Misc 09.17.2020

The Miscellany News miscellanynews.org

Vassar College’s student newspaper of record since 1866 Volume 154 | Issue 3

September 17, 2020

For over 200 Vassar workers, in-person is often the only option Tiana Headley News Editor

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Vassar employee Shanna Treasure. Courtesy of Grace Rousell.

First-years face social obstacles Sara Lawler Reporter

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mid hybrid classes, social distancing guidelines, remote learning and many other changes to campus life, the Vassar College Class of 2024 is having a different first-year experience than they may have imagined.

First-years did not get the traditional college drop-off. Parent information sessions were replaced by mandatory novel coronavirus testing. Orientation did not entail hours of sitting in the sweltering chapel or endless tours around campus. Rather, most of orientation was conducted via Zoom and focused more on delivering necessary logistical and safety information. Some first-years who chose to study remotely are now experiencing the transition to college life entirely from home.

Despite these changes, Eve Dorfman, a first-year who chose to come to campus, felt like the orientation process was thorough, stating, “I definitely got all the information I needed despite not being able to do in-person sessions.”

Annabelle Wang ’23, a student fellow, said, “The virtual org fair was a great way for my fellowees to begin their integration into the Vassar community.”

See First-years on page 3

very weekday, Shanna Treasure walks from her Town of Poughkeepsie home to her job as a Vassar custodial worker. While students, faculty and administrators sheltered in place through the remaining spring semester, she had to walk into work, albeit with two to three-day work weeks and personal protective equipment as the College managed on-campus density.

This continued into the summer as she and the College’s other maintenance, custodial, grounds and dining employees were furloughed for an average of three days per week between May 18 and July 31. While campus workers received full pay in the spring, now they had to apply for state unemployment for the days they did not work. This was to offset the predicted economic fallout of the pandemic. With the start of the fall

semester, Treasure and her coworkers are needed now more than ever.

Many criticize colleges like Vassar for reopening in the midst of a global health crisis far from over. But some students and professors at these schools had a choice: work from home or brave going to campus amid a pandemic. For many custodians, food staff and grounds workers—the backbone of a functioning college campus—the nature of their work hinges on their presence.

As colleges and universities rolled out their reopening plans, administrators emphasized enhanced cleaning protocols. Custodial staff, who already perform a vital service, were more crucial than ever.

Non-academic campus workers across the country have protested these reopenings without union protection while relying on students and faculty to champion their concerns about workers’ safety. A

group of faculty, graduate students and other university workers filed a class-action lawsuit against the University of North Carolina system, claiming that they were not provided a safe work environment due to the systems’ reopening plans.

Many campus workers unions are pushing for hazard pay or paid leave in collective bargaining rounds.

Local Service Employees International Union (SEIU) chapter Vice President Cathy Bradford shared that Vassar has not offered workers hazard pay. Associate Vice President for Human Resources Ruth Spencer said Vassar worked to accommodate employees in other ways in the early weeks of the pandemic. “We instead significantly reduced schedules of employees whose jobs required them to continue working on campus—a step intended to both keep employees "whole" and reduce population See Workers on page 3

Professors navigate online teaching

Annabelle Wang Guest Reporter

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his past summer, Vassar students and faculty alike considered how the COVID-19 pandemic would affect teaching in the fall semester. While students faced the difficult decision to either return to campus for in-person classes or learn remotely, faculty weighed the pros and cons of fully remote teaching.

About 40 percent of Vassar faculty have opted to teach remotely this semester. Each professor’s individual decision to elect fully online instruction was heavily informed by a variety of factors.

For the entire Japanese Department, the decision to be remote for the semester was greatly impacted by pedagogical concerns. According to Professor of Chinese and Japanese PeiPei Qiu, in-person classes were not

well-suited for language learning classes during the pandemic.

Qiu shared, “Observation of the positioning of the mouth and culturally specific forms of facial expression is extremely important for language learning. Wearing a mask creates a major obstacle for such observations.” She continued, “The social distancing required in [the] classroom makes the oral practice very difficult…When 15 or 20 students are practicing a dialogue six feet apart from each other, everyone needs to raise their voice, which makes it very hard to hear, especially when everyone is wearing a mask.”

In addition to pedagogical worries, Qiu and the rest of the Japanese and Chinese Department faculty were also concerned about providing equal and equitable access for all students. “We also felt

Juliette Pope/The Miscellany News. that teaching online could allow every student to participate fully as all our classes have students who are taking courses remotely in the fall semester,” Qiu said.

Many other remote professors have echoed this sentiment.

Professor of French and Francophone Studies Vinay Swamy mentioned the difficulty of student inclusivity with a hybrid model: “I felt like a hybrid classroom would be a lot harder to

deal with—and I think a lot of my colleagues are discovering that— because you have some students online and some students in person.” He continued, “I felt like it would be better...to have all my students [on] the same platform.”

Along with emphasizing equity through shared accessibility, Professor of Mathematics and Statistics Benjamin Lotto expressed concerns about other See Teaching on page 4

Women's sports set pandemic-era precedent Doug Cobb Columnist

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n my last article, I discussed the varying levels of success that the NBA, MLB and NHL experienced in returning to play during the pandemic, and expressed skepticism at the NFL’s ability to succeed without a bubble strategy. My main takeaway was that the most effective way to ensure a safe season is to create a bubble and to show

little to no tolerance for people who refuse to follow the rules surrounding COVID-19 safety. It turns out there is more evidence to support those takeaways in some less-discussed leagues: the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) and the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA).

Professional women’s sports leagues often play second fiddle to men’s leagues for a variety of

reasons, many stemming from the fact that women’s access to more equal opportunity in sports is a recent development.

Firstly, women’s leagues were established long after professional men’s leagues. The NWSL debuted in 2012 and the WNBA in 1997, while leagues like the MLB (1903) and NBA (1949) have been around for many more decades. This head start for the men’s leagues makes it much

harder for women’s leagues to emerge and gain popularity. I also believe one of the main reasons that women’s sports leagues are not as popular as men’s is a lack of resources allocated to them. But one sport that bucks this popularity trend is soccer, where the United States Women’s National Team (USWNT) is quite popular amongst American fans, and is undoubtedly the See Bubble on page 15

Inside this issue

3-4 NEWS

This week's News section takes a look at how the day-to-day lives of various members of the college community have been altered by Vassar's COVID-19 policies. Read on to learn how those on and off campus, from first-years to professors to custodial workers, are experiencing Vassar's most unusual semester.

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September 17, 2020

COVID19 AT VASSAR 5,660

Total Tests Administered

23

Total Student Cases to Date

SEPTEMBER 17TH DATA VIA VASSAR TOGETHER

02

Total Employee Cases to Date

0

Total Active Cases

For daily updates on Vassar's testing and cases, visit https://www.vassar.ed u/together/dashboard

THE MISCELLANY NEWS EDITOR-IN-CHIEF MANAGING EDITOR SENIOR EDITORS

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Lucy Leonard

Aena Khan Ted Chmyz Taylor Stewart Abby Tarwater Duncan Aronson Jessica Moss Holly Schulman

Tiana Headley Olivia Watson Lucille Brewster ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR Janet Song FEATURES EDITOR Gillian Redstone ASSISTANT FEATURES EDITOR Jonas Trostle OPINIONS EDITOR Meghan Hayfield ARTS EDITOR Isabella Migani HUMOR EDITOR Alex Eisert SPORTS EDITORS Dean Kopitsky Natalie Bober SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR Alison Carranza ASSISTANT SOCIAL MEDIA Sherry Liao ASSISTANT PHOTO EDITORS Grace Rousell Jacqueline Gill COPY EDITORS Caitlin Patterson Phoebe Jacoby ASSISTANT COPY EDITOR Julián Aguilar GRAPHICS EDITORS Juliette Pope VIDEO PRODUCTION MANAGER Alexis Cerritos Alex Barnard AUDIO EDITOR Ben Scharf LIVE EVENTS CHAIRPERSON Emma Tanner BUSINESS MANAGER NEWS EDITORS

REPORTERS

COLUMNISTS

COPY STAFF

CROSSWORD

Delila Ames Alysa Chen Carissa Clough Olivia Diallo Rayan El Amine Sara Lawler Leila Raines Francisco Andrade Sawyer Bush Madison Caress Doug Cobb Rohan Dutta Helen Johnson Xin Rui Ong Nina Ajemian Taylor Gee Jason Han Jake Johnson Emma Kahn Tiffany Trumble Frank

"Common Council weighs bill on civilian oversight of police" in the News section on Thursday, Sept. 10, stated that the Poughkeepsie Civilian Review Board would have three mayoral appointments; Mayor Rob Rolison will appoint two to the Civilian Review Board. This article also stated that board members would be paid; in reality, board members will not receive a salary. This article also stated that Councilmember Chris Petsas was a former police officer; Petsas has never served with the police force.

CORRECTION POLICY The Miscellany News will only accept corrections for any misquotes, misrepresentations or factual errors for an article within the semester it is printed.

The Miscellany News is not responsible for the views presented within its Opinions pages. Staff editorials are the only articles that reflect the opinion of a two-thirds majority of the Editorial Board.

Julián Aguilar/The Miscellany News.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

September 17, 2020

NEWS

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A campus’ backbone: staff vital to fall semester success

Continued from Workers on page 1 density and the risk of illness,” she said The College also offered temporary leave programs for workers who themselves or someone in their household are at higher risk of serious illness if they contract the coronavirus. If SEIU employees contract the novel coronavirus, they will receive paid leave for the time they must stay home.

Though furloughs in the summer were meant to cushion some of the pandemic’s economic blow, President Elizabeth Bradley announced that Vassar will eye additional furloughs and possible pay cuts if the semester presents further crunches. The College projected a $3-5 million deficit for 2020 and anticipates a $5-50 million deficit for 2021.

Then there is the uncertainty of a shutdown, where members of the College would have to isolate and evacuate. “While we cannot predict the course the pandemic will take, it has been the College’s goal throughout this crisis to protect its employees as much as possible,” said Spencer.

Vassar’s zero active on-campus cases as of last week prompted a sigh of relief from those that must traipse campus for work, but the possibility of an outbreak has not completely left workers’ minds.

Treasure shared what the past months and even years at Vassar have meant for her.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Miscellany News: How long have you been working at Vassar?

Treasure: I’ve been a cleaner for 13 years.

The Misc: Did you work this summer?

Treasure: Yes. We had a week or two of break, but then they called us back because the kids were slowly arriving. Some kids never left, so they needed us. Of course, bathrooms are going to be used and common areas and kitchens.

The Misc: Did you experience any fear when students were coming back?

Treasure: I guess I was a little anxious, not just because of [the campus], but just in my everyday—going to the grocery store and

picking up prescriptions. [COVID-19] made me more aware of who was around me. Ok, [someone] coughed. Are they sick? I cough and sneeze because I have allergies. To get through the day, I just say that person has allergies. If not, it’ll drive you crazy. Because they say people can be asymptomatic. I just think that, since everyone is [on campus] and everyone has been tested, then everyone is safe. I have nothing to worry about.

The Misc: Do you have any fear now going into work every day?

Treasure: My coworkers and I work hard to keep the bathrooms clean [in Jewett]. I do the showers with the [cleaning] machine every week. Every day we come through and disinfect. Around 11, there’s another team that comes through and disinfects everything—all the bathrooms, water fountains and door handles. I’m sure it makes other people feel good to know that something has been disinfected. You feel a little bit safer.

The Misc: It doesn’t sound like you’re as concerned as, say, campus workers at any of these other colleges that have shut down across the country.

Treasure: We’re definitely wondering if that’s gonna happen here. We see the reports and we read President Bradley’s emails. First it was four cases, then 11. It upticked, but I have to think that the College is protecting us—that they would be honest and tell us, “Guys, listen, this is what’s going on.” So we are putting a lot of our faith and trust into them to be honest with us because we’re coming in here to do a job. But now our job has changed.We’re hoping we don’t close, but if we have to, we understand. We see what’s going on in the world. You can’t take risks with students’ lives or our lives.

Nobody wants that. We just want to get through this [as] safely as possible.

The Misc: Do you feel any sense of job insecurity given these circumstances?

Treasure: I would like to say no. I’d like to think that, because we’ve been here and we know the buildings and have gotten to know students, professors and other people who

work at the College. To think that they were to lay people off or just bring in other people, that process is going to have to start all over again. It’s kind of like living somewhere for 30 years and you know your neighbors well, but your neighbors have sold the house and new people move in. I would hope that [because of] how long we’ve been here and [how we’ve] worked our hardest to make this place safe, that they wouldn’t just decide to let us go. It’s always in the back of your mind because you don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m hoping this can all die down and we can get back to some sense of normalcy—that this will be a conversation we can laugh about at another time.

The Misc: Vassar has three cases [at the time of this interview]. Does that give you any sense of relief?

Treasure: Honestly, no. When I hear that, I start thinking, “Who has this person been in contact with? Where have they been?”

