Issue 17 of the Miscellany News, Volume CXLV

The Miscellany News Since 1866 | miscellanynews.com

February 23, 2012

Vassar College Poughkeepsie, NY

Volume CXLV | Issue 16

Hill joins Governing Board of Yale satellite Molly Turpin

Contributing Editor

Y Juliana Halpert/The Miscellany News

President of the College Catharine Bond Hill joins students, faculty and staff at this year’s Alex Krieger ’95 Memorial Lecture given by humorist Andy Borowitz. Borowitz’s work often appears in The New Yorker and on his website.

ResLife to implement new Floor Fellow Program in Fall Dave Rosenkranz News Editor

O

n Feb. 17, Assistant Dean of Students and Director of Residential Life Luis Inoa sent out an all-campus email announcing the creation of a new residential life pilot program in Raymond House

and Strong House that will begin in Fall 2012: the Floor Fellow Program.

Although their primary focus will be on the sophomore class, floor fellows are designed to be student advisors for all of the non-freshmen students who live in residential houses.

Inoa, who developed the Floor Fellow Program with Raymond and Strong House Advisor Mariya Salem, believes that it will provide students with a source of information about campus resources.

“I hope that they will be working See FELLOWS on page 4

ale University and the National University of Singapore (NUS) have partnered to create Singapore’s first liberal arts campus and curriculum. Announced to the public in March of last year, the college will be called Yale-NUS College and is currently planned to open its doors to students in 2013.

Vassar has its own connection to the new, international institution. Since last fall, President of the College Catharine Bond Hill has been sitting on the new college’s Governing Board.

“I think I was asked to be on the board because, one, I have a Yale connection—I did my Ph.D. at Yale—and I have spent more or less all of my adult life involved with liberal arts colleges in one way or another,” said Hill.

The new college’s Governing Board consists of 10 members, some of whom are affiliated with NUS and others with Yale. Some members include Deputy Secretary (policy) of the Singapore Ministry of Education Ng Cher Pong and United States Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China Clark T. Randt Jr. Though both board members and college presidents undoubtedly provide See SINGAPORE on page 8

Awareness Week events to confront body image Jessica Tarantine

Assistant Features Editor

T

his upcoming Sunday will mark the beginning of the National Eating Disorder Awareness Week, a series of events aimed at not only promoting awareness of eating disorders but also encouraging discussion about how body image is shaped by the media.

Sponsered by the Office of Health Education, the theme of this year’s Week will be Everyone Knows Somebody, reminding community members that eating disorders not only affect the person

suffering, but also the friends and families of patients.

In describing the purpose of the week, which occurs annually, Wellness Peer Educator Hillary Frame ’14 said, “The bottom line is that these issues cannot be allowed to fall by the wayside, someone must always be raising concerns about the way bodies are portrayed, and help must be offered to those who want it.”

The Office of Health Education (OHE), in collaboration with Phocus, started the Beautiful Person campaign See AWARENESS on page 8

Main Street Center highlights local art Jack Owen

Assistant Arts Editor

G

Inside this issue

7

FEATURES

Students, orgs cultivate VC Twittersphere

17 ARTS

Jacob Gorski/The Miscellany News

oing down Poughkeepsie’s Main Street one could easily pass by the Mid-Hudson Heritage Center without noticing it.

The center blends in seamlessly with the other buildings along its block—but inside is a wealth of artwork and knowledge in celebration of its surrounding community.

The center was opened in 2010 by Roy Budnik, who owned the building beforehand and felt a need for a cultural center. “There is no place in the mid-Hudson Valley where one can visit and learn about these various communities. Most historic sites reflect the specific history of a single person, family, or community,” Budnik wrote in an emailed statement. “Those communities that left no physical structures (for example the early Native Americans left a few place names) are generally not remembered or celebrated. The MHHC provides a place where one can learn about these diverse communities.” Budnik defined the purposes of the Mid-Hudson Heritage Center: provide a place for exhibiting the artworks of local artists of diverse backgrounds, learn about diverse communities and act as a network for historical and cultural

organizations serving the same educative purpose.

“The goal since the center opened has been to do something that’s different from a traditional historical society, which is more about preservation and research. We are more focused on the present and finding ways to keep things relevant and finding different cultures and practices to celebrate; it’s a place that’s dedicated to cultural expression and preservation,” said Andrew Sawtelle, the Office Coordinator of the center. Local artist Nestor Madalengoitia, whose vibrant murals can be seen throughout Poughkeepsie, also works alongside Budnik as an organizer at the center. Some of his works are featured at the center as well.

The main room of the center has walls that are divided into different sections, with the red walls displaying permanent collections and the white walls showing special exhibitions. The permanent collections showcase the area’s history and prominent community leaders of the past, such as a brick-making exhibit that emphasizes this brick trade that was significant to the Hudson River Valley’s development as early as the 18th century. “Through the historical See HERITAGE on page 17

Pictured center, Delaney Fischer ’15, a forward on the women’s basketball team, receives a pass from a fellow Brewer at a recent game. Following a win last Saturday, the women’s basketball team will ascend to the Liberty League playoffs.

Women’s bball ascends to playoffs Corey Cohn

Sports Editor

O

ne year after the most successful season in program history, Vassar’s women’s basketball team earned a trip back to the Liberty League playoffs last Saturday with a 70-55 victory over William Smith College. The Brewers seek to win their second straight conference championship in a year marked by record-breaking individual perfor-

Artist, Help lead Academy Awards predictions

mances and a balanced team-wide attack.

Heading into the final week of regular-season play, the Liberty League playoff picture was uncertain, with six teams battling it out for the four qualifying seeds. Captain Brittany Parks ’12 wrote in an emailed statement that the Brewers were motivated knowing they controlled their own destiny. “We were determined because we knew that our spot in

20 SPORTS

the playoffs would be guaranteed if we won all three of our games last week,” Parks explained.

They handled the first two of those games fairly easily—they overtook Bard College 79-36 on Feb. 14 and beat Rochester Institute of Technology 69-56 three days later after building an 18-point halftime lead. Saturday’s game against William Smith on Vassar’s Senior Day See BBALL on page 19

New School pulls out lastsecond win

The Miscellany News

Page 2

February 23, 2012

Editor in Chief Aashim Usgaonkar Senior Editors

Katharine Austin Mary Huber Erik Lorenzsonn

Contributing Editors Katie Cornish Carrie Hojnicki Jillian Scharr Molly Turpin

Photographer Jiajing Sun looked to Vassar’s beautiful campus to find tranquilty in the rush of mid-semester exams. To view more of Vassar’s most serene and scenic spots on campus (and maybe find them yourself), visit blogs.miscellanynews.com/exposure for an expanded look.

A Tribute to Marjorie MacCracken ’31

by Erik Lorenzsonn, Senior Editor

M

arjorie MacCracken ’31 passed away at a Millbrook, N.Y. retirement community on Feb. 7 at the age of 102. The daughter of Henry Noble MacCracken—Vassar’s fifth president—and one of the oldest Vassar alumnae/i, she lived a life imbued with generosity, giving back to the College, the Dutchess County community and to the world.

MacCracken had a robust career as a librarian; perhaps most notably as chief librarian for the Moral Rearmament, an organization dedicated to providing aid to impoverished and war-stricken families around the world. She also devoted many years working in the local community, as a librarian with the Mid-Hudson Library System and Dutchess Community College and as a volunteer with a local Mealson-Wheels program and the First Congregational Church of Poughkeepsie. Along with her father, MacCracken also supported the formation of Poughkeepsie community services center called the Lincoln Center She will be remembered as a global citizen, a celebrated member of the Dutchess County community and a passionate and dedicated alumna of Vassar College.

News Joey Rearick Dave Rosenkranz Features Danielle Bukowski Ruth Bolster Opinions Hannah Blume Lane Kisonak Humor & Satire Alanna Okun Arts Adam Buchsbaum Sports Corey Cohn Andy Marmer Photography Juliana Halpert Madeline Zappala Online Alex Koren Nathan Tauger Social Media Matt Ortilé Assistant News Assistant Features Assistant Opinions Assistant Arts Assistant Photo Assistant Copy Crossword Editor Columnists

Reporters

Photographers

Courtesy of Vassar College Media Relations

Courtesy of Hudson Valley Funeral Holmes

Editor’s Note | Spring Recess This is the last issue of the Miscellany News before the start of Spring Break, which will last from March 3 to March 7. The 17th issue will be on newsstands Thursday, March 22.

Be sure to keep up with miscellanynews.com and our Facebook and Twitter pages to stay up to date with the latest headlines during this period of Spring Recess.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Leighton Suen Jessica Tarantine Gabe Dunsmith Jack Owen Matthew Hauptman Carlos Hernandez Melissa Johnson Jonathan Garfinkel Sarah Begley Jean-Luc Bouchard Brittany Hunt Michael Mestitz Tom Renjilian Sam Scarritt-Selman Andy Sussman Emma Daniels Bethan Johnson Bobbie Lucas Burcu Noyan Rachel Garbade Katie De Heras Emily Lavieri-Scull Alex Schlesinger Jiajing Sun

LETTERS POLICY

The Miscellany News is Vassar College’s weekly open forum for discussion of campus, local and national issues, and welcomes letters and opinions submissions from all readers. Letters to the Editor should not exceed 450 words, and they usually respond to a particular item or debate from the previous week’s issue. Opinions articles are longer pieces, up to 800 words, and take the form of a longer column. No letter or opinions article may be printed anonymously. If you are interested in contributing, e-mail misc@vassar.edu.

The Editorial Board holds weekly meetings every Sunday at 9 p.m. in the Rose Parlor. All members of the Vassar community interested in joining the newspaper’s staff or in a critique of the current issue are welcome. The Miscellany News is not responsible for the views presented in the Opinions pages. The weekly staff editorial is the only article which reflects the opinion of the Editorial Board. The Miscellany News is published weekly by the students of Vassar College. The Miscellany News office is located in College Center Room 303, Vassar College.

NEWS

February 23, 2012

Page 3

Geek culture thrives at NSO’s annual NonCon event Joey Rearick News Editor

L

Kat Mehocic/The Miscellany News

ast weekend, dozens of fans converged on the College Center for NonCon, the science fiction, fantasy, anime and manga convention hosted by No Such Organization (NSO), Vassar’s own “nerd culture” club. The convention, held annually since 2001, included several long-standing events, as well as new activities introduced by NSO’s current membership. Though the majority of planned events went smoothly, the organization encountered some difficulties orchestrating the convention after a chaotic transition in leadership last semester.

“We really ended up coming down to the wire this year,” wrote NSO President Genevieve Lenoir ’13 in an emailed statement, “and there were definitely parts of the con that suffered because of that, which is something I regret.”

She described a total turnover in NSO’s leadership between this year and last that left the organization scrambling to prepare for NonCon, its largest event. She added that she has yet to be technically sworn in as NSO president, but took the reins of the group so that it would not fall into disarray after the its former leaders failed to conduct elections for successors last year. “None of [NSO’s leaders] had worked on the con at a high organizational level before, so there were a lot of things that nobody knew how to do, and I felt like I had to figure out all the processes myself,” she wrote.

Jim Dunaway, a game technician for Looney Labs, a table-top games maker which hosts product demonstrations at NonCon, has been attending the convention since 2002. Each year, he introduces new Looney Lab titles and organizes a group game called Are You a Werewolf? that has become a favorite among returning NonCon attendees. “I’ve seen less and less organization,” he said of the convention’s management. “There are communications problems between the outgoing group and the incoming group.” He also asserted that NSO should advertise the convention more effectively in the local community to attract larger crowds.

His colleague, Jeanine Calabro, however, voiced her appreciation of the friendly nature

of the convention, which she has attended for multiple years. “The size is comfortable,” she said, comparing NonCon’s scale to larger, impersonal conventions she has attended. “It gives everyone a chance to re-connect.”

Lenoir acknowledged that the group has faced organizational challenges in the past, but said she is working to insure history won’t repeat itself. “Part of my plan with the NSO this year has been making these kinds of organizational matters more accessible to the incoming executives,” she said. “For example, cleaning up the timelines of when things need to be accomplished, organizing our resources into documents that anyone can access, and fixing the website so that it is easier to edit.”

Despite his hopes that NonCon will be planned more efficiently in the future, Dunaway was quick to praise NSO‘s members for their helpfulness during the convention.

“When situations arise, the con staff is very responsive,” he said. “We are treated well, and we really appreciate that.”

One problematic situation arose when a vendor, whom NonCon participants referred to as “Steampunk Guy,” accidentally locked his wallet, insulin medication, paperwork and keys inside his car. When a Safety and Security Officer informed the vendor and Lenoir that she did not have the authority to break into the vendor’s car, a fellow NSO member offered his expertise in locks. “An hour later my friend strolled back in, handed Steampunk Guy his keys and told me, ‘That was fun. I’ve never done a car before,’” Lenoir wrote in an emailed statement.

A more serious incident occurred on Saturday night, when several men dressed as characters from the Mortal Kombat video games created a disruption in the College Center by blasting a portable stereo. According to Lenoir, they were not Vassar students, and Security swiftly responded to their presence and removed them from the convention. “Security had it in hand,” she wrote in her statement, “and I certainly wasn’t going to defend them—they were annoying the other con-goers as well! My main concern was that they stopped bothering people, and that it was made clear that they weren’t representative of the con as a whole.

Above, visitors to this year’s NonCon play the card game Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot in the CC MPR this past weekend. An annual event, NonCon is hosted by No Such Organization.

Aside from these difficulties, however, the convention was largely successful. This year’s relatively inexperienced membership was able to inject new ideas into the convention’s planning. NSO has benefitted from a particularly enthusiastic freshman class, which contributed heavily to NonCon by designing and executing events that the convention had never before included. “I was here for the entire con,” said Jarret Hotlz ’15, “except when I had to leave part of it to go to my job.” He said he first encountered NSO through its club dinners, held weekly at the All Campus Dining Center, and quickly became excited to help run the convention. “Fandom Deathmatch was pretty interesting,” he said, describing an event in which participants debate as to which fictional characters would win in a theoretical battle. “It gets pretty intense.”

The convention culminated in a presentation by Dark Guardian, a costumed community activist whom the media has dubbed a

“real-life superhero.” He described his own work to reduce drug trafficking in New York City public parks and his efforts to aid the homeless. He also spoke to a growing contingent of superheroes working throughout the world today. “There are people doing amazing things,” he said. “It’s just such a weird variety of people; it’s definitely really interesting.”

Still, he cautioned that the choice to become a superhero should not be taken lightly, and there are many ways to do good in one’s community. “I’m not telling everybody to go put on a costume,” he said.

“This year was a really great year for the con,” Lenoir wrote. Still, she hopes NonCon planning can be more orderly in future years.

“As fantastic as this year’s con was, I feel like we pulled through by the skin of our teeth.

A lot of the success of the con depended on knowing the right people and getting help from them directly, as personal favors, and that isn’t something we can rely on forever.”

News Briefs Freshman Class Council endorses Bookstore resolution

The Freshman Class Council recently endorsed a resolution supporting the transformation of the current Bookstore into a student space once the store moves offcampus—which may happen as early as next year. The VSA and the administration have been discussing how the space should be used since the College announced the move last fall (“VSA, administration look to adapt Bookstore,” 11.29.11).

According to Class of 2015 President Benedict Nguyen ’15, the Council initially considered writing a resolution after receiving student feedback on how the College should use the empty area. Bearing these opinions in mind, the representatives engaged Vice President of Student Life Charlie Dobb ’12 and President of the College Catharine Bond Hill on the idea of transforming the Bookstore into a multipurpose room. “From [these] conversations…it seems that the College already generally favors the idea but we hope to supplement the support,” Nguyen explained in an emailed statement. The Council then wrote a draft of the resolution and polled the freshman class for opinions on the resolution’s goals and wording. The poll was open for roughly a week and revealed that the vast majority of th Class of 2015 supported its Class Council’s plan.

The respondents’ main concern was centered around the lack of available gathering spaces on campus. The resolution addresses this concern in its initial section, which reads “Students of the Class of 2015 want a 24-hour student space outside of the Library that has an open and relaxing atmosphere where they can congregate.” Nguyen noted that the Council intentionally generalized the resolution’s aims for the location because it felt that the space had the potential to house various ac-

tivities. However, the Council does hope that the space will provide facilities in which organizations could hold meetings and theater groups could rehearse.

While detailed planning for what will replace the Bookstore remains far off, this resolution represents another set of student voices articulating their hopes for the space. The Freshman Class Council chose to focus on the future use of the Bookstore area because it feels that the proposed student space could dramatically improve the community experience of not just the freshman class, but also the whole student body. “There’s currently no all-campus multipurpose student space available 24/7,” Nguyen observed. “Hopefully the Bookstore will become a space where students can get together, study, relax and just hang out.”

—Bethan Johnson, Reporter CCP rethinks class scheduling

The Committee on Curricular Policies (CCP) is currently working on a proposal that would alter how classes are scheduled in order to decrease the number of courses taught in a given time slot and address other logistical concerns. The Committee, comprised of two professors and one student from each academic division, is considering suggestions from faculty and administration, as well as comparing Vassar’s scheduling model with those of other colleges.

The CCP started looking into changing the system after receiving student feedback over the frequency of course conflicts. The Committee believes that Vassar’s problem of over-scheduling during peak hours impacts the overall education students receive. Overscheduling forces a student to pick only one of the courses that interest them because all are taught at the same time. According to CCP member and Vassar Student Association VP

for Academics Kate Dolson ’12 “Every semester, students on this campus find it a struggle to take the courses that they want simply because so many of them are taught at the same time, [which] becomes a serious concern for students who need those particular classes in order to complete their major.”

The most recent, and most popular, options the Committee proposed would require professors to teach more courses outside of “peak hours.” The CCP defines peak hours as 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday.

Under the current system, each faculty member must teach at least three courses, with one being outside peak hours. According to Chenette, the change would require “each faculty member teaching four or five courses to teach two outside the peak time periods, and developing some Monday to Friday slot pairings.” The CCP will discuss the viability of this option compared to others at its meeting this week.

The CCP has also considered redistributing students’ workloads by changing how certain days are paired within the weekly course schedule. Currently, most classes follow a Monday-Wednesday or Tuesday-Thursday structure. The CCP believes that a shift to Monday-Thursday and Tuesday-Friday will give students the opportunity to do their work for the second half of the week in the middle of the week. “This did not get much support,” recalled Dean of Faculty Jon Chenette. The reasons for the faculty’s objections to the shift arose out of their knowledge of students’ busy schedules outside of classes. “The relative lightness of Fridays as a day for regular classes outside the sciences and languages,” Chenette noted, “also allows some students a weekday option for pursuing field work, internships, tutoring, and other such important experiences.” The Committee also suggested increasing the number of early morning classes. Again, faculty raised concerns about consistently

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

low attendence in earlier classes and how it might impact students’ schedules.

Despite its numerous suggestions the Committee is struggling to reach a consensus. “It’s a complicated issue,” Chenette explained, “[there is] a desire do something but little consensus on what.”

—B.J. CIS hosts Google Appps info sessions

As part of an ongoing effort to prepare the campus for a transition to a new webmail provider, Computer and Information Services (CIS) is hosting a series of question and answer sessions about the replacement of Zimbra with Google Apps, the latter of which is tentatively planned to “go live” on July 2 of this year.

Vice President for Computer and Information Services Bret Ingerman said that these forums are purely informational—opportunities for hands-on opportunities to explore Google Apps will come later in the semester.

“The purpose of the workshops is to give the community the opportunity to hear why we’re doing it, the timeline for conversion and to ask any questions,” he said.

The plan to switch to Google Apps was announced in a campus-wide email from Ingerman last November. The email, which was sent to confirm hearsay from “the rumor mill,” outlined reasons for the transition: the high cost of using Zimbra, the middling functionality of its calendar, the breadth of features Google Apps offers that Zimbra lacks, and the practicality of offering an already widely used service like Google.

Ingerman continues to stress that Google Apps’ impressive range of features will be a boon to the College. Using Zimbra requires the College to update its hardware every three to five years, with a price tag of $40,000 annually.

See BRIEFS on page 5

NEWS

Page 4

February 23, 2012

VSA, ResLife work towards Senior Week compromise Leighton Suen

Assistant News Editor

T

Juliana Halpert/The Miscellany News

his past Sunday, the Vassar Student Association (VSA) Council passed a resolution endorsing the presence of underclassmen on campus during Senior Week. The resolution gave formal support to a memorandum that was written by Class of 2012 President Pamela Vogel ’12, unanimously endorsed by the Senior Class Council and sent to administrators in the Offices of Residential Life and Campus Activities two weeks ago. During the Feb. 19 VSA Council meeting, Vogel listed a variety of reasons for keeping underclassmen on campus. “If seniors want them there, they should be allowed to be there,” she declared.

“Commencement is a long-standing tradition that should not be changed.”

