TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2018
EARLY WEEK
MNDAILY.COM
SCIENCE
ADMIN
responds Supporting women engineers U to Shapiro venue suit
The University claims it did not violate free speech rights in a motion filed late last month. BY EMMA DILL edill@mndaily.com
COURTNEY DEUTZ, DAILY
Freshman Elsa Forberger, center, speaks to Ellie Burns, left, and Ashmeta Sarma about the Association for Computing Machinery for Women on Thursday, Aug. 30 outside Lind Hall on East Bank. The College of Science and Engineering held an activities fair for incoming freshmen.
A new program was launched in response to a lack of women in engineering and science fields. BY THERESA MUELLER tmueller@mndaily.com
Faculty members at the University of Minnesota are hoping to support the next generation of female scientists and engineers through a new diversity program. The Emerging Scholars Program, which was launched at the beginning of the fall semester, will bring together female students and other students from diverse backgrounds to cultivate a sense of community, provide resources and encourage
collaboration within the engineering field. The program is funded by a grant from the National Center for Women and Information Technology. Influenced by their own experiences of sometimes being the only female in a class, Maria Gini and Shana Watters, founders of the program and faculty members in the University’s Computer Science and Engineering department, said they wanted to combat feelings of loneliness that can accompany this by providing a welcoming environment in the program. The program was created in part as a response to the low percentage of women and people of color in the computer science field. Women account for around 16 percent of undergraduate students studying in the CSE department at the University, according to data from Peterson’s, LLC.
u See ENGINEERING Page 4
STATE LEG.
U’s strategic plan may prove beneficial in upcoming legislative session Lawmakers and UMN officials aim to find common ground with the system-wide strategy. BY ISABELLA MURRAY imurray@mndaily.com
University of Minnesota officials are set to release the first system-wide strategic plan for the school, which could positively affect state funding at the next legislative session, regents and lawmakers say. The impending plan, which will be discussed at next week’s Board of Regents meeting, will act as a financial framework for academic and state priorities.
Officials say having this concrete strategy might help lawmakers understand a tangible need for upcoming biennial budget requests. “The strategic plan is important in that it shows where we want the U to be in five years,” University Regent and former Minnesota Speaker of the House Steve Sviggum said. In recent years, the University has failed to receive all the budget it requested of the state. In 2017’s session, the University received less than 13 percent of its original request. This failure is due in part to a miscommunication between lawmakers and University officials regarding what the school’s needs are, Rep. Gene Pelowski,
DFL-Winona, said. “The U’s biggest problem is that they present budgets that are wants and they can’t articulate a need,” Pelowski said. “No one is going to throw money at anything. We need to understand a consequence.” Sviggum said the plan can communicate the school’s need for state funding by illustrating freshman retention, graduation times and postgraduate employment rates. “Our job is to make the argument and show through performance, earning increased state allocations,” he said. Last session, the University requested $10 million of the state’s budget surplus. u See LAWMAKERS Page 4
Ice cream rolls into Dinkytown Wonders Ice Cream plans to open shop near the UMN campus by mid-September. BY IMANI CRUZEN icruzen@mndaily.com
books. Boris Oicherman, Weisman creative collaboration curator, quickly saw potential for McCarthy Clifford’s ideas to become something bigger. u See EXHIBIT Page 3
u See ICE CREAM Page 7
Literature and the prison system: art for change and justice A new WAM exhibit grapples with prison system censorship through an interactive display. BY KSENIA GORINSHTEYN kgorinshteyn@mndaily.com
COURTESY OF WEISMAN ART MUSEUM, PHOTO BY BORIS OICHERMAN
Viewers of the exhibit, “The Section of Disapproved Books,” interact at the Weisman Art Museum.
stride,” McCarthy Clifford said. “People are responding to it ... which I think is now letting me know that I can actually do this. It’s kind of happening before my eyes.” The project didn’t start with the intention of creating a library of rule-breaking
BUSINESS
One Two Three Sushi’s former Dinkytown location will soon welcome Wonders Ice Cream, the parlor that first introduced rolled ice cream to Minnesota. Co-founded by Joungkong Yang and Kit Houngnakhone in August 2017 in St. Paul, Wonders Ice Cream offers 20 signature flavors of ice cream. The Dinkytown spot, which is expected to open by mid-September, will be its fifth location. “We’ve always wanted to have Wonders in Dinkytown,” Yang said. “We thought that it was a really nice area and there’s a lot of students on campus and we felt that we can bring something really cool to campus.” To make the dessert, ice cream flavors are mixed and spread on an ice grill at minus 20 degrees before hibachi scrapers are used to roll the ice cream sheet and toppings are added. The method gives the parlor its name, a reference to the Seven Wonders of the World. “It’s a really cool process so we kind of felt that our process looked like the eighth wonder,” Yang said. Marvis Monteiro, a first-year graduate student at the University of Minnesota, said he’s had rolled ice cream before and would be interested in going to Wonders Ice Cream. He said the customization rolled ice cream offers appeals to him. “It’s like everything is in the power of the consumer. It’s like he gets to decide what flavor will it be, what would he like to add,” Monteiro said. “It’s not like a conventional box of ice cream where you have a definite flavor.” Yang said the store continues to
A&E
It started with an edgy prison humor zine. “The Inmate Activity Book,” created by recent University of Minnesota MFA graduate Daniel McCarthy Clifford and a partner, followed all necessary federal prison guidelines and regulations, but was ultimately labeled as “a threat to the security of the institution.” The zine, a type of small magazine, eventually grew to become a list of more than 400 pieces of banned literature from prisons across the country. The project that followed became “The Section of Disapproved Books,” an exhibit opening at the Weisman Art Museum on Sept. 8. The exhibit’s shelves house the banned books and attendees are invited to flip through them. Previously displayed at the Northern Spark festival this past summer, the exhibit focuses on issues of justice reform, a subject that McCarthy Clifford has tackled in previous projects as well. “I came out for the grad program [at the University] and started making this work about the justice system. I sort of hit my
The University of Minnesota filed a motion late last month to dismiss a lawsuit that alleges the school discriminated against conservative views when hosting speaker Ben Shapiro in February. The lawsuit filed by conservative nonprofit Young America’s Foundation, Shapiro and student group Students for a Conservative Voice states that hosting Shapiro on the University’s St. Paul campus limited how many students could attend and violated the school’s First Amendment obligations. In the motion, filed Aug. 22, the University states the North Star Ballroom in St. Paul was chosen for security reasons with the consent of SCV. The University argues it did not violate the plaintiff’s free speech rights because the decision was based on security concerns SCV initially raised when submitting a venue request. “The Constitution does not guarantee a right to host an event in a particular venue,” the motion states. The University also argues that campus buildings are limited public forums where speech restrictions are appropriate as long as they are reasonable and viewpoint neutral. The University complied by working with SCV, adding extra seating and livestreaming the speech, the motion states. The motion also maintains that the plaintiffs do not prove injury. The conservative groups, however, claim that limiting the attendance caused injury to the larger campus climate. “When the University takes action like this to censor or treat conservatives disparately, it has a chilling effect on free speech on that campus,” said YAF spokesperson Spencer Brown. The University of California, Berkeley filed a similar motion last spring after a YAF lawsuit claimed the university discriminated against conservative speakers including Ann Coulter and Milo Yiannopoulos. A federal judge rejected the university’s dismissal and the lawsuit moved forward. “Berkley did it and lost. Minnesota did it and we believe they’ll lose on that point as well,” Brown said.
VOLUME 118 ISSUE 66