You hear that someone is in self-quarantine, and it’s like a waiting game. Do they have it? Are they asymptomatic? For people to compare this with the flu, for people to now say, “well, you should be worried about the flu.” No, I'm not worried about the flu. I’ve had the flu before. This is different. With this, there [can be] people walking around who have it with no symptoms. That’s what makes me on edge. You see the trend of a school that just opens after Vassar, and now they’re closed. It’s kind of like everyone’s looking at us like, “Well, how come they haven’t closed yet? What are they doing differently that we’re not doing?” I think a lot of it is us workers and students are being more responsible. I still occasionally see kids off campus, but hopefully we can keep it down so we won’t have to close, send anyone home, we won’t be out of work and more importantly, none of us get it. That 's the last thing I want.

The Misc: Is there someone whom you have to take care of right now?

Treasure: I haven’t seen my grandmother in months. She’s a particular age. I don’t

know who I’ve come in contact with, and I don’t want to put her at risk. I have little cousins who I haven’t seen in almost six months because they’re little. I don’t want to get them sick. Even though I do live alone, I do have people who I haven’t seen in six-plus months because I don’t want to put them at risk. I would feel horrible.

The Misc: Do you feel appreciated for the work you do on campus?

Treasure: I do my job to the utmost, and I do my job for the students and me. I will say that this year, there definitely has been much more “Thank you so much” probably more than all my other years. That makes me feel good. Some kids will say, well that’s just her job, I don’t have to thank her. But now, I go into a bathroom and someone thanks me, or someone will walk by and back up and say thank you. They don’t have to, it’s that they took that little bit of time just to say thank you. And not even just the students either, the people in the office too.

That makes you feel good. You’re doing your job, but every once in a while it’s good to hear that you’re appreciated and that someone has noticed that you’ve made a difference.

The Misc: Do you have anything else you’d like to share?

Treasure: I hope the future at Vassar is bright and safe and we all continue forward together. Again, if they close because of the COVID, we all would understand because we all want safety first.My 13 years at Vassar have been a blessing. I've met some very interesting people from all sorts of walks of life [and from] countries I never even knew existed. And I have mementos that kids have brought me back, and I love when it's a reunion and we get to work and see past students come back as adults, married adults, sometimes with their kids, and you get to meet the husband or the wife. I enjoy seeing that. I enjoy seeing someone come in as a freshman, watching them throughout the years and then on graduation day. Those are probably some of my favorite times here at Vassar.

Loneliness, disconnect plague 2024’s first-year experience Continued from First-years on page 1 While the Zoom webinars offered extensive orientation programming virtually, they provided little opportunity for social interaction. Remi Kauderer ’24 worried about making friends and meeting people before arriving on campus, given the restrictions in place to prevent the spread of the virus. Similarly, Wang is concerned that the students in her fellow group might have a hard time finding their place on campus. “Sometimes I do worry about my fellowees finding communities beyond the fellow group,” said Wang. “I know that sports teams members may have an easier time finding another community, but for those who are not athletes, I am afraid they might find it more difficult to find ‘their people,’ considering the fact that most academic and extracurricular meetings are conducted over Zoom.” Some dorms have even organized Zoom sessions where participants are divided into breakout rooms of two, so that first-years can develop friendships one-on-one.

Both Dorfman and Kauderer explained that they have met most of their new friends through socially-distant informal gatherings outdoors rather than through orientation programming and other virtual activities.

Kauderer explained, “Informal gatherings have been more helpful because meeting people over Zoom is difficult and awkward.”

While first-years on campus have had the opportunity to talk six feet apart outdoors, remote first-years do not have these opportunities to make connections. Sophie Wood ’23, a

First-years Eve Dorfman (left) and Remi Kauderer (right) demonstrate the six feet of distance required outdoors at all times. Grace Rousell/The Miscellany News. student fellow studying remotely this semester and working with a group of entirely remote first-years, has explained the difficulties of remaining off campus while on-campus students mingle. She said, “I try to remind my fellowees that they are just as valid as those in person, but it’s definitely hard when you’re on Zoom and it seems like everyone else is on campus. Social media is also challenging because we see people being on campus and it’s like, dang, I wish I was there.” Adding to these challenges was the fact that Wood’s first-years live across multiple time zones, making it difficult for Wood to organize Zoom calls.

To combat these setbacks, Wood has tried many different techniques meant to keep her fellow group engaged and connected. She has

a virtual bulletin board where she posts advice and resources, and consistently emails her fellowees with reminders of virtual events that the College is holding. Wood is also planning a Zoom game night for the near future.

While many of the Class of 2024 are dealing with social concerns, the academic transition has also brought some first-years a great deal of stress before starting classes. Dorfman explained her worries, saying, “I think I was the most nervous about re-adjusting to an educational environment and an academic routine being that I hadn’t been in a physical school setting since March.” Despite this, she has found being on campus helpful in adjusting to new academic demands: “I feel comfortable emailing professors with questions when

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

necessary, and I’ve made a few friends in my classes that I can talk to if I need assistance.”

Kauderer says the workload has been manageable for her so far, but Zoom classes are not ideal. “I think it’s much harder to focus during online classes because there are a lot of factors that can distract you from the class or lecture,” she explains. Only one of Kauderer’s classes is in person; the others meet via Zoom. Still, she has found that there are enough resources available for academic support on campus.

Wood noted that some of the remote firstyears in her fellow group have had a tougher transition to college academics, especially due to the difficulties of the hybrid teaching model. Many of her fellowees have been having trouble hearing and seeing what is going on in in-person classes. Wood stated that “Vassar needs to figure out the technology, because not being able to hear classes is damaging and upsetting.” Additionally, the first-years in her fellow group are concerned about equal access to on-campus academic resources, such as the libraries and laboratories, and forming close relationships with their professors.

Overall, Wood is concerned that the remote first-years are not getting an adequate first-year experience. “I think hearing you’re a part of a community is a lot different than feeling it,” she shared.

Despite Vassar's best efforts, there seem to be two Classes of 2024: those remote and those in-person. Only time will tell if this disconnect will define the 2020-21 first-year experience.

NEWS

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September 17, 2020

Remote faculty face trials, discover silver linings Continued from Teaching on page 1 students who may struggle with certain COVID-19 protocols in the classroom.

These worries informed his decision to be entirely online: “I started thinking about students with hearing loss and those whose first language is not English, for example, and how wearing masks in the classroom might impact equitable access.”

In other departments, specifically Music, instructors found it unethical and even dangerous to host in-person classes.

Adjunct Professor of Music Robert Osborne and his colleagues decided to teach all voice lessons remotely, citing that the novel coronavirus is primarily transmitted via aerosols, of which singing produces a significant amount.

Other faculty were influenced more by personal circumstances.

Several factors influenced Assistant Professor of Astronomy Colette Salyk to choose remote instruction. In an email statement she wrote, “In general, I feel that, if I can do my job reasonably well remotely, it’s better for society if I don’t contribute to the spread of infection.”

Salyk is particularly aware of the harmful health impacts of the coronavirus. She shared that her parents who live in New York City contracted the virus in April.

Her father was hospitalized and has since fully recovered, but mother developed long-term neurological symptoms, including extreme fatigue, after a mild period of illness.

Salyk said, “Although I always took the virus seriously, this certainly makes me more personally aware of the severe health impacts this disease will cause in some individuals.” Salyk also lives with a family member who is immunocompromised and wants to avoid the risk of infecting them.

Associate Professor and Chair of Education Maria Hantzopoulos, who is teaching remotely from her home in Queens, NY, also felt the impact of the pandemic personally. She knows people who have been infected with the virus and have passed away. Moreover, she needs to take care of her younger children, who are both learning entirely online.

While it was a difficult decision for Hantzopoulos to have her children learn remotely, she did so for the benefit of her community as a whole: “Even though it was a tough decision, because it’s not easy having children here with me all the time…we just felt we needed to make space in the schools for children who had no choice but to be there, whose families [had]...caregivers [who] had to physically go to work or if there were other circumstances—food insecurity, housing insecu-

rity, whatever it is—that they just need to be in school,” she explained.

Assistant Professor of Biology Dianne Pater, who had to opt for remote instruction for personal health reasons, expressed her appreciation for the College’s flexibility in letting her choose to be completely remote: “I really appreciated having the opportunity to choose because I know there’s a lot of faculty members at other schools that didn’t actually have that choice. They were really forced to choose between having a job or not and Vassar was really proactive in taking into account the professors’ health for making this choice.”

Regardless of the reason, each professor has dedicated more time and energy toward restructuring classes to better suit online learning.

Over the summer, several fully remote professors attended seminars on effectively using online teaching tools to engage students in classrooms, science labs and other venues. Supplemented by their own ingenuity, professors have used this knowledge to adapt their courses to student's. As proclaimed by Lotto, “Everyone is putting in more hours for class.”

Lotto himself, has been dedicating more time to conversing and getting to know his students. He has focused on capitalizing participation and engagement more than in past semesters. Every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, Lotto meets with smaller groups of around five students (as opposed to the whole class) in hopes of sparking more collaboration and discussion. While he is able to meet with two of the groups during his regular class time, he has also dedicated four more hours each week to meet with the rest of the groups.

Lotto has also sent frequent surveys to students to check in on them and ask for feedback on the class. Thankfully, his efforts appear to be paying off. He claimed, “I actually know my students better now than if I were just lecturing online.”

Other professors have also relied on virtual discussions and surveys to help engage with students and promote discussion. In her Energy Flow in Biological Systems course, Pater has approximately 90 students—most of whom are first-years.

To get to know her students on a deeper level, she has used online discussion forums to interact more with them.

Pater highly encourages her students to speak with her and provide feedback, especially as it pertains to the structure of the class. She explained, “We’re [faculty] trying our best, but if we’re missing something, you [students] have to let us know because we don’t know what we’re doing any more than anyone else does.”

Qiu has also been working longer hours to adjust her courses. On top of attending five pedagogical workshops over the summer, Qiu has had to develop new teaching materials and revise existing ones, including all the tests and homework assignments, in order to make them suitable for online learning. These changes, she affirmed, have kept her busier than ever.

Salyk has made significant structural changes to her astronomy classes. PreCOVID, the Assistant Professor would lecture her astronomy classes and often pause for reflection and problem-solving.

However, Salyk has found pedagogical research that suggests a “flipped” model can be more effective than lectures when teaching online. This mode of teaching has synchronous and asynchronous components: students watch lecture videos before class and then spend classroom time working on problem-solving and homework.

After applying this method, Salyk has noted positive outcomes: “I’m…excited about having more time during class hours to work with students, rather than lecturing ‘at’ them. Although Zoom still doesn’t feel like an in-person class, I’m already feeling that in-class sessions this fall feel more human and inclusive than they did in the spring.”

As remote faculty continue to experiment with their virtual classroom design, many have expressed their gratitude for the flexibility of the pupils. Osborne is particularly appreciative of his students taking vocal lessons. Technical difficulties such as video and audio lags make it difficult for him to accompany his students in real time. Therefore, he has provided pre-recorded audio accompaniments or has had his students perform voice exercises without any accompaniments altogether.

Unfortunately, as Osborne shared, “These unprecedented methods are vastly inferior to face-to-face music making.”

However, he notes, “I have been deeply grateful to all of my students for remaining open, vulnerable and eager to excel.”

Swamy also praised his students in his Francophone Literature and Culture seminar for their patience when he had to switch the class time from 1 p.m. EST to 8:30 a.m. EST to accommodate a student with a 12-hour time difference. With much gratitude he said, “Students have been incredibly patient and incredibly generous in accepting the situation as it is.”

Although most remote professors have devoted plenty of their time and energy into delivering the most robust education they possibly can, they have had to grapple with some limitations. In many cases,

the limitations are physical. This includes experiencing “Zoom fatigue” after sitting in front of computer screens for many hours.

Hantzopoulos in particular has been experiencing much “Zoom fatigue.” As the Department Chair of Education, she is working with other Education faculty in trying to partner Vassar alumnae/i who work as teachers with student interns to help teach younger students in communities in need of assistance during these times. She stated, “We are trying to seize the opportunity to support the needs that are emerging out of this pandemic.”

However, orchestrating this program via Zoom while simultaneously teaching class online has proven exhausting. As articulated by Hantzapolous, “Sometimes I’m on Zoom for eight hours in a day…I just need to get out just even for half an hour or 45-minute walk just to feel like I’m okay.”

Remote teaching has also proven to be very isolating for some professors missing their pre-pandemic interactions with colleagues. Pater joked, “Being around other adults is something that I miss a lot…I really haven’t left the house much. And, I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m a really sociable person and so it’s killing me.” As this is Pater’s second year teaching at Vassar, she is sad to lose the opportunity to meet even more faculty: “This has really thrown a wrench into my even getting to know other people on campus,” she said.

Although in-person interactions are not as prevalent for remote faculty, Pater has tried to look on the brighter side: “I have actually had more interactions with faculty members outside my department who are active on social media. So that’s something that maybe would not have happened as much had this not happened.”

Swamy called on both faculty and students to acknowledge and accept the limitations that the current pandemic presents and to shift their focus towards fostering a more transparent, compassionate relationship with one another. He described the situation with a metaphor: “It’s like the beautiful swan swimming upstream. It looks like it’s gliding, but do you know what’s happening under the water?

The swan is furiously paddling with its webbed feet.”

He continued, “Sometimes, it’s hard to pull the curtain back and see that and let other people see it, right? Students don’t want to tell other students ‘Oh I’m having a hard time.’ Or professors don’t want to say ‘I’m sorry, I’m just overwhelmed.’ But I think we need to be able to say that and find comfort and support in the community to get over that feeling so we can do what we need to do.”