Talks between the administration and the senior class were begun after the Office of Residential Life decided to revisit the current Vassar guest policy. “The initial outreach was that we were considering completely eliminating the Vassar guest policy,” said Assistant Dean of Students and Director of Residential Life Luis Inoa, when asked if the involved parties were on the verge of finding a middle ground. “If by compromising, you mean that we have moved slightly from this position, then yes. [The Class of 2012] has been able to articulate a rationale for how we can continue with the program.”

“I think that underclassmen should be allowed to stay on campus for Senior Week,” said Shawn Davis ’12, who is a member of the senior class, when informed of the Office of Residential Life’s original plan. “I think we develop bonds with underclassmen, and it would be nice to celebrate our accomplishments with our friends. After all, it will be the last time that we [seniors] will be in the same space as them.”

The current Vassar guest policy states that any member of the senior class is permitted to sign in a single underclassman guest for the week leading up to Commencement. “Gradu-

Class of 2012 President Pam Vogel ’12, above, works in the Vassar Student Assocition office. Vogel and the the Senior Class Council are trying to reach an agreement about undergradates at Senior Week.

ation is a Vassar celebration,” Inoa continued.

“As an office, we have to be careful with the ease with which underclassmen can sign in [to stay on campus]. The Senior Week event has many festivities, but no classes. What has happened the last few years is that the numbers [of underclassmen during Senior Week] have grown significantly, making it difficult logistically for Buildings and Grounds and Residential Life … It’s not like we get a plethora of incident reports. We hear anecdotes of what people are up to, but it’s not like the Security reports are crazy or underclassmen are going to the hospital or anything like that. It’s more logistics.”

“All of our conversations with Luis Inoa and [Assistant Dean of the College for Campus Activities] Terry Quinn have been extremely

Fellows address social ‘gap’ FELLOWS continued from page 1 with the class reps to do in-house programming for the upperclassmen,” said Salem, who went on to suggest that Junior Year Abroad information sessions, Career Development Office interview and job search preparation Q&A’s, and Writing Center overviews would be particularly useful for upperclassmen. She thinks that students many not have been introduced to these offices as part of the Student Fellow Program because they are not relevant to most freshmen.

The Floor Fellow Program will also help students deal with the everyday stresses of college life. The Office of Residential Life is particularly interested in using the Floor Fellow Program to diminish the effect of the sophomore slump, which is a well-documented tendency for students to grow apathetic toward their academic and extracurricular activities during their second year at college. “If you’re a sophomore and you’re struggling with your classes, or if you’re not going to classes, or if you’re in a bit of a funk, there will be somebody attuned to noticing that, and asking you, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’” said Inoa. Salem echoed Inoa’s thoughts in a separate interview, adding, “When I was at the Town Hall meetings, I heard a lot from students in my two houses. Sophomores were saying to their president that they were struggling with the sophomore slump and that they need more support with that. It makes sense to have somebody that students can go to for support.”

In addition to their academic and extracurricular responsibilities, the Office of Residential Life thinks that floor fellows could play an important social role. “The narrative that we were hearing from students is that you have the intimacy of the student fellow group in that first year, and then there really is—especially for sophomores—a kind of gap. What kind of mechanisms do we have for sophomores to use to reunite after [summer] break?” asked Inoa, highlighting his perception that there is a wide social disparity between freshman and sophomore year.

According to Inoa, floor fellows will also “support the house fellows in the planning and execution of cultural, intellectual and recreation [sic] events within the House[;] work to foster an environment that encourages community building within each floor and the house[; and] check in with the students periodically and inform the house advisor or other appropriate administrative staff of concerns regarding the behavior, health and wellbeing of upperclassmen on their floor.” As a result, the Office of Residential Life sees the Floor Fellow Program as an extension of the House Fellow Intern Program (which has similar directives) and a supplement to the house teams (particularly the class representatives).

The Floor Fellow Program will begin as a pilot in Raymond and Strong starting at the beginning of the 2012-2013 academic year. According to Inoa, Strong was chosen specifically because of a perception within the Office of Residential Life that its inter-class relationships are weaker than those of other houses. “[Strong] is a house with strong upperclassmen representation, but historically there has been a little bit of a disconnect between the sophomores, juniors and seniors that live there, and the ability of the freshmen to connect with them. I thought that this might help facilitate those relationships,” recalled Inoa. He added that Raymond was chosen because Salem, as Raymond’s house advisor, would be able to judge the program’s effectiveness first-hand, and because Raymond’s coed community will reflect the Floor Fellow Program’s potential impact in other houses better than Strong’s all-female community. There will be four floor fellows in Raymond, and three in Strong.

The pilot program will end after two years.

At that time, the Office of Residential Life will use student input to determine whether or not to implement the program in each of the other residential houses. “This is about personal support and community building,” said Salem. “We’re very excited about this program.”

helpful so far,” wrote Vogel in an emailed statement. “The decision to author a more official memorandum from [Senior Class Council] about the Vassar guest policy a) came from a desire to create a record of this conversation for the future, and b) helped us to articulate exactly why we supported, as a body, the current policy, as well as structure our conversations about the issue.”

Included in the memorandum were several reasons why the presence of underclassmen should be preserved for this occasion. Besides the aforementioned reasons of letting seniors celebrate with their underclassmen friends and preserving Commencement as a traditional, annual experience, allowing underclassmen to stay on campus would also prevent unsafe and unequal standards for those who choose

BRIEFS continued from page 4 With Google Apps, no such cost will incur; the company began the service with the goal of giving back to the educational community. As the name implies, the Google Apps also offers a profusion of applications for its users to embellish their account with, like Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Calender, Blogger, Picasa, YouTube and others.

“It opens up a robust environment,” said Ingerman on the switch to Google Apps. “We want to make sure we’re choosing the best possible tools for the college.”The Q&A sessions are only one phase of the ongoing effort to acclimate the campus to the new email service. According to Ingerman, CIS will host workshops for community members unfamiliar with Google products to try out the new service later in the Spring using test accounts.

For now, two more Q & A session are planned: one today at 10 a.m., and another on Wednesay, March 7 at 3 p.m.

—Erik Lorenzsonn, Senior Editor VSA Council vets bylaw amendment

Following the tumultuous passage of a Vassar Student Association (VSA) bylaw amendment earlier this month that altered the timeline of elections, Class of 2014 President Michael Moore ’14 proposed a new electionsoriented bylaw amendment in a VSA Council meeting on Sunday, Feb. 19. The amendment differentiates between the timelines for spring and fall elections, and changes the timing of the latter.

Whereas the elections timelines for fall and spring are currently identical in VSA Governance, Moore’s amendment would shorten the timeline for fall freshman elections from three weeks to two. Moore decided to write the amendment following a heated VSA Operations Committee meeting on Feb. 8, which was driven by debate over an amendment proposed by South Commons Representative Matt Wheeler ’12 to alter the structure of the elections timeline.

At one point, the discussion on Wheeler’s amendment turned to the subject of fall elections. Alex Koren ’13 argued that because of its small candidate pool and the sensitive timing,

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

to stay regardless of the official policy. Unregistered underclassmen could cause overcrowding in Senior Housing areas, fire hazards, a higher-risk party atmosphere and their presence on campus would obviously not be documented in the case of an emergency. In addition, the memorandum noted that students from higher economic backgrounds and closer permanent residences would be unfairly favored, since they would be more able to stay on or near campus for Commencement.

In order to counter the Office of Residential Life’s concerns, the Senior Class Council also crafted suggestions for modifying the Vassar guest policy. These included adding more underclassmen-specific programming to Senior Week, placing more responsibility on seniors who sign in underclassman guests and limiting the number of Vassar guests.

“What we are thinking about now is having only 25 percent of [the] senior class be able to sign in [underclassmen], on a first-come, first-serve basis. We won’t be able to accept any more. It will be a hard deadline,” said Inoa concerning current talks. “I think that’s ridiculous,” responded Davis, when asked how he felt about this compromise. “I think if they can find a way to keep the original policy, but to make seniors more accountable for their underclassmen, that would be the best thing.

But limiting the number of seniors who can do this just doesn’t sit right with me.”

Discussions between students and the administration regarding the Vassar guest policy are ongoing. “Right after this [year’s Senior Week], we need to figure out if this is something we can continue to support,” said Inoa, speaking for the Office of Residential Life. “If we need to work more on this, then we will.”

Vogel echoed Inoa’s sentiments in her emailed stastement. “I do believe that the conversation about the underclassman presence during Senior Week is not going to end any time soon,” she concluded, “and I hope that the passage of this Resolution will create a jumping-off point for future years.”

fall freshman elections merit their own timeline. Koren is a student advisor in Lathrop House and a member of the Board of Elections (BOE), and feels strongly on the need to differentiate for freshman elections.

“Freshman elections start too late and last too long,” said Koren. “When the freshman [representative] joins the house team, it’s already October.”

Wheeler, who is also co-chair of the BOE, said that Koren’s argument was the impetus for Moore’s amendment. “Shortening the process allows [freshmen] to be part of house team,” he said, summarizing the rationale behind the proposal. “Instead of spending their time assimilating, it will help them be a part of creating the dynamic.”

Moore decided to split the time between campaigning and filing evenly, with seven days allotted for each; at the Council meeting when he presented the amendment, he described this split as “clean” and “easy to remember.”

Currently, filing starts three weeks before voting, with 10 days allotted to campaigning.

Koren thinks that Moore’s shortened timeline for filing in particular is sagacious. “Under the current system, over 90 percent of filing occurs between the first two to three days, and then there’s only a trickle after that, especially for freshman,” said Koren. “Most freshmen come to campus, and either they want to be involved or they don’t.”

Moore also justified the shorter campaigning period to Council in terms of opportunity cost; the more time students spent campaigning, he argued, was time diverted away from academics and other pursuits.

The amendment proposal also makes other, minor changes in the bylaws. One section strikes inconsistent language pertaining to elections from the bylaws; another further differentiates between fall and spring elections with regards to the mandate of informing the VSA of the opportunity to file for candidacy.

VSA Council will debate and vote upon the proposed bylaw amendment on Sunday, Feb. 26. The amendment will likely be the capstone of four weeks of heated debate over the elections process.

—E.L.

February 23, 2012

FEATURES

Page 5

Underwood talks foreign oil at Bookstore Author Series Energy Vision founder addresses national dependency Casey Zuckerman Guest Reporter

I

Rachel Garbade/The Miscellany News

n the Vassar Bookstore last Monday, at 5:50 p.m., discussion was brewing over energy use in the United States. Joanna D. Underwood, founder of Energy Vision—a non-profit dedicated to reducing the United State’s dependency on foreign oil—gave her lecture entitled “Turning Trash to Fuel: Ending Our Country’s Addiction to Oil” to a captivated audience of professors, students and Poughkeepsie residents.

Underwood’s lecture was part of the Vassar Bookstore Author Series, which was created in 2009 to provide students with access to lectures by authors covering a wide variety of fields, from humanities to mathematics.

“This lecture series has grown exponentially,” said Assistant Manager of the Bookstore Susan Vinett, who began the series. After she introduced the lecturer to the audience, Underwood took the floor and proclaimed, “The United States is competing more and more for the world’s oil.” She included Power Point slides exhibiting the negative effects of using diesel fuel has had on the environment and the economy.

Energy Vision’s mission is to move away from oil dependency by promoting the transition to pollution-free renewable energy sources and to clean, petroleum-free transportation fuels.

Underwood said, “We work with government and business leaders to implement changes on the ground.” The change the group advocates for is conversion from diesel fuel to natural gas, or it’s renewable twin, biomethane. She stated that the concept of harnessing this energy from landfills, sewers and places that produce organic waste would reduce the amount of foreign oil United States imports.

“Refuse and recycling trucks, school busses, transit busses: These are the workhorse fleets that allow the U.S. to function,” Underwood said. “If the United States was to have an oil supply interruption, it would be disastrous.”

Therefore, Energy Vision focuses its time and resources to finding ways to integrate trucks running on natural gas or biomethane, for the purposes of a cleaner and healthier alternative. She spoke about New York, saying, “New

York State is perfect for this [alternative].”

After describing her vision of New York State’s farms and factories helping produce biomethane, she talked about progress already made: positive examples of integration of natural gas garbage vehicles into diesel fleets across the country. Although the implementations in New York State would be a big step, Energy Vision’s goal is much more illustrious: to stop U.S. use of diesel fuel. “Our goal is to end this country’s addiction to oil.”

Over the phone three days before the lecture, Underwood explained how she ended up participating in the lecture series. Vinett had worked for her around 20 years prior, and had kept up to date on Underwood’s work, including decades of researching alternative fuel, and serving on the United States Department of Energy advisory board among other things, and recently got back in touch.

Energy Vision’s focus on New York State also prompted interest in the lecture. Said Underwood, “[Vinett] told me about the series and we indicated that we [at Energy Vision] were very interested in the possibility of Dutchess County, and in fact the Hudson Valley region, taking advantage of the organic waste that is generated in both rural and urban settings, and the possibility that those wastes can be turned into a vehicle fuel for busses and trucks.”

Other than the relevance of Poughkeepsie’s location, she agreed to come for the sake of spreading Energy Vision’s message. “I’m also very pleased to do this because I think that there is nothing more important than students knowing about the kinds of options for change that are out there in their world, and starting to think about what they can do about it,” Underwood said.

Her goal for her lecture was an extension of Energy Vision’s message. “It’s not to just do the research and to publish it, but to actually go out and educate policy makers, citizens, students and environmental groups about what we’ve learned,” Underwood said.

Many Hudson Valley natives were present at the lecture. Cathy Law, who works at New Paltz High School, came to pass on information to her own students. “I teach [Advanced Placement] Environmental Science, and I’m

Founder of Engery Vision Joana D. Underwood delivers a Power Point presentation at last Mondays Bookstore Author Series. The series began in 2009 to provide lectures covering a number of fields. always trying to teach my kids new ways to use alternative energy, in a more realistic sense.”

While the lectures are organized and funded by Vinett, others—including President of the College Catharine Bond Hill—have donated time and/or money to the effort. Upcoming lectures include Professor of Biology John Long’s lecture on his book, Darwin’s Devices.

Vinett’s goal for the series is “to make available lively, relevant content to [not only Vassar students, but also to] unusual suspects. Unusual suspects are our middle school kids, our high school kids, even our elementary school kids in the Poughkeepsie area and further.”

She is in communication with many schools in Poughkeepsie and surrounding areas, often coordinating with principles and teachers to

bring grade-age students to these lectures.

She also works with them to integrate an upcoming lecture into class discussion, so the students are prepared and excited about it.

Another facet of this idea is that Vassar students can motivate younger students to be intellectually curious. “The goal is to make education accessible, but it is also an implied mentorship, in that the more Vassar students there are at the lectures, the better.”

While no grade-age students came to last Monday’s lecture, adults from the Poughkeepsie community commingled with Vassar students as they found their way to their seats.

Those interested in learning more about Underwood’s work and about Energy Vison, students are encouraged to visit energy-vision.org.

Fukui integrates personal with political in senior thesis Chris Gonzalez Guest Reporter

A

Jiajing Sun/The Miscellany News

s a capstone of all the work a student has put into his or her field, a senior thesis becomes meaningful to its writer and is something more than just a time-consuming burden.

Yet for Roku Fukui ’12, his senior thesis on social movements in Singapore not only encapsulates his academic interests, but also hits close to home. “My personal involvement and life story came together in my thesis,” he said.

Last summer Fukui was awarded the Davis Prize for Peace Fellowship, an honor that allowed him to work with migrant workers in Singapore.

“I wanted to go home and work for a migrant worker organization in Singapore so the process of applying for that fellowship seemed like an appropriate thing to do,” he wrote in an emailed statement.

Fukui was awarded the prize from the Fellowship Office at Vassar. In order to get the award, he was required to present a grassroots project for peace—one that would be implemented during the summer, essentially becoming the premise for his thesis.

“I was working for advocacy awareness and documenting cases of abuse. I’ve come to realize that the social movement [in Singapore] has to operate differently that the western world,” he said. As he put it, the political atmosphere is heavily restrictive in comparison to this part of the world: “The different actors from the government and the state, as well as private employers and NGO are trying to create a space for [themselves] in Singapore.” As he explained, the power struggle between these different agents have direct consequences on activism in this nation.

Fukui’s thesis basically urges what he calls

Roku Fukui ’12, pictured above studies in his off-campus home. Fukui’s senior thesis covers social movements in Singapore, encapsulating not only his academic pursuits but also his personal interests. “soft activism” in Singapore. With the rigorous control the State possesses, activism cannot be forthright as it often is here in the United States. “Activists must mobilize around advocacy work that falls within the parameters of what the government allows,” he wrote.

Social movements aimed at promoting the welfare and rights of migrant workers are considered a form of rebellion, and therefore they must tread softly if they hope to improve their situation.

Professor of Geography Yu Zhou works alongside Senior Lecturer of Urban Studies

Timothy Koechlin as a thesis adviser to Fukui. “He is writing very interesting things …

I am very encouraged by his research so far.

The thesis he is doing is quite significant and promising,” she wrote in an emailed statement. “It will help us to understand how social movements on migrants work in a relatively tightly controlled political space of Singapore.”

Though the experience played an instrumental role in his research, the struggles that migrant workers face cuts close to home. “I

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

was born and raised in Singapore. My mother is an activist. So, I have been faced with these migrant workers all of my life,” he wrote.

Fukui recalled that his house is often used as a lodging for male foreign workers. He has become quite accustomed to up to 10 of these men living in his home. “[They are usually] injured or facing shelter disputes with an employer,” Fukui wrote.

While his activist mother has provided much of the influence behind his deep interest and experience with the subject matter, Fukui admits that she had no part in developing his thesis. “I try to keep her at bay so I can develop my own ideas,” he chuckled.

He does acknowledge that Vassar faculty has helped him reach this point in his academic career. Fukui is an independent major with most of his classes incorporating geography and urban studies.

One of the teachers that inspired Fukui’s academic interest in geography is Associate Professor of Geography Joseph Nevins, who Fukui describes as “the perfect mix of academia and activism.”

Similarly, Fukui hopes to achieve a similar balance with his own thesis and work in the future. He has done some work with the Dutchess Institute, an organization that strives to deliver academic articles and scholarly journals to a wider audience.

As his senior year dwindles down, Fukui reflects that his research as always been apart of his college experience. “I think that throughout the classes I have had here I’ve written about these issues to some extent,” he explained. Fukui felt that this thesis, which serves as a marriage between his academic and personal interests, would be a great way to culminate his time at Vassar.

FEATURES

Page 6

February 23, 2012

Slow Food dinner brings local food, farmers to table Danielle Bukowski Features Editor

B

Emily Lavieri-Scull/The Miscellany News

ringing together Vassar students, community members and local farmers, Slow Food Vassar’s benefit dinner, Shake the Hand that Feeds You, on Feb. 17 underscored interest in bringing healthy and sustainable food to campus. The appetizers, main course and dessert served were made from produce supplied by five local farms. Students interested in learning more about the food they were eating were encouraged to speak with the farmers themselves, who attended the dinner. “We wanted to do [a dinner] that would benefit the farmers directly,” Slow Food’s Student Food Cooperative co-Founder Zack Zeilman ’12 said. 100 percent of the revenue from the event went back to the farms involved in the event.

Said Slow Food co-President Meghan McDermott ’13, “We really care about these farms, and we [saw] the dinner as something that encourages students to continue to support local food, and to interest them in buying from the food co-op.”

The dinner was more than a way to get a great meal from local source: Slow Food also used the event as the launch for the student food cooperative The Pumpkin Patch.

The cooperative was co-founded by Zeilman, and is partnering with the local non-profit Shaping Empowered Teens program & Health Café, which engages Poughkeepsie High School students in volunteerism, sustainability and career development.

Representatives from the after-school center were invited, and plans for the Pumpkin Patch cart were on display for interested students.

Said Zeilman, “We’ve been working all year developing plans to have a food cart to bring local produce to campus. It’s one of the ways we’re trying to engage with farmers, by having a buying club and providing some samples of food from local vendors, like Peanut Butter & Co. and Sweet Mama’s vegan desserts.” Although the cart still needs to be built, in the long-term Zeilman would like to see it coming to Vassar regularly.

Vassar’s Dining Service already receives

Above, students converse with local farmers and community members at the Slow Food benefit dinner, Shake the Hand that Feeds You, held in the Aula on Feb. 17. The event promoted sustainable eating. roughly 20 percent of the campus’s food locally, McDermott was told, so she contacted those local farms for the event.

Five farms within 50 miles of Vassar’s campus ultimately gave food to Shake the Hand: J. Glebocki Farms in Goshen, Meadow View Farm in New Paltz, Ronnybrook Farm and Dairy in Ancramdale, and Shunpike Dairy in Millbrook sold food to the dinner; Hepworth Farms in Milton donated their produce.

“My original idea for [the dinner] was that kids just don’t get to see the farms [where our food comes from],” said McDermott, acknowledging that it would require transportation and some students might feel uncomfortable just showing up on a farm. “So this [was] a way for students to see that the farmers really do want you to know what they’re doing. It’s bringing local food to Vassar, and the ideology behind small farms and engaging conversation to the

community.”

And since multiple farmers were present, students could literally shake the hands of those involved in making their meal.

