver believes that in his case, we have made an exception.

Columnist

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agnetic Resonance Imaging machines, or MRIs, are often used in identifying the location and approximate size of tumors in the brain and other body parts. However, during surgery, it can be quite difficult to locate the tumor the MRI identified. Often, cancer cells will remain even after an extensive surgery. Many doctors have also stated that even when they can locate the tumor, it is often hard to distinguish healthy cells from tumorous cells during the actual surgical procedure, resulting in removal of healthy cells with the tumor. Since doctors cannot accurately locate or remove tumors due to limited imaging technology currently available, complications can occur during and after surgery. These complications can range from incomplete tumor removal to even severe brain damage (NPR, “Why Painting Tumors Could Make Brain Surgeons Better,” 09.12.13).

Pediatric neuro-oncologist at Seattle Children’s Hospital Dr. James Olson, who is also a well-known cancer researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has spent the last decade trying to figure out how to limit the number of medical problems that occur post-surgery and allow doctors to more precisely locate and eradicate tumors during surgery.

Although major funding groups originally denied Olson funding for research, support for Olson’s research has been unwavering: his patients as well as their friends, family and allies alone raised $9 million to fund him (CNN, “Tumor Paint: Changing the ways surgeons fight cancer,” 11.13.13). His decade-long creation, colloquially called tumor paint, has now become a reality and is currently being evaluated in FDA approved clinical trials at the Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Olson and his collaborators’ tumor paint is made from chlorotoxin, a protein derived from scorpion venom. Chlorotoxin targets the chloride receptors on the surface of tumor cells. Chlorotoxin also contains a non-toxic

chemical that makes the cells fluoresce when they are exposed to near-infrared light (Popular Science, “Glowing ‘Tumor Paint” shows surgeons where to cut,” 04.08.15).

What does this mean exactly? When tumor paint is injected into a patient’s veins, it travels through the body, across the blood-brain barrier, and settles in the tumor. All the doctor needs to do is shine near-infrared light on a brain region, and the tumor starts to glow a bright green color. This in turn allows doctors to more easily identify and remove the tumors and reduce the risk of medical complications (NPR, “Doctors Test Tumor Paint In People,” 04.08.15).

Dr. Chirag Patil, a surgeon at Cedars Sinai Medical Center where the clinical trials are taking place, has been mesmerized by this novel creation, especially because the paint can be injected anywhere in the body and will only attach to tumors. Patil has noted about the innovation that it’s, “a concept neurosurgeons have probably been dreaming about for 50 years” (NPR, “Doctors Test Tumor Paint In People,” 04.08.15).

Recalling his first experience with the paint, Patil added, “The first case we did was a deep tumor. So with the camera, we couldn’t really shine it into this deep small cavity. But when we took that first piece out and we put it on the table. And the question was, ‘Does it glow?’ And when we saw that it glows, it was just one of those moments... ’Wow, this works.’“ While the focus of tumor paint has been on brain tumors, research has shown that the paint attacks multiple types of cancer tumors including breast, skin, prostate and colon cancers. However, the clinical trials are currently only including brain and spinal tumors.

While Olson and his team are credited with this novel paint, his team is not alone in trying to create better ways to remove tumors.

Teams in Germany and San Diego have also been trying to create substances that cause certain cells to glow. Knowing this adds another interesting aspect to Olson’s research, for he has an “open door policy.” Olson insists

Word on the street What advice do you have for a prospective student?

“Make sure you like Vassar before you come.”

—Rachel Jones ’18

“Go to the Mug as many times as you can.”

— Alex Masters ’16

—Marie Solis ’15 is a Contributing Editor for The Miscellany News.

Tumor paint improves medical accuracy Delaney Fischer

Page 11

that his data and research be made available to any researcher who wants to access it. He hopes his work will inspire others with their research and bettering of the world. “We’re creating drug candidates... that could fundamentally change the world,” Olson says.

“We’re throwing motives of profit or biotech building to the wind. Let’s do what’s right for the greatest number of people.” His attitude is hard to come by, with intense competition in the field of pharmaceutical development (CNN, “Tumor Paint: Changing the ways surgeons fight cancer,” 11.13.13). Perhaps this is because Blaze Bioscience, the company that produces tumor paint, is actually founded by Olson himself. Nonetheless, his stance on collaboration and sharing of research is something that I find very rare and respectable.

Many might also find it amazing that Olson dedicated a decade of his life to this discovery, but what many don’t know is that while Dr. James Olson was at the University of Michigan, he developed a molecule that turned tumor cells radioactive. It turns out that this paint has been on Olson’s mind for much longer than expected, and in reflecting on his discovery at Michigan to his success with tumor paint now he said, “You can say I’ve had a chip on my shoulder for the last 25 years.”

Olson’s dedication to his work is admirable to say the least and is expected to change countless lives, preventing unnecessary brain damage and the removal of all tumor cells during surgery. Olson however remains humble about his work, but also knows that this paint is about to change the field of surgery drastically, saying, “In a matter of 10 years, surgeons will look back and say, ‘I can’t believe we used to remove (tumors) by using our eyes and our fingers and our thumbs.’“ Olson plans on continuing his research to better surgical procedures and help pediatric cancer patients. I can’t wait to see what his team develops next.

—Delaney Fischer ’15 is a neuroscience major.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

“If you beat box, you’ll make friends.”

— Tim Veit ’16

“Figure out what your interests are...but don’t commit.”

— Sophie Hessekiel ’16

“Use condoms.”

—David Garfinkel ’15

“Hope you like the cold.” ­­— Apostolos Anyfantakis ’18

Chris Gonzalez, Humor & Satire Editor Sam Pianello, Photo Editor

OPINIONS

Page 12

April 16, 2015

Documentary ban reinforces gender inequality in India Udbhav Agarwal Guest Columnist

Trigger warning: This article graphically depicts and describes rape and murder.

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n the night of Dec. 14, 2012—just as the malls of the new India were drawing their shutters, lamps illuminating Justin Bieber underwear advertisements were switching off, local radio channels were shuffling between the latest Bollywood hits (“My busty youth is too sexy for your lust” and “Stick my lips to your chest using adhesives”)—Nirbhaya, a 23-year old physiotherapy intern, was brutally gang-raped by five men in a moving bus in Saket, New Delhi. Thirteen days later, she finally gave up in a hospital in Singapore. The doctors, though, had given up much earlier: “In 29 years of practice, we have never come across such a brutal case.” Autopsy reports indicated the use of a sharp long metallic object to deepen penetration. Two blood-stained metal rods were retrieved from the bus.

Mukesh, a 24-year old cis-male, currently on death row in Tihar Jail for the rape of Nirbhaya, described the night in the following words: “The 15 or 20 minutes of the incident, I was driving the bus. They switched off the lights.

My brother was the main guy. They hit the boy and he just hid between the seats. The girl was screaming, ‘Help me! Help me!’ My brother said, ‘Don’t stop the bus. Keep driving!’ They hit her and dragged her to the back. Then they went in turns. First the juvenile and Ram Singh.

After that, Akshay and the rest went. Someone put his hand inside her and pulled out something long. It was her intestines. He said, “She’s dead. Throw her out quickly.” First, they tried the back door, but it didn’t open. So they

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“For Mukesh, boys and girls are most definitely not equal...”

“To call them human, is to give humanity a bad name,” proclaims Mr. Badri, a leading activist and spokesperson for a local NGO. I disagree. Calling “them” names, or ostracizing their words is a gross misrepresentation of the reality. The blood of Nirbhaya is on our hands, yours and mine, and Mukesh and Sharma are as human as the persistent rhythm of blood pumping through our veins. Mr. Badri, like so many of us, would love to take the moral high ground

on the issue: “How can they say something like this?”­—taking to Facebook walls, writing open letters to national newspapers—only to return to dinner and recorded television shows interspersed with underwear advertisements, relieved of the blame. Sadly he, like so many of us, forgets that Mukesh and Sharma are born in the streets that we have built for them, and studied (or not studied) in schools that are run (or not run) by us. We cannot separate their crime from who they are. Forget what the ban tells us, in order to blame them we have to blame ourselves first.

Watching “India’s Daughter” is a heart-breaking experience. It piques just at the right spot.

It also fills one with disappointment. What could have coalesced into a lasting moment of simulation to the collective conscience of the nation, a gentle reminder of the night of Dec. 14 2012; is now reduced to a closed government file in some dusty cabinet in an old, run-down warehouse.

I realize it has become idiosyncratic of me to use the phrase: “It is not the first time, and I know it would not be the last”- but I mean it with as much, if not more, conviction whenever I use it. It is not the first time, and I know it would not be the last. Missing the point is an act that the Government of India exercises with thorough proclivity. As it covers up for the comments that the country itself engenders, it revitalizes the concerns that it hopes to eradicate. This is hoping that the next time the opportunity arrives, for the sake of India’s daughters, it knows to hit the center rather than circle around.

—Udbhav Agarwal ’18 is a student at Vassar College.

by Collin Knopp−-Schwyn, York Chen and Alycia Beattie

ACROSS 1 Sublime genre 4 Sailboat fixture 8 “When ___ Cry” (Prince, 1984) 13 Half a salad server?

15 Out of’s partner 16 “August: ___ County” (Tracy Letts play and film) 17 Therefore 18 Leak, slowly. Sensually.

19 Prufrock author T. S. 20 American president famous for his 14 Joints?

23 Deece omelette topping 24 Chili ___ carne 25 President who won the MexichronicAmerican war?

32 Like a good blunt 35 Gulf by Yemen 36 NYC bodega 38 Something 32-Down might qualitycontrol 40 Ikea’s founder, for one 43 Default dorm furniture 44 Indigenous Japanese 45 Architect van der Rohe of the Seagram Building 47 Confederate general 48 Vice President to George H. W. Kush?

52 German one 53 Boob tube

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born and brought up in a village where there are triple the number of sons than daughters, where dowry is rampant, where child marriage is the norm and where schooling, let alone sex education, is unheard of, would believe that his sister is inferior to him if all his life he has seen reincarnations of precisely that. When he sees his parents give him more milk than his sister, or when he memorizes the lyrics of the latest Bollywood song (“Stick my lips to your chest using adhesives”) or when he suddenly notices his neighbor’s daughter missing for days until people around him forget about her completely; what would he think?

For Mukesh, boys and girls are most definitely not equal, yet the documentary ban hides this certainty from us. It targets not the ideology but its manifestations. Not patriarchy but its aberrations.

The Miscellany Crossword

“National Holiday”

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dragged her to the front. They threw her out.”

M.L. Sharma, a 32-year old cis-male and one of the key defendants in the Nirbhaya rape case, was all in praise of Mukesh and what he had done, saying: “We [Indians] have the best culture. In our culture there is no place for women.”

2 years, 6 months and 11 days later, a BBC Documentary, “India’s Daughter,” one which finally explained why Mukesh and his gang had raped Nirbhaya, the same documentary responsible for the accounts mentioned above, was banned by the Indian Government under Section 505 (1) (b) of the Indian Constitution“with intent to cause fear or alarm to the public.” Progress had been made.