From left to right: Faculty Members PeiPei Qiu, Robert Osborne, Benjamin Lotto, Colette Salyk and Maria Hantzopoulos are teaching remotely this fall. First courtesy of Buck Lewis; second courtesy of Graham Haber; third, fourth, and fifth courtesy of Karl Rabe/Vassar College.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

September 17, 2020

ARTS

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A look back on Carol Christian Poell Autumn/Winter 2001 Massimo Tarridas Guest Columnist

Carol Christian Poell is a Milan-based Austrian anti-fashion designer. He is known for his highly conceptual work in which he uses singular artisanal techniques. Poell’s most fabled pieces include a sweater knit from tanned pig intestines, a tie made of a horse’s tail, a whole piglet taxidermied into a purse, transparent leather, leather dyed with blood…

Born into a lineage of leather-makers, Poell’s collections are obsessed with cycles of life and death. In Poell’s Autumn/Winter 2001 video presentation titled “Public Freedom,”he continued to explore this fascination by locking models within the cages of a municipal dog pound in Milan.

The opening image is an unoccupied hallway lit by bright white fluorescent lights.

The sterile scenery mocks the typical runway show by playing with the structure of the catwalk: there is no one walking in the elongated hallway, and where there should be seats for press, there are cages. The show

has become a panopticon. The models pace around nervously—one of them puts a cigarette in his mouth but never lights it. Another grabs hold of the iron bars in a cartoonish “Free Me!” position. The video’s soundtrack consists of incessant electrical whirring and the harsh echoes of dogs barking; the cinematography is all tilted angles—poorly framed, poorly timed, the camera panning from our subjects into nothing. The discomfort is purposeful.

All of Poell’s clothing is infamous for either being so delicately constructed that the wearer might tear it at the seams, or for containing materials that might inflict pain on the wearer. These two kinds of constructions—frailty and pain—are conceptualized as the “DEAD END” and “SELF-EDGE” series. The “DEAD END” line is sewn in such a way that the garment threatens to pull itself apart, where a pair of pants might be made of a single piece of fabric held together by a thin overlock stitch (aesthetically mirroring the stitching on a fresh wound). The “SELFEDGE” line is represented by impossibly

Courtesy of Stephan Zeisler.

Via fashionlines.com strict materials and cuts; for example, Poell extends the sleeves of a moto jacket into a fingerless glove, and places rough titanium prosthetics over the knuckles and the elbow.

In a rare interview, Poell mused, “I do not think of dress as a complement to the body.

Rather I seek to annul the body—actually, I consider it only a volume and a three-dimensional form.”

“Public Freedom” likewise neglects the body. Every outfit is dysfunctional; tuxedo shirts are too long and untucked, pants are tucked inside of tall boots, leather gloves are built like tight mittens, belts are replaced by rubber bands, a sweater is knit from strands of thick latex… And the final step of this dehumanization occurs at the very end, when models are credited by first name only, like animals. Poell’s work is a veritable example of the term “anti-fashion” because he never adheres to trends or glamour; he is not concerned with elevating the human form.

The look of his garments may sometimes be somewhat strange, but the vast majority of them are actually quite boring when compared to the colorful, shapely theatricality of regular fashion. Since the outward appearance of his garments usually hide

a complex or fragile fabrication, the act of wearing them is extremely personal.

For this collection, Poell asked himself “about the difference between us and people who are in jail … I was thinking about Sunday clothes, which represent a rather false situation where even someone who beats their wife at home dresses well.”

Poell gives nuance to the dichotomies—of life and death, freedom and imprisonment, appearance and inner workings— by leaving the cage doors open. In one instance, a model is even seen walking into a cage voluntarily, and in another we see a group staring into one from the outside. By including a permeability in the show’s performance, Poell is suggesting that these dualities, though seemingly unchanging and impenetrable, are constructs with which we engage (or perhaps suffer through) for some inexplicable aesthetic. After all, why would someone wear Poell’s garments if not for their own semi-masochistic enjoyment? This question could be posed towards any piece of clothing that isn’t immediately striving for maximum comfort—but the answer lies within our pursuit of supposed beauty, which imprisons us despite the pleasure it bestows.

CTV3 by JADEN: a psychadelic meandering in isolation Hindley Wang

Guest Columnist

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t’s mellow, nostalgic, colorful and sad.

The hypnotic music video for “Cabin Fever” brings the wistful imagery of “Tall palm trees and kaleidoscope dreams” to life.” In Jaden’s third studio album “CTV3,” he is definitely imagining, and even reminiscing about, a familiar reality that seems to be drifting away. The songs are full of retrospective reflections and emotional explorations, suitable for this time of great uncertainty—a time where excess feelings have to stay at home.

“Falling for You” features Justin Bieber, to whom Jaden owes his 2008 debut track “Never Say Never”—a full circle moment for Jaden’s musical journey. The chorus is a playful punchline that lacks self-awareness: “I think I’m fallin for you/if you don’t call me I’ll jump off the roof.” “Everything” is a change of pace, featuring a beautiful background instrumental that demonstrates his sonic breadth—however, his musicianship is overshadowed by the monotonous chorus of the single line “You’re my everything.”

If his previous projects of “Syre” and “Erys” evoke memories that we never had, then to a certain extent “CTV3,” de-

spite its flaws, stands as a remembrance of a (cyber, emotional, temporal) space and time we used to know.

The album heavily features guitar ballads against a background of various pop and R&B instrumentals, allowing the melodies to explore the possibilities of both comfort and anxiety. Jaden is “ dreamin’ bout a summertime” of unrequited summer love; cruising by the coast with the top down, music blasting; hanging out with friends at a beach picnic; holding hands; dancing—all of which are out of reach right now. He’s dreaming about a “summertime” in summer, alluding to a feeling of displacement in time and experience that we are all exhausted and overwrought by. Carefree no more.

Although with a conspicuous appropriation of elements from his contemporaries (Frank Ocean, Tyler the creator, Post Malone), he presents an altered reality where the sounds that represent our generation exist in a reimagined space of placid solitude and playful serenity.

What this album offers is a vision of millennial sensibility and fragility that resonates at this juncture of past and future—an end to the simple comfort we took for granted. “Girl, I really wanna be-

lieve ya/If you love me, how come I never see ya? Eating marshmallow pies while you're flying through the sky/Girl, I got that cabin fever.”

It’s nostalgic, and captures the essence of universal youthful hopelessness and playfulness—the melodrama of unstable love, the emotional turmoil of lost connections—all of which sound like bliss compared to the agitation that the world is in.

Compared to his previous projects,

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

which contained too many concepts and not enough thoughtfulness, this album is focused on conveying one general sentiment with poetic attunement. Stylistically the most coherent of Jaden’s creations, “CTV3” shows both ambition and attentive curation. The result? A saccharine desolation.

This longing for love, fun and pink sunsets is what makes us feel the most displaced in isolation, in a time when the sky is on fire and people can’t breathe.

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September 17, 2020

Campus musicians explore isolation, vulnerability, nostalgia Summer standouts: Alouette Batteau, "Extra Vacation Days" and Ezra Caspi, "Recent Nostalgia"

Ben Scharf

Live Events Chairperson

Courtesy of Alouette Batteau.

This past summer was a long one—and not in the romantic “Endless Summer” kind of way.

Uncomfortably long. Stagnantly long.

Alouette Batteau ’23 found herself catapulted back into her hometown of Shelby Falls, MA in early March; unprepared and under-packed, she returned to a closet of sports shorts and old high school jerseys. Luckily, also waiting for her was a small room, perfectly carved for music- making.

It was there she recorded and produced her first solo EP, “Extra Vacation Days,” which paints a vivid portrait of life in quarantine: the space, new habits, pining for others.

Opening single “Isolationist” is clever and effervescent. Batteau shares with listeners her musings on the mundane. Her love for air conditioning and boxed wine is professed over sweet and tremulous guitars. “Honestly, I'm sick of rooms and blurry screens/ I’ve worn out all the novelty,” she admits. Speaking for all students frustrated by Zoom fatigue, Batteau is here to empathize.

Another standout track, “Half Assed Poetry,” houses a lyric that inspired the project’s namesake: “Love to feel the post party haze// and extra vacation days.” Surprisingly, however, this song was written pre-quarantine, giving it clairvoyant relevancey.

“I had played the song a couple of times on campus last semester, then took it back home to my three-piece band Kalliope Jones,” Batteau said as we talked under a tree on the quad.

“I guess it was quarantine that afforded me the time to create my own arrangement for the song and record it myself. I didn't even need to change the lyrics, somehow it just perfectly fit into the quarantine theme.”

Batteau’s first solo venture also showcases her skills as a formidable multi-instrumentalist, reliably proficient in each instrument she picks up. Rich guitar tones weave through inventive song structures, offering unexpected interludes and powerful builds between ear-catching hooks.

“It was cool to have full artistic control,” Batteau said. “With Kalliope Jones, the arrangements were always just drums, bass guitar and vocals, so I enjoyed getting to arrange horn sections and trying weird synth sounds out on my own.”

Listening to Batteau take on a stronger production role leaves me anxiously anticipating the release of her first solo record, “Turn Me Honest.” Until then, “Extra Vacation Days” leaves plenty to get lost in. Poignant lyricism and whimsical arrangements invite listeners to reflect on their own experiences of isolation.

Once quarantine hit, Ezra Caspi ’23 returned to his seaside home in Holmdel, NJ. He was alone in some sense of the word, but with ample time to comb through his favorite late ’60s era rock records, he never felt it was hard to ever feel completely solitary.

Caspi wears the influence of those timeless records on his sleeve in his latest album, “Recent Nostalgia.” Boasting meticulous harmonies and air-tight songwriting, the record makes for pleasant, relaxed listening. Guitar in hand, Caspi effortlessly floats across different genres, determined to pay homage to his heroes while also sharing his own stories.

The surf-rock revival single “Mice in the Sound Hole” is an immediate standout due to its infectious, sticky hook and bright guitar leads. The lyrics’ reference to the Beach Boys— “You say you like The Beach Boys, and my long hair, turn my life into an August love affair”— is a clever nod to one of Ezra’s key influences.

“When I was a kid, the Beach Boys played constantly. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were equally huge,” Caspi told me while sitting on a bench outside of Noyes, next to a tent selling posterssaid. “Hearing all of those harmonies, I just grew to love that sound. I feel like that style of harmony was really left in the ’60s and ’70s. Why? Why are we not doing that anymore? I suppose that's why I was so intent on reviving that sound.”

'Thus, Caspi's rich, retro harmonies are the centerpiece of the album. Three and sometimes four-part harmonies soar over acoustic guitars and playful synths, capturing the elusive charm of rock ’n’ roll’s golden age.

“Sad at Night,” with its driving beat and bright guitars, is enough to plunge any McCartney fan into full- blown Beatlemania.

“My initial intention wasn't to go for a Beatles sound, but once I got to the verses, the harmonies came to follow,” Caspi said. “It just felt right. The Beatles knew what they were doing, so why not try to learn from the best?”

It is evident that Caspi clearly wrote and recorded each song with care. Caspi is in many ways grateful for the COVID lockdowns, as it gave him boundless time to perfect the record."

“I think [quarantine] gave me a chance to be precise and really thoughtful about production in a way that I never had an opportunity to do before,” he reflected. “There is no way I would be as happy with the record if it wasn't for all the spare time I had on my hands.”

Lyrically, “Recent Nostalgia” confronts loss: of loved ones, of relationships, of time. The album’s title beautifully articulates a sentiment shared by anyone longing for the past, no matter how distant.

“When you think of nostalgia, normally you think of things way in the past, like childhood. But there's this weird phenomenon, especially in these bizarre times, where I find myself missing times from not so long ago at all, like a couple months ago when things were ‘normal,’ because everything changed so fast,” Caspi mused. “Sometimes it's even hard to discern what normal is anymore.”

No matter what a ‘new normals’ delivers, Caspi is determined to roll with the punches.

Courtesy of Ezra Caspi.

First-years return to the roots of bedroom pop: Casey McDonough, "ACVM-the EP" and Margot Gordinier, "Maladaptive Daydream" Katie Gebbia and Maya Page Guest Reporters

The once-underground genre of bedroom pop has recently exploded in popularity, and some of its biggest stars, such as Clairo and Still Woozy, have now entered the mainstream. They’ve moved from playing guitar in their bedrooms to playing sold-out shows across the globe—that is, before the pandemic began. With artists stuck in isolation, the pandemic has sparked a resurgence of the bedroom pop that is, true to its title, produced in the musician’s home. Like the luminaries of the genre, first-years Margot Gordinier and Casey McDonough took on the task of writing and recording EPs in their bedrooms.

McDonough’s interest in music began in her childhood. “I grew up in a very artistic household, and that kind of sparked me wanting to become a musician,” she said.

She began learning about music production in high school, which provided her with the skills to begin recording her own music. McDonough used SoundCloud as a platform to share her early work. With each release, she strived to share her love of music with more people.

The production of McDonough’s EP, “ACVM-the EP,” was not her first experience with authentic bedroom pop. She recorded and produced all of her previous singles from her home. When asked how COVID-19 affected the production of the EP, McDonough said, “It felt more enclosed, because I wasn’t able to go out and seek resources.” Her process, however, remained largely unchanged; she recorded, produced and released the EP entirely from her bedroom, using an iPad with GarageBand, an audio interface and her guitar.