Bart Colucci from Meadow View Farm in New Paltz got his farm involved in the event after he was contacted by Slow Food.

“I was involved in raising money for the summer Vassar Farm Project, and they knew me from there,” Colucci said. “I really like [the group]. I’m a member, I try to go to most of the local meetings. I can just say it’s the greatest organization.” Meadow View Farm’s produce is Certified Naturally Grown, which means that it is committed to farming without chemical pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers or genetically modified organisms.

Liz Baldwin of Shunpike Dairy, which is certified to sell raw milk in New York, saw the event as a way to encourage students to

come out to the farm. The Raw Milk Co-op, part of the Vassar Greens, regularly buys raw milk from Baldwin’s farm. In a short speech to the room during the opening presentation, Baldwin encouraged students to visit the farm, saying they were welcome to pet the cows and learn how to milk them; she included pictures of the cows as well.

The doors opened at 6:30 p.m. and those filtering in were encouraged to sample a variety of kosher, gluten-free and vegan peanut butters from Peanut Butter & Co., with bread placed on every table. The appetizers also included a caramelized onion and goat cheese tart, which illustrated the cooperative effort put into keeping the food local and sustainable: The onions came from Glebocki Farm, the dairy from Ronnybrook and the eggs from Shunpike Dairy.

Students from the jazz band played as appetizers went out and students spoke to members of Slow Food and the farmers about the food and the work going into Pumpkin Patch.

The main course included roast beef, roasted winter vegetables and a spring mix salad, followed by a dessert of apple tart, ice cream and vegan brownies—all made with products from the local farms. The food was prepared in the kitchens of the AULA by Slow Food members, and was all fresh and delicious. Zeilman noted that they almost ran out because more people than anticipated purchased tickets; but there was plenty to go around and knowing exactly where the food came from added to the delictability of the dishes.

Said Slow Food Treasurer Evan Herdrich ’14, “I think the dinner was delicious. I loved the peanut butter samples, especially the [spicy] The Heat is On sample. And the atmosphere was perfect; the band was very good.”

Moving into the rest of the semester, Slow Food wants to have more community dinners and to collaborate more with the farms, in addition to beginning work on The Pumpkin Patch. The turnout for Shake the Hand that Feeds You—over 70 individuals—showed the increased awareness of the necessity for local and sustainable farming and the interest in bringing these goals more visibly to Vassar.

Assassins game marries cameraderie, stalking strategy Lea Brown

Guest Reporter

N

Courtesy of Dave Rosenkranz

owadays, walking across campus is a little more dangerous than usual. Assassins, the popular live-action game, has come to Vassar, and brought with it a wave of “killing.”

Assassins is a game of stealth, wit and, as its players and organizers will tell you, a healthy amount of stalking. Games have recently finished up in Josselyn, Lathrop and Davison Houses, and a new one has recently started in Raymond.

The rules of the game are fairly straightforward: each person signs up for the game and then receives the name of another person, their target. That player must then “assassinate” their target by stabbing them with a Retreat spoon.

Once the player kills their target, they receive the name of a new target. All the while, the player must also avoid being killed by the player who is hunting them.

Despite the seeming free-for-all nature of the game, there are a certain number of restrictions.

The player cannot be seen by anyone while attempting to kill their target, or the kill will be deemed invalid. There are also a certain number of places that players cannot kill their targets: the target’s dorm room, the bathroom, classrooms, places of worship and sporting events. In addition, if a player does not kill their target after four days, they will be placed on the Wanted List. Players who were already killed may kill that player on the Wanted List and retake their place in the game.

Though the game itself is relatively simple, organizing it is not. Traditionally, the process of setting up targets and logging kills is done by pen and paper, a daunting task. Jewett Sophomore Representative Ben Morse ’14. “Last year, when you killed your target, you had to tell your moderators what was going on. However, they had about 20 people telling them all at the same time. They got really confused, and it became really, really difficult.”

Despite difficulty with the logistics, the Jewett House Team wanted to go forward with the game again this year. In order to accommodate a much larger number of players, and to rectify the problems of last year, Morse wrote a computer program that would make running the game much easier.

For the fall semester, Morse created a website specifically for the game being played in Jewett.

After that trial run went smoothly, Morse went about fixing up the website for the next semester. “I went through and I patched [the old website] up so that it can run multiple games,” Morse said. “So right now, Davison, Joss and Lathrop are all running a game at the same time.

The old website couldn’t do that. This one has a feed, like Facebook, that updates the players on who’s been killed.” Additionally, the new website also helps administrators resolve disputes between players, which was previously a complicated situation.

“I would say it’s been instrumental to making Joss’s game very efficient and fast,” said Joss Freshman Representative Casey Hancock ’15, who assisted Morse in improving the program.

“There was one day where I think we had a total of 25 people eliminated in that day. Sending out emails to 25 people would destroy me, so it’s been very helpful and useful.”

In order to win the game, players have employed a number of strategies and methods that range from making allies to staking out for hours at a time to trickery to plain, old-fashioned stalking.

Sam Kennedy ’15, one of the finalists in the Davison game, had a very specific strategy. “I stalk my targets. I try to figure out where they’re going and when, and wait for them there,” he explained in an emailed statement.

Gabriela Medina ’14, the winner of the game in Josselyn, took a simpler, more defensive approach. “I definitely learned to refine some of my stalking skills but my main strategy was to not be killed,” she said in an emailed statement.

“I would feel pure adrenaline and exhilaration

Four students hide their Assissans weapon—a spoon—behind their backs. Assassins is a live-action game in which participants are given a target to “kill” in a four-day window before being eliminated themselves.

after making a kill but the lead up to it was torture. I once waited for one of my targets to leave the bathroom and my heart started to beat almost painfully with anticipation.”

Christian Romero ’14 even went as far as to stop sleeping in his room in Josselyn and temporarily take up residence in Jewett.

“A guy on my hall was after me,” said Romero.

“He had all these allies...so I counter escalated.

My big counter escalation was staying in someone else’s room. I did that for a handful of days.”

Romero assassinated six people, mostly through creative strategies like reconstructing the chain of kills and forming a group of allies. His game ended with a betrayal by an allyturned-double agent, who turned him over to his killer.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

For Owen Brady ’15, the winner of Lathrop Assassins, the game was made much easier by the fact that one his targets was his roommate.

“I came back early from volleyball practice, and the room was open with the lights on—I knew he was around,” Brady wrote in an emailed statement. “I looked in the shower and sure enough his towel was hanging on the outside. I locked our door and hid around the corner and waited for him to come out. Right before he reached the door, I rushed him ... I stabbed him easily.”

Despite how seriously some seem to take the game, the lesson that most take away is one of bonding and fun.

“The main thing is that going through all these lengths to play Assassins is a lot of fun,” said Romero.

FEATURES

February 23, 2012

Page 7

Brain food: Power through midterms with healthy snacks Roxanne Ringer Gusst Columnist

W

ith only two weeks of classes left, you might be tempted to let your mind wander to sunny beaches, or trips to your home and family, but don’t lose focus! To get to Cancún you still need to write that research paper and take two midterms; and wait, when’s that other paper due?

Turns out this week is a lot more stressful than you anticipated. Your stomach is in knots and you don’t have time to cook or to run to the All Campus Dining Center. It may be tempting to eat your emotions by shoving down a bag of chips, but that won’t do your mind or your body any favors.

Getting the right nutrients is even more important than usual in this last stretch before break. What’s the best way to combat stress and exhaustion while treating your body right?

Give your brain food. Though it’s only two percent of your body’s mass, your brain typically uses 20 percent of your energy. And if you’re thinking more than normal, like during a test, it’s generally agreed that even more energy is being used. If you forget to eat, you forget the information you’ve been cramming, and then nobody’s happy. Here are some small snacks that give brainy results.

Espresso beans

If you need that caffeine-sharpened focus, grab a handful of these. They’re easy to munch on and give you a great boost without the shakes.

Dark chocolate covered espresso beans are especially delicious. And in small quantities like this, dark chocolate can be quite beneficial.

Peppermint tea

Tea is helpful for all-around health. In addition to containing anti-depressant qualities,

tea can boost your immune system, jump-start your metabolism and help prevent bad breath.

Peppermint specifically makes you alert and releases anxiety. Just the smell improves focus and boosts performance. This tea also helps with indigestion, in case you’ve unwisely scarfed down three Retreat donuts.

Flaxseeds

Flaxseeds are low-carb, high in fiber and filled with Omega-3 fatty acids. Flaxseeds are also filled with ALA­—alpha-linolenic acid, an essential fatty acid that the body can’t make— which helps your cerebral cortex work better.

Sprinkle them on your salads, or into smoothies, shakes or cereal.

Low-fat yogurt

In addition to having good bacteria and animal protein, low-fat yogurt provides amino acid lysine, which reduces anxiety.

Nuts

If you’re missing meals because you’re stuck in the Library, snack on some raw and unsalted nuts. Walnuts have high concentrations of DHA, another Omega-3 fatty acid that boosts cognitive performance. Almonds and hazelnuts are two of the most concentrated sources of Vitamin E available. Vitamin E is commonly known for slowing age-related cognitive decline, but what’s important for right now is that it improves memory and verbal abilities.

Salmon

You may have heard that fish is brain food, but it’s salmon and mackerel that are full of the Omega-3 fatty acids that help you think fast.

Those looking for a quick, fishy snack will be happy to know that salmon burgers available at

Salmon is one healthy option to keep your brain energized during the stress of midterms. It contains Omega-3 fatty acids that help you think fast. Salmon burgers are available at the Retreat every Friday.

the Retreat on Fridays!

the ice cream try a little avocado. The thick, rich texture will satisfy your fat cravings in a healthy way.

Asparagus, broccoli, spinach and other dark green veggies

Rich in folic acid, iron, and vitamins B6 and B12, these will stabilize your mood, improve memory and provide energy for your brain.

Avocado

It’s no secret we crave high-fat foods when stressed. An unhealthy relationship can develop with food when it’s eaten as comfort. If you’re feeling frantic, instead of reaching for

So, take care of yourself this week. Your body, brain and grades will thank you for it.

And have a fun and healthy Spring Break. You earned it.

Pureé a medium avocado, add 2 tablespoons of lemon juice and a dash of cayenne for a delicious dressing. Drizzle it over a spinach salad and sprinkle with cranberries, almonds and flaxseed for a brainy treat. Good luck and good eating!

Orgs, administrators cultivate Vassar Twittersphere Matt Ortile

Social Media Ediitor

W

Juliana Halpert/The Miscellany News

riting 2000-word essays is something of a casual hobby for a Vassar student.

Condensing thoughts into 140 characters, however, may be more of a challenge.

Unlike essays, Twitter requires all written thoughts to be condensed in this way.

Since its debut in 2006, Twitter has gained over 300 million users, from celebrities and political figures to your friend down the hall.

It now operates as a sort of equalizer; Twitter is accessible to everyone with an Internet connection, although many smartphones allow you to tweet on the go.

Its connective potency aided sociopolitical revolutions at home and abroad, such as the Arab Spring and #OccupyWallStreet movements. Even the word for its short-form posts, “tweet,” has made it into the Oxford Dictionary.

Given the political and democratic force that Twitter has become in such a short period of time and how deeply it’s ingrained into the cultural zeitgeist, it’s surprising to see that the Vassar Twittersphere is still only in its infancy, yet growing steadily.

Twitter is not nearly as popular as Facebook in the Vassar community, but there are still a fair number of student accounts actively tweeting online. Some use Twitter as platforms for political commentary and information dissemination. Others tweet about their abundance of homework, lack of sleep and recaps of their Friday nights. Let’s be real: “drunk tweeting” is now a thing. Still, regardless of content, the medium of Twitter speaks to the ability for any individual to easily generate discourse in a public space.

“Twitter is a way to have active communication in little bits at a time,” said Vassar Student Association (VSA) Vice President of Operations Jenna Konstantine ’13. She follows the New York Times and Miscellany News Twitter accounts and uses the platform as her primary source of news while on-the-go.

“It’s information that people can collect on their own terms,” Konstantine said. Most news sources have Twitter accounts, and many students will learn of national events through Twitter before checking headlines.

While Twitter is not nearly as popular on campus as Facebook, a fair number of student and administrative accounts use the social media as a platform for political commentary and relating information.

Konstantine praises Twitter’s mobile and instantaneous messaging qualities. Last week, during the parliamentary house riots in Athens on Feb. 12, Konstantine relied on global Twitter feeds from protestors on the scene for immediate news. “I have family in Greece and it was helpful to keep track of the riots as they unfolded,” she said.

Konstantine applies the same creed of accessible information to her management of the VassarVSA Twitter account. “I use it to communicate with the student body on behalf of the VSA Executive Board,” explained Konstantine. “I advertise open committee meetings and highlights of the VSA Council meeting’s weekly agenda to encourage students to be part of the VSA process.”

Other Vassar organizations, such as the Vassar Greens and the Vassar Democrats, use Twitter in similar ways to the VSA. Vassar College Entertainment and Vassar’s Department of Music utilize their Twitter feeds to advertise upcoming concerts and events.

Even the College itself, through the Office of Communication, uses Twitter as an information platform through the Vassar, Vas-

sarNews and VassarAlerts accounts, keeping the campus community informed on breaking events.

“I see the greatest asset of Twitter to be the live-tweet,” said Class of 2012 President Pam Vogel ’12. “Every celebrity death, election update and all things in between are instantly showing up on Twitter.”

She went on to echo Konstantine’s praises and said, “In a way, getting news through Twitter boils it down to its purest, most democratic form.”

This spring, Vogel entertained the idea of proposing a student seminar that focused on the potency of Twitter as a political tool in the context of the protests in Moldova, Iran, Tunisia and Egypt. More light-hearted topics, such as the etiquette of live-tweeting, would also have been incorporated into the syllabus.

Vogel and her co-teacher Noor Mir ’12 have decided not to push through with the seminar, however, due to thesis deadlines. “I also think there’s something to be said about the concept-Twitter as a form of artistic expression that really draws on the collective ex-

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

perience,” added Vogel, referring to comedy Twitter accounts such as VCGirlProblems, VassarProblems and WTFVassar.

VassarBro is another satirical Twitter account that pokes fun at the sporty male student attending a liberal arts college. In a private and anonymous direct message on Twitter, VassarBro writes, “The best thing about Vassar-specific humor is that it inspires a sense of pride and collective identity at VC. We all belong in our own ways.”

Certainly a tweet that says, “Had to take a break from watching the Super Bowl because, come on, cast lists are up!!!” speaks to the multiple facets of a Vassar student. “I think there’s something magical about that ‘Oh, me too!’ moment,” writes VassarBro. While there is no official count for the current Vassar Twitter population, Vassar’s presence online is substantial enough that President of the College Catharine “Cappy” Bond Hill and Dean of the College Chris Roellke officially joined Twitter in October 2011 (CappyHill and ChrisRoellke, respectively). Most recently on their accounts, Hill tweeted about A Vassar Evening at The Brooklyn Museum and Roellke promoted the Student-Faculty Basketball Game.

However, their tweets are few and far between. In an emailed statement, Roellke wrote, “I must confess that I have not been a steady Twitter user and I am still figuring out the best way to deploy this form of social media.” Yet Roellke says he has recently found that his personal Facebook page has been useful in keeping in touch with current students and graduates of Vassar.

While Twitter continues to flex its democratic muscle outside of the bubble, it remains privy to an intimate community of media-savvy students and groups on campus. The reach of Twitter at Vassar may seem limited at first, but the modest size of the Vassar Twitter population has its positive aspects.

“It’s like your own private audience,” Konstantine said. “It’s a midpoint between writing in your journal and posting a status on Facebook.” As technology continues to connect everyone to everything everywhere, only time will tell if this private audience will expand or diminish in the coming future.

Page 8

FEATURES

February 23, 2012

Yale-NUS to open in Singapore, amid cultural differences

Courtesy of the Yale Daily News

SINGAPORE continued from page 1 leadership for institutions, Hill described her new position on the Governing Board for Yale-NUS as very different from her day job.

“It’s fun and interesting for me being on the board because I’m so used to being someone who’s involved in the day-to-day operation and being on the board is very different,” she said. “You’re not down there doing the nittygritty, and I’m used to that.”

The first 150 students will matriculate in the fall of 2013, though the new campus, adjoined to the larger NUS campus, will likely not be completed until 2014.

Yale-NUS will house three residential colleges with space to add a fourth if necessary.

The college will aim for about one thousand students in total. From its opening, the college will offer 14 majors, which include anthropology, physical science, urban studies, environmental studies and global affairs.

Each major is broadly conceived to encompass various approaches to the subject. For example, those who choose to major in physical science would take classes in astronomy and chemistry in addition to physics and geology.

“They’re really patterning it on a small liberal arts college,” said Hill. “But the difference would be that it’s located at a university, so the students and the faculty will be able to take advantage of the existence of the university around them, including the library.”

Nevertheless, Hill noted that there is still a lot to accomplish before students arrive.

“It’s starting basically from scratch,” she said of the school. The curriculum, faculty and campus are literally being built from the ground up.

Currently, a small search committee is looking for presidential candidates.

This is not NUS’s first partnership with an American university, however. As just one example the University has a graduate medical program with Duke Univeresity. But this par-

The campus for the Yale-NUS liberal arts college will be built next to the above National University of Singapore dorm. President of the College Catharine Bond Hill sits on the college’s Governance Board. ticular partnership is the first to bring a liberal arts curriculum to the University and to place such focus on undergraduates. American schools’ internationalizing their reach has also been a growing trend.

“The tradition in much of the rest of the world has been for students to specialize in a particular subject right away,” said Hill.

“I think what American colleges and universities have to offer is the notion that a more broadly liberal arts curriculum is a really wonderful form of education, and can create a group of graduates who are bright and articulate and think critically and can be creative and innovative.”

Though the curricular tradition is American, the curriculum itself will not be, and many articles about the new program note how it will fit the “Asian context.”

According to Hill, this is also an opportunity for schools in the United States to learn and to shape their own curricula.

“Despite the fact that we’ve tried very hard to globalize our curriculum I would still say that historically we’ve been more western-centric,” she said.

“So I think that the curriculum will be much more about trying to bring a conversation about Western and Asian traditions in history and literature together, particularly in the humanities.”

Eating Disorder Awareness Week promotes healthy POV AWARENESS continued from page 1 that critically questions how bodies and individuals are viewed. “Students can send in photos and a caption stating why they consider this person to be beautiful, whether it is because they are kind, or because they work really hard, or any other reason,” said Frame.

Currently the photos and captions from this campaign are colorfully displayed on the second floor of the College Center. The captions range from the heartfelt to the poetic.

One caption written by Shane Trujillo reads, “I have never met someone in my life that is so gracious, forgiving and kind. Whenever I think the world is a cruddy place that is only getting worse, Alex [Dorsey ’13] reminds me that true good exists in the universe.”

Another OHE event aimed at promoting healthy body image is “Barbie and Ken,” which will take place on March 6 at 6 p.m. in the Faculty Commons. The event focuses on female and male perspectives on body image and how they interact with eating disorders and the media. To put on the event, the OHE is collaborating with the Women’s Studies Department.

Associate Dean of the Faculty and Associate Professor of English Eve Dunbar will speak.

Overall, the programming for the week was marked by a high degree of collaboration between the OHE, the Women’s Studies Department, The Miscellany News and members of the Feminist Alliance.

Co-President of the Feminist Alliance Faren Tang ’13 clarified that though their participation was limited to individual members, “Feminist Alliance is in full support of Eating Disorder Awareness Week.”

The members of the Feminist Alliance will join the Women’s Studies Department, OHE and the Miscellany in hosting a screening of Miss Representation shortly after the break.

The film, first screened at the Sundance Film Festival, explores the under-representation of women in influential positions as portrayed by the media. Utilizing the stories of women of all ages, including Nancy Pelosi, Katie Couric

and Condoleezza Rice alongside teenage girls, the film shows how the negativity of the mainstream media contributes to a lack of empowerment for women.

In addition to bringing attention to media’s affect on body image, Frame said, “We want people to think about the people in their lives who could possibly be dealing with an eating disorder.”

The National Eating Disorder Association spearheads the week’s events and the organization encourages local groups across the country to register as participants. In years past, programming has taken place in all 50 states and 29 countries outside of the United States.

All programming is conducted under the same theme; this year educates community members of the far-reaching effects of eating disorders.

Associate Dean of Students and Director of Psychological Services Sylvia R. Balderrama wrote in an emailed statement that eating disorders are a national issue. “Eating disorders affect between one percent and three percent of women and less than .5 percent of men nationally,” she wrote.

For Vassar, a key part of the week will be raising awareness and letting people know how to get help. “We will have a table stocked with information about eating disorders for the last week of February, so that people can gather resources when they are comfortable with doing so,” wrote Balderrama.

For individuals suffering from an eating disorder, Balderrama wrote, “Seek[ing] nutritional help, hav[ing] a physical and talk[ing] to a counselor are good first steps.”

