Fall 2013

northwestern NORTH BY

WHO’S THE HEADLINER? FALL 2013

FIVE DAYS BEFORE DILLO DAY 2013, MAYFEST DIDN’T KNOW. PLUS: A Greener Endowment | The Income Gap | Following Ferris Bueller | Campus Water Fountain Guide

Going Home for Break?

TO THE AIRPORT

Just one hop away!

Stress-Free Run by Northwestern students Safe We offer premium shuttle service to and from O’Hare and Midway. Book now!

www.nuairhop.com

inside this issue

on the cover (cover photo by Jenny Starrs)

Five Days in May

Less than a week before showtime, Dillo Day’s headliner canceled. Here’s what happened next.

37

The Income Gap

Their Northwestern lives certainly aren’t uniform, but for many low-income students the college experience is marked by feelings of disconnect and isolation.

Taking Stock

DivestNU takes a unique approach as it campaigns for a greener endowment.

When Stars Don’t Align

Northwestern’s 2014 football recruiting class might be the school’s best ever, but history shows high rankings don’t necessarily guarantee success on the field.

48

45 PREGAME 5 6 7 8

EDITOR’S LETTER DISCUSSION SECTION LIFE ADVICE FROM A PROFESSOR THE PURPLE TRAIN THAT COULD Take a ride through the history of the CTA in Evanston.

9 LOVE OF THE GAME LZ Granderson brings unique sports journalism experience into his first course as a Medill instructor.

WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU ACTUALLY GIVE A MOUSE A COOKIE? A McCormick professor explains.

10 STRANGER THAN FICTION Yes, these movies exist—and Northwestern alums created them.

YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ANY OF THESE SONGS But here’s when you should listen to them, courtesy of some of WNUR’s most talented DJs.

11 NO SHAVE, NO PROBLEM Put a beard on it.

42

12 YOU’RE WELCOME, FITZ With a little

21 THE OFF-CAMPUS MEAL PLAN You

help from Xbox, we evaluated Northwestern’s QBs.

should probably learn how to feed yourself before you graduate.

WE WILL CHEER YOU ALL THE TIME

SATIATION SHOWDOWN We

Win or lose, we’ve got you covered.

SPOTLIGHT THIS ISSUE, WE’RE THINKING ABOUT ...

SURVIVAL

14 BUNKER DOWN If a natural disaster hit campus, would you know which buildings are best prepared?

15 RUB SOME DIRT IN IT Injuries couldn’t slow down these Wildcats.

16 LOCKED OUT For five days, one of our writers survived on campus without a bed or money for meals.

18 SCAREDY ‘CATS Beware the ghosts of Evanston’s past.

genius 20 NOM NOM NUPTIALS Evanston food is served best in pairs.

compared dinners, gorged ourselves and depleted our finances.

22 THE ODD COUPLE An NU junior and trained bartender pairs crappy college foods with classy drinks.

SPIKE IT! Sorry, Frances Willard.

23 BREAKFAST LIKE BECKHAM Enjoy the beautiful game with Chicago’s most diehard soccer fans.

WELCOMING WILDCATS You don’t have to be in Evanston to watch the ‘Cats, thanks to these three.

24 THIRSTY? We’ve compiled the most comprehensive research to date on Northwestern’s water fountains.

26 WANNA GET AWAY? Get out. (Leave!)

Right Now.

BYE, BYE, BAKE SALE Give your oven a break with these semi-realistic fundraisers.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 3

QUAD

35 CROSSING OVER Some students seek social circles different from the ones they would presumably belong to.

28 A MATCH MADE ON FACEBOOK Don’t ignore your notifications.

29 LOVE, ON THE ROCKS For several Wildcat couples, the Lakefill holds a particularly special meaning.

30 ONE IF BY LAND, TWO IF BY MOPED The athletes are coming ... to practice.

CHICAGO’S IVY LEAGUE TEAM? Thirty years ago, Northwestern considered leaving the Big Ten.

31 I ALMOST DROPPED OUT OF NU One student recounts why he stayed, despite great opportunities elsewhere.

32 THE MUSIC MAN Despite starting out with no space, no patrons and no money, Gary Geiger directs more than 100 children in the Evanston Children’s Choir.

34 IS THIS ACTIVISM? Students protest on Facebook and Twitter—but the streets are often empty.

36 WILDCAT WILDLIFE Campus pets pose for the camera.

CHECKOUT 51 FOLLOWING FERRIS Life moves pretty fast. But did Ferris Bueller’s life move impossibly fast?

53 COLOSSAL CREATIONS Make the most out of your meal plan.

54 DINE AND DASH Don’t worry, your walk of shame is totally worth it.

hangover 54 PRESIDENT SCHAPIRO’S (FAKE) FACEBOOK FEED Our friends at Sherman Ave imagine Morty’s newsfeed.