It is ironic how, out of the spate of legislations available to the Indian Government—including a tabled bill in the Indian Parliament that would instate a series of new fast-track courts to deal with pending cases of rape in India and one that would indelibly compromise the careers of 250 members of the Indian Parliament who are currently accused of rape— the Indian Government chooses to institute the one ban that would lead to the most sociological incompetence. Yes, sociological incompetence. By banning “India’s Daughter,” not only has the Government of India completely failed to grasp the real issue of an assertive patriarchy that blinds the country, but it has also cleansed more than a billion Indians of any moral prerogative for a crime they are all equally responsible for.

The men of “India’s Daughter,” for those of us who are left aghast by their comments, speak true (not truth). When Mukesh says that “Boys and girls are not equal,” I am ashamed to admit that I know why he would say so. A man

58 President who led us into the Great Dopepression?

63 Yellowcard’s “Avenue” 65 Well-ventilated, say 66 What some work for 67 “It could be ___...”

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69 What’s left after you behead a flower.

70 Big Swedish prize 71 Straight-___, if you’re cool!!!

72 “Maid of Athens, ___ we part” (Lord Byron, 1810)

42 Unagi 46 Mokuba’s older brother (on “Yu-GiOh!”) 49 Popcorn popper 50 “purchaser of securities that is deemed financially sophisticated and is legally recognized by security market regulators to need less protection from issuers than most public investors” (abbr.)

51 Discomfort 54 Altar promises

DOWN 1 Sits and gets mad 2 Where the DMZ is 3 “Buffy” spinoff 4 Soup with sushi 5 Again 6 Thick soup 7 Points of discussion 8 “Scotty ___ Know” (classic from Eurotrip) 9 Where most Norwegians are, probabilistically 10 “You’re So ___” (Carly Simon, 2009) 11 Freud had one that was super 12 Play before a spike 14 Lana del Rey pairs them with Monsters 21 Bell who once clotheslined Kobe Bryant 22 “Avatar” sequel (abbr.)

26 Hulu interruptions 27 Pokémon #151 28 An assblasting 29 Not even 30 “___ over” (to die) 31 Besides 32 They oversee nutrition labels 33 Dry a f 34 Ahi 37 President we like 39 It can be loaded 41 Garage projects (abbr.)

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

55 Glide across ice 56 Like a beaver, maybe 57 This puzzle’s is 4/20 58 Oregano or marijuana 59 Comfort 60 Orange skin 61 Pre-pre-calc 62 On-campus hip-hop dance crew 63 Possess 64 Pigeon’s hello, goodbye, and literally every word they know, fucking birdbrains

HUMOR & SATIRE

April 16, 2015

Page 13

Breaking News From the desk of Chris Gonzalez, Humor & Satire Editor Human oil spill receives attention from one prospie; in unrelated news, 20 students trampeled outside of ACDC ~Beyond Basic~: 10 original If You Give a Senior a Meal activities to fill your spring Swipe: a children’s classic Zander Bashaw

As Basic As This Headline 1.Never shut the fuck up about how nice it is out

The first step to enjoying warm weather is to tell everyone that you are enjoying it. This provides key material for smalltalk with professors and past hookups. If either of these parties tries to steer the conversation into dangerous waters, like your grades on recent problem sets or the 4 a.m. texts you have been sending them, just forcefully bring up how nice the weather is to placate them.

2.Wear socks and sandals

Roll into your classes and parties in style with this staple of the spring collection, Technicolor socks crammed into your flip flops. You’ll get respect from your hipster classmates who think you are wearing them ironically, and people will look up to you as an old person who just doesn’t give a fuck. It also conveniently gives you the chance to wear sandals without revealing your hideous, misshapen feet.

3.Play Frisbee very seriously

Frisbee is the Hallmark card of college quad experiences. In fact, when I visited Brown, I saw a kid run into a tree while chasing a “the disc.”

To truly embrace the spirit of Frisbee, you have to take it as seriously as the tree kid. If anyone thinks you are playing it for fun, promptly body slam them onto the quad. Frisbee is not a game.

4.Ask your professors to have class outside.

Contrary to popular belief, this middle school tactic is actually encouraged at the collegiate level. All of your professors will be delighted to move their lessons outside if you are just willing to raise your hand in a lecture and ask. Your classmates will be impressed by your courage and charisma.

If you want to truly immerse yourself in the outdoors, transport your desk, mattress and fridge out onto the quad and spend a week there. Seniors cite this tradition as one that must be completed before graduation. Adjusting to life outside of a dorm can be challenging, and many English majors use this week as a way to practice for their future after Vassar.

7. Wear obnoxious sunglasses

From April to October, you should never take off your sunglasses. Wear them in the shower, at night and in your lectures. Only take them off to switch to a pair that better matches your socks with sandals or inch-long shorts. Remember, the goal is to look like either Morpheus from the Matrix or Cyclops from X-men, depending on your style.

8. Mud wrestle in campus puddles

April showers bring big puddles, and rather than walking around them, why not put on an old pair of jeans and wrestle the fuck out of your arch nemesis in front of the whole campus? This is a great opportunity to assert dominance, and also foster unity, as the crowd roars and you struggle with a classmate like a pair of feral animals.

9. Plow the campus lawns to plant crops

Reduce your eating expenditures for next semester by plowing a section of Noyes circle.

Whether you are looking to grow soy to fit your vegan needs, or harvest potted pot plants, go green this spring for a plentiful harvest next fall. Watch out for Vassar’s scorched earth policy, though; Administration often burns and salts the fields to encourage students buy bigger meal plans.

10. Go for a refreshing dip in Sunset Lake

5.Show at least 90% of your thighs at all times.

This spring, hearken back to the ancient proverb “Sky’s out thighs out” and follow it religiously. Even if you are as pale as a piece of printer paper, display your pasty palate with pride. Wear unapologetically short shorts to everything, including (but not limited to) Cappy’s Office Hours, Career Development workshops and department-sponsored lectures.

Chris Gonzalez

6. Bring your mattress and desk out to the quad

Take the plunge into the lake this spring and put your Darwinian survival mechanisms to the test. Expose your body to up to 40 different strains of E. Coli to test your immune system, try out your fight and flight abilities when confronted with vicious snapping turtles and freshwater sharks, or study the behavior of your fellow swimmers as they swim in the festering waters.

Desperate

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f you give a senior a meal swipe, they will want to sneak no less than two and no more than 13 pieces of Tupperware with them into the Deece.

And if they bring Tupperware into the Deece, they will definitely load up on ungodly proportions of spinach, onions and shredded cheese from the salad bar. And bread. And cookies. Anything but buckets of capers.

With this fresh supply of stolen goods, the senior will scurry back to their house and stock the fridge with enough food for three dinners, or one 2 a.m. stress-eating session.

The senior will reminisce about times when food was at their fingertips.

They will be bitter.

So they will get used to the idea of eating on a regular basis and wish to incorporate this into their future plans.

When the senior sits down to formulate their future plans—a process which will cause them to jolt from their sleep in the wee hours of the morning, flinging them into a downward spiral of despair, heartache, loneliness and a shocking state of arousal—they will decide that what they need is a job.

The search for a job will leave them with sleepless nights, and the senior will find themself becoming unhinged.

When the senior becomes unhinged, they might experience a slip of the tongue, where words soar from their mouth at breakneck speeds and eviscerate those within their path.

Honestly, it’s pretty cool, but you might get caught in the crossfire.

When you are caught in the crossfire, the senior might start to notice they don’t have as many friends as they originally thought.

The senior will feel even more lonely.

If the senior begins to feel lonelier than thought possible, they will lie awake at night, remembering how horny they’ve become...and their jobless existence.

So the senior, in a frenzy, will apply to all of the jobs.

When they apply to all of the jobs, including ones in fields for which they are not qualified in the least bit, they will live in fear of rejection.

This is nothing new for the senior, so they won’t react; however, in this liminal space with-

out a secure future, the senior will live the life of a hermit.

The senior, now hermit, will disappear for days on end, applying to more jobs and losing more hours of sleep.

When the senior embarks on a life without sleep, their dreams will blend into reality: sharks fly across the sky, monkeys dance on an ignited stovetop, Cappy performs scarf dances on the Library lawn.

In the midst of this hallucinatory mindset, the senior will develop a plan, a HUGE PLAN. The plan will go into highly specific details about how to secure employment, but the steps they will need to take might land them in prison.

You will warn them not to follow through on the plan, but at this point the senior is long gone—their mind a soupy pudding.

And when their mind is soup, they will seriously consider using sex to earn an entry-level or assistant position as some company. With benefits.

The senior will drool over the potential benefits, waking up from hazy dreams with their face caked in spittle and mucus.

You will find them disgusting.

And they won’t disagree.

It would do you good to remind them to shower, or at the very least tell them to replenish their supply of deodorant.

When you bring their grossness to the forefront of their consciousness, they will stumble down to Stop & Shop.

At Stop & Shop, the senior will be blinded by the fluorescent lighting, and their nose will burn from the aroma of grocery-store sushi melting in its glass case.

When placed in a situation with real food, the senior’s hunger will begin to dig into their deflated stomach, clawing at their insides and screaming, “Feed me, Seymour!”

And upon listening to this command, the senior will remember the tingling sensation of food on their tongue.

They will decide to head back home, to find work.

Before writing another cover letter, though, they might want a bite to eat.

So they will ask for another meal swipe.

And if they ask for a meal swipe...they will want to bring some Tupperware.

Ask Banner: Thesis Edition of The Misc’s “Weekly” “Advice” Column

by Banner, Blacked Out Dear Banner, I completed my thesis this week. Hooray, right? Not so much. I guess I didn’t plan on becoming so absorbed into the process of writing a thesis. Now that I’m free and ready to drink my body weight in vodka, all of my friends seem so busy. Some of them still have theses, which, it’s like, not my fault. Other people kinda just forgot I existed; they don’t even look my way when I’m walking through Sanders Classroom or popping wheelies on my scooter. I’m friendless, Banner. Like Stella, how can I get my groove back?

Always, Riding Solo Only One, Congrats on finishing your thesis. I would applaud you, but you’re not worth one clap.

Want your friends back? Never mention your thesis again.

Banner

Dear Banner, Does my thesis really need a title? That’s not a trick question. Thinking of a proper title for this 40-page piece of shit is like giving birth to a St. Bernard. It was a horrible idea going into it, but now that I have the damn thing I’m not only supposed to claim it but name it too? What makes an adequate title, Banner (yes, “adequate.” I’m not trying to act like this “thesis” is something it’s not), and for that matter, what are words, Banner?

What are letters and language?

Best, Agyfbasjhfbask Dear Gibberish, You are correct—coming up with titles is a difficult part in any writing process. Follow my format: “Punchy Two-Word Phrase: String of Pretentious Words Including ‘Theory’ and ‘Discourse’ or ‘a Deconstruction of.”

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Dear Banner, I think I’m losing my mind. Er, maybe it’s already gone. I don’t sleep anymore, and if I manage to catch the tiniest nap it’s during daylight hours when I should theoretically be a person. The thesis will get done, I keep telling myself, but is it true? I feel like in my search for the light at the end of tunnel all I see are the fiery pits of Hell. I’m asking for comfort, Banner. I need some reassurance that I can finish my thesis, that I didn’t spend the better half of my senior year wasting away in the library for nothing, that, at the end of the day, when I have a degree, I will be a whole person again.