“Metcalf is a wonderful place to start as far [as] resources go, as they can help on campus or, if you prefer, be referred off campus. In addition there is a nutrionist at Baldwin once a month who can meet with students,” said Frame.

Overall the organizers of the event thought the week was an invaluable jumping-off point to begin conversations about body image and eating disorders. “It helps to start the ball rolling on more thought and action on eating disorders and body image,” said Frame.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

In the development of this curriculum, however, some have raised concerns about the sanctity of the freedom of expression and free inquiry at a campus in a country where freedom of expression is not guaranteed as it is in the United States.

In a column in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Yale professor Christopher L. Miller wondered if students and faculty could truly enjoy the same rights on campus if not in the rest of Singapore. Specifically, Miller raises concerns about the campus’s policy on homosexuality, which is illegal in Singapore.

“Yale has no business establishing a campus in a state where some of its own faculty members are subject to arrest because of who they are. By doing so, the university has, in effect, violated its own nondiscrimination clause, which protects sexual orientation,” Miller writes.

Hill also commented on how the cultural differences between the United States and Singapore could affect students’ educational experience in this new school.

“Singapore has lots of traditions and laws that are very different than ours; they do respect academic freedom on campus,” said Hill, who explained that Yale had conversations on this topic as they approached the project.

“Faculty can publish in their areas of expertise, they can offer courses on the death penalty, for example, and discussions within the classroom is very open, but they do have laws against public demonstration, and very strong defamation laws, which are very different than ours.”

Hill continued, “You could make a decision to not engage with societies that are different or you can make the decision to engage and through education influence the evolution of that society over time, so I think that’s the idea.”

ADVERTISEMENT

OPINIONS

February 23, 2012

Miscellany News Staff Editorials

CCL must include opinions of Vassar staff in campus smoking ban discussion Y

esterday, Vassar Student Association (VSA) President Tanay Tatum ’12 sent an email to the student body containing an important survey addressing the longstanding question of a smoking ban on Vassar’s campus. Several Vassar administrators, including Dean of the College Chris Roellke, have considered such a ban. If enacted, Vassar would join the ranks of 600 smoke-free colleges and universities in the United States, including peer institution Barnard College and 51 others in New York State. Nevertheless, the Vassar Student Association (VSA) Council has said it hopes to act upon the results of this survey in a way reflective of student opinion.

The Miscellany News wishes to make its voice heard on the issue, not in support of either side of the argument, but to remind readers to consider the opinions of members of the Vassar community over national trends. We recognize and appreciate the VSA’s attempts to be transparent and inclusive in basing their decision on a student poll. In particular, however, we urge the College and the VSA to poll faculty, staff and administration in addition to students, as these non-student groups will be similarly, if not more, affected by a campus smoking ban. As it stands, the staff perspective is entirely absent from dialogue surrounding the issue and we find it essential that their collective opinion be included among those already voiced by faculty, administrators and students in outlets such as the Committee on College Life and the forthcoming VSA survey.

When polling for campus opinions on the smoking ban, the VSA should first en-

sure that their sample size is large enough to represent the entire community. Barnard College’s smoking ban materialized after their Student Government Association administered a survey in which 72 percent of those polled supported a ban, while 26 percent were against and two percent were unsure. But only 10 percent of the student body chose to vote. While the situation at Barnard is fundamentally different because of the campus’ urban location, we hope the VSA recognizes that limited participation can hinder developing an accurate perception of the campus climate. More importantly, it is essential that students make their voices heard and formally participate in this process, through voting and any other avenue of advocacy.

And if a small sample size proves unavoidable, the VSA must strive to make all ongoing legislative information available and at the forefront of student awareness.

As the smoking ban proposal moves forward, all parties involved in the polling and policy-making process should keep in mind the consequences this ban has on people other than students. To put this in perspective: the student constituency will be here at most for three more years, but most faculty and staff will spend far more time at Vassar. Additionally, a quarter to a half of the students who vote in this survey will never experience the results. Because a smoking ban affects them more than it does students, faculty, staff and administrator opinions must be considered with equal or greater weight.

It is not only students’ relatively short tenure at Vassar that makes them less af-

fected by a smoking ban. The nature of the relationship between students and administration is fundamentally different than that between administration and staff or faculty. If a faculty or staff member breaks a “banned activity” rule, his or her punishments are issued from employer to employee, a relationship in which infractions generally carry more weight that those between students and administrators.

Furthermore, it is not the role of the College to dictate lifestyle choices for its faculty and staff. The administration can exert pressure to guide student choices because of the agreement to uphold certain lifestyle choices made with Vassar upon matriculation. The administration’s relationship to faculty and staff, however, does not share this paternalistic character.

Vassar is an employer as well as an educator, and we must consider the various types of agreements that allow our community to function without assuming that a change in policy will affect all members equally.

As we consider the question of a smoking ban on the Vassar campus, the editorial board reminds the VSA and the administration of the importance of large and inclusive sample sizes on which to base policy decisions. We do not endorse either side of the debate. Rather, we urge the campus to use this decision as a way to reinforce solidarity and respect between all members of the Vassar community.

—The Staff Editorial represents the opinion of at least two thirds of the 23-member Miscellany News Editorial Board.

A Feminist’s perspective on Chris Brown Nadja Leonhard-Hooper

A

Guest Columnist

t this point, I’m sure a lot of you are sick of hearing about Rihanna and Chris Brown.

I’m not.

Let’s remember, just for a second, that we’re talking about a guy who, less than three years ago, drove home from a party with his girlfriend, got in a verbal argument with her and then beat her half to death. According to the recently leaked police report, he punched her in the face and smashed her head against the dashboard until her mouth was full of blood and she had contusions on both sides of her face. He punched her arms and legs, bit her and put her in a stranglehold until she lost consciousness. When she tried to call for help on her cell phone, he yelled that she had “done the stupidest thing ever” and that he was “really going to kill her.”

I would say that Chris Brown should still be in jail, but that’s tricky, since he never went to jail in the first place. After pleading guilty, he made a deal that got him five years of probation, 1400 community service hours, and a year of mandated anger management counseling.

Rough life.

But look at him now. He is getting paper.

Since the assault three years ago, he has been crowned artist of the year by Billboard, performed “Man in the Mirror” at the BET Awards, released his fourth studio album and, just last week, performed twice at the Grammys where he also won for best R&B album.

Certainly, Brown received some backlash; Brown’s music was taken off of multiple radio stations, and he withdrew from certain musical performances. People got mad, called him harsh names like “woman-beater”; he did the whole “publicly apologizing on YouTube” thing (in which he was almost certainly reading from a script), and went on David Letterman with his mom to talk about his experiences of seeing his stepfather beat his mother as a child. He said he was shocked and confused at his own actions, and was ready to do the work on himself to

make sure that this never happened again.

But recent occurrences—Brown smashing a window and storming out of his Good Morning America interview shirtless when they asked him about the “Rihanna incident,” tweeting a picture of himself with his middle finger extended to the sky almost exactly three years after the assault, tweeting things like “HATE ALL U WANT BECUZ I GOT A GRAMMY Now! That’s the ultimate FUCK OFF!”—all suggest that anger management counseling may not have been all that effective. And yet his career continues.

Just as bizarre as Brown’s continued success are the two different types of backlash that Rihanna received. The first type is what I’ll call the “anti-feminist” backlash. After Rihanna went public about the assault, many on the Internet engaged in a heated debate about whether Rihanna deserved what she’d gotten­— whether she’d brought it on herself. Blogs and comments suggested that Rihanna had “given Chris Brown herpes,” which, it was implied, would clearly justify a brutal attack. A website created by “people close to Chris Brown” says Rihanna was “outrageously jealous and insecure,” was physically abusive and had started the physical fight that ended in him beating her unconscious.

This type of backlash was substantiated by centuries of stereotypes of black women as emotionally unstable, and of black women’s sexuality as unclean and dangerous. As it is in most cases of sexual assault or other abuse, the media, the legal system and the public tended to focus more on the behavior and personality of the woman than on the actions of the offender. According to feminist theorist Kimberle Crenshaw, women are generally cast into one of several roles: “the whore, the tease, the vengeful liar, the mentally or emotionally unstable or, in a few instances, the Madonna figure.” Only the Madonna—the pure, untouched woman (generally white)—is seen as a true victim who deserves justice. Deeply ingrained stereotypes about black women being sexually voracious and indiscriminate, and the reinforcement

these stereotypes receive everyday from mainstream rap music and imagery, made it easier to suggest that Rihanna was not this Madonna.

She was sexy. She was a little dangerous. She occasionally wore black and some chains. She was, as her album said, a good girl gone bad.

Her critics suggested that if she sang about liking “S&M” or “Disturbia,” perhaps she really had been “asking for it.” Maybe Chris Brown had just gotten “confused.”

To many Vassar students it all sounds absurd, and we assume that this kind of thinking isn’t present here. It is. But it’s phrased differently. That’s the second type of backlash she received; the “feminist” backlash. When Rihanna didn’t immediately end her relationship with Brown and initially refused to press charges, she was demonized for being a bad example for young women. The fact that Rihanna went back to work and put out two albums, collaborated with a number of artists and released four number one hits was seen as a sign of weakness, of missing the opportunity to speak up for victims of domestic abuse.

Her hit video “S&M” in particular drew heavy criticism. In the video, in which she dances around in revealing, brightly colored outfits, plays with whips, and writhes on the floor, tied up, she sings that “sticks and stones may break my bones but chains and whips excite me.” Interestingly, most critics ignored the fact that Rihanna is rarely being dominated or subjected to pain in the video. In fact, for most of it, she is acting as a dominatrix, tying up paparazzi who, in the beginning of the video, are seen labeling her with phrases like “princess,” “slut” and “daddy issues.” Despite this interesting and more complicated message, critics felt that the difference between consensual and safe S&M and assault would be ignored, and that Rihanna’s revealing clothing and raunchy dancing would be used against her to trivialize the incident.

This is where it gets a little tricky. Yes, Rihanna probably should have ended her relationship immediately after she was brutally See BROWN on page 12

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Page 9

Photography knows no ethics?

Hannah Ryan

Guest Columnist

W

e’re nearing the end of our Tangiers walking tour on the VC 2011 INTL Spring Break Travel Trip. I’ve fallen behind, bewitched as much by the city streets as by my camera’s need to document them. Without warning, feverish chanting inhabits the space that, moments before, had housed our dissonant chorus; I raise my camera instinctually. The commotion careens around the corner and I take the photograph without hesitating. Stripped of the momentary security provided by my viewfinder, I’m faced with a crowd of men supporting a wooden stretcher covered in a white cloth. The leader of the group observes me, observing them. “No photo.” His tone is commanding, but tolerant as if he’s giving instructions to a child. I nod, relieved my photo has gone undetected. I turn and run to catch up with the tour. The men follow me around the corner seconds later. I see our group of 40 Americans from an emotional and physical distance, I watch cameras rise. The man’s tone is audibly distressed this time when he repeats, “No photo! No photo!” I cringe, seeing myself in every hungry face, eager to capture the man’s emotion.

Then the men recede from view, our guide announces we have witnessed a funeral procession for a young boy, and the moment passes. “Good photography knows no ethics,” one of our chaperones declares to me later in the afternoon. He says this abruptly and though I am initially disturbed, I’m convinced he is correct.

The National Press Photographers Association holds its photojournalists to a stringent Code of Ethics. “Article 4: Treat all subjects with respect and dignity. Give special consideration to vulnerable subjects and compassion to victims of crime or tragedy. Intrude on private moments of grief only when the public has an overriding and justifiable need to see.” This brings to mind the controversy behind Kevin Carter’s haunting, Pulitzer-Prize-winning photograph depicting a vulture stalking an emaciated Sudanese child. The photojournalist was widely condemned for both the image and his decision not to intervene. My photograph of the funeral procession in Tangiers is in no way equivalent to Kevin Carter’s notorious picture, neither thematically nor aesthetically. But when I look at my picture now, nearly a year removed from the trip, I don’t know how to feel about it and I don’t know what to do with it. This is reason enough in my mind to indicate that I overstepped my bounds as an observer. The title of our seminar was Envisioning Spain’s Borders. Ironically, the act of taking a photograph constructs a border, a boundary that separates the artist from the subject, the objectifier from the objectified. That disproportionate power dynamic is implicit to photography and photography is embedded in our cultural consciousness.

Unlike painting or drawing, photography relies on a machine. The value and function of technology in our society defines that machine as objective. This association lends photography an authority that I don’t believe it deserves. The absence of the photographer in a finished image (as compared to the painter’s brushstrokes) further cements photography’s perceived authority. A photograph shouldn’t be viewed as a window; rather it is a scene scrutinized by a hidden eye. While a photograph can inform, it isn’t a narrative; it’s a fragment, divorced from its spatial and temporal context. Equating the subject of the gaze with its representation in the photograph breeds an intimacy that grossly oversimplifies the art form and our world.

Travel photography is a particularly dangerous strain of the art form. The immediacy of digital photography makes it even easier to lapse into a passive ennui. Photography’s exploitative potential is not being called into question, however; it is we who exploit the art form, not vice versa. Susan Sontag articulates it best: “Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks.”

—Hannah Ryan ’14 is a Russian studies major.

OPINIONS

Page 10 ADVERTISEMENT

February 23, 2012

Doctors’ religious choices cannot trump women’s health Carson Robinson Guest Columnist

L

ast week, I wrote an opinions column arguing that withholding women’s reproductive health services is a form of violence (02.16.12, “Birth Control Ban Case of Violence Against Women”). The policy implication of this is obvious: Health care organizations should be required to provide these services. But this is much easier said than done. When we talk about women having access to medical services, when we say that these services are available, we need to consider how accurately this describes the behavior of medical providers and the experience of their patients.

Health care organizations can provide services in a number of different ways. They could provide the services in good spirits and under safe conditions, according to the optimal medical practices.

If the services are something that the providers think is important—if it is something that they believe their patients need and deserve, and to which all people should have the human right to access— then we can expect that the institutions will provide the services appropriately.

On the other hand, if the institution morally disagrees with the service—if the providers judge the patients requesting the services to be morally objectionable, consider the requested medical interventions to be heretical and even homicidal—then how will they behave toward patients who come seeking these services? What nonverbal cues will convey their attitudes toward the patient? Which rooms in the hospital will be designated for these procedures?

Imagine a woman seeking internal contraception because her boyfriend refuses to wear a condom. She goes to the hospital and when she states the service that she is seeking, staff members express their opposition. She waits three hours before someone leads her down the hall to the acute psychiatric unit, to a room with no TV or magazines, and she waits there for two more hours. As you can see, hospitals can impose a number of barriers, disincentives and punishments for women seeking morally contested services. And because it is disguised as typical hospital inconvenience, political regulation of this behavior will be extremely difficult.

When the patient finally speaks to a doctor, how is the doctor going to convey their opinion about the moral status of the procedure, and of the person requesting the procedure? If this

woman’s doctor believes she is making decisions about her sex life behind her boyfriend’s back, having sex out of wedlock, disobeying the law of the official religion of the institution that is now being forced to provide this service, then what can the woman expect her doctor to do? It would be naïve to think that these attitudes could ever be extracted from doctors’ medical decisions.

Even unconscious prejudice has been shown to predict biased medical behavior, as shown in a 2007 Harvard Medical School study. And in the case of attitudes toward women’s reproductive health, we are probably not dealing with unconscious attitudes but with overtly antagonistic disapproval of patients.

The doctor can easily sabotage the patient’s attempt to obtain birth control. They can prescribe an inappropriate dosage, recommend the option with the least effective action and most adverse side effects, or come up with some medical reason why the treatment would be unsafe for this particular patient. They can forego handwashing or other safety measures. Or they can simply give misleading information about the various treatments while clearly communicating their disapproval of the patient’s decisions.

I would imagine that some patients would be so uncomfortable with this that they would leave the hospital. Then, if a pregnancy ensues, her inaction will be misread as an outcome of a decision that she made, when in reality she has been made a victim of systemic injustice that has been left unchecked by the government.

Appropriate treatment involves providing all of the relevant information, helping a patient navigate the dizzying array of treatment options, screening for abuse and assault, offering additional services, and carefully adhering to the treatment protocol. Ideology corrodes all of this.

At any hospital, only a subset of medical staff can be trusted to provide reproductive medical services with full integrity. These staff members must be identified, and any other staff member must be regarded as a potential safety concern.

It might even be a good idea to have the pro-reproductive rights staff members wear something (like a colored stripe on their lanyard) that will signal their identity to patients. Such a measure might go a long way in terms of sterilizing the hospital, protecting patients from the pathogen of ideology.

—Carson Robinson ’12 is a psychology major.

EPA must protect public health, not corporate favor Gabe Dunsmith

Assistant Opinions Editor

I

n the contemporary political sphere, calls to reform the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) often come from politicians on the far right. For such rightwingers, reforming the EPA means draining the agency of funding, killing its efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and ensuring that the “job-killing” agency stays out of the way of corporate polluters. Such attacks are reactionary and promote the falsehood that Big Business is the cornerstone of environmental morality.

Unfortunately, without any dictate from Congressional Republicans, the EPA is already well on its way to doing what industries demand. Let’s be clear: the Environmental Protection Agency is not meant to serve the institutions that it is supposed to regulate. So yes, the EPA is in dire need of reform, but the agency must be reformed to uphold its mission of safeguarding the environment and human health, not to promote the agendas of industry.

Left alone, the agency will continue down a deteriorating path of corporate servitude and lackluster implementation of environmental laws.

Here’s why: In my hometown of Asheville, N.C., CTS Corporation ran an electroplating facility from 1959 until 1986. The company, currently headquartered in Elkhart, Ind., used the degreasing chemical trichloroethylene (TCE) in its processes, and dumped the leftover solvent into the ground. According to the Centers for Disease Control, TCE is a human carcinogen and is known to damage the immune, endocrine and reproductive systems.

Though the EPA was well aware of the contamina-

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

tion at the site, the agency removed the site from its Superfund inventory, a list of sites known to be polluted by industrial contaminants in 1995. The agency continued to do nothing until 1999, when one woman’s well tested at 7000 times the legal limit of TCE. Its inaction allowed dozens of people to fall prey to the adverse effects of TCE and even led to the development of a multi-million-dollar subdivision on CTS Corporation’s contaminated property.

The enemy in this situation is, and has always been, CTS Corporation. But when a government agency fails to fulfill its most basic task of protecting human health, the mission of the affected communitymust become two-pronged: One, to battle the corporation that made this mess, and two, to ensure that the responsible government agency does its job.

It is a sad state of affairs when people who have suffered for years due to the pollution of their community are forced to fight the bureaucratic structure of the very agency that is supposed to be on their side.

Unfortunately, however, this is the reality at the CTS site. At its best, the EPA has defended the community’s efforts against CTS Corporation and has provided municipal water to a few people whose wells have been contaminated. At its worst, however, the agency has actively promoted the agendas of polluters and attacked the very human beings who are being afflicted by the contamination.

Every day that the EPA does nothing, the contamination continues to spread, threatening not only people’s wells but their health and safety as well.

Instead of extending municipal water to all residents within a mile of the CTS site, which the community See EPA on page 12

February 23, 2012

OPINIONS

Page 11

Occupy should not marginalize itself Bill Crane Columnist

L

ast week marked three months since Occupy Wall Street’s encampment at Zuccotti Park was shut down in a show of brute force by the New York City government. If we expect the fall of Occupy to give way to an American Spring of renewed struggle on an even larger scale, as I have heard many occupiers predict, it is past time for us to start thinking about how we are going to make that happen.

The question of whether struggles like the hundreds of thousands marching on N17 last November in New York, or the port shutdown and “general strike” in Oakland on Nov. 2 last year, are possible without some shift in the dynamic of the struggle remains open. Here is where we start to see a very real threat to the movement, that does not come from the police or halls of government, but from within.

Anyone who has been paying attention to Occupy since the end of the encampments might notice a series of increasingly desperate, violent and adventurist struggles intended to provoke confrontation with the state and reignite mass protests. One such example is the action in Oakland on Jan. 28. After masses of people failed in trying to take over a building for a renewed encampment, a small group going by the name “the Occupy Oakland Move-in Assembly” went into City Hall, trashed a children’s art gallery and burned an American flag, warning the city government: “Don’t fuck with the Oakland Commune.”

The Oakland Commune…if only it were so.

Behind these supposedly revolutionary words and action, however, lurks a philosophy of struggle that is dangerous to the point that it will wreck the movement, if it has its way.

Substituting a few enlightened “revolutionaries” for a mass movement that poses the question of power is in fact a deeply conservative strategy in that it does not trust the masses of people to act of their own accord. What’s

more, it has failed every time it’s been tried.

Not only has it stopped the so-called revolutionaries in the past, but if their actions in this instance are allowed to continue, they are more than capable of wrecking real chances for mass resistance.

We see this “radical” strategy being presently enacted in the call for what has variously been called a “General Strike” or a “Day Without the 99 Percent,” for May Day (International Workers’ Day), which was first made

by Occupy Los Angeles and has been taken up within many Occupy groups nationwide.