Though quarantine had little impact on her production process, the experience influenced the lyricism of the song “fearing the unknown.” Inspired by McDonough’s feelings of claustrophobia as the end of high school approached, she wrote the song about wanting to move on, despite the fear that she would never be able to. For other Vassar first-years, having just experienced a similar uncertainty, this sentiment is particularly moving.

McDonough’s music is deeply emotional, and she hopes people can relate to the experiences she conveys. Her goal is to make people feel known and to help them through periods of difficulty with her creations.

Much like McDonough, Margot Gordinier’s connection with music began at a young age. Flying through musical theater in kindergarten, piano in second grade and guitar at age 14, she had accumulated impressive melodic awareness and technique by the time she reached middle school. It was around that time, she lightheartedly recalled, that she started writing “angsty poetry” on the Notes app of her old phone.

Suddenly, the two art forms merged: “I was like, oh—maybe I can put some tunes to this, so I’ll get a guitar and live out my angsty dreams.”

It wasn’t until the end of her sophomore year of high school, however, that Gordinier made the leap to recording, prompted by an assignment to do so in her chorus class. That summer, she created her first album entirely on her phone. Gordinier used the website Soundtrap, which she de-

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Courtesy of Margot Godinier. scribed as “like GarageBand, but worse.”

Both Soundtrap from Spotify and Garage Band from Apple are technology basics for the bedroom pop genre, providing young artists with the necessary software to record, edit and produce their own music all on one device. And as much as Gordinier jokes about the poor sound quality, she agrees that Soundrap was the introduction she needed to up her production game for the next project.

Enter Gordinier’s EP, “Maladaptive Daydream,” which was released in April. This time, she stepped up her tech by adding a computer, a microphone and a MIDI, as well as by enlisting other musicians to diversify sound. “I tried to add more layers and make it more complex so it was a little bit more professional,” she explained.

Though most of the recording was done before quarantine, she completed the tail end of production with the program Logic (“GarageBand on steroids!” she exclaimed), which she plans to further explore it in future projects.

Gordinier admitted she hadn’t done much recording during isolation. “I just couldn’t put as much time into music. I wanted to come out of it withan album, but I was just so miserable,” she shared. Her writing, however, soon flourished with the extra time alone. She said her new lyrics and tunes are an honest reflection of both her experiences in quarantine and the universally overwhelming state of the world today.

Gordinier recommended new listeners start with the songs “Daydream in the Fairest Weather” and “Debt.” The first is her most popular, clocking over 1,500 plays on Spotify. Yet, despite having the lowest play time, “Debt” is her personal favorite. “I’m obsessed with the slide guitar, and I’m really happy with the way it turned out,” she said.

Gordinier explained that the title of her EP and the message of her songs are cautionary; she seeks to warn listeners of the dangers of fixation. “It’s definitely a reflection on how I get so obsessed with things that are just trivial, and think about them so much that it’s harmful to me,” she shared. She noted that music has helped her grow out of these harmful behaviors.

As she continues to create, Gordinier looks forward to using her songs as a vehicle for even deeper catharsis.

Despite the ever-present shadow of COVID-19 pandemic, artists like McDonough and Gordinier are still finding successful modes of artistic expression from the comfort of their own homes (or dorms). Musicians from all genres may find themselves taking notes from the innovative, passionate and COVID-safe ethos of bedroom pop.

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September 17, 2020

Page 7

What I did for a week and a half before classes started at Vassar after moving in the second week of August

by Olivia As a Japanese major, I spent much of practicing during quarantine reading manga. I got through one series and a few other books. Then, I stumbled upon an anime called “Toilet-bound Hanako-kun,” which definitely sounded interesting.

Well, I watched it, watched it a few more times, read the manga up to the current chapter, got some books, drew some fan art, then bought some posters. I moved back to Vassar, and one of my housemates had a button maker.

One night, I drew one Hanako-themed button, then another, and soon I had 26. Another night, I drew 14 more and put them through the button maker. Now, I have 35 buttons, one for each character. Some are directly referenced from the manga or official art, but I edited them all to fit the button format. Weeks later I am able to draw one in about 20 minutes (which was pretty fast compared to the beginning).

Of course, there are probably a few minor characters missing, but it is probably the biggest set of hand-drawn Hanako-themed buttons on campus. If there is a bigger one, or actually any other Hanako button collection at all on campus, let me know so we can be friends, please.

I tried to put them all on the back of my Vassar-mandated dining bag. However, that didn’t work since there are so many. I ended up putting the remaining buttons on the front, around the painting I did of Yashiro Nene, one of the main characters.

Political engagements redefine K-Pop stans Xin Rui Ong

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Columnist

find myself bopping my head to the catchy beats while I walk down the stairs or brush my teeth. I am just one of over 100 million people viewing South Korean boyband BTS’ music video “Dynamite” within hours of its release, smashing the previous YouTube record.

The worldwide fanbase organized streaming sessions to make the music video go viral, demonstrating the power of K-pop solidarity. But the ardent K-pop community mobilizes not only for songs and music videos, but also politics. The fanbase has gained notoriety for expanding political consciousness and advocacy among Gen-Zers.

This summer saw many publicized instances of K-pop fans’ witty political savvy.

On June 20, President Trump held a campaign rally in front of rows upon rows of empty blue seats in Tulsa, OK. While his campaign touted more than a million registrations for the event, hundreds of seats had actually been secured and inflated

by K-pop stans (name for devoted superfans) who had zero intention of attending.

Fans also prompted each other to flood the white supremacist hashtag #WhiteLivesMatter with fancams (focused footage of

their favorite idols,) messing with Twitter’s algorithm. The platform then promoted #WLM as a circulating K-pop trend. BTS and their label, Big Hit Entertainment chimed in with anti-racist sentiments and donated one million dollars to Black Lives Matter, which quickly prompted fans to cooperate and match another million dollars for the movement. Leveraging on close-knit fan networks and proficient digital literacy, K-pop fans have emerged collectively as online activists.

While this increased political consciousness is new within the K-pop community, it is impossible to discuss its role in promoting Black Lives Matter online without acknowledging the influence Black culture has had on K-pop: Black hairstyles and dance have been frequently appropriated. In addition to activism that is a result of watching idols express anti-racist ideals and values, there is still space for K-pop stans to critically reflect on what BLM means in an industry that incorporates Black culture superficially.

Crucial conversations surrounding cultural appropriation and racism do not end after donating. An industry that draws attention to aesthetics should always consider the cultural implications. K-pop girl group BLACKPINK’s recent music video “How You

Like That” featured a statue of a Hindu deity lying on the ground, devalued as a prop. It was removed from the video after criticisms appeared online, but no statement of apology acknowledging the transgression was publicized. While many K-pop musicians and fans have taken big steps in educating themselves and others on social media, they must also be alert to signs of appropriation and hold record labels accountable.

A resulting heightened awareness is integral to earning respect from the global fanbase. SM Entertainment, the oldest and one of the most recognized Korean entertainment company, issued a statement on Twitter expressing support for BLM. They mentioned that they were “new to this conversation,” but current discussions on anti-racism will be key commitments.

This did not please US fans who expected actions much more substantial than an online statement from SM, a company that prides themselves on their global reach. In response, fans organized #SMBLACKOUT, a movement to call on SM Entertainment for more stakes and accountability in BLM. Admittedly, this hashtag has little impact on SM’s influence in the industry, but this instance highlights outspoken American fans’ willingness to use the social tools they

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

have and press for changes they anticipate to see.

The truth is that the K-pop industry itself isn’t inherently political, and scrutiny from a global audience on sociopolitical issues is a relatively recent phenomenon. There are many ways for the industry to continue learning—one way to start is by building more diverse creative teams, featuring artists of different backgrounds who recognize the cultural references used in production and can speak on their appropriateness.

Rather than just passively acknowledging fan reactions, labels should also engage in conversations with fans. In turn, when recognizing mistakes that have offended fans, labels should issue formal apologies.

K-pop stans are not passive consumers, but rather critics of the media they consume. The ideals that motivate them to push for change in the political arena branches out to the ways they challenge the entertainment industry. With the help of social media, the quick evolution of K-pop fans into online activists has brought surprises in political discourse. Social media has bridged two seemingly tenuously related topics, K-Pop and politics, and the pivot towards increased social consciousness brings a lot of hope for the future.

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September 17, 2020

Vassar may be changing, but the climate is too Monika Sweeney Guest Reporter

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very day without fail, trash bins across campus reach maximum capacity. It is impossible to miss the omnipresent, ever-growing piles of Deece graband-go plastic containers and single use utensils filling the fetid, wasp-guarded bins. Judging by the amount of containers tossed into trash receptacles around campus, an overwhelmingly large percentage of the student body still does not seem to realize that the black-bottomed containers, once washed, are in fact recyclable.

While the switch to single-use plastic utensils and containers in the Deece is just one of this semester’s many precautionary safety measures, one can not help but wonder just how far actions like this will set Vassar back in its long term goals for a sustainable campus. With years of progress to reflect on and plans already in motion for a greener, more eco-friendly campus, will this single-use plastic overload chip away at the years of advancement that members of the Vassar community have worked towards? Or will the community rise to the challenge, adapt to their surroundings and press even harder for a more sustainable campus?

A number of students, such as Tess Ruddy ’24 and Amanda Berry ’23, have taken initiative and invested in their own sets of reusable silverware. “I am continually working to reduce waste in my personal life, and given the necessary changes in the usage of plastic containers in the Deece, I have been trying to figure out other ways that I can become more sustainable,” said Ruddy.

Office of Sustainability Director Micah Kenfield recently joined students in this endeavor, sending out a Google form for those interested in ordering their own set. Currently, a caddy sits outside the Office of Sustainability with dozens of reusable silverware containers for students to take. Celeste Weidemann ’23 happily ordered her own collection of reusable silverware last week.

Weidemann, an active member of Students for Equitable Environmental Decisions (SEED), worked throughout the 2019-2020 school year to push the college and President Elizabeth Bradley to formally declare a climate emergency. The strategy detailed in the Climate Emergency Response Plan (CERP) includes a complete divestment from fossil fuels, implementing changes to make the Deece more sustainable and initiating more policies to keep both the administration and individuals on track with Vassar’s goal.

Through this formal declaration, Vassar responded to the increased awareness and education promoted over the past few years by clubs like SEED, Vassar Greens and the Vassar Bike and DIY Repair Shop, as well as committees such as the Climate Action and Sustainability Committee (CASC).

CASC is one of the many mechanisms in place to keep Vassar on track with its promise of carbon neutrality. The group regularly meets with administrators to analyze past and future sustainability projects, and to offer its own input as to how the college can minimize its carbon footprint. As a committee of faculty members, students and administrators, a range of viewpoints are guaranteed to be heard.

Additionally, Vassar Greens, an organization that starts action-based campaigns to create long-lasting positive impacts

on the environment, has paired up with SEED this semester to provide the campus with information about waste reduction, an area members of Greens are very familiar with. Last year, pre-pandemic, Greens helped push Vassar’s dining facilities to use nearly 100 percent compostable materials. Even amid a pandemic, members of Greens are hard at work, currently organizing a sustainability week and a climate strike for next month. Those in the club also regularly focus on minimizing personal waste and working towards a zero waste living space.

Environmentally conscious students insist that sustainability can be practiced in every facet of campus life, including student residences. Weidemann suggests that houses work as a collective unit to combat climate change—they can start by electing an official within the building, similar to a House Fellow or House Advisor, to take on the position of Sustainability Director. Their job would be to educate the house on recycling, composting and other ways to live more sustainably. While compost bins within the dorms have always been a difficult task due to bugs and unpleasant odors, some students are still willing, to some degree, to give it another go.

Another pandemic-induced sustainability nightmare involving the Deece can be seen at the building’s exit: a sea of plastic water bottles bobbing in ice bins. In the past, Vassar had banned the sale of water bottles on campus and introduced refillable water bottle stations, which now lie unused. While the Deece’s water bottle bins and grab-and-go system are less than ideal for waste management, the dining hall’s food-service management company, Bon Appétit, recently announced on their website that it is the first in its industry to address the role food plays in climate change. The company has also shifted to using only sustainable seafood and supporting local farmers.

SEED president Lucinda Carroll ’23 believes that the Deece should also swap some of the meat products served throughout the week for healthier, greener alternatives. SEED members are also seeking to minimize the egregious amounts of both plastic and food waste coming out of the Deece. A group of SEED members, in collaboration with those in Greens, have compiled a tentative list of some possible solutions, of which include a recycling campaign, exploring dishwashing options for the to-go containers and displaying more images around trash bins to educate students on how to sort disposable materials such as containers, utensils and napkins.

“Sustainability at Vassar is largely connected to individual actions and decisions, but there’s a lot of work to be done on an administrative level,” says Carroll.

SEED members are calling upon the administration to repurpose the Vassar Golf Course, a generous plot of land that was recently at the center of a campus debate on the prevalence of non-masked visitors.