Warmly Yours, Broken Needy, It’ll get done, but you will forever be a fractured being. At least you’ll have a degree.

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MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Dear Banner, I’ll preface my question with this: I am in a privileged position. Obligatory checking of privilege out of the way, I come to you because my friends are all working on their theses—Haha, losers!—and I’m left wondering what to do with my life. Though I could join them in the library to work on a Moodle post, it seems silly to enter that space when I could lounge around in bed and watch random documentaries on Netflix instead. I feel lonely in my TA now, just playing NHL 09 on my XBox. Any advice on how to fill my time?

Sincerely, Yoloswaggins #Yolo, Look at all the fucks I give:

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ARTS

Page 14

April 16, 2015

Dancers leap from Met Opera House to Kenyon stage Sieu Nguyen

Guest Reporter

N

ot often does one see Vassar’s own Francis Daley Ferguson Theater hanging up so many mirrors. Reflections and projected images occupy the stage, and whenever a dancer steps into the space, the projection at that position changes color.

An interplay between the real and the imaginary, technology and human, color and light, Daniil Simkin’s “Intensio,” took place at Vassar College on April 8. Dancers from the American Ballet Theater and Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal participated in this event.

American Ballet Theater is a classic ballet company based in New York City. It was founded in 1937 and recognized as “America’s National Ballet Company” in 2006 by the

United States Congress. The company performs at the Metropolitan Opera House and holds worldwide tours annually.

“Intensio” is a dance project by Simkin, a member of American Ballet Theater, and outside choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa.

Its cast includes Simkin himself, along with Isabella Boylston, Alex Hammoudi, Blaine Hoven, Hee Seo, Cassandra Trenary and James Whiteside from the American Ballet Theater and Celine Cassone, a special guest from Les Ballets Jazz de Montreal.

To prepare for their world-premiere performance at Jacobs Pillow in July, the company used the Francis Daley Ferguson Theater at Vassar for technical rehearsal. The workshop on April 8, which was coordinated by the Vassar Repertory Dance Theater (VRDT), was a

courtesy of Kenneth Edwards

Isabella Boylston is one of seven American Ballet Theater performers who visited Vassar this past week. She and others from the company performed “Intensio,” an original piece by Daniil Simkin.

kind of thank-you gift for the location from the company.

With music from the recomposed version of “Vivaldi Four Seasons” by Max Richter, “Intensio” utilized three hanging mirrors and projected images to experiment with dancing aesthetics. The theater stage was equipped with several infrared projectors. Whenever a dancer crossed a projection spot, the projector would pick up the heat of the body to create a light design that resembled the movements.

Based on principles in physics, the performance setup is meant to blend the capacity of technology with the organic human form.

Commenting on the complication in stage design and choreography, Anna Beeman ’18, one of the organizers of the workshop, said, “This is a very new and innovative thing to do in dance and I thought was really amazing.

The dancing as well was world class, for these dancers are internationally known and celebrities in the dance world.”

Before the Wednesday workshop, members of VRDT also had the chance to interact, learn and gain hands-on experiences with the dancers from American Ballet Theater. Megan Jackson ’18 noted, “We got to take class with them earlier this week and we got to watch their rehearsals and it was really interesting to see the process of teaching such a complicated show, and the relationship the professionals have with their choreographer.”

She also added, “I chose to go to the event because I am a huge fan of Daniil Simkin and because I love ballet. The event was amazing and by far the best thing that has come to this school this year.”

Although the performance is roughly a rehearsal in preparation for its world premiere later in the year, the workshop was still packed and met with positive reception. Audience members filled up to 90% of the dance theater, showing excitement and satisfaction.

Kerri-Anne Bell ’17, another member of VRDT who also attended the workshop, commented,

“I thought ‘Intensio’ was like no other piece, let alone any other ballet piece I’ve watched.

Though the piece was not complete, we were able to see 25 minutes of it and I thought it was incredible. What was most interesting was the use of light and technology and the interesting use of mirrors. Three mirrors were hung from the ceiling, allowing the audience to watch the dancers from different angles.”

Bell continued this sentiment, “Also through the use of projectors, different lighting designs were projected on the floor of the stage so that added a nice dynamic to the piece.

If this is the direction dance performance is headed, then I am extremely excited and I hope to be able to watch this piece completed with costumes.”

The members of VRDT tried to offer as much hospitality and appreciation for the presence of American Ballet Theater on their dance stage as they could. Jacob Butter ’18, a VRDT member, said, “I really enjoyed the event and thought it was very cool to have the American Ballet Theater dancers perform on a stage that I have performed on.”

On his own website, Simkin describes his piece, writing, “Intensio is an art project and series of performances created and curated by me and my family. Our intention is to merge the highest level of ballet and choreography with the new possibilities of media in order to create a unique and special experience for the audience. We are eager to push the boundaries of collaboration of different fields and the constant work in progress of the project ensues that no program is the same.”

He also explains the meaning behind the name of his piece. As he wrote, “INTENSIO is a new word created to reflect our approach to performance. A performance should be an INTENSE experience for the viewer resulting from a firm INTENTION for the program, which in INTENSIO is to combine the new ways of technology with the substance of world-class dance.”

For one student organist, power is all in the fingertips Emma Rosenthal Arts Editor

F

Alec Ferretti/The Miscellany News

or most of us, the organ is that intimidating instrument we see in the Chapel at freshman orientation, but for Patrick Walker ’16, it is an opportunity for powerful musical expression. If you are in the Chapel on Friday, April 17 at 5 p.m., you will get a chance to hear Walker make the Chapel organ come alive for his junior recital.

A musician his whole life, Walker attributes his passion for the art to his family, who raised him with the deep appreciation for music. “I actually started playing music at a very young age because my whole family plays music. But we all did traditional Celtic and American music at that time. So I started by playing the tin whistle and I played the flute and the guitar and the bagpipes all in the Celtic folk genre,” said Walker.

Although Walker didn’t attend traditional high school, his secondary school time was spent branching out from Celtic music and exploring a new instrument. He said, “Then when I was 15, I started playing the pipe organs. That was kind of my introduction to the classical music genre.”

He continued, speaking to his family and home. “I was home-schooled, so in some ways it was really my musical family that was my upbringing. My oldest brother was also a student here, class of 2007 and so I would come and see him at concerts and stuff. And that was really what catalyzed my desire to do classical music,” he explained.

Having built a strong background with the organ, Walker came to Vassar ready not only to keep advancing his skills, but to expand his musical repertoire as well. He met friends and faculty who shared his love for music, including Adjunct Artist in Music, Gail Archer, who worked with him since his freshman year. She wrote in an emailed statement, “Patrick has been a member of the organ studio since his first year at Vassar.

We have worked on representative organ literature from the 17th to the 21st centuries.”

Apart from working privately with Archer, Walker advanced his skills through other musical outlets. “I’ve been doing private lessons in pipe organ with Gail Archer ever since I came here.

And then freshman year, I also played organ with

a student-run group called Camerata during baroque and early music. Then, starting my sophomore year, I’ve been conducting the orchestra.

It’s kind of separate, though, because the organ is really in general a solo instrument, and so that is mostly on my own. And then I do the conducting and also I sing in some of the choirs, so that’s kind of how I do music with other people,” he said.

Walker’s friend and fellow member of the Vassar Camerata Luke Kachelein ’15 wrote about how he met Walker through music, “Patrick lived next door to me his freshman (my sophomore) year in Davison. Despite this, I only got to know him well when we realized that we were both in the Vassar Camerata. Thereafter, our proximity and shared interest in Baroque music naturally led to our friendship.”

Walker has been able to form these friendships through the Camerata, even though his instrument begs a solo artist. Reflecting on his experiences in solo and ensemble settings, he said, “[In] Modfest 2014, I played organ with the orchestra because there are a couple pieces that have both.

It was a piece by Charles Ives that had an organ with the orchestra, so that was fun because it is fun to be part of an ensemble rather than having to be the whole ensemble by yourself.”

Playing an instrument complex enough to be considered a whole ensemble on it’s own, Walker explained some of the organ’s intricacies, “It’s one of the more technology-based instruments there is; just because it’s so large and complex...I’m very fascinated with how much power you have at your fingertips in a way. Especially with a modern instrument that has electric relays and stuff, no matter how many stops you have on, it’s still a very light touch to the key and so it’s very exciting when you have that light touch–all the sound comes out.”

He continued, reflecting on the experience of physically playing the organ. “It’s a very absorbing process to play, because you’re playing with your hands like a piano, but you’re also using your feet and then there’s another layer of interest and complexity in the registration with all the stops. You can imagine it like an orchestra and all the players, so which players you’re asking to play at a certain time,” he said.

Patrick Walker ’16 came to Vassar with the intention of pursuing music. His intentions have become reality through the many musical outlets he chooses, including his upcoming junior recital on Friday.

Kachelein also commented on the complex instrument, and Walker’s skill in maneuvering it, “Patrick is quite adventurous and determined at the keyboard, and on one occasion his determination saved him. Last year, he was scheduled to perform in an organ concert in the chapel along with several other members of the Central Hudson Valley chapter of the American Guild of Organists. However, mere weeks before the concert, he broke one of his hands! Any reasonable organist would have despondently quit, but not Patrick.

He rearranged new pieces for one hand and pedals, incorporating another organist for help on only one of the pieces if I recall. It was a success.”

Apart from his skills on the organ, he has advanced his conducting through practice with the Camerata, and lessons with Lecturer in Music and Director of Orchestral Activities Eduardo Navega. Navega commented on his experience with Walker, “He is a young conductor so he has this energy that is characteristic of young con-

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

ductors, but he’s very serious...He understands that conducting and playing the organ and making music in general needs some discipline and some investment of your time and effort.”

As for Walker’s future in music, he hopes to continue honing his musical ability after Vassar.

As he said, “I would like to go on to graduate school, probably I’m going to try to get a degree in sacred music so that would be organ performance, but also choral conducting. And then I would like to eventually get a PHD and hopefully teach someday in music.”

Undoubtedly, Walker has had a successful three years at Vassar in the music department and has the support of his teachers and friends as he continues his collegiate musical career here and after Vassar. “As a musician, Patrick is versatile, adept, and informed. He is excellent at sight-reading, understands issues of historical interpretation, and can effectively lead the Camerata orchestra,” wrote Kachelein.

ARTS

April 16, 2015

Page 15

Wordsmiths, Elhillo join to explore loss and language Connor McIlwain Reporter

“M

courtesy of Safia Elhillo

y body is a pill, small, and love is the wrong man’s tongue to tell me so,” began Safia Elhillo at the 2013 College Union Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI). Her performance of “What I Learned in the Fire” secured NYU as first-place finishers at the competition, making them the best college slam team in nation for the second year in a row.

Two years later, Elhillo is bringing her talents to Vassar for a night of Spoken Word Poetry, hosted by Vassar’s Wordsmiths. The event, Love Started the Fire, is named after her 2013 poem and is a showcase of poems from Vassar’s CUPSI Team that will also feature some of Elhillo’s own performances.