Intended to echo the hugely successful “Day Without an Immigrant” protests on May Day of 2006, the protest call reads in part, “Will you buy nothing in support of the 10 million foreclosed homes expected in 2012? Will you march out of classes for the millions of uninsured children in this country? Will you general strike with me?”

Certainly all of the issues noted in the call for protest are worthy of concern, and worthy of having a general strike over. But the call itself displays profound ignorance of the actual nature of a general strike. General strikes are those events in which all workers, or at least a sizable majority, walk off the job to deny their labor power to the one percent and force them to pay attention to their demands. Successful general strikes like those in Seattle in 1919, Toledo, Minneapolis and San Francisco in 1934, or of course, the current nationwide one in Greece, are intrinsically linked to the power of workers, organized in unions, to act collectively and pose a real challenge to the power of the ruling class.

What is most worrisome in the current call for a general strike is that it assumes that one can be called in the absence of organized labor. While only 11 percent of workers in this country are unionized, many of those who are—including teachers in our public schools, longshoremen on our docks and ports and workers on mass transit systems—have the

power to slow or shut down large cities. The call does not pay the slightest attention to unions­—in fact, in discussions I have heard and participated in, some activists have suggested it would be a good thing if the unions did not participate, as they represent a privileged layer of workers which is not interested in engaging in real struggle.

This kind of attitude needs to be called out.

The only forces currently capable of striking effectively in this country are the unionized workers with traditions and memories of struggle. The question “Will you general strike with me?” effectively says that a general strike can be any random assembling of individuals engaging in “radical” action. In this way, it would effectively alienate organized labor, which I and other socialists argue is the key to future struggles, the only force capable of posing a sustained, organized challenge to the status quo.

A general strike cannot be conjured out of the air. In political struggles such as the ones we are engaged in, you cannot go from zero to 60 miles in seconds flat. To have a nationwide general strike will likely take years of patient work in movements and workers’ struggles.

Certainly, in the meantime May Day should be used as a day of action, including protests, marches and whatever else it may entail. But there will be no strike, and it will not be general.

Occupy is, to use a cliché, between things ended and things begun. At this stage it would be a great shame if we allowed our impatience with the current state of affairs to overwhelm our capacity for sober analysis and reassessment. What the next phase of struggle will look like is not entirely clear. What is clear, however, is that repeated actions with evermore “radical,” ever-smaller numbers of people intended to reignite mass action will lead us straight off a cliff.

Guest Columnist

T

here are three words that I seldom utter but I am prepared to write today: I was wrong. I was wrong when I took to these pages a few weeks ago and protested the Obama administration’s directive that religiously affiliated employers cover contraceptives in their employee’s healthcare plans (“HHS order violates nation’s right to freedom of religion,” 02.09.12). But in the process of changing my position my eyes were opened to something that hits at the heart of who we should be as students preparing to enter the broader world.

There were three factors that caused me to shift my position on Obama’s mandate.

First I became aware that DePaul University, the largest Catholic education institution in the country, already offers contraceptive coverage. So if the Catholic hierarchy felt so strongly about the issue why, then, do they allow their flagship education institution to cover contraception? This suggests that church leaders were just looking for a political fight. It has been well documented that the Conference of Catholic Bishops has been waiting to pick a fight with President Obama.

The second factor that contributed to my change was public opinion. According to a New York Times poll, 59 percent of all Americans support the federal mandate requiring religiously affiliated employers to cover contraceptives. More importantly, 57 percent of Catholic voters support the mandate while only 36 percent oppose it. Who knows better how actual Catholics would be affected by this proposal than actual Catholics?

The third factor that influenced my change was seeing and hearing the opposition. Many well-intentioned liberals understandably opposed the Obama mandate but most of the opposition was the conservative Catholic hi-

erarchy that is intensely disconnected from the Catholic masses and the reality of modern life in general. Standing with them were Obama’s Pavolovian conservative opponents.

These people will find any reason to reflexively oppose anything and everything the administration does. Media personalities like the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, who breathlessly wrote that Obama had awakened a sleeping giant and would pay dearly in No-

“The contraception debate sheds light on how we debate issues on this campus….… ..disagreement is fine; in fact, it should be welcomed.

vember, falls into this category. So too does MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who claimed that Pennsylvania—a state the Republicans have not won on the presidential level since 1988—was now in play. Of course Pennsylvania is no more in play now than it was before, while Noonan’s sleeping giant remains morbid or, more accurately, non-existent. People like Noonan, Scarborough and the Catholic bishops are parts of a conservative cabal that thinks they know what Americans are thinking and how they feel, but in reality are ignorant of what is occurring outside their detached orbit.

The contraception debate also shed light on how we debate issues on this campus.

open a satellite campus?

“Well, Newt Gingrich already claimed the moon.”

Deb Steinberg ’13

“Kenya and Tanzania.”

Niya Nicholson ’14

“Noam, Alaska; it’s the least mainstream city in the United States.”

—Bill Crane ’12 is an Asian studies major.

Contraception fosters opposing views Debate informs how students disagree Juan Thompson

Where should Vassar

It still stuns me how vitriolic some people can be when they disagree with you. Disagreement on our campus is fine; in fact it should be welcomed. We should all have our opinions interrogated and critiqued, but in a respectful way that adheres to the truth.

Jack Mullan ’14 did just that last week with his eloquent column disagreeing with my original position (“Secular laws must trump reilgious beliefs Institutions must respect individual freedom,” 02.16.12). The other column by Carson Robinson ’12, however, chose another route (“Birth control ban case of violence against women,” 02.16.12). First I was accused of hijacking “buzzwords associated with feminism, like safe space and marginalized” in order to use “them in defense of violence against women.” Does the columnist truly believe that only feminists need a safe space from marginalization? Any group that experiences oppression can make use of those words. I argued last week and I argue now that there is a segment of the population here at Vassar—as evidenced by Robinson’s screed—and elsewhere that attempts to marginalize those people who have genuine religious beliefs or other opinions that may sit outside the mainstream.

And though it may be hard for some on this campus to comprehend, feminists are not the only group who has to worry about oppression. Moreover, various opinions and experiences should be welcomed into our campus discussions and not be tarred with hyperbolic attacks. To accuse those who hold my original position of being in favor of violence against women is not only untrue but also inflammatory. Our goal should be to lift up the debate and discourse, not to tear each other down with foolish attacks that contribute nothing to the debate.

—Juan Thompson ’13 is a political science major.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Michael Moore ’14

“Yale.”

Genevieve Lenoir ’13

“Bosnia. I’m from there.

Luka Ladan ’15

“Utah.”

Luke Leavitt ’12 —Juliana Halpert, Photography Editor Matt Ortilé, Social Media Editor

OPINIONS

Page 12

February 23, 2012

CTS case reveals bias Debating Rihanna’s choices for Big Business in EPA ignores principal concern EPA continued from page 10 had been promised for months, the EPA opted for water filtration systems. CTS Corporation itself will be overseeing the filters. Given that this corporation has demonstrated a fundamental adherence to the profit motive to the detriment of its community over the past several decades, can the community expect the polluter to be the guardian of their water? It is outrageous and demeaning to the community that the EPA would even consider letting the polluter assume full control over the resource most precious and vital to human life—and the means by which so many people in the community have gotten sick.

Instead of negotiating with the community, arranging a full-scale clean-up, and charging CTS the bill, the EPA has done the opposite: It has negotiated with CTS on the terms of a non-cleanup, and told the community, “Deal with it.” Why would the Environmental Protection Agency, of all government entities, ever consider negotiating with the polluter? If anything, it shows that even the EPA has capitulated to market forces and is now obliged to do the bidding of corporate contaminators.

In 2010, the agency demanded that resident David Bradley file any TCE contamination he may have generated on his property, or else face a fine of $37,500 per day for every day he did not comply. Bradley’s well, hundreds of feet from the CTS site, had tested positive for TCE the year prior. With the source of pollution staring the EPA in the face, it seems authoritarian and tyrannical that the agency would threaten an individual whose health has been endangered by a corporate polluter. Last time I checked, we don’t live in a police state where the government can terrorize its citizens without due reason. But if the EPA is threatening victims without any rationality, then it has redefined its role as one of obedience to the every whim of polluting industries, a very frightening prospect indeed.

The case of CTS is an all too common one seen throughout the United States: A polluter

dumps toxins into the ground, refuses to clean them up and abandons the site, leaving local citizens—often victims of the contamination—to figure out a way to handle the toxic mess in their backyards. In addition, the EPA is almost always loath to help, refuting its fundamental mission to safeguard human health and the environment.

Perhaps the problem is that the EPA has no ethical apparatus. It has allowed mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia, permitted offshore drilling projects, authorized the use of poisonous pesticides and sat idly by as millions of Americans have become subjected to pollution; and it has all the while maintained that the public’s health is being safeguarded and the environment is the agency’s utmost priority.

In my community, the reason so much controversy has arisen towards the EPA is because we need the agency—we need them to protect us, and they are not fulfilling their most basic duty.

My community should be fighting alongside the EPA. The EPA should be fighting for us, in a fullfledged assault against CTS Corporation. My community should not have to spend its time and resources tussling with an agency that is charged with our very protection.

This battle is not about attacking the Environmental Protection Agency itself. It is about attacking the system in which the EPA is entrenched.

The EPA has a fundamental directive to do what is right. We need the agency to stand up, get clean municipal water to residents, implement a full-scale cleanup, and kick CTS where it hurts by forcing them to pay for it all.

But more than that, we need reforms within the EPA itself. Until we rid the EPA of its obedience to polluters and institute broad changes to EPA policy, we can never expect the EPA to put human health and the environment first.

BROWN continued from page 9 beaten. But the thought that a young woman could leave her first love and best friend easily is a fantasy.

It takes most women much, much longer to get out of abusive relationships. Yes, Rihanna could have used her fame and influence to draw attention to domestic abuse everywhere. But that’s not what she wanted. She didn’t want to be the poster child for domestic abuse, or the “victim.” She wanted to make music and get on with her life. And yes, releasing a song about how pain is your pleasure after you’ve been assaulted might not be the best idea. But it’s still her choice.

All of these attacks on Rihanna are detrimental to the feminist cause because they support the deep cultural belief that the only victims of domestic abuse (or sexual abuse) that deserve our support are the victims that come forward as figureheads, that are pure and virginal and only ever have sex in the missionary position, and are willing to put their most intimate and terrible moments on display to help others.

The “neutral parties” on the issue say that this was a personal matter to be handled privately—that it was no one’s business. That’s bullshit. If it’s our business to see

Beyonce’s newborn and Snookie’s weight loss and Whitney Houston’s corpse, then it’s our business to know that in our culture, fame and image seem to excuse abuse.

Chris Brown teaches us that if you’re talented enough, and if you can croon those high notes, you can beat someone up, continue to have a good career, win a Grammy and get a new girlfriend within three years.

Women will still want you, as the recent collection of female tweeters saying they wouldn’t mind if Chris Brown beat them shows. That abuse will be taken less seriously if the story can be told as: “a wild black singer forced the nice boy to defend himself in a fight.” If the woman can be cast as a whore, a freak, or jealous bitch, then the man can move quickly from the status of monster to that of repentant sinner rising from the ashes to the victim? There’s a deep, cultural problem in the way we view domestic abuse that is rife with racism, sexism, and the tricky place in between.

Getting to the root of the problem is the only way to begin to fix it.

—Nadja Leonhard-Hooper ’15 is a member of the Feminist Alliance.

ADVERTISEMENT

—Gabe Dunsmith ’15 is Assistant Opinions Editor of The Miscellany News. He is a member of the Vassar Greens.

The Miscellany Crossword

by Jonathan Garfinkel, Crosswords Editor ACROSS

18. Move like a mouse

39. Nixon Vice Presi-

DOWN

1.An assembly, old style

20. Gridder’s org. north

dent Agnew

1. Shepherds and re-

5. Prefix for a global

of the border

41. “We’ll be there in 5”,

trievers

phone, perhaps

22. 30-Rocker Baldwin

briefly

2. ____-Z (souped-up

8. Schlep, perhaps

24. They’re not butter

42. Decay

Camaro)

12. French river

27. The Marines, for

43. CIA output, per-

3. “Orinoco Flow”

13. Flight 800 airline,

one

haps

singer

briefly

31. Foretelling

44. Loud, booming

4. One side

14. Euro peaks

34. Talented

48. “Jaws of Life”

5. “_____ City” (Pitts-

15. Spanish painter

35. Recede

maker

burgh)

Francisco

36. ___-de-dah

49. Russian space sta-

6. Alert

16. Waxy spot

37. Benefits

tion, once upon a time

7. Black road goop

17. Blocked “land”,

38. Army builders,

50. Online instruction

8. One on the phone or

perhaps?

briefly

manual

at the door

53. Tractor maker John

9. Beer type

_____

10. Soviet-made ba-

55. Renaissance human-

zooka

ist

11. Poultry officer?

60. Contemporary

19. Once-upon-a-times

61. Parabola

20. Machine bit

62. Vena ____

21. Thing going viral?

63. Blocker of 62-across

23. Rears

64. K-i-s-s-i-n-g in a

25. Ex-Houston foot-

tree? Briefly

baller

choice, once

of silence

tion watchdog

65. Zone

26. Results of laughs

32. Fox’s _____ (choco-

46. .ZIP rival

56. Con

66. Dirt-eating disor-

while drinking

late syrup)

47. Gold dust

57. Lady-horse

der

27. May, Ann, and oth-

33. Spectre

51. Bands (i.e. of cattle)

58. I-are counterpart?

67. Foolish one

ers

35. Grey-yellow shade

52. Killer whales

59. Franco-German

68. Harlem ____ (cen-

28. _____ Joy

39.

53. Rossi’s in Pough-

river

tral park pond)

29. Played again

40. Dien Bien ___

keepsie, for one

60. Angel dust

30. 007’s weapon of

45. Cosa Nostra code

54. Fed. Job discrimina-

62. Cit. type

Answers to last week’s puzzle

ə

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

HUMOR & SATIRE

February 23, 2012

Page 13

OPINIONS

This second-semester senior’s Vassar bucket list Brittany Hunt Columnist

M

y senior year is almost over. I am less than three months from a terrifying future of unemployment, living in a tenement in Brooklyn with eight other liberal-arts graduates to a bedroom, surrounded by albino rodents and using shredded pages of Foucault as toilet paper.

While I can’t wait to really get out there and sink my teeth into a career (as a part-time stripper and full-time starver) there are a few things still on my “Vassar Bucket List.” Hopefully the next few months will afford me ample opportunity to live out my dreams!!

Be in a Stage Production

During my time here it has been

impossible to avoid theater. Around every corner is an attention-seeking drama major trying to hide the fact that they used to be a weirdo who cried while listening to the “Wicked” soundtrack and wore an AvrilLavigne-inspired tie/wife-beater combo all through middle school by talking really loud about HOW MUCH WORK THEY HAVE and TECH WEEK and ALL THE SEX THEY’RE HAVING. I mean, the rest of us do that too, but minus the part about “tech week.” (Is that even a real thing?)

These pests have kept me away from the theater, but I really do wish to make my mark on the stage before graduation. I wanted to be in “Hair” but apparently sending them pictures of me French braiding my

pubic hair wasn’t what they were expecting for an audition, so that was a no-go. I’m currently working on a script that revolves around themes of Judaism, childhood and the McDonald’s dollar menu that I’m hoping to put up in the Shiva one of these weekends.

Sneak onto the Roof of Main

freshman year. He is beautiful and dreamy and perfect and I want more than anything to be with him.

I talked to him once last year but I have resolved to try it again. Hopefully this time it doesn’t end with him making out with his serious boyfriend in front of me while I cry during Intro to Sociology.

Go to Storm King

Because I don’t respect rules and I think gravity is a construct and I’m wild and throw caution to the wind and FUCK SECURITY and I want to see the stars and feel like I am a goddess amongst womyn and I’m on PCP. Talk to my Crush

I’ve had my eye on this guy since

I respect art.

Start a Micro-Controversy

We all have fond memories of controversies past: the thwarted Davison Luau, the laptop thief, the butt-toucher, that guy who stole $2 million. I would love to do

something so memorable. I want to piss off as many people as possible.

I have a moleskin notebook where I jot down possible ideas but as of yet the list just reads, “menstruate into the Retreat chili.”

Channel Matthew Vassar’s Ghost

I’ve put this one off for three years because I’m really afraid that he was secretly a racist and will say things that will make me uncomfortable, but I think I’m finally ready to summon the founder’s spirit. I would love to chat with him about his life and legacy. After our seance I would teleport with him to Half Time where we would pick out a micro-brew of his choice and then play beer pong outside of my TH.

A Meta Calendar by Alanna Okun, Humor & Satire Editor I am a creature of habit. I do yoga every morning, eat goat cheese at every meal, yell about the patriarchy as often as I can and for the past two years I’ve faithfully and hungover-ly sat down every Saturday to write the Weekly Calendar. If you’ve been reading the Humor & Satire section for any length of time, you’ll have noticed that there’s an eerily similar formula from week to week, (In some circles they refer to this as “unbridled laziness” or “self-plagiarism.”) Here, in honor of my 45th ohmyfuckingchristIcan’tbelievetheystillletmedothis Weekly Calendar: How to write your very own.

Thursday

Sunday

3 p.m. Tea. Introduce the theme. It should be topical and relevant but surprising; nobody wants to read “How all Sophomores Are Self-Righteous D-Bags” or “Why the Deece Can Fellate Me.” Like, we know. Rose Parlor.

10 a.m. Catholic Mass. Nothing ever happens on Sundays (besides your own life-ending hangover). Chapel.

Friday

3 p.m. Orchestra Concert. So milk these lame events for all they’re worth. Skinner.

3 p.m. Tea. The first real listing should be short and simple enough that freshmen/ prospies/ lobotomy patients who don’t understand that Tea should all be read in a row even though it’s February and you’ve done the same frickin’ thing for the last 44 issues, do. Rose Parlor.

5 p.m. Your Life-Ending Hangover. Or if there’s really no programming at all, write something totally self-referential that the student body can both relate to and pity you for. Your TH.

7 p.m. Sports Game. Sports. Sports place.

3 p.m. Tea. Mondays are generally bad for events too, so make sure this Tea listing is unnecessarily long and lengthy and wordy in order to take up enough space and room and lines that the Editor-in-Chief doesn’t yell at you for totally dicking over layout. Rose Parlor.

Saturday 8 p.m. Symposium/Band Concert/Play. It’s always good etiquette to publicize the events of people you’re hooking up with. Rocky 200.

10 p.m. Night Owls Concert. Less so to advertise your own events, but you’ve got to scrape up a few perks where you can in this thankless godforsaken position. Rocky 300.

Monday

Tuesday 3 p.m. Tea. You’re starting to run out of steam here, so fall back on a foolproof trope or two. Veganism, Cappy’s addiction to beige and the collective obesity of the senior

class are always okay bets. Maybe you’re just over the hill*, though. Rose Parlor. *THE CATHARINE BOND HILL OH SHIT SHE STILL GOT IT.** **Footnotes are a good way to take up space too.

5 p.m. Lecture by a Lesbian, Haitian, Paraplegic AIDS Victim. A member of VHP or something, who clearly has never touched a copy of the Misc ever, will have emailed asking you to publicize this event. There is no way to make it funny. Sanders Auditorium.

10 p.m. Trivia Night. Question # A Number: Got an idea for a column that you’re too lazy to write? Make it into a rhetorical question, stick it here and you’re good to go! Mug.

Wednesday 3 p.m. Tea. This one should be the real kicker. If it’s before a break, write something heartfelt about how even though Vassar is a fleabag with an attitude problem, you love it anyway. If not, it’s the best place to slip in a “fuck” or two because the copy editors don’t care enough to read past Monday. Rose Parlor.

Weekly Calendar: 02/23-02/29 by Alanna Okun, Humor & Satire Editor Thursday, 2/23

time. Lana Del Ray/Cappy. Shiva.

Off-site: Bardavon Opera House.

3 p.m. Tea. Things to do with that extra leap-year day. (“But Alanna, that’s not how leap-years work!” “Shhhhhhhhh.”) Rose Parlor.

Saturday, 2/25

7:30 p.m. The Oscars. Wilde. Schindler. The Grouch. That obnoxious 12-year-old from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. UpC.

6 p.m. Reforestation Gala. It’ll be just like your junior prom, only minus your date upchucking white wine spritzer all over your rented tux and plus eco-guilt. Villard Room.

1 p.m. Bookstore Book Club. If this is anything like my mom’s book club, get pumped for a whole lot of wine, Sparknotes and middle-aged women asking ad nauseum whether or not the tiger was REALLY in the boat the whole time. Bookstore.

9 p.m. FWA Cabaret: We FWAound Love in a Hopeless Place. Fancier theme ideas: FWA Cabernet. FWA Ca-beret.

FWA Ca-borai pri hagafen*. Aula. *Not fancier, just less goy.

10 p.m. Seven Deadly Sins. More like Seven Deadly Lins, amirite? LOOK YOU GUYS NEUROTIC JEWISH ENGLISH MAJORS KNOW ABOUT BASKETBALL TOO SOMETIMES. Jewett.