NORTH BY WE ASKED: What song encapsulates this magazine?

“Beard Lust” by Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head Editor | Stanley Kay Creative Director | Chrissy Lee Photo Director | Jenny Starrs “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Cyrus Deputy Editor | Kimberly Alters “Leave (Get Out)” by JoJo { Senior Editors | Kit Fox & Kevin Kryah Associate Editors | Susie Neilson & Lucy Wang “All I Want For Christmas Is You” by Mariah Carey Senior Design Editor | Sunny Lee “Bohemian Polka” by Weird Al Designers | Katy Kim, Jonathon McBride & Sarah Turbin “Juliet” by LMNT Photo Assistant | Samson Fong “We Can’t Stop” by Miley Cyrus Photographers | Aimee Hechler, Priscilla Liu, Colton Maddox & Alex Zhu Illustrators | Julie Kukral and Sarah Turbin Contributing Writers | Tyler Daswick, Katherine Dempsey, Aric DiLalla, Dana Driskill, Sarah Ehlen, Sam Freedman, Steven Goldstein, Sean Gransee, Daniel Hersh, Shannon Lane, Sylvan Lane, Anne Li, Orko Manna, Ben Oreskes, Jonathan Palmer, Josh Rosenblat, Preetisha Sen, Luke Srodulski, Taylor Thomas, Derek Tucker, Emily Wickwire, Zachary Woznak “God Bless America” by Irving Berlin

northbynorthwestern.com Editor-in-Chief | Gabe Bergado Executive Editor | Denise Lu Managing Editors | Susan Carner & Sylvan Lane Asst. Managing Editors | Ben Oreskes, Connor Sears & Preetisha Sen News Editors | Mitchell Caminer & Lauren Lindstrom Opinion Editor | Yunita Ong Asst. Opinion Editors | Rachel Fobar & Lucas Matney Features Editor | Anne Li Asst. Features Editor | Zack Woznak Life & Style Editor | John Hardberger Asst. Life & Style Editors | Lauren Kravec & Braelyn Wood Entertainment Editor | Sandra Song Asst. Entertainment Editors | Forrest Hanson & Inhye Lee Sports Editor | Luke Srodulski Asst. Sports Editor | Shannon Lane Politics Editor | Samuel Niiro Asst. Politics Editor | Alyssa Kincaid Writing Editor | Amanda Glickman Video Editor | Christophe Haubursin Asst. Video Editor | Adam Mintzer Interactive Editors | Sam Hart & Nicole Zhu Webmaster | Tyler Fisher 4 | FALL 2013

North by Northwestern, NFP Board of Directors President | Gabe Bergado Executive Vice President | Denise Lu Vice President | Stanley Kay Treasurer | Saron Strait Secretary | Sylvan Lane CORPORATE Director of Marketing | Paige Rotondo Director of Operations | Saron Strait Director of Talent | Susan Carner Directors of Ad Sales | Katherine Doyle & Sylvan Lane Asst. Director of Ad Sales | Hannah Zweig

Published with support from Generation Progress, a division of the Center for American Progress (online at GenProg.org).

BEFORE WE BEGIN.

PREGAME Editor’s Letter: The Importance of Perspective Leading by three points with only four seconds left in the game, every Northwestern fan watching the Wildcats’ Nov. 3 contest against Nebraska was thinking the same thing: How are we going to lose this one?

Considering everything that the Wildcats had endured the previous few weeks, the question wasn’t unreasonable. Northwestern’s season had come crashing down from fairytale heights. The ‘Cats appeared on ESPN’s College GameDay, the ultimate spotlight for a college football program, but that milestone was followed by four straight losses to Big Ten opponents. Fans moved from asking “How did we get here?!” in excited disbelief to “Ugh, how did we get here?” in disappointment after the season had inexplicably unraveled. As Nebraska prepared for its last-ditch effort against Northwestern, you could forgive the ‘Cats faithful for being a little pessimistic, even as the team was about to beat a big-time program and snap an emotionally draining losing streak.

A little cynicism was understandable. But still—Northwestern was on the cusp of beating Nebraska. Nebraska! If you want to know why this was such a big deal—even though the ‘Cats managed an upset victory over the Cornhuskers two years ago—take a look at history.

Three decades ago, Nebraska finished the 1983 season with 12 wins and a single loss. They were one of the best teams in the country and nearly won a national championship.

Northwestern finished that year with only two victories. And that season was hardly Northwestern’s worst of the era.

