The Miscellany News
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Vassar College Poughkeepsie, NY
Volume CLI | Issue 5
October 4, 2018
Dees’ life, work honored
Broom & ball bond Brewers
Frankie Knuckles
Duncan Aronson REPORTER
COPY STAFFER
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I Courtesy of IYEC
ast Thursday, Sept. 27, the Vassar community gathered with the family and friends of the late Adjunct Assistant Professor of Philosophy Marco Dees in a celebration of his life and legacy. The events consisted of a memorial service followed by a lecture by Professor Dean Zimmerman of Rutgers University, Dees’ doctoral supervisor, in which he presented some of Dees’ work on spacetime functionalism. Speaking to the planning process and his hopes for the event, Associate Professor and Chairperson of the Philosophy Department Jeffrey Seidman said that when the department got together to begin planning the memorial, the idea to hold a lecture in Dees’ honor came from Assistant Professor Sofia Ortiz-Hinojosa. She, along with Seidman and Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life and Contemplative Practice Reverend Samuel Speers, assembled an informal committee to organize the planning See DEES on page 3
Vassar hosted its first annual Immigrant Youth Empowerment Conference on Sept. 22, featuring panels and workshops addressing the concepts of resilience and resistance in immigrant and undocumented experiences.
Event empowers immigrant youth Rachel Yang
GUEST REPORTER
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eading up to Saturday, Sept. 22, Vassar’s campus was adorned with flyers featuring a vibrant butterfly splashed across the front, which advertised the first annual Immigrant Youth Empowerment Conference (IYEC).
As the name implies, Saturday’s conference was the inaugural event in what is planned as a series of annual conferences aiming to inform and empower immigrant and undocumented students. Included in the conference were workshops, a plenary session and a keynote address by the founder of the
undocumented youth resource program Adelante Student Voices Gabriela Quintanilla. IYEC planning committee member and Assistant Professor of Education Jaime Del Razo explained that the idea for the event was first conceived in the See IYEC on page 4
Poets instill hope, inspire students Holly Shulman GUEST COLUMNIST
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In their lecture, Vassar alums Elsbeth Pancrazi ’05 and Geoffrey Hilsabeck ’03 discussed the refreshing perspective that poetry can provide in a world fraught with technological obsession and off-putting political turmoil.
Inside this issue
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ARTS
of how poetry can function as a tool of resistance: “Poetry is very unique because it really operates outside the boundaries of commerce. There’s no money to be made so you don’t really See POETS on page 6
Courtesy of the Vassar English Department
n Thursday, Sept. 27, at 6 p.m., 21 senators sat in a room on Capitol Hill facing Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Three hundred miles away, about 15 students and faculty members sat in an auditorium in Taylor Hall facing two poets. Elsbeth Pancrazi ’05 and Geoffrey Hilsabeck ’03 had returned to Vassar’s campus to read from their debut poetry collections (Pancrazi’s “Full Body Pleasure Suit” was published in February 2017 and Hilsabeck’s “Riddles, etc.” was published in November 2017). Hilsabeck wanted to share with the Vassar community a way of looking at the world that “makes more sense than what [he] was reading in the newspapers.” With this comment, Hilsabeck was responding to a question regarding an article he wrote in January 2017— shortly after President Trump’s election—titled “Resistance.” In that piece, he wrote, “In days when speaking feels like betrayal because speech is both inadequate and normalizing, and it seems wrong, dangerous even, to talk in the same old ways about what has happened but worse to avoid talking about it, I need a new language. […] I know that poetry can help.” When asked about how poetry functions as “a new language” to be
used in discussion of the contemporary political field, Hilsabeck said, “The fact that poetry speaks in metaphor was helpful in processing what was happening at the time.” Pancrazi, too, offered explanation
On identity and development, novel relatable, relevant
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New library location designed FEATURES for creation, collaboration
f you have ever passed by Joss Beach on a Wednesday, Friday or Sunday afternoon, you may have run across a motley crew of broom-andball-wielding Vassarites throwing balls through mounted hoops, one of them dressed in yellow with a tennis ball stuck to their posterior. That dynamic group would be our very own Quidditch team—the Butterbeer Broooers. I sat down during one of their Thursday bedtime readings of “Harry Potter” in Raymond to learn more about the sport of Quidditch and their student org. For people like me, whose Harry Potter knowledge has been deteriorating in a dusty corner of their brain, fear not—members of the org provided a quick Quidditch rundown. Captain Lestra Atlas ’19 explained, “There are five positions: beater, chaser, keeper, seeker and snitch. Chasers handle the quaffle, a scoring ball, that gets 10 points if it goes in See QUIDDITCH on page 10
On fantasy football, Georgetown Prep Emmett O’Malley GUEST COLUMNIST
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wrote two articles for this week’s issue. You’ll only be reading the fluffy one. But I want to quickly acknowledge the other one that, for the foreseeable future, is stuck in my Google Drive. Last week was a particularly emotionally charged week in American politics. What transpired—like many of our current political challenges— had plenty to do with sports. Even for someone as privileged and relatively unaffected as I am, watching the Kavanaugh hearings was nauseating. The hearings prompted me to do some thinking and writing on masculinity as it relates to sports. Kavanaugh’s professed love of sports took on an outsized role in the hearings. During his morally depraved youth, his love of sports rested at the intersection of fierce competition (between mediocre, doughy white kids) and bonds he developed with a group of boys defined most accurately by their striking similarities to Vineyard Vines t-shirts drenched with too much Axe body spray. Kavanaugh’s favorite sport—and it pains me to say this—is basketball.
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What passed for basketball at Georgetown Prep in the late ’70s was surely some sort of under-the-rim, chestpass-heavy, slow-paced nonsense that featured as many crossovers as it did people of color (I couldn’t get a picture in this article, but go ahead and type “Brett Kavanaugh Georgetown Prep basketball” into Google Images). During the hearings, Kavanaugh rambled about his days as a high school athlete and reified his love of the game. He did so because he thought that this sort of appreciation for sports and the camaraderie that comes with them is antithetical to the credible allegations he is facing. He was, and is, wrong. Among other things, Brett Kavanaugh is a lens into the largely unexamined world of prep-school sports, a world I know intimately. He gives a glimpse of the twisted form of male bonding that seeps into almost every part of its culture. As much as I love sports, not acknowledging the toxic masculinity located at the very heart of male, sports-based camaraderie is counterproductive. Indeed, erasing the hateful aspects of sports aids in perSee KAVANAUGH on page 18
Editor waxes poetic on autumnal athletics