Friday, 2/24

Sunday, 2/26

3 p.m. Tea. Grab a CHOICE envelope and that cute soccer player who you keep making eye contact with when you’re both brushing your teeth in the communal bathroom. After several minutes of heavy petting, decide you’d both rather watch a New Girl marathon instead. Rose Parlor.

3 p.m. Scrabble Tournament. We live in a society where “qi,” “za” and “jo” are all acceptable Scrabble words, and “antifeminist” and “Nutella” are not. I’m going to raise my kids in a tree. Faculty Commons.

6 p.m. “Harlot/Nun.” Dog/Cat. Mom/Dad. Daytime/Night-

3 p.m. VRDT Bardavon Gala. It’ll be just like your senior prom, only minus your date coming out to you at the beachhouse after-party and plus “Jai Ho” and a bunch of leotards.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

Monday, 2/27 3 p.m. Tea. Question your burgeoning heterosexuality. Rose Parlor.

Tuesday, 2/28 3 p.m. Tea. Stake out the Deece for a full 12 hours. Eavesdrop on conversations, track patterns of French-fry rotation, analyze the crucial spoon-to-fork ratio. Submit your findings to NPR/The Chronicle. Rose Parlor.

8 p.m. “Measure for Measure.” Come feast your eyes on William Shakespeare’s gripping tale of lust, betrayal and an allfemale a cappella group that just really really wanted to sing some Regina Spektor. Martel.

Wednesday, 2/29 3 p.m. Tea. Work on your thesis. Like a BITCH. Rose Parlor.

ARTS

Page 14

The Low Anthem to perform Adam Buchsbaum Arts Editor

A

Lindy transitions from ice skater to dancer Sam Garcia

Guest Reporter

I

saac Lindy ’14 was just a five-year-old boy at home from school when he was watching television. “I was watching figure skating,” Lindy said, “and I turned to my parents and said, ‘I want to do that.’” Lindy’s father took him to the ice rink at University of Pennsylvania, and Lindy took up competitive figure skating.

After arriving at Vassar his freshman year, Lindy stopped skating competitively, though he still tries to get to the rink at least once a week. His figure skating experience led him to Vassar’s Dance Department.

“I trained in ballet for several years to supplement my figure skating training, so I had had exposure to dance,” explained Lindy.

“Figure skating was my entry into the world of creative expression and that introduced me into the world of choreography and expressing choreography with music.”

Lindy enrolled in Professor of Dance Stephen Rooks’s Low Intermediate Modern Dance class his first semester at Vassar.

“Rooks’s classes are rooted in Martha Graham technique, which I found to be an emotionally raw and cathartic style of movement,” Lindy wrote in an emailed statement. “I connected to this visceral element—a Graham class is an amazing way to vent some frustrations, and as an inordinately angsty first-semester freshman, I appreciated the outlet.”

For his class final, Lindy choreographed and performed a skating piece using elements of Graham dance techniques. “Steve’s energy is literally contagious. He runs his classes not by being a feared disciplinarian but by being inspiring and communicative,” Lindy wrote.

“He paid attention and gave constructive comments to every student in my class and made each of us feel welcome.”

Lindy discovered a new outlet to replace ice skating, and a love for dancing from Rooks’ class. In turn, Lindy decided to audition for Vassar Repertory Dance Theatre his sophomore year. “Seeing all the parallels that existed between skating and dance and all of the opportunities for choreography, especially in our Dance Department—which is pretty accessible I find—I felt the need to audition,” Lindy said.

Lindy also found himself interested in working with Vassar’s vibrant theater scene, which had impressed him as a prospective visiting student, and found himself only further in-

Campus Canvas

Alex Schlesinger/The Miscellany News

n abandoned pasta sauce factory is a barren place, but indie folk band The Low Anthem had recorded its latest album there. The Aula, thankfully, is a decidedly less desolate location for The Low Anthem’s upcoming concert. Joined by opening act Thea Ballard ’13, the group will perform on Tuesday, Feb. 28 at 7 p.m.

Vassar College Entertainment (ViCE) Music Chair Andy Dymond ’12 had the idea to bring The Low Anthem to Vassar. Ballard had introduced Dymond to the band a few years ago; Dymond also attended one of their concerts over the summer through an internship he had on The Low Anthem’s label, Nonesuch.

Having enjoyed their music, Dymond emailed them to request they come to Vassar.

Dymond describes the Low Anthem as having a clear country-folk influence, but with a more ethereal tinge. Their lyrics are often bucolic or folk in setting, but from a more personal and emotional standpoint. “I think the lyrics are really good. I think the composition is amazing. I like the singer’s voice,” Dymond said, “and I like the way they’ve brought country folk away from some of the negative associations I have with the genre.”

The Low Anthem is fronted by Ben Knox Miller, who also happens to be the son of Professor of Philosophy Mitchell Miller. “He is a part of the Vassar community,” ViCE Publicity Director Eli Schutze said, “which was just an added bonus.”

Ballard will open for The Low Anthem at the concert. “She’s performed at ViCE events before. She’s great,” Schutze said. “We picked her because she’s very good, and also because her music fits the mood of the show.

We thought she’d be the best fit.” Dymond agreed with Schutze. “It was between her and a couple others,” Dymond said. “But I think that her musical style is influenced by them, and it fit the best.”

Ballard describes her music as folk in style, instrumentation and lyrics. “It’s pretty emotionally direct. I write a lot about home, my family, close relationships,” Ballard said. “It’s pretty personal.” Ballard, in fact, is familiar with the band, having watched the Low Anthem perform in a cafe one town over from her high school. “It’s a little scary actually. I feel like I saw them become a big deal,” Ballard admitted. “It’s funny because I feel like there’s a very strong Vermont presence in my music … it comes full circle.” Ballard enjoys their music, and saw them live during last Winter Break. Even Ballard’s parents enjoyed their songs.

As the program director for WVKR, Ballard must constantly listen to and review new music. “Music can become very disposable for me,” Ballard noted. “What they play is very amazing. I’ve followed them, which doesn’t happen with a lot of bands for me,” she said.

In keeping with the relaxed atmosphere, the Aula will have seats, coffee and other snacks available. “This show is supposed to be more for a different audience, more low-key. Their music is very slow, very haunting,” Schutze said. “It’s going to be very low-pressure. We just want people to relax, and have fun and have some coffee if they’re writing papers.”

ViCE chose the Aula for the concert because of its intimate, inviting setting. “We were originally trying to look for a non-traditional space for it but we couldn’t really find one that we liked and also were allowed to use,” Schutze noted. “I know we considered doing it in the Library meditation room, but it is in the middle of midterms and it’s music, so it wasn’t possible.”

ViCE hopes that the concert will act as a respite from midterms, a study break for students looking to unwind. “Most concerts that come here into school are dance,” Dymond noted, “and while I think there’s a lot of merit to that, it’s also useful to remember that the chill music you listen to in your room alone can be amazing live. It’s beautiful.”

February 23, 2012

Isaac Lindy ’14, pictured above, began competitive figure skating at the age of five. After arriving at Vassar last year, he became involved in the Dane Department as a choreographer and dancer. trigued with choreography after exposure to the process. In turn, Lindy co-choreographed “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” his freshman year alongside co-choreographer Isabella Kosmacher ’14. “‘Dr. Horrible’ was my first experience with the responsibility of orchestrating movement for an entire production. It was certainly daunting at the beginning of the project,” Lindy wrote. “After that initial intimidation, though, the experience was wholly positive and extremely edifying. I loved working with [Kosmacher]—I learned so much from her, as she is a far more experienced dancer than I am, but our choreographic processes also meshed really well.”

Lindy finds great pleasure in the choreographing process. “My favorite part about choreographing pieces honestly stems from the moment I hear a piece of music and know that I need to create something alongside it.

I love being lost—albeit for a brief few moments—in visualizing movement to accompany a piece to which I particularly connect,” Lindy wrote.

Lindy added, “After that initial inspiration, I usually listen to the piece repeatedly—and print out the lyrics if there are any—to delve

A weekly space highlighting the creative pursuits of student-artists

Recently, I’ve found myself very interested in the idea that if I could focus more on my process of creating than on what my creation will end up looking like, then maybe I could make more happen in my work.

The idea is that, sometimes, a preoccupation with the composition distracts from opportunities to explore elsewhere. So, for this particular work, I chose to zoom in on a very small section of an older piece of mine and replicate it. Having the composition already decided for me forced me to consider aspects of my work that I usually take for granted. Actually, the act of enlarging such a tiny area helped me see the subtleties within a color, explore the textures within a texture and discover new ways of depicting identical compositions. As a result, I used more materials (paper, bark, pieces of chair, paint, flies, plastic, ink, chalk, charcoal, cardboard, etc.) and gave my work more of a physical presence (being 24in. x 33 in. x 3in. and weighing in at about 12 lbs).

—Ashley Julien ’13

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

into the meaning, or what I find to be the meaning, of the music,” Lindy wrote. “This meaning that I establish through such analysis drives my choreographic process, whether I’m telling a story or exploring more abstract ideas or feelings.”

Lindy also worked last semester as an outside tutor and mentor at the Catherine Street Community Center through an Education Department class. Lindy and fellow students Wes Thompson ’13 and Yanee Ferrari ’14 began a media and literacy program for students at the Center.

“I was assigned to work with fifth to seventh grade students,” Lindy wrote. “We polled the students and discovered that a unit about pop music might really grab their attention.

The kids ended up latching onto the idea of gender roles in the music videos we showed, so we capitalized on that interest and investigated gender norms and the ideas of equitable relationships in pop music.”

Lindy enjoyed his time at the center mentoring its students. “I like to teach a lot, I like to teach skating and I like to have that mentor position,” Lindy said. “I would love to use my Urban Studies major to do arts education and arts outreach.”

submit to misc@vassar.edu

ARTS

February 23 , 2012

Page 17

‘harlot/nun’ explores Madonna-Whore dichotomy Nicole Wong

Guest Reporter

T

Celia Garrity/The Miscellany News

hink of a production that combines the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay ’17­­­, passages from the Bible, excerpts from Shakespeare’s plays, pieces from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, quotes from Gone With the Wind, and feminist punk songs and rap music from the ’90s. While at it, combine these and many more sources with an examination of the archetypes of the goddesses, Artemis and Aphrodite. The result: “harlot/nun.” “harlot/nun,” an Unbound production performed by the troupe Britomartis, will examine the specific roles and archetypes both Artemis and Aphrodite fill through analyzing history, literature and pop culture. The resulting commentary traces the reinterpretation of these archetypes. “harlot/nun” will take place in the Susan Stein Shiva Theater Feb. 24 at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. and Feb. 25 at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m.

Formed last year after the production of “Letters in Pink and Grey,” Britomartis is a devised theater—meaning, non-hierarchal and collaborative—troupe composed of nine students who all write and direct together for each performance, as is the case of “harlot/nun.”

“We all take equal parts and fill the roles on the production variously as is needed,” wrote Britomartis member Violet Edelman ’12 in an emailed statement. “We are extremely equitable and collaborative in terms of sharing responsibilities for the production.”

A title taken loosely from an St. Vincent Millay poem, “harlot/nun” intends to investigate the Madonna-Whore complex, a Freudian concept that contends men tend to reduce women to one of two dichotomous roles—the saintly, virginal Madonna or the debased, immoral Whore—through developing reinterpretations of both Artemis and Aphrodite. “harlot/nun” actor Molly Senack ’14 said, “I thought the idea had always been to kind of trace not just the goddesses but the archetypes specifically, and the development and the distortion of the archetypes.” “harlot/nun” is no ordinary production—the

Above, cast and crew of the Unbound’s production of “harlot/nun” put together their set in the Shiva Theater. The perforomance combines various pieces to explore the Madonna-Whore dichotomy. performance’s content is composed of over 50 different sources, including but not limited to the aforementioned Bible passages and poetry of St. Vincent Millay. The sources span a time period of 3000 years and make up almost all of the performance’s script. Members promise “harlot/nun” has at least one text that everyone can recognize.

Written collaboratively by all nine members of the troupe, Britomartis members joked that they had only written about a total of 20 words in the entire play. “Our play is not original in that we didn’t write it all ourselves,” said Senack, “what we did was that we actually put everything together. We literally pulled texts word for word, and we combined it.”

Sound Director of “harlot/nun” Kevin Ritter ’15 put it somewhat differently. “Sometimes I like to think of it not so much as writing but

more curating because we put one thing next to each other and they spoke to each other,” Ritter said.

Stage Manager of “harlot/nun” Corinne Hastings ’14 added to Ritter’s statement. “You look at two pieces of text and intersperse them and you realize that they’re in conversation with each other and nobody even realized that initially,” she said. “It’s definitely much more intimate, because at every single moment of this performance, I know that I had a thought about this and this is something I wanted to express and it’s finally being put out there in a unique way.”

Lyla Porter-Follows ’14, who will play Artemis, noted that “harlot/nun” in turn doesn’t have a clear narrative. “‘harlot/nun’ doesn’t really have a plot...but it has a progression, a thematic progression,” she said. “We kind of

wanted to show how it’s sort of ridiculous that no real woman is going to fit neatly into either of those categories, but we wanted to explore the pressure to fit into those categories and we grew to develop more of a commentary than we had anticipated.”

The performance was written in three movements but will be performed in one act. “We start by examining two archetypes in the most classical forms by looking at the stories that they’re involved in and reinterpreting those stories,” Porter-Follows said. “As we move forward, we focus on the character of the woman and how she’s interpreting and internalizing those archetypes and how the line between them ceases to exist and where it does and where it doesn’t.” The performance will feature a mixture of dance, theater elements, narrative qualities and different modes of storytelling such as reading children’s fairytales, playing with dolls and having conversations.

For the Britomartis troupe, having conversations and working collaboratively are huge parts of the troupe’s mission. “The whole process is collaborative, so it was written collaboratively. We all did independent research, came together and shared the texts that we found,” said Porter-Follows. “We had a lot of intellectual discussions about what we wanted to do and part of our troupe’s mission is to incorporate a multidisciplinary approach to theatre that involves having discussions about what we’re trying to create. Everyone was able to bring their particular field of study into the conversation in a really interesting way, and as actors and also designers, who are usually excluded from the process of writing and directing [is].

We really just enjoyed the opportunity as performers to have more of an input and more of a discussion about what we wanted to perform.”

Actor Siobhan Reddy-Best ’13 found it empowering to help shape not only the piece’s staging but its creation and writing. “I just really hope it does make people think about the way that we tell stories,” Reddy-Best said, “and the way that we work through things that we deal with on a daily basis.”

Professor Judith Linn: the accidental photographer Adam Buchsbaum Arts Editor

A

thought process was simple. “I got a job teaching. Why not?” she said.

Linn’s approach to teaching photography is to emphasize its aesthetics. “We try and keep the technical very small, very short and very fast,” Linn said. “I want to make it as simple as possible: to demystify the technical part and mystify the aesthetic part.”

Linn said it is aesthetics, after all, which is important and meaningful in photography. “What do photographs make you think? What does it do to your brain? What does it do to your thoughts?” Linn said. “How does it affect your perceptions— does it endorse what you see, does it contradict what you see? Sometimes it can really change the way you see the world.”

Currently, Linn is working on another photography book, but remains mum on the details. “I haven’t gotten very far on it,” she said, only revealing its focus is more a location, rather than a person.

Linn recalled a moment she had while putting the book together, a moment she used to conclude the afterword in her book. “I found this tape from one of the times we took photographs together,” Linn said. On the cassette, Smith recites a poem

by Brian Jones, a founding member of the Rolling Stones. “The tape recorder’s on and we leave the room, and I’m listening to this tape,” Linn continued, “and I realize I’m waiting for something that happened 40 years ago, and it just blew me away...I never saw the time go by.” Linn concluded the afterword of Patti Smith 1969-1976 by writing, “Photographs let you hold the past in your hands, the imaginary past.”

Courtesy of wdr3.de

djunct Assistant Professor of Art Judith Linn teaches photography, though she had originally planned to be a painter. Her art school, the Pratt Institute, forced her to take a photography class. “I hated it initially because I was so inept,” Linn said. “I dropped it a few times ... I had always been good at art and I wasn’t good at [photography]. It was very frustrating.”

Linn eventually had to take a latenight session after dropping the class so many times, but in her last semester she had a good professor, Phillip Perkis, who changed everything. “I just got intrigued by [photography].

I couldn’t figure it out,” Linn said.

“Once I learned a little bit of facility…I just became fascinated with it.”

Linn left painting behind and began to carry her camera everywhere. “I was taking pictures of everything. If I was on the bus in Brooklyn, I took pictures of Brooklyn,” Linn said. “I wasn’t filtering out what is subject matter or what isn’t.”

Still beginning her photography career, Linn met and befriended ’70s punk icon Patti Smith through their boyfriends and mutual friends in 1968, years before Smith would skyrocket to national fame. “We’d seen a lot of the same movies. We liked a lot of the same music,” Linn said. “It was make believe. It was like kids playing dress up more than anything else— fantasizing, and playing different roles.” Linn and Smith had fun, and drew upon cinema for inspiration— some of their photos, Linn noted, would not look out of place in a JeanLuc Godard film.

Linn released a book, Patti Smith 1969-1976, assembling the photos last year. The book is a mixture of both candid and staged black-andwhite photos, and documents not only Patti Smith but also Smith’s boyfriend and later confidante Robert Mapplethorpe. Some of the photos were taken to promote jewelry Mapplethorpe was making as well.

The line between staged and candid photos isn’t clear. Linn intended it that way. “I like both, and I like confusing people,” Linn said. “It’s nice to go back-and-forth.” Linn describes it as a visual narrative, beginning with Linn’s first photographs and ending just as Smith starts to have a bigger audience outside of just Linn. Linn had never guessed at Smith’s future stardom at the time. “She was my friend and she liked to be photographed,” Linn explained. “I knew she was very ambitious, and I knew she wanted a bigger audience.”

Linn would first have her photography exhibited at P.S. 1 thanks to meeting Mapplethorpe’s boyfriend, curator and collector Sam Wagstaff.

Wagstaff curated Linn’s first photography exhibition in 1980, and Linn has steadily had her work in galleries since. She now has her own gallery through Feature Inc. Feature Inc. acts an agent of sorts, handling any of Linn’s body of work.

Linn eventually came to teach photography at her alma mater the Pratt Institute, and has settled now at Vassar. When Linn was at the Pratt Institute, there were only twocourses of study: graphics or art education. It was in graphics that Linn had to take photography, since Linn had no interest in pedagogy. However, when Linn nabbed a job teaching, her

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art Judith Lim, pictured above, orginally planned to become a painter. She switched to photography after taking a class in college.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

ARTS

Page 16

February 23, 2012

Shakespeare’s ‘Measure for Measure’ graces VC stage Matthew Hauptman Assistant Arts Editor

S

Kat Mehocic/The Miscellany News

hakespeare’s later work “Measure for Measure” has only gained relevance with its age. The play explores sexual harrasment and the abuses of power. Its topics would have troubled those who saw the first production in 1604, but these themes continue to resonate in ways equally, if not more, unsettling.

“We landed on this particular play, I think, because it’s a better play today than it was when first written,” Adjunct Assistant Professor of Drama Darrell James explained. Though commonly categorized as a comedy, critics label “Measure for Measure” as one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays”—meaning, it deals with contentious social issues of its contemporaries.

This semester, the Drama Department will put on “Measure for Measure.” Directed by Assistant Professor of Drama Shona Tucker and James, “Measure for Measure” will be performed Feb. 28 to March 1 at 8 p.m. in the Martel Theater.

Literary critics have not always treated “Measure for Measure” kindly. “It’s often been considered an experiment or a confused play, though I’m sure it has its champions,” said Professor of English Robert DeMaria. Despite the play’s detractors, “Measure for Measure” has enjoyed (and continues to enjoy) a fruitful afterlife, not least because of its champions, as DeMaria suggested.

Professor of English Donald Foster observed, “Recent stage direction and literary criticism have found much in Shakespeare’s ‘Measure for Measure’ that resonates with our own familiar cultural debates—sexual freedom, the purpose of marriage, collusion of church and state, and what [Associate] Professor [of English] Tyrone Simpson has astutely called the ‘carceral regime’ of our so-called ‘system of justice.’”

The play itself tells the story of Vincentio, Duke of Vienna, who decides to take a sabbatical and appoints his deputy, Angelo, to rule as his proxy while the Duke is gone. But the Duke, it seems, has grown lax in the enforcement of laws regarding wanton or unchaste behavior, and Angelo is given his powers for two specific reasons.

First, the Duke doesn’t want to seem like a bad man; second, someone has to accept the unpleasant and unpopular task of being more strict. Angelo is a zealous man, and the Duke feels he is perfect for the task. Meanwhile, however, the Duke secretly remains in town disguised as a friar in order to keep an eye on his subjects’ behavior.

As Foster went on to explain, “‘Measure for Measure’ is a play in which the humor turns upon veneral disease, sado-masochism, bad marriages, adultery, whoredom. It ends with the prospect of four marriages—all of which are arranged to contain transgressive sexuality; two of those are punishments handed down by the state, in lieu of imprisonment and death.”