Sonali Deshpande ’21 and Jacob Hunter ’21 came up with the idea to use the course as a Photovoltaic Solar Facility, a system of solar panels that are able to generate a direct current through a conversion of electricity through sunlight. Melissa Hoffmann ’21 created a petition to push the administration to adopt their proposal. This project includes tables and graphs of Vassar’s energy projects and global growth in net electricity generating capacity, in addition to a proposed solution, a break-

down of numbers, and an emphasis on underutilized property. Although the school’s golf team does not practice on the Vassar Golf Course, there is even a section listing alternative course locations for the team’s use. This proposal concludes with a call to action through competition. It lists a handful of comparable schools, such as Bowdoin College and Fordham University, that have already implemented on-site solar initiatives.

According to Vassar’s website, existing initiatives in building on-site solar, along with switching to natural gas for heating and purchasing greener electricity, have been the areas in which the most significant carbon reduction has occurred. As of 2018, Vassar came to an agreement with BQ Energy, in which the college would purchase 15 percent of its electricity via a community solar project just a few miles off campus. Members of the Vassar community that pushed for this agreement were also responsible for the 34-kilowatt on-site solar array installation put in at the Vassar Farm and Ecological Preserve later that year. Another 10 percent of Vassar’s electricity is purchased from Gravity Renewables, a company that runs a hydroelectric dam in Beacon, NY. Vassar is still planning to slowly move toward some of their climate action goals during the COVID-19 pandemic. Renewable Fuel Oil (RFO) is a sawdust and tree trimming-derived biofuel that Vassar plans to use to further its goals in reducing the college’s carbon footprint. A tentative schedule proposed for this partial decarbonization process has it take place up until 2022. Some more immediate steps include implementing alternative heating technologies into buildings and establishing more locations for electric vehicle charging. As of now, there are only two on-campus electric vehicle charging stations, both of which are outside of Josselyn House.

A new Climate Action Plan is also in the

works, one that will wholly and clearly articulate Vassar’s sustainability plans for the next five years. With this plan, students across campus hope to see a higher level of commitment from the administration to promoting environmental justice—not just at Vassar, but also in the surrounding community. As Carroll puts it, “We have a duty to use our resources and give back to the place we call home, and that includes supporting the environmental initiatives in Poughkeepsie and Arlington.”

Hoffmann, an Environmental Studies major, active member of SEED and former member of Greens, summed up why sustainability is so important to our communities: “Sustainability means preserving what we have left of the environment and stable climate to protect communities most hurt by harmful extraction practices, and continu[ing] to provide necessary resources to communities that have been left out from receiving them.”

Hoffmann’s advice to the Vassar community is simple: Educate yourself on environmental issues, including environmental racism, indigenous rights and everything in between. The path to a better future, she believes, will be paved by a commitment among students and administrators alike to reduce the campus’s energy consumption and implement a plastic-free policy. Carroll advised building more water bottle refilling stations in dorms or devoting an aspect of orientation to discussing the college’s sustainability goals as immediate goals for the Vassar administration.

Despite discouraging vistas like the plastic water bottles left on Joss Beach or the egregious amount of water wasted in the College Center’s dispenser, conscientious organizations, open-minded faculty members and inspired students will continue to tirelessly work for a better, cleaner Vassar that future generations will be able to enjoy.

Above, Amanda Berry ’23 uses her reusable silverware to eat dinner outside of Main Building. Courtesy of Monika Sweeney..

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

FEATURES

September 17, 2020

Page 9

Easy-to-make pasta for Zoom breaks Lukas Johnson

Guest Columnist

So, you haven’t thought about food at all during the long hours of Zoom classes in your bedroom. But when the day is done, and you’re sitting there doing nothing, a pang of hunger slowly creeps into your stomach. You need something to eat, and fast—but you don’t want the same old college meal. You want something special, satisfying and also healthy. You want to cook for yourself—but you, like many college students, are not exactly a gourmet cook. Don’t stress! A quick pasta is the perfect solution.

Easy to make and a staple comfort food, it brings me back toloud, high energy pasta parties with my teammates the day before a big meet. Here is a simple recipe that I’ve been working on over the neverending months of quarantine that uses common ingredients and turns you into an instant chef.

Buttered Pasta with Fried Herbs Ingredients: • Salt, lots of it (preferably kosher or sea—more on this later) • 1 lb. dried pasta (fettuccine or spaghetti, but whatever you have on hand will work just fine)

•

4 tablespoons (½ stick) butter (if this seems like too much butter, replace half or all with olive oil) • ~¼ cup chopped leafy herbs (sage is one of my personal favorites!)

• Dried herbs can easily be substituted.

Just remember that they are much more concentrated, so only use a tablespoon. As a rule of thumb, you only need around ⅓ of the volume of fresh herbs if using dry.

• Parmesan cheese (opt. garnish) • Black pepper (less opt. garnish, freshly ground is preferred) Boil a large pot of water. Add salt. Add the pasta, stirring frequently. In the meantime, place a skillet over medium heat. Melt 3 tablespoons of butter, then add the chopped herbs with a light sprinkling of salt (add a splash of pasta water if using dried herbs).

Consistently stir for about one minute, or until the herbs start to turn a darker green.

Switch heat to low and add one more splash of pasta water to prevent burning.

When the pasta is al dente, drain it, saving some of the pasta water, and quickly rinse with cold water to prevent overcooking. Add the pasta to the skillet with the

last tablespoon of butter, adding some more pasta water as needed to get your preferred consistency. Serve hot out of the pan and garnish with grated parmesan and ground black pepper (I usually use a lot).

Now that we have the basics down, here are a few crucial pointers to elevate this simple meal: SALT. YOUR. PASTA. WATER. I cannot emphasize this enough! So many people either don’t salt their pasta water at all, or just don’t put enough. Don’t be shy—most of the salt will go down the drain, so you better put enough in to draw out the flavor. Go ahead and taste some:It should taste like an Italian beach in the summertime. The first time I properly salted pasta, my world changed forever. “Pasta can have flavor?!” I thought to myself. Yes, it can! Salt your pasta!

Use kosher or sea salt when you do! Normal table salt, while perfectly fine if no other option is available, is not ideal. It contains iodine as an additive, which was once thought to be an important dietary mineral, but nowadays we get more than enough of it. But most importantly, iodine just tastes yucky. By using pure NaCl in the form of sea or kosher salt, we eliminate the muddled

flavor of normal salt and emerge with much more satisfied tongues.

What even is al dente? Maybe this is common knowledge, but when I first really got into cooking I didn’t know what it meant, besides just an ideally cooked pot of pasta. Al dente means “to the tooth” in Italian. Essentially, it is the “just right" of pasta—cooked, but not too floppy. The time it takes to boil pasta al dente should be marked on the pasta box, but it is also extremely important to taste the pasta to make sure it has the right consistency.

Practice makes perfect! While cliché, this phrase is something often neglected in cooking. Even with something as simple as pasta, you need to make it many, many times to truly become a master. As you cook more and more, you’ll start catching onto cues—what al dente pasta looks, sounds and even smells like; how much salt is just right; which herbs taste best and which should be saved for a different recipe.

All in all, the more you cook, the better you cook. But with this guide and whatever other resources you choose to use, you’ll embark into the world of top tier pasta with a running start!

Vassar students provide local perspectives on Oregon fires Dean Kopitsky Sports Editor

If you already know what it means to worry that your home will soon burn to the ground, you don’t need to read on. If not, let Eleanor Carter ’22 and Kaiya John ’23, two Vassar students from a rural area in southwest Oregon, paint that picture for you.

Kaiya and Eleanor went to the same high school. Their hometowns are just miles apart, and now they live just a few doors down from one another in Lathrop.

Eleanor is from Ashland, a picturesque town of about 20,000 people nestled in a valley between the Siskiyou Forest and Cascade mountain range. Ashland deserves its own story—everyone there is seemingly bound to a hippie ethos. When Eleanor graduated from high school, family friends gave her crystals as tokens of good luck. (For Eleanor’s sanity, I should point out that she is not a crystal hippie). Ashland is a mostly well-off community, the sort of town where coffee shops sell $8 juices. A sheer gap in wealth equality means there is almost no middle class, just mansions within the city limits, working class homes below the main boulevard and little in between.

A flood of tourists from the town’s annual Shakespeare festival—the largest of its kind in the United States—makes the town seem more affluent than it is. There is one high school in Ashland, and, most importantly, everyone knows everyone.

Kaiya is from a town called Talent, just a few miles to the northeast of Ashland on Highway 99. Talent boasts three grocery stores, one gas station and 4,000 people.

Kaiya says it’s a one street town, with a population on the older side. “We don’t have anything else to do,” said Kaiya. And just like Ashland, everyone knows each other.

As wildfires are common during this time of year, both Eleanor and Kaiya were signed up to receive alerts from the emergency notification system. On Tuesday, the Almeda fire broke out three blocks from Eleanor’s home. 3,000 miles away, Eleanor and Kaiya were in class when they started getting notifications. “Evacuate Quiet Village,” said one of the alerts, referring to Eleanor’s neighborhood. From there, the fire spread to a skate park and followed a greenway that runs parallel to a bike path.

Soon Interstate 5, Oregon’s only interstate, was shuttered due to traffic.

The official count of homes destroyed by the fire is at 600. However, the state doesn’t count mobile homes as houses. Because all the mobile home neighborhoods, of which there are many, in the area burned down, that number is actually in the thousands, according to Eleanor. An estimated 80 percent of Phoenix Elementary School students and 50 percent of Talent Elementary School students are now homeless.

An Oregon man was soon arrested for potential arson in connection with the fire, but Kaiya and Eleanor know that he isn’t really to blame for the whole wreckage. It was 100 degrees the day the fire started and winds blustered at 50 mph—two symptoms of climate change that have caused recent wildfires to swell to unprecedented magnitudes. “You can’t even use a lawnmower because it could spark and go up,” Eleanor explained. Kaiya’s father is an arborist, but the times he can use power tools on the job are limited. “It used to be you couldn’t use it after 1 p.m., now it’s 10 a.m.” she said.

In past summers, pregnant women were cautioned to evacuate from Ashland because of the dangerous air quality index (AQI). 100 is considered dangerous—in Oregon, the AQI can reach 500. “It’s like smoking every time you go outside,” said Eleanor. One summer the air quality was so poor that it made Eleanor sick after each shift at an outdoor restaurant. She recalled, “I would come home, coughing the whole time until my shift the next morning. Not to mention, the current pandemic contains a virus that crudely attacks the lungs, compounding on these fires.”

Looking at The New York Times wildfire tracker, the Almeda Fire now hugs Highway 99 in a reddish-grey haze. It has transformed into an amorphous blob that indiscriminately covers the landscape, roads and subdivisions as it stretches from northeast Ashland to Talent to Phoenix.

“This is the nightmare scenario for college kids who move this far away,” said Eleanor. “This is the thing that you think about.

What if my family needs me?” Neither of their families revealed to them the extent of the damage at home. “Because we’re at this fancy school, they think we shouldn’t

be concerned about money, or a fire...It was really difficult to figure out what was happening,” said Eleanor.

For the first couple of days, Kaiya had to negotiate her desire to know her family’s whereabouts with their desire to keep her mind at ease. “I didn’t want to feel like an extra burden by asking them what was going on,” Kaiya said. She asked for the bare essentials. “I just texted them every night to know where they were sleeping.”

It also remains uncertain how much longert Eleanor and Kaiya will be at Vassar.

The COVID-19 pandemic is held at bay by the thin reassurance of a bubble around a campus that is currently down to zero active cases—but if an outbreak occurs, they might be forced to leave Poughkeepsie. What does being “sent back home” mean if you’re sleeping somewhere new every night, or if your home may have burned down? “Literally my street, all around it is burned down.

I don’t know why or how it didn’t but it should have,” explains Kaiya. “There is one street that is Talent,” she says. “One side of the street burned down and the other didn’t.

I’m on the side that didn’t.”

It is a hard thing to wrap your head around, but the same crews that respond to home fires and cats in trees are now fighting fires that cover entire metropolitan areas.

Needless to say, the crews are overburdened.

“It’s such a great group of guys, but there’s just not enough of them,” said Kaiya, who spent some of her senior year of high school riding in their trucks for a school project.

As for Eleanor, she recalls seeing requests for civilians to come help fight the fires. “I

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

saw a Facebook post that read, ‘if you’ve got a bucket and a shovel, come down to this hotel, because it’s about to catch fire.’” Eleanor shared the last news she heard: “The fire was zero percent contained and the fire department decided it was too much to try to control... so they just stopped fighting it.”

But people haven’t stopped fighting for resources and aid. Eleanor looked down at her phone intermittently throughout the interview. A few minutes in, her phone dinged and she apologized for the interruption. It’s the Slack for the mutual aid spreadsheet, she explained. She repurposed the document Vassar students have been using to support each other since the pandemic hit in March. Other people have helped translate the spreadsheet to Spanish, and have pasted links to GoFundMes, but “it has gotten unmanageable,” she admitted.

“In the past week I probably spent five or six hours a day responding to people’s requests, explaining how to use it, fielding emails to combine resources. I haven’t done my homework this week…so many people are so desperate.” Her phone rang again. “I just missed a call from a guy who wants to put information on the spreadsheet.”

A gust of wind blowing a different way, and this story could’ve been far graver. The fire is now 60 percent contained, and both Kaiya and Eleanor’s homes have survived.