Elhillo is a now New-York based, Sudanese-American poet. In addition to pursuing an MFA at the New School, she is part of a group called the Divine Fabrics Collective. Founded in 2012 at an IHOP on the Lower East Side, the group is comprised of four poets. Their goal is “to write with nuance, artfully shit-talk and deliver new work at high octane levels.”

Kelly Schuster ‘15, a member of the Wordsmiths and Vassar’s CUPSI Team discussed Elhillo’s writing in an emailed statement. “She writes about loss and mourning and language and she’s wonderful.” But, she approaches the topic of loss in hopes of reclaiming, not mourning. Fascinated with words and descriptions, she aims to build a presence of things lost and imaginary. She has appeared on TV1’s “Verses and Flow” and was a finalist in the 2011 Women of the World Poetry Slam. She published a short book of poems, “The Life and Times of Susie Knuckles,” with Well&Often Press and has been featured in several other publications.

Love Started the Fire comes at an exciting time for Vassar’s Wordsmiths. Schuster ‘15, explained, “I am on the Vassar CUPSI Team along with Royal Scales ’17, Ellie Vamos ’17, Andrew Yim ’16 and Cheikh Athj ’16, with Hannah Matsunaga ’16

Safia Elhillo, a spoken word poet and member of the four-poet group, Divine Fabrics Collective.

She will be performing at Vassar with her loss- and imagination-filled writing and spoken word. as our coach. I believe in the power of this team and our ability to create meaningful art so fully.

I think we collaborate beautifully together and I hope to continue making art with this group for a long time.”

The group certainly does work well together.

Their coach, Matsunaga, said, “The CUPSI team placed ninth out of 68 teams at this year’s competition,” which placed them among the top teams in the nation. The annual CUPSI tournament was held in Virginia this year and is poetry’s equivalent of nationals, explained Matsunaga. Schuster wrote in an emailed statement, “[The performance was] incredible, and draining–invigorating and exhausting.” And, the group secured this spot with even more competition present. CUPSI team member Scales explained, “This year, the ‘I’

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actually stood for International because we had our first team not from the U.S. compete, Ryerson University in Toronto.” Overall, the group had positive sentiments to share of their experiences. “My experience with Wordsmiths has been great so far. Every workshop, open mic, and performance inspires me,” wrote Matsunaga.

For Schuster, spoken word allows words to take on new meanings. She wrote, “The transformation that happens over the course of a performance poem, to the audience, to the performer, to the space, to the work itself, engages my senses and transports me to another world—something that words on a page just can’t do for me. Spoken word creates an opportunity to transform someone’s understanding or perception of something that doesn’t require them to know how to read in

order to engage.”

These performances hinge on a unique balance between the performer and the audience.

This interaction can weigh heavily on the competition’s outcome. “Because there is a competition at stake, slam can also be a toxic space where people expose traumas in ways that sometimes may be cathartic, but also sometimes may be unhealthy for the performer or audience if they aren’t ready to share. At CUPSI we saw a lot of emotionally reckless performances being performed and then rewarded with high scores, which can create a dangerous cycle that encourages artists to put themselves in unsafe mental spaces in order to win,” writes Schuster.

Nevertheless, spoken word can be both entertaining and uplifting. Its history is rooted in making the art of poetry more accessible. The slam, or competition aspect of spoken word, was popularized in Chicago in the 1980s as a reaction to the more elite and academic styles of poetry.

Spoken Word quickly became a way for more diverse performers to express themselves.

“The idea behind slam poetry is that anyone off the street can perform or judge the competition which allows for the space to, in some ways subvert the elitist power structures that typically dominate spaces of art-making,” wrote Schuster.

The openness of the slam attracts the competition and craft to many college campuses where its messages resonate with students. Slams have transformative qualities that can better oneself and his or her community. Schuster explains, “I hope to use this form as a space of healing and community-building, but always a way to be critical and reckon with my own privilege while striving to center the voices whose stories are typically silenced by this society.”

After their impressive performance at CUPSI this year, the group has lots of content to share alongside another highly regarded young poet.

The Wordsmiths’ award-winning showcase and Elhillo will perform this Friday, April 17, at 8:00 p.m. in Rocky 200 for Love Started the Fire.

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ARTS

Page 16

April 16, 2015

Album spans Farhadi’s film small-scale but far-reaching style, crosses old borders Charles Lyons-Burt Columnist

About Elly Asghar Faradi Dream Lab Films

Joshua Sherman Opinions Editor

Kintsugi Death Cab for Cutie Atlantic

I

got hooked on Death Cab for Cutie ever since its last album, “Codes and Keys,” released in 2011. Four years have come and gone though, and now the indie band is back with its latest album, “Kintsugi,” hoping to perhaps attract Billboard success while giving fans the sound they enjoy.

However, a lot has changed for Death Cab for Cutie in the four years since “Codes and Keys.”

In 2011, Death Cab creator, lead vocalist and lead guitarist Ben Gibbard divorced Zooey Deschanel after a short 3-year stint. The band’s lead guitarist and producer Chris Walla has also left, an evolving decision that finalized just months before the new album’s release. Meanwhile, Gibbard briefly revived The Postal Service, one of his pet projects, in 2013 before killing it later that year. Yet Death Cab has wavered its storms and Gibbard is still steering the ship. It’s clear “Kintsugi” is also emerging out of that storm’s wake, and what is more or less musical and personal chaos.

“Kintsugi,” by name, is about appreciating destruction—the album title refers to a Japanese art form centered on repairing broken pottery with a glue mixed with powdered gold, expressing the beauty of fault rather than trying to hide away the cracks. The album is also a nod to Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” with a bit of added indie flair. It poses the questions, “What will Death Cab do without a core member?” and, “How will it make sense and beauty out of this chaotic recent history?” But ultimately, where I thought I saw opportunities for Death Cab for Cutie’s new album to soar to new heights, it only glides; “Kintsugi” is just another indie lovesick album that’s from a band not really so indie anymore and perhaps starting to fall apart.

If there’s a voice I’d identify “Kintsugi” with, it’s one with a midlife crisis desperately trying to be a tourist in parts unknown. It dabbles in a slew of places and musical styles, thinking about Tokyo and L.A. with bits of electronica and pop thrown in for good measure. It’s a stark contrast to the homeliness I felt in “Codes and Keys,” an album whose voice was like a seasoned commuter—perhaps even from the Hudson Valley—as they reflect during a long train ride. Songs like “Portable Television” and “You’re a Tourist” felt personal and comfortable.

“Kintsugi” is reflective too, but it isn’t a comfortable reflection—it’s tough and tired, jagged with heavy guitar riffs in the album’s anthem “Black Sun” and acoustic revelation in “You’ve Haunted Me All My Life.” Everything else feels like it revolves around these songs, with more or less the same distrust of a certain significant other. Gibbard has said before he doesn’t want listeners to think this is about real life experiences, but he isn’t doing enough to prove otherwise.

I suppose what I find most disappointing in “Kintsugi” is that the album shifts closer to the norm rather than away from it. In the few times that the sound is not the typical vibe you’d come to expect from a band like Death Cab, what you have is something like The Black Keys. Don’t get me wrong, I like The Black Keys, but Gibbard expressed an interest in change with this album; he should leave “Lonely Boy” to those who write and sing it best. I’m not saying he’s just trying to get hits on Billboard, but it feels like they’re not taking risks. Death Cab for Cutie is supposedly free, but their sound is still as imprisoned as ever.

In an interview with the Seattle Times, Gibbard noted, regarding the departure of Walla, that, “17 years in, we could kind of figure out how to move on.” I like Death Cab for Cutie, but it’s lovesickness is stifling innovation. This doesn’t feel like the anthematic goodbye to Walla I wanted. You’ll like it if you already like Death Cab for Cutie, but with so much change in the last few years, “Kintsugi” was a chance at evolution for the band. What we get instead is just another lovesick album.

There has always been a steady interest in the alternative, art house, academic-minded film circles for Iranian cinema, but more widespread investment in the nationality as it pertains to movies has existed in the Western world only in select cases. Abbas Kiarostami is one of the most prominent talents, turning his focus in recent years outside his homeland in films like the Tuscany-set “Certified Copy” and “Like Someone in Love,” which takes place in Tokyo.

Director Jafar Panahi reached widespread notoriety a few years ago because he was sanctioned under decades-long house arrest for the pure fact of his moviemaking—though still managed to co-direct 2012’s “This Is Not a Film” and one of the best films of last year, “Closed Curtain,” from the confines of his own home.

The other hottest name in current Iranian filmmaking is Asghar Farhadi, whose divorce drama “A Separation” was much-touted as an American critics’ and awards’ favorite upon its stateside release in 2011. While “A Separation” was Farhadi’s first significant release for a majority of U.S. audiences, the director had made four features before putting together his heralded tale of a splintering family unit and their complex life choices regarding their child and an ailing parent.

The film Farhadi made directly preceding “A Separation,” entitled “About Elly,” was released in Iran, France, and other countries in 2009 but is not receiving its official U.S. release until now, in April 2015 (the filmmaker has made one film since “A Separation”: “The

Past,” which released in 2013 in the U.S.).

“About Elly” is in a similar vein to previous Farhadi endeavors in its theatricality, centering itself around a single event or mysterious question through which a host of familial struggles, long-kept secrets, and crescendos of emotion are uncovered. In this case, the scenario focuses on a group of eight adult friends as they vacation together at a seaside villa in northern Iran.

At dinner, joking around and playing Pictionary, the group—three couples and two singles, Elly and Ahmad—begins to act casually irresponsibly with their children, who tend to frolic on the rocky waters’ edges, and as a result, devastating questions unfold in a chain of sudden events.

“The Past,” Farhadi’s most recent U.S. release prior to “About Elly,” sometimes suffered from its melodramatic grandiosity—as precise as was Farhadi’s direction, and as humanistic and sensitive as were his actors’ performances, the scope of the film, spanning years and continents, had a way of emboldening the screenplay’s defects, feeling too rote and structured. “About Elly,” however, eschews such overt dramatics by virtue of being set entirely in one place, save for a few short trips to a shopping mall or grocery store in the outside world.

Rather than overplay how far-reaching the implications of the film’s events and morally-contemplative conversations are, Farhadi’s film is instead perfectly scaled to its subject matter. A small event and a tiny miscalculation have grave, impactful consequences in Farhadi’s world, and because the events of the film are contained to the villa and its immediate topographical surroundings, we see the rippling, cataclysmic effects of “About Elly[’s]” narrative reverberate between characters and within the hampered consciences of individuals.

The surprising proceedings enliven new, unseen dynamics between couples, and fas-

cinatingly reduce certain characters to their most instinctual and grossly reptilian states.

As “About Elly” moves along, it becomes a “Ran”-like display of a series of conflicting, highly personalized testimonials about the same event. Each of the characters have a story they wish to spin, a personal difficulty or frustration that has been unleashed, and Farhadi does a skillful job of granting his characters each a specific cinematic point of perspective while maintaining the film’s naturalistic elements.