As Foster’s remarks indicate, the play addresses sexual relationships, the power dynamics at play in those relationships and the consequences of sexual satisfaction in a society run by religious zealots. “The two [characters] that are punished have the most fulfilled sexual relationship,” noted Tucker.

The play has many central characters other than the Duke and Angelo. As James pointed out, “If we do it right, the goal is to make the audience wonder who’s story this really is.” As James and Tucker also observed, each major character in the play is deeply flawed; part of the challenge, then, is to make each character understandable, perhaps even sympathetic.

“We have to fall in love with a little bit of everyone,” Tucker said.

Professor of English Robert DeMaria, left, and Assistant Professor of Drama Shona Tucker, right, discuss the upcoming Drama Department performance of William Shakespeare’s “Measure for Meaure.”

Timeless as Shakespeare’s plays may be, they are rife with subtle references that might be lost to contemporary viewers. Collaborating with James and Tucker, Emily MacLeod ’12 has worked on this production as an assistant director and dramaturge. In keeping with the latter role, MacLeod has adapted and contextualized Shakespeare’s play. As she pointed out, a dramaturg must take into account four equally important considerations.

First, she must look at the historical context of “Measure for Measure.” When was it written? What particular events and concerns would have prompted Shakespeare to

write this play? Secondly, MacLeod considers the location of the play (Vienna), and its relevance to the plotline and themes. Next, she must consider the audience members: their assumptions, amd expectations, the world events foremost on their minds. And finally, the dramaturg helps decide how to contextualize the play, in light of the three previous considerations.

Foster concluded, “Under the brilliant direction of Darrell James and Shona Tucker, and with such a talented cast, I don’t know what to expect of Vassar’s ‘Measure for Measure,’ except that it promises to be among the best shows of the year.”

VRDT takes to the Bardavon in its 30th anniversary Emma Daniels Reporter

O

Madeline Zappala/The Miscellany News

n Monday, Vassar Repertory Dance Theatre (VRDT) prepared for the Bardavon Gala. Checking costumes, setting up lights, and running every piece in the repertoire, the dancers, the faculty and the technical crew rushed to ready themselves. This year marks the 30th anniversary of VRDT’s Bardavon Gala. There are two performances, one on Saturday, Feb. 25 at 8 p.m. and one on Sunday, Feb. 26 at 3 p.m.

Senior Lecturer in Dance and Drama and Assistant Director of VRDT Katherine Wildberger has choreographed a piece entitled “Drumlin,” based on the poem “The Buck in the Snow” by Edna St. Vincent Millay ’17. The short poem itself mourns the death of a buck. Adjunct Artist in Dance Howard Kilik has composed musical pieces for VRDT in the past, and this year he composed a piece for a live string quartet to use in “Drumlin.”

The Gala will also feature “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux” by George Balanchine, a legendary ballet choreographer and co-founder of the New York City Ballet. Additionally, the Gala will present two new works by Edwaard Liang and Larry Keigwin, two sought-out contemporary choreographers based in New York City.

Keigwin, a renowned modern dance choreographer, was commissioned to create “Take Off” for the sesquicentennial in October 2011, and students worked on it over October Break.

It is set to the music of Jonathan Melville Pratt, a Brooklyn-based composer well-versed in dance composition, and its central themes are youth, energy, dance and flight.

Liang, who danced with New York City Ballet and later performed on Broadway in the musical “Fosse,” choreographed “Whispers in the Dark,” a combination of modern dance and traditional ballet. “Whispers in the Dark” was commissioned for this 30th anniversary of VRDT at the Bardavon.

The Gala will also feature six student-choreographed pieces by Mickey Mahar ’12 (“Of Some”), Elly Dembo ’13 (“Chiaroscuro”), Michael Graceffa ’13 (“Contact 3 2 1”), Niya Nicholson ’14 (“Jigsaw”), Matt Ortile ’14 (“Brightside”) and Emma King ’15 (“If I Am Not Beautiful”).

(Disclosure: Ortile is Social Media Editor for The Miscellany News.)

Above, the Vassar Repertory Dance Theatre (VRDT) performs a piece from last semester’s “Final Showings.” VRDT celebrates its 30th Bardovon Gala this weekend with performances on Feb. 25 and 26.

Mahar described his piece as agressively about nothing. A modern piece, “Of Some” incorporates videography and carefully chosen silence to explore movement unrestrained by narrative. Dembo’s “Chairoscuro” is a ballet piece en pointe—performed with pointe shoes.

Her piece places the dancers between the academic setting of ballet class and their personal daydreams of dance.

Graceffa’s work was inspired by an adventurous night out with friends at Vassar. The massive cast of his work exudes the passionate, fun and lively energy of going out on the weekend.

Nicholson takes a peek into the inner mind of a schizophrenic woman in “Jigsaw.” It is a piece in three parts, and explores a different facet of her fragmented, subjective reality.

Ortile’s “Brightside” explores a group of friends overcoming their freshman year fears.

“One of my really good friends was going through a dance injury and she was really anxious about dancing again,” Ortile explained.

“Another one of my friends was going through

the pressures of a long distance relationship.”

Ortile noted the title stems from the notion that every situation has a bright side, regardless of how stressful it may seem. “The piece is a love letter to all the great friendships out there.

It’s dedicated to friends who have each other’s backs,” Ortile said.

Fellow VRDT dancer Nathan Muscato ’14 said of Ortile, “It’s clear he’s invested a lot of personal experience into the piece and as dancers I think that makes us really excited and invested in it too.”

King’s “If I Am Not Beautiful” is a modern dance number, and King is quick to emphasize that it’s derived from no specific genre. “It’s a purging of dance ideas. I took the emotions from a solo I had choreographed last year with the same title, and applied it to a larger group,” King said. “It’s really taken on a life of its own.”

Much like Mahar’s piece, it explores non-traditional concepts of dance.

Around 30 years ago the only feasible places to perform dance repertoire at Vassar was at

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

the the Powerhouse Theater, which was the only adequate dance studio substitute at the time, and the Music Department stage in Skinner Hall. However, VRDT eventually found a home in the Bardavon, and the Gala has been there ever since—and this year, VRDT is celebrating their 30th anniversary of performing at the historic opera house.

The Bardavon 1869 Opera House is a theater in the downtown district of Poughkeepsie, and the oldest continuously operating theater in New York. Today, it hosts theater, dance, music, opera and other performance genres; past events have included an Andrew Bird concert, a David Sedaris reading, and other various artistic and cultural events.

The Gala is open to the public, and connects the Vassar and Poughkeepsie communities.

“We instituted a large-scale publicity campaign to draw in the general public this year,” said Professor of Dance and Director of VRDT John Meehan. “That includes advertising on the radio, in local publications and on the Internet.

We want to get the word out so more people know that there are high-quality arts in Poughkeepsie.”

Performing at the Gala is a full-circle moment for returning seniors and new members alike. “I’m really excited to perform at the Bardavon,” said new VRDT member and The Miscellany News’s current Artist of the Week Isaac Lindy ’14. “Last year I wrote a research paper on its role in the urban revitalization of Poughkeepsie, and I can’t wait to be a part of the history that I studied.”

Meehan commends his students for their consistent dedication to VRDT. “I’m in awe of the dancers and the commitment and the work they put in,” Meehand said. “Each year we see the date shifting and this year it’s right in the middle of midterms, and during rehearsals members stay in the audience and do homework during breaks.”

Professor Emeritus of Dance and former Director of VRDT Ray Cook has attended the Gala consistently over the years. “The company and its yearly repertoire gets better and better every year,” Cook said. “I can’t believe all of the members are majoring in something else at Vassar and dancing just because they like to dance.”

ARTS

February 23 , 2012

Page 17

Oscar predictions favor Artist, Help Katharine Austin and Erik Lorenzsonn Senior Editors

W

ith this year’s Academy Awards just around the corner, here are two cinéphiles predictions. Be sure to tune in Sunday, Feb. 26 at 7 p.m. to see for yourself.

Actor in a Leading Role

George Clooney, The Descendants. Jean Dujardin is certainly a likely candidate as well, but I’m going with Clooney for this category. While not his best career performance, I think Clooney’s portrayal of Matt King, a man struggling to reconcile his grief at his wife’s coma and his anger at her infidelity, is the best of this year’s nominees. The Academy will also likely award Clooney the Oscar this year to make up for not giving it to him back in 2010 for his role in Up in the Air, a recurring conciliatory trend in the actor and actresses categories.

Actress in a Leading Role

Viola Davis, The Help. MERYL MERYL MERYL MERYL MERYL MERYL. And with that out of the way, let’s move on. To be clear, I would honestly love to see our alumna and trustee powerhouse steamroll the competition with her obviously Vassar-inspired majesty. But although The Iron Lady has front-runner buzz, the underdog Viola Davis will finally get a tip of the cap from the Academy; in my books, she deserved the nod in 2008 for her performance alongside Meryl in Doubt.

Actor in a Supporting Role

Christopher Plummer, The Beginners. Plummer’s won every single award-season accolade for this performance, so it seems like his Oscar fate is sealed. Is anyone else enjoying Plum-

mer’s comeback as much as I am? He’s racked up an impressive resume in the last few years.

Plummer’s come a long way since Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music.

Actress in a Supporting Role

Octavia Spencer, The Help. She’s already tucked a Critic’s Choice Award, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award under her belt for her performance. I like these odds.

too, but I’m pulling for Allen because this film was pure delight, partly for its bewitching, witty and imaginative screenplay. Allen seamlessly strings together multiple time periods to make a Parisian fairy tale so enchanting it practically had me looking up flight times to Charles de Gaulle.

“Celtics games.”

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

Rango. While I still can’t believe the Academy snubbed Pixar, Rango will always be my top choice no matter what films are nominated.

It’s filled with enough visual film references to put a Martin Scorsese flick to shame, which made a fairly simple story incredibly rich and enjoyable. The way the film recorded its voice performers—acting out their characters together on a stage instead of individually in a sound studio—also deserves some recognition.

Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The adaptation of John Le Carre’s classic novel was not released to excessively positive acclaim, but there is one element that the critics are totally gangbusters for: the dialogue. The dialogue drips with intensity, most notably during a scene in which Gary Oldman’s character recalls a memory of his time as a government cell in Cold War Soviet Russia.

While I was equally impressed by Moneyball’s capacity to dramatize a relatively cut-and-dry nonfictional narrative, this category will go to O’Connor and Straughan.

Foreign Language Film

Directing

A Separation. This category has a history of throwing Oscar viewers for a loop. Remember how Pan’s Labyrinth locked down the award no problem in 2006? Oh wait, it lost to the (still unknown) dark horse The Lives of Others. So while all signs say that A Separation is a shooin, precedent says all bets are off. The Iranian film has absolutely dominated top-10 lists from critics nationwide—Roger Ebert chose it as his number one. But for those on the lookout for an upset, you’re looking at the right category.

Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist. Martin Scorsese finally got his due with The Departed in 2006, ending a decades-old legacy of being snubbed by the Academy. But the cinematic master may be capped at just one boon, methinks. Hazanavicius will take home the award this year.

Animated Feature Film

Writing (Original Screenplay)

Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris. Michel Hazanavicius for The Artist is a strong contender

“You.”

Dan Flynn ’13

Best Picture

The Artist. This seems like a pretty done deal. While not an exceedingly original story, The Artist features some beautiful filmmaking.

And the Academy loves novelty, so the film’s attempt to resurrect silent cinema works in its favor.

Center features African-American art

“Revenge and Once Upon a Time.”

Jack O’Brien ’15

“The Daily Show.”

Nick Creighton ’14 Courtesy of Darrin Lawrence Weaver

HERITAGE continued from page 1 exhibits we’re trying to show that this is a city with deep roots and there’s a lot of history that sits below the surface you wouldn’t know about,” said Sawtelle. The center also hosts lectures, dinners and receptions that discuss local history and issues. This very upcoming Saturday, Feb. 25 at 9:30 a.m. Fergus Bordewich, a writer and historian since 1970 whose work has appeared in notable publications like The New York Times and Harper’s, will deliver a lecture entitled “The Underground Railroad in the Hudson River Valley.” A light breakfast will accompany the lecture, with a suggested $5 donation.

Currently, the center is holding the African-American Cultural Exhibition, which celebrates Black History Month by highlighting local African-American artists and incorporating exhibits on local AfricanAmerican leaders of the community and anti-slavery efforts. The exhibition opened on Feb. 3 and will be up through Feb. 28.

The exhibition includes a variety of works, in many different mediums, by 10 local artists, most of whom are from Poughkeepsie and some from the greater region.

Spectators can expect to see a diverse array of work, including paintings, collages, illustrations, quilts and silk screens.

“The exhibition has two elements: a) exhibits on historic African Americans who were active in the Abolitionist Movement before the Civil War, and on more recent personalities involved in desegregating various local institutions, and b) works of art by contemporary local African American artists,” wrote Budnik. “Hence, those interested in history get exposed to contemporary art and, conversely, those interested in art learn a little about historic figures.”

One of the artists is well-known Chef’s Helper at Vassar’s very own All Campus Dining Center Darrin Lawrence Weaver, better known as T.C. to most students. Weaver also goes by Rez Ones in the exhibit. Weaver, who works with partner Boogie Tochigi,

Alisa Prince ’14

A photo of Yanee Ferrari ’14, above, is one of many featured in an exhibition at the Mid-Hudson Heritage Center. The center was founded in 2010 by Roy Budnik to showcase local art. said he uses almost any medium, including painting, photography, graphic design and fashion design, among others. In fact, Weaver actually took part in developing the idea for the exhibition.

“Often those of the community who are more politically active may be more clearly visible, and there are a lot of portraits of prominent people in the area,” said Weaver. “I have always felt that everyone in the community matters, and everyone should in some way be represented,” he continued.

Weaver has several photographs on display that show different Poughkeepsie residents, and even some Vassar students.

Weaver described the pieces as “levitation pictures.” He took shots of individuals jumping, managing to capture their sense of motion at just the right moment. “Some of them are photoshopped, I’d say the more

spectacular ones are,” he explained. “The other ones are just people jumping, and it’s funny because when people look at them they don’t know which are photoshopped and which are not.”

Weaver uses his art to foster connections between people and community.

“We’re brought up to see how different we are, which is valid, but the fact is there are more things that make us the same than different. I try to utilize art to connect to that energy, those parallels between all of us,” he explained. This emphasis on communal ties relates closely with what the Mid-Hudson Heritage Center hopes to develop through the African-American Cultural Exhibition and their work as a whole. We want to do shows that have mixed aims,” said Sawtelle.

“As the center develops the ideas for the shows will evolve.”

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

“Work of Art on Bravo.”

Tiffany Nguyen ’12

“Skins, the U.K. version. ”

Tre Artis ’15

—Adam Buchsbaum Arts Editor

SPORTS

Page 18

February 23, 2012

Women’s tennis seeks to start a new championship run Jessica Tarantine

Assistant Features Editor

C

Courtesy of Vassar Athletics

oming off a strong fall season, which earned them the No. 26 national ranking and the No. 10 ranking in the Northeast, the women’s tennis team will look to use their versatility and depth to regain the form that led them to nine consecutive Liberty League Championships from 2002-2010.

At the forefront of the players’ minds is continuing the momentum gained at the end of the fall season. “I am looking forward to seeing the team compete and strengthen as a whole this season,” wrote Captain Nicole Block ’12 in an emailed statement. “Each player has improved tremendously over our short fall season, and I am really excited for everyone to have the opportunity to work on their game and spend time together supporting each other on and off the court.”

The fall season saw the addition of four freshmen to the Vassar squad, none of whom waited to make an impact. Ava Sadeghi ’15 made program history, becoming the first singles player to qualify for the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) National Small College Championships, after winning the ITA Northeast Regional singles title. Samantha Schapiro ’15, Hannah Van Demark ’15 and Anisha Kurien ’15 also represented the program well in their first season, all advancing to the semifinals at the New York State Championships at the No. 2, 3 and 5 spots respectively. Van Demark and Kurien each made it to the finals of their respective flights.

While six Brewers total made it to the finals of their respective singles or doubles flights at the New York State Championships, only Lindsay Kantor ’14 was able to capture a title, competing at No. 4 singles. Kantor will be one of a number of veterans who the team will rely upon for leadership. In addition to Kantor, Block, Captain Joy Backer ’12 and Jennifer Beckerman ’12 will provide strength at the top of the lineup.

Ava Sadeghi ’15, a member of the women’s tennis team, competes at a recent match. Sadeghi, ranked No. 8 in singles in the ITA Northeast, is only one example of the team’s success, ranked No. 20 nationally.

Head Coach Kathy Campbell wrote in an emailed statement, “Our spring team features strength at the top and depth, so the team and coaches are all looking forward to a rewarding, successful season.”

Campbell explained that the plan for the season would require hard work and attention to detail. “Some of the main things we are working on include high percentage point construction, decision making regarding shot selection and more offensive doubles,” wrote Campbell.

The team realizes that all of this will not come without commitment. “As a whole, our team is working to keep our fitness at a high level and to work as hard as we can during practice,” said Lindsay Kantor ’14. “Also, we are working on communication amongst each other, and making sure we are showing a ton of support for our fellow teammates in all situations,” Kantor continued.

This approach will be solidified over Spring Break when they travel to southern California. “It is a great opportunity to bond as a team on and off the court, but also a chance to prove ourselves against other highly ranked teams,” wrote Beckerman in an emailed statement.

Block shared this view, writing, “We are really looking forward to our Spring Break trip to California to play a lot of matches in a condensed time and really be able to work on match play and make immediate improvements day by day.”

In California, the team will play five matches over a seven-day span, including a contest against No. 9 Pomona College on March 7 and one against No. 27 Trinity University the next day. The Brewers will face three other teams ranked in the top 30: No. 25 Skidmore College on March 31, No. 19 Wellesley College

on April 15 and No. 23 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on April 21. Each of these matches will have added significance as the Skidmore contest represents the Brewers’ last regular season Liberty League challenge. The Brewers will face Wellesley at the Seven Sisters Championship, an event they won in 2010 and finished second to Wellesley last year. Finally, the MIT matchup falls on Vassar’s Senior Day. In addition, a new rule this year mandated that each Liberty League team play at least four other Liberty League teams. This rule added a few more conference opponents to the schedule this year. The Brewers will look to reclaim the Liberty League Championship—a trophy they held for nine consectuive years (2002-2010) before falling 6-3 last year to Skidmore—when they host the annual tournament on the weekend of May 4 to 6.

While the outlook for the season is bright, there is always the occasional pitfall. This past weekend in the season’s opener, the team lost to 9-0 to Division I Fordham University. The match marks the second consecutive loss to the Rams following a three-season winning streak for the Brewers that ended in 2010.

Even so, Campbell remained optimistic.

She wrote of the Fordham contest, “We were extremely competitive in most of the matches. At the No. 1 and No. 2 singles spots we lost in third set superbreakers and at No. 3 doubles we lost 8-6.”

“It was a great experience to face that level of competition this early in the spring, and we’re playing at a higher level at this point than we were last year. That is encouraging to everyone,” wrote Campbell.

With spirits high, the team members are aware of the difficulties they face. “The challenge lies in staying tough and aggressive in the most competitive situations and playing like we know that we can win,” wrote Beckerman. “We are a stronger team than last year. If we keep improving and practicing with intent each and every day, then we will be in the best position possible to qualify for nationals.”

Allen Iverson’s bankruptcy reaffirms character issues Sam Scarritt-Selman Columnist

A

“What makes the story of Allen Iverson so saddening is that such greatness came bundled in such an emotionally complicated package.” was the fact that this same person who they found unlikable possessed such a phenomenal talent. Iverson was an explosive and powerful athlete even though he was noticeably diminutive; he had such faculty for basketball that he made the game look beautiful and effortless. Outside of Philadelphia, most sports fans internalized Iverson in his prime with a type of double register: At once, they’d be jaw-dropped in amazement while also muttering to themselves, “What a waste of talent.”

What makes the story of Allen Iverson so saddening is that such greatness came bundled in such an emotionally complicated package, and, moreover, that we as a public

judged him for having unresolved issues that he had no say in in the first place. So much of who Iverson is stems from his upbringing in a poor, crime-ridden area of Hampton, Va. It was his experience on the rough streets of Hampton that he developed his style of play. It was through the racism he encountered on and off the court that he developed a chip on his shoulder. Once it became clear that he had a chance to make it, and not only to make it out of Hampton, but to make it out for Hampton, Iverson became burdened with the weight of an entire community’s expectation. When Iverson had to serve jail time for his role in a bowling alley fight that may have been racially motivated before he had even played college ball, he probably concluded that he would never get the benefit of the doubt, that he’d appear forever to be an incorrigible hoodlum and a “waste of talent.”