But that could change. “I’m trying to prepare myself mentally because that could still happen,” says Kaiya. As climate change heats and dries the West Coast, wildfires are projected to become as much a part of an Oregon summer as Shakespeare Festivals.

A house in Ashland burns. Courtesy of Gabriel Lipper.

HUMOR

Page 10

September 17, 2020

Breaking News

From the desk of Izzy Migani, Humor Editor

Watching "Pride and Prejudice" (2005) for the fifth time this week found to not count as psychiatric therapy Roommates become indistinguishable Blair Webber

Talent Scout for Ripley's Believe It or Not

With many professors opting to teach online and most org activities happening remotely, getting out of your dorm room can feel like a chore. With assigned sinks and toilet stalls, even going to the bathroom is no longer a casual activity. This has left many students, such as first-year roommates Jada Markland and Jo June Rawlings, struggling to spend time out of their room.

“Between org meetings happening mainly online and not being able to work in places that aren’t my room, I haven’t left except to go to the Deece. And besides Jo June, I don’t know that many people on campus, so it’s been hard to make a lot of new friends,” Markland commented.

“That’s OK, though, because we get along really well and we like spending time together.”

But after close to a month of spending almost every hour of the day together, Rawlings began to notice that something unusual was happening.

“I’d go to the bathroom in the morning and someone would say to me ‘That’s not your sink,’ even though I knew it was my

ARIES

sink,” Rawlings shared. “I thought it was an honest mistake—maybe people in our hallway weren’t sure which one of us was which—but it kept happening and I had to keep saying ‘This is my sink, I’m Jo June.”

Markland noticed the shift, too.

“When we first arrived, no one had trouble telling us apart. But lately it’s been like everyone thinks we’re exactly the same person,” Markland said.

The roommates have not gone crazy— everyone mistakes them for each other because they now look exactly alike. The science works like this: Two people spend so much time together in one room that they begin to take on the likeness of the other. It’s similar to how every dog looks like their owner, except in this case, two roommates look identical. This has created some problems for the roommates.

“They tried to give us a new roommate a while back,” Rawlings said. “Apparently Res Life got confused and thought only one person was living in our room, so they tried to put a third person in here. It was very awkward.”

Markland added, “We’ll get turned away at the Deece if we don’t walk in at the exact same time. If we stagger our entrances

HOROSCOPES

March 21 | April 19

TAURUS

April 20 | May 20

GEMINI

May 21 | June 20

You might be having trouble sleeping or odd dreams. Learn dream symbolism—a swimming pool can be a stand-in for your emotions. Or maybe you just like to swim. Whatever. Freud sucks and I hate him.

It’s never a bad time to understand the inherent value of simply listening—to your friends, a TED Talk, Gregorian chants, the far-superior and oft-overlooked Byzantine chants… whatever you feel is right.

August 23 | September 22

Madi Donat

LIBRA

If you’re confident, others will be too. Remem-

September 23 | ber why others gravitate to you—your exuberance!

Your love of life! The superstrong electromagnet October 22 you keep in your pocket that throws off the Earth’s spin!

SCORPIO

October 23 | November 21

November 22 | December 21

Good things for this week: Skirts, molasses, cats, saying hi to your professors, ABBA. Not-so-good things for this week: flip-flops, rocket ships, cannibalism, silence, hydrocarbons, not listening to ABBA. Try to give out compliments recklessly. It improves your own self-esteem, too! Tell them you like their pants, or their music taste, or the…cursed amulet that you…stole from Aries? OK, not that.

Please give that back.

CAPRICORN

Look up fun facts and tell them to your friends unprompted. Some starting points: Learn obscure animal sounds (lynx, fox, manatee, etc).

Or weird correlations (statistics prove storks might deliver babies after all).

Why do you always want to be in a place other than where you are? Take a shower, and notice the shower. It’s gross? Consider it noticed! It’s scary?

Consider that noticed, too. Maybe do this with a nature walk instead.

AQUARIUS

Have you ever thought about the fact that some letters are super underrated? Why does no one seem to care about W, huh? Like, where would journalism as an institution be without her? E and S have had their time in the spotlight.

September is a weird month because it doesn’t hide anything, though I guess that also makes it nice. If September were a person, I hope she’d be my friend. Make friends with new people this week, especially if they’re months.

PISCES

All of my best creative ideas come when I’m dog-tired. Try waking up really early and drawing a picture of a small animal. Give it a name and a kiss, and then release it into the world. You’d be surprised how fun it is.

LEO

VIRGO

Philosophy major so it’s not even like we can do useful things with this like attend each other’s classes when the other doesn’t feel like it or something. What a waste of suddenly being identical.”

Astral Projector

SAGITTARIUS

Do you ever think about old songs? Like, jazz standards and stuff? Where everyone was just like “I’ve never been more in love ever?” I don’t have advice; I’m just chatting. Those guys knew what was up. Why can’t we be like them?

July 23 | August 22

slightly, they think we’re trying to game the system and sneak someone in. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

Rawlings chimed in, “Jada is a Chem major and I’m thinking about declaring a

You feel caged in right now, but remember: That cursed amulet I gave you should get you out of any bind. Wait, you…you lost it? You lost the cursed amulet? OK, um…burn some sage and hope for the best.

CANCER

June 21 | July 22

Above are first-year roommates Jada Markland and Jo June Rawlings, who are now indistinguishable after spending nearly every waking moment together in their dorm for an entire month. They report that being identical isn't as fun as it seems. Via Pixabay..

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

December 22 | January 19

January 20 | February 18

February 19 | March 20

HUMOR

September 17, 2020

Page 11

Dr. G's Love Advice: Kinky Zoom University edition

By Nicholas Gorman (Zoom Sexpert)

D

ear Dr. G, I’m trying to keep things interesting for my girlfriend and me, but with all the Vassar Together regulations (which I respect and follow), it’s so hard to *spice things up* in the bedroom. How can I keep the teleromance going?

- Practicing Safe Six

D

ear Safe Six, Your plight is not a rare one in the modern age, especially since the start of quarantine. And I know that sometimes it may feel like romance is dead ,especially when your love is just a face in a sea of Zoom participants, all just trying to make it through your 200-level sociology class. However, the Pandora’s Box of the Internet era has a new, yet hidden, gift: kinky digital sh*t.

For starters, it sure was polite for Vassar to give us free premium subscriptions to Zoom, which enables you to record videos (in HD, if you have the camera for it), save them in the cloud and email to your lover at your leisure. You can also download just the audio, and make them

just sorta guess what’s going on. Perhaps one day it’s a video of you eating your grab-and-go hummus wrap from the Deece deli station, and the next it’s your adventures with anal beads—if you’re pleased enough with your wrap, they might not even be able to tell the difference. Better yet, if you and your partner are feeling adventurous, you can elect to add another person to the mix. Or another two people. You can actually host up to 100 people in one Zoom call on the current Vassar membership. Don’t be afraid to experiment with Breakout Rooms, too ;).

For many of us, Zoom University means many more free hours, which you may be filling with extra readings, research, independent projects or maybe even studying for some higher education entrance exam, like the GRE. I propose to you an activity that can perfectly merge these pastimes into one: writing vulgar fanfiction about yourself and your partner. Other writing is boring, and an ArchiveOfOurOwn.org account is free to make. With all these free minutes you could write a piece that rivals “My Im-

mortal,” both in absurdity and spelling errors. After all, “Fifty Shades of Grey'' is what happens when horny people write fanfiction about “Twilight.” Use this time to explore your alternate universes, buy the leather harness you’ve always wanted, and maybe even see how lucky you can get in Rocky 200 before your Math126 professor arrives for the 9:30 lecture— the possibilities are limitless.

Of course, sometimes even with all the smut, erotica and dirty videos in the world, it still doesn’t work out. I will take this as my cue to remind you that SeekingArrangements.com will give you a free premium account if you sign up using a .edu email address. So, happy hunting!

PS: In order to connect with my Generation Z readers, I want to add that you can record and download raunchy TikTok videos to send to your boo, but this seems kind of time consuming and it’s always so hard to pick the right audio…

Maybe just send regular nudes, it’s not like you don’t all already have Snapchat anyways smh.

Juliette Pope/The Miscellany News.

Frog and Toad are Frenemies

by Julianna + Olivia

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

OPINIONS

Page 12

September 17, 2020

I've seen protests like this before in America, but never in the U.S. Helen Johnson Columnist

T

his January, I wrote an article about the massive protests that erupted while I was studying abroad in Valparaíso, Chile last fall. I had never witnessed social unrest on such a large scale. I had never seen so many people demonstrating together, across an entire country, united by one cause, across party lines and differences of race, class, gender and other identities. I had also never witnessed violent oppression by the state against peaceful protesters.

In my article, I posed the question: “Could this level of unity among the people ever occur here, and what would be the results?” I also noted that: In the United States, although we certainly see increased policing, mass arrests of protestors and t h e criminalization of certain social movements (re: mass incarceration that started during the Civil Rights Movement) it is hard to imagine our military patrolling the streets where we live or the government prohibiting us from leaving our houses after a certain hour.

Reading this now, it is glaringly obvious just how naive I was. At the beginning of June, I moved to St. Paul, MN for the summer. There, I went to protests where we were surrounded by the National Guard. I once again found myself living under a curfew. And I couldn’t stop thinking about the uncanny resemblance to the protests in Chile.

There are obvious and important differences between the two movements. One is centered around class inequality, while the other stems from systemic racial oppression. One was sparked by a government spiking a metro fare, the other by the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police. Although the inequality in Chile is deep-rooted and the people have been calling for action on individual issues for decades, the sense of a broad, cohesive movement was novel. Meanwhile, the official Black Lives Matter movement is not new—it began after the acquittal of George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin 2013. Finally, much of the stratification of wealth in Chilean society is due to the Pinochet dictatorship and its neoliberal economic policies. The dictatorship ended in 1990, so it has been 30 years since the country’s return to democracy.

In the United States, however, the structures that oppress, traumatize and kill Black people are hundreds of years old.

That being said, the similarities between the two cases are remarkable. I feel like I could draw a timeline of events for each situation and every stage would match up perfectly—from the “tip of the iceberg” event that sparked the groundswell, to the spread of education about the underlying systemic injustices, to the tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets used on protesters by police, to the installation of a curfew, to the protests spreading across the country and even internationally, to the deployment of auxiliary forces to keep the “order” (in Chile, the military; in the United States, the National Guard).

Politicians, the media and citizens alike have criticized the violence in both scenarios. However, in both cases, people have been peacefully protesting the issues at hand for decades with little to no change. When peaceful protests fall on deaf ears for so long, people have no other choice. Quite frankly, America does not

Above, demonstration in Minneapolis, MN. Helen Johnson/The Miscellany News

Above, demonstration in Valparaíso, Chile. Helen Johnson/The Miscellany News

Above, Minneapolis, MN. Helen Johnson/The Miscecellany News

Above, Valparaíso, Chile. Helen Johnson/The Miscecellany News The opinions expressed above do not represent those of The Miscellany News as a whole.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

have the right to tell Black people in this country how they can and cannot protest.

And in Chile, a government that took years to reckon with a brutal dictatorship that killed, tortured and disappeared thousands, and has only perpetuated inequalities in the aftermath of Pinochet, also has no right to judge the outrage of the Chilean people.

What should be in the spotlight in both countries is the violence against protesters at the hands of the police. In both cases, the police have used tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets—ruthlessly— against largely peaceful protesters. In both cases, the police have arrested and detained people who were simply exercising their right to demonstrate. In both cases, state-sanctioned violence has been used to control, curb and punish those asking for justice—all under the guise of law and order.

In Chile, the massive protests actually led to hope for change: The government agreed to hold a referendum about the possibility of finally rewriting the Chilean constitution. (Originally scheduled for April 26, the referendum was pushed to Oct. 25 due to the pandemic.) The current constitution is handed down from Pinochet, and codifies many of the systems that have produced such stark inequality in Chile, such as the privatization of water. Chileans had been protesting the country’s inequities for 30 years and nothing changed—until they forced the government to listen.

Americans oftentimes see violence or unrest in places like Latin America and say, “That could never happen here.” We believe that our democracy protects us from the political unrest that many other countries experience. Some Americans even look down on countries that have suffered through horrible dictatorships and oppression (that the United States oftentimes supported and even established) and call those countries undemocratic and unstable. We forget that our country has also experienced this level of social unrest and protest and is experiencing it again. It should be obvious that our democracy is, in practice, not very democratic.

Many Americans also often look down on places like Chile, where there is extreme repression of protests, violence against protesters and restrictions on freedom of speech and the freedom to demonstrate, and say “That could never happen here.” We naively believe that the freedoms granted to us in the Constitution will protect us from state-sanctioned violence. And yet we have witnessed violence against protesters this summer again and again, as well as the criminalization of the entire Black Lives Matter movement, exemplified by the prejudicial targeting and arrest of protesters.

This should not come as a surprise, as it has happened before. May it serve as a wake-up call to those who have forgotten.

In Chile, a metro fare hike was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was finally time to reckon with 30 years of wealth stratification and with a neoliberal government filled with corrupt politicians who care more about their own wealth than helping the country’s poor.

Sound familiar? At least Chile has universal health care. On top of extreme wealth inequality, Americans must also reckon with the deep-rooted racial violence that continues to kill Black people. Let’s take our country off of its pedestal.