There are two bookending inventorial scenes in which a character goes through the cast, asking each group member their “yea or nay” answer to a pressing question, the first a good deal more trivial than the last. In addition, in a crucial moment in the film, the entire main cast stands tensely on the beach as a boat speeds toward the shore. Before the contents of the boat are revealed—to us or the characters—Farhadi brilliantly surveys each actor’s face in urgent close-up, building tension and developing the emotional stakes, one by one, in elegant tableaus.

Tension in the film is also evoked by the constant roar of the ocean on the film’s soundtrack, which takes the place of a traditional orchestral score and is commented on

by Shohreh (Merila Zare’i) who says, “The sound of the sea drives me crazy.” To these characters, the sound of water flowing has an insidious, and thoroughly guilt-inducing ring.

Farhadi’s screenplay and direction allow scenes to assume a natural rhythm that lets compelling dynamics play out between characters believably. But some of his more daring shots, like the extended take of Elly poised, frozen, in the kitchen early on, or the series of takes of the eponymous woman flying a kite on the beach, radiate the romanticism of classic melodrama. The director’s fleet management of diverse tones makes “About Elly” a taut but recognizable work about small deviations of human error.

Show brings comic series back from dead Saachi Jain

Guest Columnist

iZombie Rob Thomas and Diana Ruggiero Wright Table Six Productions

T

he new CW show “iZombie” is an unusual mix of genres, including all the best elements of crime, horror, comedy and drama. Something in that mix makes the show incredibly enjoyable to watch. “iZombie” was created by Rob Thomas and Diana Ruggiero-Wright, and is an adaptation of the “iZombie” comic series by Chris Roberson.

From the premise and advertisements themselves, I wasn’t too keen on watching the show, but when I heard it was co-created

by Rob Thomas, who also created one of my favorite shows of all time, “Veronica Mars,” I decided to give it a try. I’m very thankful I did, because the show, which airs on the CW on Tuesdays at 9 p.m., is equal parts charming, hilarious and heartwarming.

The first episode starts off with a scene of Liv Moore, a talented medical resident, single-handedly saving a patient’s life. Afterwards, she is invited to a party by her coworker, and though at first she declines on the basis that she’s meeting up with her fiancé and that she’s not much of a party person, she eventually decides to go. Before the party, Liv Moore was an accomplished young woman with a job she loved, a fiancé she adored, amazing friends and family, and a life with which she was happy. After the party, she loses all of that and more when she becomes a zombie.

Five months after she wakes up as a zombie, Liv has become distant from those she loves. She broke off her engagement with her fiancé due to the fear that she’ll turn him into a zombie too, and her best friend, roommate and mother are worried about her.

She also quits her job at the hospital and starts working at the morgue with her boss Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti. She uses her new job to

acquire what she truly craves—human brains.

Eating brains doesn’t just satisfy her new urges, however; they also give her flashes of memories from the person whose brain she ate, which helps her solve who killed them.

An interesting twist is that Liv also temporarily gains the person’s personality traits, making her act out in ways she wouldn’t otherwise. Because of her new skill, she can help the Seattle Police Department with murder cases, though she pretends her knowledge comes from her being a psychic.

“[The show] is equal parts charming, hilarious and heartwarming.”

In addition to the plot being enjoyable, the cast is extremely talented. As I was watching, I noticed a lot of familiar faces. Rose McIver, who I knew from “Petals on the Wind,” “Once Upon a Time” and “The Lovely Bones,” plays Liv. Robert Buckley, from “One Tree Hill,” plays Major, Liv’s ex fiancé. David Anders, who was also on “Once Upon a Time” as well as “The Vampire Diaries,” plays Blaine, the zombie who scratched and infected Liv and so far seems to be the main antagonist.

Alyson Michalka, whom most will know from “Phil of the Future” and “Easy A,” plays Liv’s best friend and roommate. The ones that stood out to me, though, were Malcolm Goodwin and Rahul Kohli. Goodwin plays Clive, a Seattle PD detective who is skeptical of Liv at first but ultimately needs her help. Kohli plays Ravi, who is the only one who knows Liv’s secret and helps her as much as he can.

Most of the characters are likable and well written, especially Liv, Clive, and Ravi. Liv is a great lead character, strong and kind and funny but also flawed. Her struggles with being a zombie and leaving her old life behind are well depicted, as well as her newfound happiness and purpose when she realizes she can

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

use her gift to help people and bring justice.

Clive seems cold and unfriendly at first, but soon became one of my favorites. Ravi is endearing, loyal, and hilarious, and I hope we find out more about both of them as individuals in coming episodes. I do wish there were more main female characters, since as of right now Liv is the only one. Peyton, Liv’s best friend, is recurring, and the rest of the cast is all male. The weakest character so far is Liv’s ex-fiancé, Major, who is sweet but not too interesting. However, Blaine is a great antagonist and though we know he is manipulative, conniving and a murderer, he’s still a mystery.

The dynamics between the characters are well set up. Liv and Clive going from distrust and slight antagonism to working together as partners was great to watch develop in the first few episodes, and I am excited to see them become closer friends. Liv and Ravi’s friendship is also really adorable, especially because he is the one person who knows her secret and whom she can trust.

It is unclear whom they are setting up as a love interest for Liv, as it is unlikely that they would revisit Liv and Major as a permanent relationship. I hope it’s Ravi, because I’d love to see their friendship turn into something more. The brief bits that we have gotten of Liv and Peyton’s friendship is also great and so is the family dynamic between Liv, her mom and her brother, though that doesn’t seem to be a focus and could certainly be elaborated upon.

The plot for the rest of the season, which will consist of 13 episodes, is set up well, with the characters solving a different crime every episode, similar to “Veronica Mars.” Yet, there is the larger mystery of Liv’s zombie condition, finding a cure and Blaine’s sinister operation of selling brains to zombies that he has presumably turned.

The atmosphere of the show is light and entertaining, and though it’s clearly aimed at teenagers, a lot of different audiences could enjoy it. I had never been particularly interested in zombie shows before, but “iZombie” is a refreshing take on the genre and a show worth giving a chance.

ARTS

April 16, 2015

Page 17

Lecture casts light on daily colonialism

Campus Canvas

Excuse me, Show us your best smize.

courtesy of Daniel A. Anderson

THIONG’O continued from page 1 about my work this summer. ” Célérier added, “I had wanted to invite Ngugi to this campus for long and this was an opportunity. So I asked Noah if he could get Ngugi’s contact, and he did. So I took it from there and secured the funding.”

Various members from the Africana Studies Program, the Departments of Political Science, French and Francophone Studies and the Office of the Dean of Faculty came together to sponsor the event and Thiong’o’s lecture. “It was really a group effort,” Célérier commented.

Célérier specifically pointed to Thiong’o’s exploration and contemplation on the question of language, as he sought to establish African literature on its own terms.

“Ngugi is a foremost authority on post-colonial literature...Being born in Kenya which was then a British colony, he pointed to the absurdity of actually being an African writer but writing in English. He has looked at this idea throughout his career—what is the status of African literature, particularly within this context of globalization…The question of language is absolutely seminal to literature. ” Moreover, Célérier considers the event to be an opportunity of exchange and conversation between students, faculty and Thiong’o as well.

“Many faculty here already work and publish in the issue. But this will be a great opportunity for us to share our thoughts, and to raise new questions,” said Célérier.

Students from various departments including Africana Studies, Political Science and French and Francophone Studies plan to attend the lecture, showing the diversity of the speaker.

Alessandra Seiter ’16 said, “I’m currently enrolled in Professor Muppidi’s ‘Decolonizing International Relations’ seminar, and he alerted our class to Ngugi’s visit. I definitely plan on attending—Muppidi might even make the lecture our class for the week if its scheduling interferes with our regular class time.”

At the same time, David Finger ’15 is looking forward to a more personal take on these issues.

“I’m hoping to gain from hearing someone speak in person on this, given that I have only ever really interacted with issues regarding decolonization in terms of text,” he said.

A student from Célérier’s class last year, Shiqi

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, a author and Nobel Prize nominee, will be coming to Vassar to deliver a lecture called “Decolonizing the Mind: Are We There Yet?” which addresses postcolonial theory.

Lin ’17 is especially interested in the conversation between Thiong’o and Vassar. “I’m particularly curious about what kind of a conversation would happen between the speaker and Vassar members. It’d be interesting to see where the conversation can go when led by a provoking theorist and writer such as Ngugi.”

She continued, remarking, “We don’t have a lot of Asian or African speakers come for visits, so I’d love to take each opportunity when they do. The previous lectures on similar topics I went to have all greatly opened up my imagination of the world. So I’d love to be able to communicate with Ngugi face to face and hear about his views of the world.”

Many students also spoke about the colonialism in their daily lives at Vassar. Seiter commented, “I think that virtually everyone on this campus has grown up with, inherited, internalized, etc. a colonial mindset, which guides and shapes our interactions with the world and, I feel, really prevents us from coexisting with others.”

Michael Nishimura ’15 pointed to the difficulty of removing these mindsets. “I think for most

people at Vassar, we profit from the relics and the persisting nodes of colonialism; we are at a colonial institution after all. And because we have the privilege of receiving a world-class education, we don’t have to think about decolonizing ourselves very much. In order for that to happen, we need to make serious sacrifices in our daily lives, and I don’t think many are willing to do that, let alone even know how to go about that process in the most inclusive and just way.”

He continued, “There are some classes devoted to this, but I think it’s just as important that we have these ideas in our heads constantly, to see how we reproduce these oppressions we talk about so much in class, manifest in the mundane, everyday spaces.”

The event this time is probably a step at tackling with these concerning issues. As Célérier concluded, “The ultimate goal of this event is to have a sustained conversation on the profound effect that colonization has had on modernity, and on such values as democracy, progress, justice, which very much inform our reality today and also define dignity and self-worth.”

A weekly space highlighting the creative pursuits of student-artists

Lily Kitfield ’18

Beatrice Land ’18

Stephen Jennings ’17

submit to misc@vassar.edu

Meropi Papastergiou ’15

“Slow Portrait of the Fastest Man” is a portrait carved in rough vine charcoal and kneaded eraser. Done in the early hours of midnight, this piece examines the face of James Fast as he works diligently. His focused gaze and untamed mane are the cornerstones of this work. Although this piece only took a few hours, Fast’s facial features were a slow rendering.

-Sam Blanchard ’18

Penina Remler ’18

Amy Lieber ’18

Emma Rosenthal Humor & Satire Editor Sam Pianello, Photo Editor

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

SPORTS

Page 18

April 16, 2015

Despite loss, young blood brings life to men’s volleyball Zach Rippe and Erik Quinson Sports Editors

F

courtesy of Vassar Athletics

illed with youth and optimism, the men’s volleyball team headed off to the United Volleyball Conference (UVC) playoffs this past Friday to take on the third-seeded Nazareth College. Despite putting up three close sets, 2522, 25-23 and 27-25 respectively, the Brewers lost the match 3-0, ending their season. Vassar led by as many as six in the first set.

The men went 18-13 this season, which is a huge improvement from their last season where they finished with a record of 10-21 and did not make it to the UVC playoffs.

Coach Rob Wolter believed that the team was undone by nerves and the service game, “... we played well after the first set. There may have been a case of the jitters in set 1, but in the following sets, we outperformed Nazareth on the offensive side and we even out blocked them and they are the bigger team. I think the biggest difference in the match was that Nazareth was able to get service aces and we didn’t.”