There were those years with the Philadelphia 76ers, though, when Iverson was transcendent in the fullest sense of the word. It felt like there was no one he couldn’t beat off the dribble, no shot too impossible for him to take. His masterpiece was his 2001 season, during which he led the league in scoring and steals, led his team to the NBA finals and was awarded MVP honors. Contrast those moments of glory to today, where I imagine that a sizable portion of the people that Iverson entertained during his prime will look at his present debased and destitute state and, selfsatisfied, think to themselves, “I was right all along. Of course he’d blow it all on jewelry. What a waste.”

Courtesy of planetill.com

llen Iverson earned $154 million over the course of his 15-year basketball career. He presently owes $860,000 in an unpaid jewelry debt.

Not many people are going to have much sympathy for him, which is perfectly warranted—Iverson has often been difficult to like, even though there were times when it was impossible not to watch with wonder as he played the game of basketball in a singular and unique way. The fact that an athlete who briefly owned the sport has now reached what is surely his professional nadir is, on some level, sad. Only I don’t know how exactly I should feel about it all.

It would be both incredibly easy and ultimately unfair to turn this story into an indictment of the profligacy of the modern athlete, or a grumpy harangue about how anybody foolish enough to squander such a fortune probably did not deserve that much money in the first place. Conversely, it would be hard to justify calling this fall from grace tragic—there are fates far worse things than jewelry debt. However, there is surely something darkly poignant and somewhat depressing about what has happened to AI—not only the problems of financial improvidence that currently beset him, but, really, everything that has led him here.

The relationship between Iverson and the general public has been tenuous and tumultuous at best. He has always struck people as arrogant and selfish, which might be true, but this perception certainly flows to an extent from his showy, shoot-first, seemingly boastful style of play. Fur-

thermore, at a time when NBA commissioner David Stern was trying to clean up the league’s “too black” image by implementing a dress code, Iverson’s cornrows and tattoos seemed thuggish to mainstream sports fans. For this, he was always unapologetic. Yet what really frustrated so many people about Iverson

Despite his professional success, Allen Iverson, pictured above, formerly a member of the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team, owes $860,000 in unpaid debt.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

February 23, 2012

SPORTS

Page 19

Parks breaks VC’s career scoring record

Andy Sussman Columnist

T Jacob Gorski/The Miscellany News

BBALL continued from page 1 proved more challenging. The Herons held the Brewers to 35 percent shooting in the first half while carrying a 34-28 advantage. Parks and co-Captain Cydni Matsuoka ’14 agreed that defensive modifications catalyzed the team’s turnaround in the second half.

Parks added that this “defensive intensity” was supplemented by a team-wide determination to secure the all-important victory. “Going into the locker room at half time, we knew that we could not, and would not, lose this game on our home court on Senior Day,” Parks wrote.

“We all felt that our season was not meant to be over that day.”

It was fitting, then, that the Brewers’ win resulted from a balanced offensive attack—six players scored in double-digits, with seniors Parks and forward Kristyn Tempora leading the way with 15 and 13, respectively. Matsuoka (10 points, six assists), however, acknowledged that everyone left a mark on this game, in some cases beyond what was shown in the box score.

“Whether it was scoring, rebounding, defending or providing energy, all 14 of us made some sort of contribution to the win on Saturday,” she wrote. “I don’t think enough recognition goes to the players on the bench. They really help set the tone for the players on the floor in terms of energy level and support.”

One of those bench players, forward Colleen O’Connell ’15, re-wrote her name in the record books with 21 rebounds in the game, breaking her own school record of 19 from Jan. 28. This continued a week in which O’Connell averaged a double-double, helping her earn her third Liberty League Rookie of the Week recognition in 2011-12.

O’Connell wasn’t alone in reaching milestones on Saturday. Parks entered the game 12 points shy of the program’s all-time scoring record of 1540 career points, set by Kristin Vogt ’96. With 6:28 left in the fourth quarter, and with Parks having already tied Vogt, Parks drew a shooting foul, earning her a trip to the charity stripe and two shots to break the record. Parks was aware of the importance of the moment, writing, “I was very nervous when I was standing at the free throw line, and I just kept thinking in my head, ‘Don’t miss’—probably not the best strategy.”

Poor strategy or not, Parks’ first free throw attempt was true, falling through the net after a couple of dramatic bounces around the rim.

Co-Captain of the women’s basketball team Cydni Matsuoka ’14, center, moves to score at a game against Rochester Institute of Technology last Tuesday, Feb. 14. The Brewers won 69-56.

Parks felt relieved while everyone else was ecstatic. She wrote, “As soon as the shot went in, all of my teammates who were on the floor hugged me at the free throw line, mid-game mind you, and the crowd went crazy.”

Matsuoka appreciated the narrative this moment fed into, writing, “For her to do it on her senior night and arguably the biggest game of the season for us is almost too perfect.”

Parks has since had more time to reflect on the scoring mark. “It really has opened my eyes to how blessed I am to be a part of the women’s basketball team here at Vassar and of the opportunities that have been afforded to me,” Parks wrote, citing the significant playing time she received as a freshman and the tireless efforts of third-year Head Coach Candice Brown.

Still, Parks considers the team’s accomplishments a higher priority, writing, “The [record] is an affirmation of my personal abilities as a basketball player, but it does not speak to my ability to turn a program around, my ultimate goal in coming to Vassar, and my position as a team leader—something that another Liberty League Championship would encompass.”

A Liberty League Championship would sig-

nify a lot for the women’s basketball program, particularly in terms of its reputation. Last season’s title came as somewhat of a surprise to the rest of the conference; Vassar had been selected to finish seventh in the 2010-11 preseason coaches’ poll. Coming into this season, Vassar was still ranked behind St. Lawrence University, who enters the playoffs as the No. 1 seed. Parks sees this as an opportunity to embrace the same underdog status the team assumed last year.

She wrote, “In reality, St. Lawrence, the firstplace team in the league who is currently undefeated, should probably feel the most pressure of all because they have everything to lose, whereas we have everything to prove.”

At the time of publication, the Brewers were preparing for last night’s first round playoff game against No. 2 seeded Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Matsuoka stated that the team aims to focus on one game at a time. Still, the star point guard admitted that last year’s success left her craving more. “I can honestly admit that I am addicted to that feeling that only comes with winning a championship,” she wrote. “I think every athlete is. Last year’s success has fueled my desire to get back there.”

Volunteer coaches from diverse backgrounds Tina Caso

A

Guest Reporter

t Vassar, the athletic community remains a large and diverse cast of active members. Though much credit goes to the players, there are a few dedicated individuals who donate their time to the progress of the sports teams while flying somewhat under the radar. These are the volunteer assistant coaches. Ron Stonitsch from track, Sean Rigothi of men’s basketball, and Terry Hanlon of men’s volleyball all approach their positions with dedication and vigor.

Coming from different backgrounds, the coaches began their work here from varying degrees of affiliation with Vassar. “I’m from the area, so I didn’t really have a connection,” said Rigothi. “I was networking with [men’s basketball Head Coach Del] Harris and it just happened one day … I had to jump right on it.” In an emailed statement, Rigothi added, “[Harris] gave me my first college coaching position here at Vassar. He believed in my ability and passion to coach. I am thankful for that every day.”

Hanlon, on the other hand, was already employed by Vassar before he got the position of volunteer assistant coach. “I’m the House Advisor for Cushing and Noyes and the Assistant Director for Residential Wellness Programs. So I was hired in July and I just wanted to get as involved as I could in the campus community,” he said. “I live in Cushing so there’s a lot of interaction [with students] there.”

Stonitsch, who has been coaching at Vassar for 30 years, has become further involved in his work here by founding the Track Club in 1985 after requests from the

Spicing up NBA All-Star Weekend

team. During his lengthy tenure, Stonitsch also coached current Head Coach James McCowan ’99 when McCowan was a runner at the school. “I volunteer now for track because it gives me pleasure to help the Head Coach and support the program I started,” he wrote in an emailed statement.

“As an associate head coach for [Vassar] cross country I get paid. As a volunteer assistant in track, my only recompense is non-monetary, as in appreciation, an occasional sandwich and seeing the students reaching their goals.”

Despite these differences, all of the coaches would agree on one thing: that they coach to re-connect with their love of the sport. After a long history of playing basketball, Rigothi felt that it was necessary to get involved following his playing days.

“I was recruited by Division III schools to play in college but I decided to go away… and attend a big Division I school. I graduated from the University of South Carolina [USC] and enjoyed rooting for our athletic teams at USC.” He added, “Since I didn’t play [at USC], I really wanted to get into college basketball.”

Now in his first year at Vassar, Rigothi values how his new role has impacted his relationship with basketball. “It’s pretty much our guys this year, the love of basketball, the level of play and just being around the game at all times,” he wrote.

Stonitsch devotes a large amount of time to track in addition to his other responsibilities. “As a volunteer for Track I put in maybe 20-plus [hours per week], usually starting in March. I started the Founder’s Day Run and the Alumni Fun Run; I also am in regu-

lar contact with VC cross country and track [alumnae/i].” His duties also include assisting Head Coach McCowan, timing runners and helping his athletes by offering a good ear and advice. “I also make great sandwiches on away trips!” he added.

For Hanlon, “A lot of [the job] is helping with practices and home games. I don’t travel with the team–I’m required to be on campus.” In an emailed statement, he wrote, “My relationship with the players is really as an extra pair of eyes on the court and a helpful voice from the bench. I think they respect my opinion, but I am always conscious to respect their own experience and knowledge of the game.” Hanlon went on to elaborate on his role during competition, adding, “In games, I just try to keep the spirit and energy high as well as focus in on some trends I’m noticing on both sides of the net.

Overall, I love the guys we have on the team.

They are all very smart, extremely talented, and just good people overall. I wish I could travel with them to away games more, because they are a great group to spend time with.” Hanlon estimated that he spends a total of about eight to 10 hours a week assisting the men’s volleyball team.

For Rigothi, his responsibility for recruiting is a yearlong job, though it is not his only duty to the team. “It’s a lot of time that goes into recruiting and scouting,” he said. “It’s as much as you put into it.” As for his time commitment as a volunteer assistant, “It’s a lot of hours when you want to be good. Obviously, you want to be a fulltime assistant but it’s a great place to be.

It’s very rewarding. You put in lot of hard work and it pays off.”

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE

he NBA All-Star Game will be played this Sunday, but it will be far from the only NBA-related event of the weekend. The Slam Dunk Contest, the Three-Point Shootout, the Skills Competition and the Rookie-Sophomore game will all lead up to the main event. All things considered, the weekend should be fun to follow, even for the casual fan. However, that does not mean that I haven’t been thinking of ways to make All-Star weekend even more entertaining, only some of which involve Jeremy Lin. If I become NBA commissioner for some reason, expect to see the following events: Croquet Competition: One of the main criticisms of the NBA All-Star Weekend is that there is not enough time for players to rest, which is particularly true in this condensed season. At the same time, we know athletes always want to stay competitive. Not only is croquet physically relaxing, it gives the potential for a commentator to legitimately say: “Kenyon Martin knocks Metta World Peace’s ball through the third wicket!”

Capture the Flag: Everyone loved playing capture the flag as a child, only to somehow find themselves in college doing something called “homework.” Imagine watching some of the very best athletes, who probably have not even thought about the game in 10 years, strategize how they can get to the other side without being thrown in jail. As a bonus, the “flags” will be J.J. Barea and Earl Boykins, who are small enough that they can be held in Dwight Howard’s palm.

Trivial Pursuit: Did you ever wonder which NBA players knew the capital of Syria? If yes, then you are either: A. Me, or B. The perfect audience for the greatest intellectual competition of all-time (excluding every other intellectual competition). Jeremy Lin will be the judge in order to prevent the inevitable argument over which team the Harvard University graduate should play for.

Twenty Questions: Will LeBron James think of an animal, a vegetable or a mineral? Will Kobe Bryant deliberately answer “no” to a question where the answer clearly is “yes”?

The suspense is already killing me!

Jeremy Lin Pun Contest: Players will be divided into three teams. The team that comes up with the most puns based on Jeremy Lin’s last name gets to be immune from ever hearing any more “Lin” puns again.

Mario Kart: NBA players are known to play lots of video games in their free time, particularly other basketball-related games.

However, I think it would be far more interesting to watch Lamar Odom try to navigate Yoshi through Bowser’s Castle without falling in the water. Also, there will be a five-second penalty for each player that curses, so watch Kevin Garnett as he pleas that he actually said “lass goal.”

Telephone: I always wondered what locker-room conversations must be like between teammates that speak different languages, but now I will know the answer. Each team will be required to have at least three different foreign players, all of whom speak different languages. To boot, each phrase will be a tongue twister, in order to ensure the utmost wackiness.

Miss America: Male athletes have a reputation for trying to be as masculine as possible, but everyone has different sides to them. What lip-gloss will Chris Paul choose to match his dress? Does Dirk Nowitzki even need a wig?

These are questions that must be answered at once.

Bingo: At some point, every player will be in retirement. The best way, nay the ONLY way, to prepare for this inevitability is to master the art of bingo. Each bingo board will also be made of candy, in order to tempt Eddy Curry and Baron Davis into eating them.

Being Jeremy Lin: Only Jeremy Lin and Tim Tebow are allowed to enter, and everyone around the world must watch by law.

SPORTS

Page 20

February 23, 2012

Students overcome faculty in annual fundraising game Andy Marmer Sports Editor

A

Jacob Gorski/The Miscellany News

jump shot from the corner by Olivia Westbrook-Gold ’13 with 21.1 seconds remaining capped the student team’s—New School— fourth-quarter rally, cementing a 51-49 victory over Old School, the faculty and staff team, in the Third Annual Student-Faculty Basketball Game. The game was attended by over 750 spectators and raised over $2328 for the Senior Class Gift that will go to the Internship Grant Fund.

The event began in 2010 as a fundraiser for the Senior Class Gift with the added intention of bringing the Vassar community together and was initially organized by then-Vice President for Operations Brian Farkas ’10 and Dean of the College Chris Roellke. Since that inaugural game, the Office of the Dean of the College has been responsible for organizing the event. This year, the execution of the event fell to interns Race Bottini ’12, Zan Schmidt ’12 and Eli Stein ’12. Explained Stein, “[Roellke] came up with the idea three years ago and it’s been his office running it ever since.” Schmidt elaborated, writing in an emailed statement, “It was a true collaboration across a number of campus groups and departments, including the 2012 Student Gift Committee, Roellke’s office, Senior Class Council, Campus Activities, Athletics and Communications, so there was a lot of hard work and support that was poured into the process and event since we started organizing in early December.” This year, the organizers moved the game from what had become its traditional Thursday night slot to Saturday night, Feb. 18, to capitalize on the Senior Days of both the men’s and women’s basketball teams that afternoon, creating what the organizers dubbed “Basketbalooza.”

The festivities began at 2 p.m. with the women’s basketball team taking on William Smith College with a playoff berth on the line. (For more, see “Women’s Bball Ascends to Playoffs” on page 1.) Throughout the game and the subsequent contest pitting the men’s team against Hobart College, a table was set up distributing rally towels featuring the message “Just Brew It” in bold underlined letters, with “3rd Annual Student-Faculty Basketball Game” inscribed below. Visitors to the table also had the opportunity to enter a free raffle, with two different winners each receiving three tries at a halfcourt shot during halftime of the women’s and men’s games. Making any of the attempts would have won the shooter a universal parking pass.

During the women’s game, Connie Zheng ’14 nearly converted her final attempt, hitting the back rim, while Andy Marmer ’12 also failed in his three attempts during halftime of the men’s game. (Disclosure: Marmer is the Sports Editor of The Miscellany News)

Members of New School try to guard an Old School opponent from scoring. While Old School held the lead for the majority of the Student-Faculty Basketball Game, New School pulled out a victory.

Following the two varsity games, the gym was cleared until 7 p.m. when spectators for the Basketbalooza main event were allowed to enter the Athletics and Fitness Center (AFC) via Walker Field House. Upon entering, attendees were greeted by an array of stadium food in the Walker Bays before they preceded to the AFC for the contest. Before the game, a cappella group the Vastards serenaded spectators with a beat-boxing rendition of The National Anthem.

As in past years, the game was a hotly contested battle. Prior to the matchup, Old School co-Head Coach and Professor of Sociology Diane Harriford explained, “We will have fun, play hard and we’re going to run [the students] until they’re out of breath. If they think we can’t run, they’re in for a surprise.” It initially looked as though Old School’s strategy was paying off as they forced the student team into nine turnovers in the first quarter to take a 17-3 lead. Old School’s margin was keyed by a 13-0 run. Women’s basketball Head Coach Candice Brown and Professor of Sociology Carlos Alamo led the way for Old School, notching seven points each in the first quarter.

While Old School dominated the beginning of the game, New School came storming back in the second quarter behind strong guard play.

Abe Gatling ’14 led the way back for the student squad with nine straight points for his team, while a pair of threes from Matt Rosenthal ’12 tied the game at 21, capping the students’ 18-2 run. Roellke, however, answered with a three

of his own before the half, sending Old School into the locker room with a 26-22 lead.

Student dance group HYPE provided halftime entertainment for the second straight year with a basketball-themed routine that concluded with New School joining the dance group on the court. Halftime also featured a shooting contest for $300 in VCash that was won by Yehudi Baptiste ’15. After Baptiste as well as his competitors—Parker Werline ’14, Nic Placeres ’13 and Vincent Marchetta ’13—all missed from half court and the three-point line, Baptiste was the only shooter to make his free throw, banking home the winning bucket. During the intermission, New School Head Coach Sam Scarritt-Selman ’12 explained, “I liked the energy the team played with in the second quarter.” Scarritt-Selman continued, “The team is playing with a lot of heart.” (Disclosure: Scarritt-Selman is a columnist for The Miscellany News) The faculty extended their lead to 30-22 early in the second half, before Gatling knocked down two free throws to cut the student deficit to six. Brown responded with a two, before Gatling answered with a three. Seeking to light a fire under his team, Scarritt-Selman earned a technical foul for throwing his jacket onto the court, which allowed Old School to extend their lead to 39-29. Wilson Platt ’14 hit a layup and Ryan McCarthy ’14 further shortened the margin after hitting one of two free throws when Old School co-Head Coach and Director of Athletics and Physical Education Sharon

Beverly received a technical foul. After three quarters, Old School still led 39-32.

The students roared back at the beginning of the fourth quarter with a series of free throws, and after women’s basketball Assistant Coach Margaret White knocked down a three, Platt dunked home a dish from Gatling to cut the margin to 42-37. A three-pointer by Stein then cut the students’ deficit to two, and after a couple of free throws by the faculty, Rosenthal hit a three-pointer to pull New School within one. After a series of misses on both ends, Roellke drew a foul to get to the charity stripe.

At this point in the game, the largely pro-student crowd tried to take matters into their own hands, making noise to distract Roellke. They were spurred on by the antics of Adam Steel ’12 who disrobed to just a speedo and proceeded to dance behind the hoop at which Roellke was shooting. Nonetheless, the Dean of the College knocked down one of his two free throws to give Old School a 45-43 lead. Said Stein of the contest, “We also had a lot of student participation with the towels, with people distracting the free-throw shooters; it was great family fun.”

Associate Dean of the College for Campus Life and Diversity Ed Pittman ’82 knocked down a pair of shots, bookending a McCarthy jumper and extending Old School’s lead to 4945; however, that was the last the faculty and staff would see of the scoreboard.

With two minutes to play, Gatling absorbed contact from Brown and knocked down a layup, cutting his team’s deficit to two. Platt tied the game with a put-back with 1:12 to play before Westbrook-Gold hit the game-winner.

Scarritt-Selman summarized his team’s come-from-behind triumph, saying, “Do not underestimate the heart of a Vassar student.”

Overall, representatives from both sides were thrilled by the way the event played out.

Bottini exclaimed, “I think this is the greatest student-faculty game in the history of the game. It was the most exciting and the best.”

Beverly echoed Bottini’s sentiments, saying, “It was a great game and a great effort.”

Still, despite the on-court excitement, it was the overall atmosphere that resonated with those involved. Explained Scarritt-Selman, “This was a lot of fun and should happen every year. It’s the best of what Vassar has to offer.”

Beverly concurred, noting, “I think the best thing out of it was the spirit.” She continued, “Both sides were intense but we knew at the end, no matter what, Vassar would win.”

Roellke perhaps best summarized the event for all involved. “This game was about community,” he stated. But he added, “At the end of the day, I have two words for you: ‘Extravaganza, baby!’”

Jacob Gorski/The Miscellany News

Jacob Gorski/The Miscellany News

Jacob Gorski/The Miscellany News

Above: From Left to Right: Dean of the College Chris Roellke is defended at the top of the key by Wilson Platt ’14 who thrilled the crowd with the first slam dunk in Student-Faculty Game history; Assistant Professor of English Molly McGlennen shoots a jumpshot in the paint over Lily Lanier ’15, while Platt attempts to help defensively; Abe Gatling ’15 drives on Professor of Sociology Carlos Alamo, while Old School Head Coach Director of Athletics and Physical Education Sharon Beverly looks on. Gatling led the student team to a 51-49 victory over Old School, including a stretch where he scored nine straight points for his team.

MISCELLANY NEWS | VASSAR COLLEGE