September 17, 2020

OPINIONS

Page 13

Stars and Stripes forever, but only if you toe the line Brittany Andrade Guest Columnist

T

he Trump administration’s plan to defund the military news organization Stars and Stripes should be a wakeup call to the armed forces of the United States. While the decision has finally been reversed by the Pentagon—following major backlash over the last several weeks—the fact remains that Trump is orchestrating a continuous attack on free press.

Stars and Stripes has existed as the military’s independent news source since the age of Lincoln. Originally created in 1861

by Union soldiers using a captured printing press, Stars and Stripes was reborn during World War I and has continued to be the source of independent news for troops on the front lines for decades. Due to its separation from the chain of command, Stars and Stripes delivers facts and opinions that have, at times, run contrary to “official” military stances.

It comes as no surprise that an attempt to stifle the voice of military news has happened this close to a heated election.

The president has made clear his opinions on both media sources that he cannot control and the military. The Stars and Stripes does not have a strong leftor right-wing bias, but also has not held back from criticism of Trump in its opinion pages. Calling any media that does not

paint him in a good light “fake news” has always been his M.O. and, while Trump cannot shut down CNN or MSNBC, Stars and Stripes is a government-funded organization meaning he controls the purse strings.

By cutting funding, the Trump Organization is able to accomplish two things: removing an impartial source of information from influencing a key demographic and “reducing” the military budget by roughly $15 million. There are obvious benefits to controlling the narrative fed to 470,000 active duty voters, but there are more sinister consequences as well.

Consequence one: a political win-win for the President. If Stars and Stripes had shut down on Sept. 30 as planned, the Trump administration would have been able to argue that the Democratic Party cares about free speech and free press only when it benefits them. Now, however, the argument that will be made is that, when the Democratic Party finally got their chance to trim the military budget, they denied it to feed into a project that does not affect fighting capabilities.

Consequence two: the President is the master of spin. He has already used his media platform to announce to his millions of loyal followers that he will not allow Stars and Stripes to fail under his watch, giving himself an easy win with

his base. Never mind the fact that the budget cut idea came from his administration’s Pentagon and Secretary of Defense in the first place.

Which brings me to my last point: the blatant disregard of American Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Airmen and even Coasties is astronomical. This president has always disrespected American service members and veterans. From his multiple attacks against the late Senator John McCain, to his most recent decision to force all active duty military members to participate in a deferred payroll tax program until January with no way to opt out of a financial nightmare, Trump has shown a disregard not only for people’s positions as service members, but also their basic human dignity and autonomy.

The military can be a conservative place. During my time in the Army, I knew people who voted for Trump the first time around. I had heated debates on why they were making a mistake (to the point that my supervisor had to ban any political discussion at work because I would stop working to argue). And some of those same people will make the deliberate choice to vote for him again because they will see him restoring Stars and Stripes as a symbol of military loyalty.

The President is a gaslighting narcissist who is hoping to convince his last loyal

friend to vote him Prom King, but I need him to know something. We see him. We see the liar behind the clown makeup, and those “losers,” who signed up to do what your five-time draft-dodging self never did, have got your number. I look forward to seeing you all Nov. 3, and more importantly I look forward to casting my ballot and casting him out.

Above, 1945 issue of Stars and Stripes.

Courtesy of Anagoria via Wikimedia Commons

Vladimir Putin's critics keep getting poisoned Jonas Trostle

Opinions Editor

I

n 2006, Alexander Litvinenko spoke his last words just before he succumbed to Polonium-210 poison: “I think, therefore, that this may be the time to say one or two things to the person responsible for my present condition. You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price … The howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr. Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.” Litvinenko, a former officer in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, was not the first nor the last critic of Putin to die or fall ill from unnatural causes.

Reporter and historian Anna Politkovskaya, who covered the second Chechen War and the rise of then KGB officer Putin, was non-fatally poisoned in 2004 en route to a hostage situation at a school in Beslan,

North Ossetia. With Politkovskaya unable to mediate, President Putin’s military forces instead stormed the school with tanks, vacuum bombs and machine guns. Three hundred thirty-four people died, 186 of them children on their first day of school.

Politkovskaya fared no better and was murdered in her apartment two years later, on Putin’s birthday.

Investigative journalist Yuri Shchekochikhin died in 2003 from a sudden strange illness similar to Litvinenko’s.

Former Putin co-worker Roman Tsepov died from an acute dose of radioactive material after having tea with a FSB agent.

Journalist and ex-KGB agent Viktor Kalashnikov and his wife survived mercury poisoning in 2010. In 2015, journalist Vladimir Vladimirovich Kara-Murza survived a sudden mysterious illness which he suspected was due to poisoning.

In 2018, ex-FSB colonel Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia survived a dose of the Soviet-developed organophosphate nerve

Polonium releasing alpha radiation. Courtesy of NASA on The Commons via Flickr

agent Novichok. Most recently, Russian anti-corruption figure Alexei Navalny survived a poisoning by the chemical agent Novichok on Aug. 20, 2020.

When they are not being poisoned by extremely rare radioactive substances or state-owned nerve agents, journalists critical of the Kremlin find themselves falling out of windows at a high rate. In fact, journalists in Russia are killed at a rate 12 times higher than journalists in the United States.

“The urge to eliminate journalists is not a unique phenomenon, and it has a common source among all governments: insecurity.”

This points to two equally important truths: Those in power are scared of courageous, critical reporting, and the killings are not about that particular person but about trying to scare reporters away from covering the crimes and corruption of their leaders. In the ideal world of autocrats and kleptocrats, journalists exist, but they are so scared to say anything that might attract ire that they say nothing, or worse, only sing the praises of corrupt governments that murder their citizens.

Worse than a “useful idiot,” these cowards

The opinions expressed above do not represent those of The Miscellany News as a whole.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

legitimize the regimes of child-killers and totalitarians.

This weeding out of any heterodox views regarding the ruling party is called a “chilling effect,” and it is tried by governments everywhere, to differing degrees.

President Trump threatening to sue for the sake of bankrupting his enemies is a local, though not particularly pernicious, example. The Obama administration’s use of the 1917 Espionage Act against Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning is another modern U.S. example, one that displays the bipartisan nature of suppressing inconvenient truths. The trial of Daniel Ellsberg for leaking the Pentagon Papers and his subsequent set-up by Nixon’s leak-plugging team “the plumbers” show that even nations with strong journalistic protections struggle with safeguarding those that speak truth to power.

Countries without such strong protections have fared worse. In 2016, Germany threatened to imprison a comedian for a poem. In 2018, Saudi Arabian officials killed and dismembered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. 2018 saw the Chinese government disappear four high-level members of the Xinjiang Daily for being “two-faced.”

The urge to eliminate journalists is not a unique phenomenon, and it has a common source among all governments: insecurity. As more and more Putin critics survive poisonings, it is hard not to see him as an archetype—a man trying his best to cling on to power, afraid at every turn of being revealed for what he really is. Poisoning one’s enemies, even on foreign soil, is not a sign of strength but of weakness. Vladimir Putin is an ex-KGB commander and has destabilized the axis of power in the Western world. Even with all of that, his nerve agents, his nuclear weapons and his ability to influence elections the world over, he is a man scared of a pen and a pad and the truth.

Page 14

SPORTS

September 17, 2020

Athletes examine team egress, recruitment disparities [CW: mentions of sexual misconduct, sexual violence, racism, transphobia and discrimination.]

This article was co-written by five current and former Vassar student-athletes: Claire Basler-Chang (volleyball), Lena Stevens (formerly volleyball), Reis Kissel (soccer), Liam Condon (squash) and Kai Mawougbe (track and field).

Vassar as a Whole One of the defining aspects of Vassar is its whiteness. Some may initially be resistant to this fact, and reasonably so, as when people mention Vassar it is often under the labels of “progressive,” and “inclusive.” There are other labels, however, that carry much more weight, especially among people of

“So what then is the defining factor in making a school appear 'progressive,' and why can this label apply to a school with such a glaringly regressive trend?” color. One of these labels is PWI, as Vassar is first and foremost a primarily white institution. When examining Vassar’s mandatory Common Data Set for the 2019-2020 school year, we found that the school reports a total of 2,441 undergraduate students. 288 are Asian, 270 are Hispanic/Latino, 216 are multiracial, 228 are international students, 91 are Black/African American, 1 is Native American/Pacific Islander and 11 represent ethnicities unknown. 1,336, over half of the student body, are white. The numbers themselves seem initially shocking; it's strange to see that the combination of all other nonwhite ethnicities don’t even make up half of the Vassar population. Additionally, past data sets reveal a disheartening trend: Vassar’s racial makeup has barely changed in the past 17 years. For example, the number of Black students at Vassar currently is actually less than it was in the 2003-2004 school year, in which Black students made up 4.7 percent of the population with 116 students total. Over the past 17 years the percentage of Black students never grew larger than 6.1 percent and has been on a downward trend for the past five years. The 2019-2020 year saw both the lowest number (91) and lowest percentage (3.7 percent) of Black students since 2003-2004. So what then is the defining factor in making a school appear “progressive,” and why can this label apply to a school with such a glaringly regressive trend? It is Vassar’s “progressive” reputation that creates a facade that distracts from the obvious and dominant whiteness from which no part of the institution is immune.

Athletics is but a small part of this institution that has suffered the toxic effects of a lack of diversity for far too long.

Athletic Demographics Comparing Vassar Athletics’ demographic makeup to that of the entire school is easier said than done. Unlike the institution as a whole, there is no mandatory common data set for the athletic population on either the Vassar Athletics website or on the Vassar College website. The NCAA collects and releases demographic information each year in a public database, but does not release information by school. One could find the racial and ethnic makeup of all athletes in the Liberty League, but not in Vassar specifically. Additionally, if anyone from the public wanted a Vassar-specific analysis, their only available resources would be the rosters and staff directory on the athletics website, which relies solely upon the (often absent) headshots and bios of athletes, coaches and staff. The nature of profiling anyone based on their appearance alone is inherently biased, so to make any accurate analysis not based on profiles alone, contacting the administration of the athletic department is a necessity.

When contacting the Athletics Department for the purpose of this article, we asked if they could share a few key pieces of information, including the demographics of student-athletes, faculty and staff; and exit data of athletes who choose to leave teams. In response to the request, we were told that they would not give us the data because it required “clean-up” and further investigation to transform it from something that, in their words, was more “anecdotal” to an analysis than they felt comfortable sharing with the public. This response was mostly in reference to the exit data, but no other requested demographic information was given either. We unequivocally know that Vassar Athletics has fewer black athletes compared to its peer institutions in the NESCAC and compared to the rest of DIII Athletics. While researching for this article we saw data that the Athletic Department refuses to release to the student body. When asked why we could not publicly share this information the response was nearly verbatim to the reason we could not have any of the other data—it wasn’t a clean enough analysis and required a larger sample size.

This is a recognizable pattern with the athletic department—although they collect necessary demographic data for the NCAA, they have no willingness to share it with the students to whom it pertains.

While we acknowledge that the COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented circumstances requiring the majority of the attention of the athletic department, these responses still reveal significant problems.

First being, the fact that data describing demographics and the attrition of athletes is collected and kept in an “anecdotal” fashion. With data that holds great importance regarding ways the Athletics Department should respond in future recruiting efforts, hiring efforts and satisfaction levels of both athletes and staff, one would expect the process of data collection to be concrete and formal. One would also expect information of this nature to be analyzed at the end of each year for recognizable trends. Anything less implies the information is unimportant, that it is collected only out of requirement and analyzed only when prompted. The second noticeable problem with the information is the lack of accessibility. The very fact that the only way to receive reliable demographic information is through contacting the department implies that it is something to be hidden, not to mention the extreme resistance in sharing it. Prospective student athletes, especially non-white individuals, consider attending Vassar after having been

promised the “inclusivity” and “diversity” described by Vassar’s website, tour guides, and brochures. They expect these promises are fulfilled in both the academic and athletic communities. They are given little to nothing to ensure the truth of those promises before they decide to make Vassar their home.

Attrition of Athletes of Color In the withheld demographic data lies the possible confirmation to a noticingly unsettling trend: the attrition of athletes of color over the years. Viewing the exit data intrigued us, because when we began discussing the demographics of our respective teams for the purpose of this article, we noticed that not only did we all share the experience of only having a few (if any) people of color on our teams, but we also shared the experience of often watching them leave.

We wanted to see if what we and others have noticed confirmed a larger trend of athletes of color leaving teams at a higher rate than white athletes.

People leave teams—it’s a phenomenon that isn’t exclusive to our teams or to Vassar Athletics alone. But what makes Vassar different is how few people of color there are on sports teams to begin with. When one of just two or three on a team decides to leave, the hole left behind feels immense, especially for the athletes of color remaining. The key question isn’t so much, “How many are leaving?” but, “Why are so many leaving?”

Yet with so few athletes of color to begin with, the two questions are inextricably linked. This necessitates the compilation and examination of exit data—specifically the demography and frequency at which BIPOC athletes are leaving teams. As was previously discussed, analysis of the exit data by the athletic department has not yet occurred and official analysis is the first step in getting to the root of the problem.