Freshman Zechariah Lee admitted some nerves but definitely felt good about the way that the team performed, “Nazareth is a bigger, more physical team however, I felt like we were able to match them while being a little undersized.

All three games were very close and I felt like we held our own pretty well. As a freshman, I felt the pressures of the postseason and it definitely got to me earlier in the match.”

Lee is one of this team’s more effective young players, earning Rookie of the Week twice and eventually earning Co-Rookie of the Year honors. What is particularly noteworthy about this year’s team is their youth, and the potential for improvement as a unit over the course of the next three seasons, not to mention who they might acquire in the coming seasons. Wolter was characteristically understated, “We will return 10 athletes next season and this core group of athletes now have first hand experience on what it takes to be able to compete in our conference. We also have an established base to continue to build off of and adding players who fit in with our concept will be pivotal to our growth.” While sophomore and captain Trey Cimorelli was excited about the prospect of a young team. He explained, “We are an extreme-

Senior Colin White-Dzuro setes a ball against Nazareth College in the UVC playoffs. White-Dzuro was at the forefront of a young, talented squad that looks to build upon its success in the offseason. ly young team. Having three starting freshman is a big deal. It definitely hurt us at times this year, because of our lack of experience in certain situations. But it is also something to look forward to. We had a very successful season, and we are returning all eight starting players.

This is huge for next year.” Said senior captain Colin White-Dzuro, “I think this season was very successful, and a great bounce-back from the previous year. Our coach’s mantra for us at the start of the year was, ‘good2great.’”

Alongside the freshman, the rest of the men’s team has performed up to impressive standards. While White-Dzuro noted their spectacular play, he was also quite proud of the sophomores and juniors. In discussing the Brewers successful younger members, White-Dzuro added, “I’ve actually been most pleased with some key unexpected emergence among the sophomores and juniors. Quinn Rutledge and Christian Lizana both moved to a new position this season and performed very well, and Erik Halberg made huge strides in his second year

at a new position. All three of these guys have shown remarkable diversity in their volleyball skillsets and I really look forward to seeing how they progress next season.”

With a young core in place, the men’s team is now looking towards the future. Players will be looking to start building strength in the weight room and keeping their bodies healthy.

As Cimorelli noted, this preparation will begin right away. “Getting stronger, faster, more explosive, better conditioned, [that] is what the off season is all about. Putting in the hard work as an individual to get better. We will also hold captains practices to keep touches throughout this semester, and in the fall.” This is important as increased chemistry and production equate to lofty goals for the Brewers next season. The men look to be ranked in the national polls next year and advance deeper into the playoffs than ever before. They hope to earn an NCAA tournament bid as well. To do this, they would have to win the entire conference. Lizana is sure this feat will help them garner a national ranking.

For Coach Wolter, however, preparation goes beyond these preparations. “We are looking to add some quality depth to our squad to ensure practices remain competitive on a daily basis. Additionally, we will have end of season meetings with all our athletes to discuss with them on what they did well and areas where we want to see improvement. We will get their input on the season and start talking with them on what they liked, disliked, what they thought went well and what areas they want to see improvement in. We will meet as a staff to discuss those similar topics and begin to outline next year,” he divulged.

While their presence was perhaps not most prominent on the court itself, the seniors did play a role in helping to shape the mens’ season. Cimorelli noted that they worked hard in practice, pushing the team to be better every day. Lizana explained that the bond goes beyond the court: “It’s always sad to see guys go, and even though it’s only been two years with them I will miss them. They’re our buddies and people who we spend most of our time time with so it’s hard, but I know they have bright futures ahead of them. They leave us with an attitude of hard work and commitment. They give us a better view on how the program as a whole has been evolving, and it’s great to hear that we were part of it.” Lee added, “With the seniors leaving this year, we lose experience and maturity in their game. You can totally tell the difference when they’re on the court.

They’re just more relaxed because they’ve grown so accustomed to the speed and style of the game but I have full confidence in our team that we’ll build on their legacy and create a legacy of our own.”

If there is any evidence that Vassar volleyball has transcended its on the court impact, it lies with White-Dzuro. When asked what he will remember most about his volleyball experience at Vassar, he replied, “Undoubtedly the friendships I’ve made. Playing a varsity sport is a massive time commitment, and it can surely be unbearable if you don’t get along well with your teammates. Fortunately, I’ve become very close with teammates ranging from Class of 2012 to 2018, and I couldn’t feel more honoured to have played alongside each of them.”

Guts and glory define Vassar rugby’s weekend venture RUGBY continued from page 1

nior Geoffrey Matthes thought this weekend’s events were a huge success for the men’s team.

“I think the tournament was great. We were successful and earned an automatic bid to the Division II National 7’s Tournament. I talked to several other players from other teams and everyone had a really great time. It was also great to see the brand new field that was just put in, being used.”

Matthes elaborated on what the new field, emblematic of the program’s success and growth, meant to him and the team as well as their coach. “I am incredibly proud that Vassar can host such great tournaments. Not only do we have three fields, but all of them are in better condition than any of the fields used by other colleges. I was also happy for our Coach, Tony Brown, who has been trying to grow the program since he got to Vassar nearly 20 years ago and is still improving it daily.

Looking more specifically at this weekend, the women started off in group play against Siena College. Siena arrived to campus late and the Brewers, despite the wind and chill, quickly dominated the game. Sophomore Nathalie Freeman and junior Cierra Thomas both scored almost immediately to put the Brewers up by 10. Senior Meg Slattery and freshman Abigail Alexander also scored a try a piece and Slattery scored two cons to lead the Brewers to a 24-5 win. The Brewers then moved on to defeat Fordham University 29-0. The Brewers were very successful moving the ball and finding holes throughout the Fordham defense. All women present managed to get some playing time and gain valuable experience. Junior Shira Idris, after a semester abroad, had a very strong game in her position as fly half. Idris managed to score a try and found weaknesses in the Fordham defense all game.

After their win against Fordham, the Brewers moved on to play Stony Brook University

for their group decider. The Brewers came out quickly when Thomas scored the game’s first try. Stony Brook responded quickly to score a try but a con by Slattery kept the Brewers up 7-5. Thomas then had a break for about 60 yards leading to sophomore Laila Blumenthal-Rothchild scoring another try giving Vassar a 12-5 lead. After that, Stony Brook perked up and with a couple of missed tackles, the Brewers lead was cut to 12-10. A few more missed tackles in close quarters led to the Brewers falling 12-15. Still, the Brewers managed to advance to the Semi-Finals where they played the number 1 seeded Rutgers University. The Brewers had trouble finding their groove against the Scarlet Knights and despite the tenacious play by the women, the Brewers fell 32-5. Rutgers ended up facing Stony Brook for the finals and the Scarlet Knights claimed the title once more after defeating Stony Brook 39-0.

Freeman was proud of her teammates but emphasized their disappointment at the loss.

“I think that our goal was really just to go out on the field and play to the best of our abilities. I think that the fact that we made it to the semi-finals shows that we played well, but there were definitely times when we lost shape and made mistakes that were detrimental…I feel like we performed well [overall] at the tournament [but] as a team our biggest problem was missed tackles.”

The men started off their day against Manhattanville College. Coach Tony Brown described the events of the match, “The first game is generally a nervous affair but Vassar immediately moved the ball well when they had possession and put Manhattanville under pressure when the visitors had the ball.” Freshman wing Joseph Simon quickly scored the first try for the Brewers. Simon had a strong day, scoring a total of 12 tries and making some very important tackles. The patient play led to senior Erik Quinson scoring another 2 tries and Matthes

scoring 1. Senior fly half Nich Graham converted on two cons. The men then moved on to play RPI and had managed to keep the RPI team off the score sheet. Simon scored two tries, Quinson scored one, and senior Jesse Myhill scored one as well. Myhill and Graham at halfback both had incredible games, running strong lines and distributing well. The final score was 28-0 in favor of the Brewers.

Matthes explained his team’s goals coming into this weekend as well as his own role. “The team goal was obviously to win every game.

After practicing exclusively 7’s since returning from winter break, we felt pretty confident we could accomplish that goal. We also really focused on trusting each other and playing good team rugby. I didn’t really have any individual goal[s] besides play well. You can’t have an ego in 7’s. Everything you do has to be with the big picture of the team in mind. I think that the team stumbled a few times and made a few mistakes but overall definitely accomplished the goal.”

The Brewers defeated Siena College 40-5 in their third game. Matthes was injured due to an illegal tackle so junior Zach Rippe came in and had a strong showing partnered with fellow junior John Loree. Simon, Quinson and Myhill all had one try a piece. Freshman George Sheppard also contributed one try before pulling his hamstring. Senior Steven Juca almost had two tries but had to settle for one as the Brewers dominated all game. The final group game for the Brewers was a big one. They were set to face Sacred Heart University Pioneers.

Both the Brewers and the Pioneers were 3-0 in group play and the winner of the game was going into the semifinals while the loser would be eliminated. The score was 7-5 against Vassar at halftime. The Brewers managed to start their comeback and move ahead 12-7 in the contest with Simon’s second try of the game. Quinson scored once more and Graham converted his

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

kick to make it 19-7 in favor of the Brewers.

Sacred Heart scored one more try to make the final score 19-14 and the Brewers made it into the semi-finals.

The Brewers faced off against Seton Hall University in the semifinal match up. The Vassar men made strong tackles and the rotation of Loree, Rippe and senior Kenta Hasui along side senior Alex Voynow were very effective in the front row. The Brewers managed to win balls and use them effectively. Simon managed to collect a hat trick and Voynow also had a try as the Brewers downed Seton Hall 24-5. The Brewers then went against SUNY-New Paltz in the finals. New Paltz had just defeated Molloy College, the two time defending champion, 1514. Vassar came out very strong and the score was 24-0 at halftime. Simon had another hat trick and Quinson added another try as well.

The Brewers spent the second half playing a strong passing game and staying on the defensive. They held on to their established lead and defeated New Paltz 24-10 to be named the TriState 7s Champions!

Despite their 6-0 records this weekend, the men according to Matthes see room for improvement but also the potential for greater success. “I think there were definitely some mistakes made and we were still working out the kinks. Combine that with the injuries and I think we have a lot more to offer in the future.

We won the tournament and we were nowhere close to playing our best rugby. I can’t wait to see how we match up against the better teams in the country, but I like our odds.”

Finally, Matthes found this weekend a strong and emotional way to cap off his rugby career.

“I think everyone is really excited. For the seniors, it’s a great way to end our career at Vassar and go out on top. For the younger guys, it shows that all the hard works pays off and it gets them excited to work even harder to keep carrying the legacy.”

April 16, 2015

SPORTS

Once King of Clay, but can he still play?

Sam Hammer Columnist

A

s the weather outside gets warmer, sports can finally move out of the hockey rinks and basketball courts and play outside. The MLB season just began this week, and although there have been tournaments in warmer climates all winter, the PGA and the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) will begin their seasons in earnest over the coming weeks.

The first major tennis tournament for the summer is the French Open, which is always played on the clay courts of Roland-Garros in Paris. The tournament, which begins May 19 and ends June 7, is highly prestigious and the best players in the world are always present. Despite the strong competition involved, Spanish superstar Rafael Nadal has managed to dominate the tournament over the last decade winning a record nine French Open titles and earning the nickname “The King of Clay.”

While he has remained the ruler on clay, Nadal has begun to lose some of the luster he once had over the past several years. He has frequently suffered knee pain, and he has also faced a few early-round exits in major tournaments. This past July, Nadal lost to Australian teenager Nick Kyrgios in the fourth round of Wimbledon. This upset came only a year after Nadal lost in the first round of Wimbledon to the unknown Steve Darcis of Belgium.

There is no doubt that Nadal is still a transcendent player, and when he is healthy there are few players in the world who can compete with him. Yet with the exception of clay-court tournaments, Nadal has begun to seem mortal. Nadal once had a chokehold on the number one singles ranking in the world, yet now he finds himself ranked number five. However, he is not the only tennis superstar who has begun to decline in recent years.

It is difficult to actually pinpoint a year, but since around 2008 men’s tennis has been commanded by the “big four” stars of the game.

The group includes Andy Murray from the United Kingdom, Roger Federer from Switzerland, Novak Djokovic from Serbia and, of course, Rafael Nadal. From 2008 until about 2013 it was almost a guarantee that one of these four would be the champion of every major tournament. In those years, there were twenty-four major tournaments, and the “big four” managed to win twenty-two of them.

It almost became boring watching the early rounds of tournaments since it was so rare for one of these players to face an upset. Even if one of them did, it merely meant that the other “big four” players had an easier path to the title. Although the “big four” are still prominent, 2014 was the first year in a long time when the competition began to open up.

Last year, Swiss player Stanislas Wawrinka won his first major at the Australian Open, and last September, Croatian player Marin Cilic won his first major at the U.S. Open. The most amazing thing about the U.S. Open last year was that the final did not consist of any of the “big four” since Federer and Djokovic had both lost in the semifinals.

This year may be the first time in a while where there will be some serious doubt with regard to the “big four.” That being said, Djokovic is still unquestionably the best player in the world and his singles ranking reflects that. Djokovic will likely be the favorite at every tournament he plays in this year. Also, Nadal is still “The King of Clay” and he has a good chance of winning the French Open for the tenth time.

The outlook is not so bright for the other two members of the “big four.” Although he is still an excellent tennis player and an amazing athlete, Federer will be turning thirty-four this August and is certainly past his prime.

Federer, currently the number two ranked player in the world, has not won a major tournament since Wimbledon in 2012. Although he played in the Wimbledon final last July, he ended up losing to Djokovic in an epic five-set

match. This past January, Federer was upset

by Andreas Seppi in the third round of the Australian Open. The loss ended Federer’s eleven-year streak of advancing to the semifinals or better at the Australian Open. Federer will still be a major threat at all of the tournaments he plays in this year, but he is beatable.

Murray has probably been the biggest disappointment over the last year. In 2012, Murray went from being known as the “fourth best player in the world” to being a superstar. That year Murray made it to the finals of Wimbledon, won the gold medal at the Summer Olympics which were played at Wimbledon and won the 2012 U.S. Open. In 2013 Murray won Wimbledon, becoming the first British Wimbledon champion since Fred Perry in 1936. In 2014 Murray fell off somewhat, failing to reach a single grand slam final and fell out of the top ten singles rankings. Although, clearly Murray has been inconsistent in the past and this year could see him rebound.

Again, the reign of the big four has certainly not come to an end, however, time is starting to get the best of them and other younger players are emerging. Bulgarian player Grigor Dimitrov has been labeled “Baby Fed” due to the fact that he shares a similar playing style to Federer, utilizing a one-handed backhand.

Dimitrov, who is only twenty three years old is currently ranked number eleven in the world and has had impressive victories over the likes of Murray and Djokovic. Another rising star to watch is the Canadian Milos Raonic who is currently ranked number six in the world. Raonic, who is six-feet and five inches tall, takes advantage of his large size to hit incredibly powerful serves and groundstrokes.

His aggressive play has led him to become the first Canadian to finish an ATP season ranked in the top ten. With new star players emerging such as these two along with several others around the world, it will be interesting to see if the members of the “big four” can hold on to their spots at the top.

Yankees stumble, Mets pick themselves up Zach Rippe

Sports Editor

T

he birds are chirping, winter coats are tucked away in their closets and I got my first sunburn of 2015. That can only mean one thing: it’s time for baseball! Gone are the plethora of perennial all-stars smacking 45 home runs a year. All of those names you remember from your childhood are either retired or limping to a .269 average (I’m looking at you, David Wright). When adults talk baseball to their work pals around the water cooler, the discussion is more likely to revolve around who has an unusually high WAR (wins above replacement) rather than who’s winning the home run race. Baseball has changed. As Keith Olberman observed, it has become more of a regional sport. Fans are flocking to see their teams play, but seem to have become disenchanted with the sport itself. You don’t go to watch baseball, you go to watch the Angels, the Mariners, the A’s, etc. You get the picture.

It is in this spirit that I will shamelessly plug my team, the New York Metropolitans.

Over the past 20 years, the New York Yankees have been by far the most consistently dominant franchise in all of Major League Baseball. They have made the playoffs 16 times since 1995. This includes their absences over the past three seasons. The Yankees are old.

Their strategy of out-bidding everyone for the biggest names in baseball is no longer working. Overpaying a 38 year-old Carlos Beltran and washed up 39 year-old Alex Rodriguez is not a winning blueprint. Baseball is changing. The Yankees are not. Their farm system is depleted, their players are old and fragile and their heir is that of mediocrity. Sure, they occupy the largest market in the majors, so things could very well turn around, but baseball is no longer dependent on traditional “stat guys” who smack homeruns at unprecedented rates. Most teams who win, I’m thinking Royals here, do it organically. Home runs are on the decline in this age of the pitcher and small ball, you know, stealing that extra base, executing a hit and run every now and then, are in.

Enter the Mets.

New York is a big city. When the Dodgers and Giants left for the West Coast in the 1950s, many fans were left with a void to fill. When the Mets came about in 1962, combining that beautiful Dodger Blue with the Giants’ orange NY emblem, they brought a laughable, yet lovable presence to New York City baseball. For those tri-staters who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s, New York may have seemed like a Yankee town. There was Derek Jeter and his crew of homegrown and store-bought Bombers who took the city by storm. People are quick to forget the 1969 Miracle Mets who came out of nowhere to win the World Series. When casual fans talk about the 1986 Mets, a team who dominated baseball both on and off the field with its edgy personalities, they think of them as an isolated team whose place in baseball lore is essentially reduced to Mookie Wilson’s slow roller that went through Bill Buckner’s legs in game six of the World Series. Yet these Mets dominated the latter half of the 1980s and owned the city of New York. Back then, there was a mural of pitcher Doc Gooden in Times Square reading, “How does it feel to look down the barrel of a loaded gun?” This isn’t to say that the Yankees were terrible in those years, but the Mets had the flair, the personalities and the winning pedigree to back it all up.

Aside from 2000 and 2006, the Mets have been nothing short of a disappointment in my lifetime. Since their move to Citi Field in 2009 the Mets have been abysmal. They have not finished above .500 since 2008 and their ownership was even involved in Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme a few years ago. They’re an easy punch line. Growing up, I was constantly reminded that Mets stood for “My Entire Team Sucks.” Having nothing to say in response, I could do nothing but lower my head in shame.

After sitting through four years of Sandy Alderson’s rebuilding plan, these Mets are ready to play, and their swagger shows it.

The past few seasons have yielded some bright spots. Centerfielder Juan Lagares has developed into one of the best defensive players in the game, winning the Gold Glove last season. Jacob DeGrom won the rookie of the

year award and his hair is spectacular. Curtis Granderson underperformed in his first year as a Met but he hit the cover off of the ball in spring training this year and has been reunited with former Yankee hitting coach Kevin Long.

Surely these improvements warrant a better record, but they don’t necessarily translate into a NYC takeover.

Enter Matt Harvey. Harvey’s legacy was cemented in 2013 when he got off to an 8-2 start and started the All-Star game at Citi Field. He has pitched with a bloody nose and posed naked for ESPN the Magazine. He was dubbed “The Dark Knight of Gotham” in Sports Illustrated that year, despite having less than 15 career wins to his name. Harvey went down in August and needed Tommy John surgery, causing him to miss the entire 2014 season.

During that time, he fought with coaches, made appearances throughout the City (including Derek Jeter’s final game at Yankee Stadium) and made it known to the world that above all else, he wanted to win. In a game increasingly absent of stars, Matt Harvey has the potential to be an icon. He, along with David Wright, the 2014 “Face of the MLB” (yeah, I don’t know either), DeGrom, Lagares and a host of young fireballers waiting in the minors for their chance to mow down major league batters make the Mets more than just competitive. They make them exciting.

With the Yankees old and irrelevant, now is the Mets’ chance. They are young, electric and represent the flair of present day baseball to a tee. The Mets have players who can transcend these “regional sport” connotations.

Harvey is one of those guys who gets a lead on Sportscenter. Wright is an established vet whose name will forever be linked with New York Met baseball. Someone posted a photo outside Citi Field ten minutes after game time last Tuesday and there were lines, long long lines. “So what?” you might say. But take it from me, a devoted fan, the vibe is a bit different this year. I mean, the Yankees will always be “the Yankees,” but it’s times like these when I don’t feel bad about getting ahead of myself.

As we Met fans say, “You gotta believe!”

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Page 19

Divine Providence intervenes Rob Carpenter

T

Guest Columnist

he men’s NCAA college hockey season came to a close on Saturday night as Providence College defeated Boston University at the TD Garden in Boston. Even though BU had a slight home rink advantage over their New England neighbors, Providence won the thriller 4-3 mainly off the Herculean efforts made by Providence’s junior goalkeeper Jon Gillies.

Gillies made 49 stops in the Frozen Four Final and easily won the championship game’s most outstanding player award. The career high number of saves was mainly a result of Providence’s defensive strategy that focused on protecting the ice in front of the goal while allowing a barrage of less accurate outside shots.

Even though Gillies and his team will return to Rhode Island with the championship trophy, it is actually BU’s junior goalie, Matt O’Connor, who will be the most remembered player from Saturday’s epic game. With 8:36 left on the clock and the championship within reach for the BU Terriers, O’Connor stopped a slow-moving, clearing pass put on cage by Providence junior Tom Parisi as the Briars tried to make time to sub. But Providence got more than they bargained for when O’Connor fumbled the pass off his glove and allowed an accidental goal. With the game tied at 3-3, Providence, ignited with energy, scored again two minutes later to take the lead.

The goal scored off a quick lefty finish by junior Brandon Tanev would prove to be the game winner. With two minutes left and BU a man up with a pulled goalie, Gillies made a diving save to maintain the lead and ensure the championship. All in all, both goalies played well and O’Connor stopped 39 shots to Gillies’ 49, but Saturday’s game displayed that NCAA hockey moves so quickly that one moment can make the difference between victory and defeat.