It's not uncommon for first-years or walkon athletes to decide that playing sports in college isn’t what they anticipated or want-

sports teams. Recruiting entails a number of different aspects, including travel costs, official visits and tours, email correspondence, recruitment camps, grades and video. Some of a coach’s recruitment bandwidth is tied to travel funds allocated for them by the department. There has been discussion of awarding money for visitation to low-income BIPOC prospects and running free or cheaper camps to allow greater attendance.

However, if Vassar athletics is truly committed to “recruiting diversely,” then they must do more than simply providing more funds for recruiting—achieving athletic diversity requires a holistic and thoughtful approach.

Statistical data gathered by Inequality.org (2020), the Pew Research Center (2018) and countless other resources show that BIPOC students are more likely to be economically disadvantaged than their white counterparts. Other research, like Kirsten Hextrum’s 2017 essay “Racing to Class: School, Sport and Inequality,” shows how massively inaccessible all levels of athletics are for people of color in the United States. Although accessibility, financial resources and social resources (which are inextricably linked with race) are major systemic issues and failures for American athletics as a whole, denoting these as the sole and primary factor in the under-recruitment of athletes of color at Vassar College is a deferral and over-simplification of the recruitment process. The Athletic Department can implement many approaches to combat systems of white supremacy.

Outreach by coaches and the administration is just as important as financial capabilities. What tools are coaches using to recruit diversely? What areas are coaches reaching out to? How do coaches determine what region they will put greater time and energy towards? How much effort are coaches putting in to recruit from a diverse pool of students? How is diversity in athletics discussed with coaches? What discussions about diversity is the athletic department

“But what of the athletes who in their junior or senior year decide that the discomfort of the athletic community outweights their years of devotion to the sport? Their experiences should draw a magnifying glass upon the toxicity of athletic culture at Vassar to which people of color continuously fall victim." ed. College is, after all, a place where most people find the areas in which they feel most at home. But what of the athletes who in their junior or senior year decide that the discomfort of the athletic community outweighs their years of devotion to the sport?

Their experiences should draw a magnifying glass upon the toxicity of athletic culture at Vassar to which people of color continuously fall victim.

Recruitment and Admissions As the demographic makeup of Vassar Athletics is white-dominated and likely disproportionately white compared to the whole Vassar student body, there needs to be an examination and questioning of how recruiting and admissions function within

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

having with Vassar admissions? What training or education are coaches receiving to inform them about the importance of understanding intersectionality, systemic racism and anti-racism in athletic recruiting? These are questions that should be addressed publicly and constantly, because regardless of the athletic administration's good intentions, systemic racism plagues every aspect of society and will deeply affect recruiting and admissions of BIPOC athletes unless it is actively combated.

This article is the third of a four-part series on community and institutional failures in Vassar’s Athletics Department. Click here to read the full version of this piece.

SPORTS

September 17, 2020

Page 15

Women's sports leagues prove bubble strategy successful Continued from Bubble on page 1 best soccer team in the world (they have won the last two World Cups and have a total of four, more than any other nation).

When the USWNT won last summer’s World Cup, the whole country was glued to their television screens. The team’s top players—Megan Rapinoe and Alex Morgan to name a couple—are now arguably bigger stars than anyone on the U.S. men’s national team. The NWSL obviously wanted to capitalize on this popularity. When all other American sports leagues were shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they sensed an opportunity.

The NWSL was the first league in the United States to announce a reopening plan. In late May they revealed that they would restart their season with a tournament in June called the Challenge Cup. The Challenge Cup had a preliminary round, where every team played four games to determine seeding, and then went on to elimination rounds starting with the quarterfinals (best eight teams). The month-long tournament was held in Utah, and a bubble strategy was employed: Athletes were not permitted outside the NWSL village, outside guests were not permitted inside the village, and face masks were required at all times except when eating or exercising. Overall, the tournament went quite well except for one problem early on: some players were entitled, inconsiderate fools.

Players on the Orlando Pride were alleged to have gone out to bars and contracted the virus before spreading it to their teammates and team staff. In total, six Orlando players and four staff members tested positive for COVID-19. However, in a move unlike that of any other league, the Orlando Pride were outright dropped from the tournament, with the team doctor reporting that “the important protocols and timelines for contact tracing make it logistically impossible for the club to participate in the Challenge Cup in Utah.”

The NWSL did everything right to ensure a safe and successful tournament, and as a result they had just that. As we saw with the NBA, bubble strategies appear to be the way to go. But another key detail here

Juliette Pope/The Miscellany News. follow our pandemic safety rules? Okay, then you don’t get to take part in our tournament. The NWSL handled this flawlessly, and are a prime example of what to do when crisis strikes. They enjoyed so much success from their Challenge Cup tournament that they decided to have an additional Fall Series, where the league’s nine teams are divided into three subgroups based on their location (to reduce travel). As of this writing, the Fall Series has begun and all the games have been played according to schedule.

The WNBA has also successfully restarted amid the pandemic, although they have admittedly seen a bumpier road than the NWSL. The WNBA bubble is in Bradenton, Florida at the IMG Academy, a boarding school known for its serious athletics program. Like with all well-constructed bubbles, no one is allowed in or out. The WNBA players are tested regularly and everyone is required to report their temperature daily with the thermometer they received upon arrival. PPE was provid-

Orlando Pride.

Courtesy of Joe Petro/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images is that the NWSL had protocols in place to prevent a team like Orlando from participating if their players were non-compliant.

This is the kind of accountability I have been begging for. Everyone loves to talk about how this is a free country, and it is, but while being stupid is legal, it should still have consequences. You don’t want to

ed and all players were tested before and immediately upon entering the bubble.

There were some initial hiccups, though not with the virus; rather, the lack of accommodations. While the NBA players were staying at a pristine Disney resort in Orlando, in early July many WNBA players posted videos and comments about bad

living conditions including suspect food, lots of rat and bug traps, and even a worm.

It does seem that most of these issues have been addressed by now, as every player’s request to change living spaces was granted, and many players saw the food quality go up after they had more regular meals following the initial quarantine. These initial inferior living conditions are proof that players in the WNBA are not afforded the same opportunities as those in the NBA. While this is due in part to the NBA taking in significantly more revenue, the proportion of league revenue to player salary is worse in the WNBA and there are a multitude of other unfair roadblocks preventing the WNBA players from reaching a level of equality with their male counterparts.

Another, more serious issue that has been raised is player injury. Connecticut Sun head coach Curt Miller said, “What we’re asking these players to do, and play every other day, is so contrary to putting their health first. We’re doing such a good job to keep them safe from COVID, but

themselves to their absolute limits. When you add more practices or have games more often, injuries will go up accordingly.

The MLB had a similar problem, as lots of pitchers injured themselves early on, possibly due to the shortened spring training and lack of time to fully prepare for real games. This is concerning, but the season has still chugged along despite the injury increase.

The WNBA and the NWSL provide more proof that bubbles are the best option for a return to sports. Not only should other leagues consider bubbles more strongly, but potentially other businesses or areas of the country too (colleges, I’m looking at you; Vassar has definitely had more success than non-bubble colleges so far).

But just as important as having a good bubble plan, is the execution of that plan.

The NWSL showed that if you don’t mess around with people who are breaking the rules, not only do you reduce the future likelihood of defectors (the NWSL hasn’t had an outbreak akin to the Orlando

Captain of OL Reign and U.S. national team Megan Rapinoe speaking at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. Via NBC News we’re putting them in such a tough situation to stay healthy, because it is so hard on their bodies.” Due to everything getting delayed by the virus, leagues have had to condense their schedules, often increasing the volume of games played in the abbreviated stretch. Professional athletes are already constantly training and working

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Pride’s since), but it also lowers the risk of getting shut down—imagine if the Orlando Pride had been allowed to mingle with the other teams. We have seen pretty much every professional sports league in the country attempt a return. Now let’s apply what we’ve learned to other sports leagues and gatherings as a whole.

September 17, 2020

Page 16

Alex Eisert

Sports Editor

S

tat of the week: 1.13, the average number of 60-game stretches per season in which a player hit .400 or higher.

In the 79 years since Ted Williams hit .400, making him the last player to do so, much has changed in baseball and the world. When the Yankees took the World Series on Oct. 6, World War II (in which Williams himself served) was still two months out from making landfall on the shores of the United States. While Williams’ historic campaign took place just before the United States joined a war that would shape geopolitics for the rest of the century, the historic 2020 baseball season is taking place during the heart of the biggest public health crisis in a century. And while the last time we saw a .400 hitter we were defenders of democracy, about to fight off fascism abroad, we are now being subjected to it within our own borders.

Baseball in the United States has profoundly changed alongside the nation that deems it a national pastime; Williams would hardly recognize the game played today. So even in this shortened 60-game season, hopes for the first full-season .400 hitter in nearly 80 years seemed unrealistic to me at first glance.

Take for instance the fact that in 1941, the league average strikeout rate was 9.2 percent and the league average home run rate was 1.6 percent. In order for the average hitter to hit .400 then, they would

have had to aim for a .430 batting average on balls in play (or BABIP, a batting average that does not include home runs or strikeouts). This is because you need to have 40 hits for every 100 at bats in order to hit .400. If you strike out (making it impossible for you to get a hit) in 9.2 of those 100 at bats, you need to have 40 hits for the rest of those 90.8 at bats. If you hit a home run in 1.6 of those 90.8 at bats, you only need 38.4 hits in the remaining 89.2 at bats, or a hit 43 percent (.430) of the time. The league average BABIP was .280 that year.

Last season, on the other hand, saw a league average strikeout rate of 23 percent and a league average home run rate of 4.1 percent, both more than double their 1941 counterparts. This means that the average hitter would have had to amass a .492 BABIP in order to hit .400. If you strike out 23 times every 100 at bats, you need a hit 40 times out of the remaining 77 to hit .400. If you hit a home run in 4.1 of those 77 at bats, you only need 35.9 hits in the remaining 72.9 at bats, or a hit 49.2 percent (.492) of the time. The league average BABIP last year was .298. While this is higher than the .280 we saw in 1941, it is .194 away from the target of .492, whereas .280 was only .150 away from its target of .430.

Clearly, it was easier for the average hitter to hit .400 in 1941 than it is now. Hitters have moved away from being kings of contact towards a more boom-or-bust philosophy: hit a homer or strike out. The

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Answer to last week’s puzzle

lowest strikeout rate among qualified hitters last year was Hanser Alberto’s 9.1 percent, making him the only qualified hitter under the 1941 league average. Alberto, with his 2.3 percent home run rate, would have had to garner a .426 BABIP in order to hit .400, which has never been done in a single season, even if we lower the plate appearance threshold to 180 (or three plate appearances per game for a 60-game season, what you would need to be considered “qualified” for this shortened season).

However, the latter single season leaderboard fails to account for 60-game or 180 plate appearance stretches that occur in the middle of a season; it only looks at a season on the whole. For this, I headed over to FanGraphs’ special 60-game leaderboards. While these leaderboards do not track BABIP, I could deduce from the statistics they did track that some players likely managed higher than .426 BABIPs across 60-game stretches: players who struck out at higher rates than Alberto such as 2019 Cody Bellinger (16.4 percent on the season) and 2016 Joey Votto (17.7 percent) managed .400 averages in 60game stretches.

After removing all overlapping stretches, I came up with a total of 63 60-game stretches from 1974 through 2019 (or 1.13 per season during that time) in which a player hit .400 or higher. Rod Carew did it four times; in 1977, his full season average was just .012 below .400. Tony Gwynn also did it four times; his full season average in 1994 was just .006 shy of .400, the closest anyone has gotten since Williams.

Sandwiched between Gwynn and Carew is George Brett’s 1980 season, in which he hit .390 for the full season and had a 60-game stretch in which he hit a whopping .473, .015 higher than anyone else on the leaderboard. Brett had two other non-over-

lapping 60-game stretches in which he hit .400 or higher in his career. The only player to have more than one such stretch in the same season is Todd Helton, who had two in 2000. The first stretch was actually through his team’s first 60 games of the season—if play had ended there like it will this year, he would have finished with a .421 average. Unfortunately for Helton, it did not. He hit only .286 in his 77 at bats between the two stretches and .270 in his 111 at bats after the second stretch. Helton wound up hitting .372 on the season.

This year, Willy Adames has put up a .432 BABIP mark through his first 161 plate appearances (as of Sept. 14) and Tim Anderson has put up a .425 mark through his first 164 after achieving the sixth-highest full season BABIP of all time last year at .400. But alas, Adames has struck out at a horrid 34.8 percent rate, leaving him with only a .282 batting average. Anderson has managed better, striking out at a 20.1 percent clip, but is still well short of a .400 batting average at .362. He currently leads the league in batting average, presenting this season’s best shot at giving Williams a run for his money. While in today’s boom-or-bust game, we are far less likely to see a .400 hitter, coming into this shortened season, it was entirely possible we would. Anderson still has a shot; if he were to go 25-48 (.521) for the rest of the season, he could make it. Otherwise, we’ll have to wait until the next contact king, a move away from the current philosophy of hitting or another partial season to see a .400 hitter. In light of the drastic changes in baseball and political philosophy since Williams’ monumental season, there is no reason to think that baseball and the world won’t continue to change. In doing so, they may very well offer another such opportunity for a .400 hitter to emerge.

The Miscellany Crossword

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by Frank

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