The championship is the first for Providence hockey and their most recent appearance in the finals since 1985. Led by juniors Tanev, Kevin Rooney and Frozen Four Most Outstanding Player Gillies, Providence has a great chance of dominating again next year and contending for another championship. That is only if the team’s leading players choose to return for another year instead of entering the NHL and playing professionally. Gillies has already been claimed by the Calgary Flames and could begin his NHL career. BU star freshman Jack Eichel faces the same difficult choice as the NHL Entry Draft’s June 26 date quickly approaches.

Even though Eichel missed out on the NCAA championship, the phenomenal forward was awarded the Hobey Baker Award last Friday.

The Hobey Baker Award is college hockey’s version of the Heisman Trophy, awarded annually to the country’s best player. But unlike the Heisman, the Hobey doesn’t posses a bias towards offensive players, and frequently defensive men and even goalies win the award.

This year, in addition to Eichel, North Dakota University’s junior goalie Zane McIntyre and Harvard University’s junior forward Jimmy Vesey were also nominated for the award. Many speculate that Vesey will return to Harvard for his senior year, but it is extremely possible that McIntrye and Eichel could be playing in the NHL next year.

Unlike the NBA and NFL draft system, in the NHL draft players can be selected but continue to play at the collegiate levels while certain pro teams maintain the rights to sign the player once they choose to shed their collegiate amateur status. McIntyre has been recognized as the nation’s best goalie and received this year’s Mike Richter Award, and if he chooses to commit to the NHL next year he would add even more talent to the Boston Bruin’s already strong corral of goalies led by Tuukka Rask.

Eichel on the other hand has yet to be claimed by the NHL but as a freshman he could take part in a one-and-done jump to the pros, Even though early April is typically dominated by the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, Frozen Four games, such as the one we saw on Saturday, rival the excitement of any March Madness bracket-breaker.

SPORTS

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April 16, 2015

Eat, play, love: SAAC, Student Athlete Week bring it all Winnie Yeates Guest Reporter

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ast week was Student Athlete Week, a time to celebrate Vassar’s athletes and encourage support among the wider community. There has always been an unfortunate gap between athletes and non-athletes at Vassar.

However, this year, the Student Athletes Advisory Committee (SAAC) has been working tirelessly to significantly decrease this gap.

Their goals have been to further involve and inform the community about athletic events and to unite Vassar in school spirit. SAAC has implemented several new policies just this year in an attempt to accomplish this. Each sports team has chosen a FAST member, which is essentially a Vassar faculty member that is associated with each sports team. Each sports team

is also working on creating a specific “Brew Crew Event” during one of their home matches or games this year that will allow fans and attendees to participate in a fun event and possibly win a prize.

According to women’s field hockey player, junior Haley Merritt, the turn out for the field hockey clinic was pretty good. “It was pretty successful this year. The clinics weren’t huge but we all still enjoyed them.” Fellow field hockey teammate sophomore Sophie Arnold spoke further on the turnout: “I think a lot of people have never played field hockey so we were hoping to just show people the sport we love. It was a lot of fun! Some of the women’s basketball team stopped by and scrimmaged with us, which we really appreciated. Two girls who play field hockey at Arlington high school

courtesy of Vassar Athletics

The Student Athletic Advisory Committee has been at the forefrunt of organizing Student-Athlete week at Vassar College. The week looks to celebrate student athletes and encourage wider support.

actually came too because their parents work here, so it’s always fun to play with younger girls who may be interested in playing in college too.”

SAAC President and women’s basketball captain junior Colleen O’Connell was instrumental in the planning of Vassar’s Student Athlete Week. “I oversaw the SAAC Committee planning the events for student-athlete week.

Trey Cimorelli (Men’s Volleyball) organized our efforts, and without him, we would not have had as many ideas and events to plan.

Additionally, members from the field hockey, women’s volleyball, and men’s and women’s soccer teams helped plan the week, and I am very grateful for all of their hard work.” On top of coordinating much of the week, she assisted in hosting the Women’s Basketball clinic last week. She commented on the success of the clinic, “The women’s basketball team put on a fantastic clinic on Wednesday night, where we played a bunch of games with students, children, and even the Dean of the College, Chris Roellke. We had a great time sharing our love of the game by playing fun games, like knockout and dinosaur basketball, with everyone!”

Additionally, five members of the SAAC committee very recently attended a conference at Williams College to hear panelists and speakers address the holistic experience of a student-athlete at a Division III level. At the conference, there were over 50 delegates from Liberty League and New England Small College Athletic Conference. According to O’Connell, “Hearing what other student-athletes were doing at their schools was extremely helpful for ideas of what we wish to accomplish in the future.” O’ Connell furthered, “Attending the conference was a lot of fun because hearing what our student-athletes at other Division III schools had to say proved to be very eye-opening. We received a lot of useful information from a sports psychologist, our keynote speaker about leadership, and sexual assault bystander intervention strategies, among others.

We are planning to utilize this information in our efforts for future events and programs on campus, some of which are already underway in terms of coordinating.”

On April 22, there will be a screening of “The Hunting Ground,” a documentary that addresses and exposes issues of sexual assault and the rape culture on college campuses that will be co-sponsored by SAAC and Sexual Assault and Violence Prevention. This screening is of particular importance to student-athletes, especially considering the Title IX federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in schools that receive federal funding—including their athletic programs. In recent years, Title IX has become even more focused on issues such as violence and sexual assault. The members of SAAC feel that they are lucky to have gotten their hands on the film so early, and that it is important to make students feel safe and be aware of their options on campus regarding these issues.

O’Connell was pleased with the week, “The feedback I received from clinic attendees was that it was extremely fun and a great way to take a break from work for the week.” However, like everything, there is always room for improvement. SAAC hopes to continue to improve this week each year by increasing turnout and even adding a speaker.

Overall, through SAAC, the student athletes on Vassar’s campus have been gaining much deserved recognition for the positive contributions that they bring to the school, and SAAC is hoping to further decrease the gap between student athletes and non-athletes on Vassar’s campus. They hope also to strengthen the relationship of the college with Poughkeepsie and Arlington communities through events like Student Athlete week that celebrate athletes but encourage the entire community’s participation. With such great leadership and passion for their sports and for their school, it is looking likely that they will succeed and accomplish their goals in future years.

VC women’s tennis commits sororicide at tournament Erik Quinson Sports Editor

Women’s Tennis

Men’s Tennis

The men travelled to New York to take on the New York University Violets on Saturday, April 11. The day did not go as well as they’d have liked, with sophomore Nick Litsky coming up with the lone victory in his singles match up. The Violets took each of the three doubles sets, 8-6, 8-1, 8-6. While in singles, despite Litsky’s win, no other Brewer could find their swing, and aside from one of the remaining five matches, the Violets took the single matches in straight sets. The Brewers will play Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at home on Saturday, April 18.

Men’s Lacrosse

The men also had two matches last week.

The first was an away game at Drew University on Tuesday, April 7. The hosts scored first, but senior Scott Brekne soon answered back, bringing the game level. By the time half time rolled around, the Rangers were trailing 8-2.

Despite Drew scoring the first goal of the half, they could not recover and the Brewers took the coach ride home reveling in a 15-6 victory.

Unfortunately, the Brewers could not keep their momentum up in their Saturday game against Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester.

After the first quarter the teams were looking pretty level, with the score at 2-2, but the Tigers turned up the heat in the second period, scoring seven goals before the Brewers were able to stop the streak, but the Tigers could not be held for long and the half ended 10-3.

The second half saw two more goals from the Brewers, but the Tigers were relentless and the game ended 22-5. The coach ride home for the Brewers must have been in stark contrast to the one they had only days before. The Brewers will face Williams College on Wednesday, April 15 at Weinberg Field.

Women’s Lacrosse

The Brewers had two away games last week.

On Friday, April 10 they travelled to Rochester Institute of Technology. They won on a goal scored in the final second of regulation time by freshman Storm Sideleau. The team was able to haul themselves back from a four-goal deficit

Women’s Track

Senior Heather Ingraham continued to impress at the Silfen Invitational on Friday, April 10. She ran the second fastest 800m in the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) and the third best in Division III athletics. Sopho-

courtesy of Vassar Athletics

The Brewers competed in the Seven Sisters’ Championship this weekend. The games were split between Saturday, April 11 and Sunday, April 12. On Saturday, the women took on Mount Holyoke College in the morning and Smith College in the afternoon. The team did not concede a single set the entire day, sweeping both teams in singles and doubles. In the double matchups, the team only gave up four games in four sets.

To say that VC was good would be the understatement of the week. Sunday brought what looked to be a repeat of the day before, with the Brewers opening against Bryn Mawr College once again winning in straight sets to take the game 5-0. In the final contest of the weekend, the Brewers faced off against Wellesley, who had also gone unbeaten over the weekend, so it was a case of winner takes all. Vassar lost only one match, beating Wellesley 4-1. The Brewers take home their twelfth Seven Sister’s cup. The ladies will be back in action on Saturday, April 18 against MIT.

acquired in the first half. Trading goals throughout the second period, the Brewers were able to take the lead in the final minute of play, winning 9-8. The next day, when the Brewers travelled back to Rochester to face University of Rochester, it would prove the harder battle. The Brewers went into the second half down again, but only by two. However, with four goals scored

by Rochester within the first seven minutes, things were looking bleak. The Brewers were able to halve the deficit to 8-4, but could never find their feet, ending the day in defeat 10-6.

The women will return to play local rival SUNY New Paltz on Tuesday, April 14.

The women’s tennis team defeated Bryn Mawr College and No. 30 Wellesley College this past weekend on their way to their 12th Seven Sister Championship. The women only lost one match on the day. more Laura MacDonald had a great day, running the 3000-meter steeplechase, coming sixth in the event, but setting a new personal best, beating her last by 12 seconds. Senior Harper Cleves also posted a personal best time in the 1500 meter, one of four Brewers to take part in the event. The team returned Saturday, April 11.

Sophomore Saparja Nag opened the day in the 100-meter sprint. Nag set a new personal best, running a 13.31. Sophomore Molly Crowell also ran well in the 200-meter event, just missing out on her own personal best. Ingraham came back to anchor the 4x400 meter, which missed the ECAC qualifying time by .04. The team will be running again on Saturday, April 18 at the Liberty League Championships.

Men’s Track

Junior Taylor Vann had an outstanding day at the Silfen Invitational on Friday, April 10.

Vann was competing in the decathlon and

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won the first event, coming in with an 11.54 in the 100-meter. Vann finished the first half of the decathlon in first place. Vann went into the second day looking to keep this up, and he did. Vann finished the day with a career high of 6024 points, and first in the ECAC. Freshman Joel Johnson posted his personal best in the 200-meter, with a time of 23.14. The team will be running in the Liberty League Championships on Saturday, April 18.

Men’s Baseball

The team went up against Rochester Institute of Technology on Saturday, April 11 and Sunday, April 12. Although the first day saw an even match up, with the Brewers dropping the first game 2-4, they came back in the second to win 6-5. Sunday didn’t go so well the Brewer’s just couldn’t hit it, and they lost 2-11 and 1-15.

Their next game will be at home against University of Rochester on Saturday, April 18.