We don’t need a reminder that this year Northwestern managed to surrender a Hail Mary touchdown to Nebraska as time expired, gifting the Cornhuskers a miraculous victory. (Sorry.) But history shows that perspective is everything. This season, I’ve heard a lot of students voice their frustration with Northwestern’s football team. I’ve heard people say they simply don’t feel like watching us lose anymore. They are tired of weekly suffering sessions.

But consider this: From 1974 to 1994, Northwestern managed to win four games in a single season only once. If you started at Northwestern as a freshman in 1978, you would have graduated in 1982 as a witness to just two football victories in your entire undergraduate career. (See page 30 for a look at when Northwestern considered leaving the Big Ten.) Today? The Wildcats can beat anybody on any given Saturday.

A little perspective can change everything: Instead of sulking about a few losses, we should marvel at the remarkable shift in Northwestern’s football fortunes.

This issue of the magazine highlights the value of perspective within campus life. Low-income students share their distinct outlooks on the college experience, a perspective many Northwestern students do not typically hear but one that challenges our assumptions about others (page 42). Students pushing for a sustainable endowment are taking an unusual path toward divestment, largely based on understanding the views of others—a tactic that could help Northwestern’s endowment become greener (page 45). Perspective helps us place issues in context, usually by allowing us to better understand our history or the views of others.

Whether perspective can help the Wildcats protect a fourth quarter lead remains to be seen.

Stanley Kay Editor

DISCUSSION SECTION pg.6 | COMMENTS OUT OF CONTEXT pg.6 | LIFE ADVICE FROM A PROFESSOR pg.7 | THE PURPLE TRAIN THAT COULD pg.8 | LOVE OF THE GAME pg.9 | WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU ACTUALLY GIVE A MOUSE A COOKIE? pg.9 | STRANGER THAN FICTION pg.10 YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ANY OF THESE SONGS pg.10 | NO SHAVE, NO PROBLEM pg.11 YOU’RE WELCOME, COACH FITZ pg.12 | WE WILL CHEER YOU ALL THE TIME pg.12 Photographs by JENNY 5 | STARRS F A L L 2 0 1 3 (KAY); SAMSON FONG (GRASS)

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 5

PREGAME

Discussion Section

COMMENTS WITHOUT CONTEXT

“

READER COMMENTS FROM NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM

The Story: In “NU’s careerist culture is not normal,” Samuel Niiro wrote about the pre-professional atmosphere brought on by the pace of the quarter system.

The Comment: “This article is fine, but don’t start thinking that this environment at Northwestern is unique. Very few people attend college simply for the joy of learning in this era. It’s just a matter of how rigorous your academia is. Drop in on any public school’s STEM campus and you’ll get the same bad taste in your mouth.”

- some_guy

The Story: In the Spring 2013 issue of North by Northwestern, Gabe Bergado reflected on the loss of his father in “Without Him.” The Comment: “Thank you for putting into words what so many Northwestern students who have lost parents go through on a daily basis. I especially relate to your experiences seeing others interact with parents and that causing an emotional reaction.

Often, I am jealous of those who have both parents alive because they get to experience everything that I cannot. It seems weird, but I don’t think that is something that I will ever be able to truly accept.”

- NUSenior

The Story: Rachel Fobar spoke out about fitness etiquette in her opinion piece, “Exercising should be more about fun, not looks.”

The Comment: “Should a fit girl being [sic] fretting over a pound or two and killing herself in the gym to the detriment of studies, sleep schedule, etc? Certainly not. But should an overweight student say, ‘I don’t need to do any gym-based cross-training because it’s not fun and playing frisby will keep me fit.[sic]’?

Certainly not.”

- Christoph Wilhelm Schmidt

“

T-Pain Confirmed.

- spac

I’ve always used a spoon, and I get strange looks for it

- JS Dixon

“ “

”

You had me at shower beer...

- Shower Beer

I use chopsticks for eating Cheetos.

- AZ

“

”

”

”

I feel like I could’ve read something funnier if I had vomited up the alphabet soup I had for dinner.

- Guest

”

STORY IDEAS WE REJECTED One of these is real.

Morty and Fitz Sumo Wrestled. Here’s What Happened.

Five Great Dinners You Can Make Using Lakefill Fish.

The Man Inside Me: Confessions of Willie The Wildcat.

Northwestern’s Journey To The Rose Bowl.

The OFFICIAL Greek Life Rankings.

Sportz.

photo: dummy name here

Editor’s note: Some of these comments were edited for space and clarity.

“

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

and I mean that in two senses of the words. One is the sense that power actually produces knowledge. What we think we know and the way we understand people has actually been created for us by people in power. So you can reduce it to something as simple as a stereotype or expectations of how you’re supposed to be, based on what I’m thinking of you as a person I’m meeting for the first time. In fact, power— meaning systems of power, people in power, institutional power—has shaped the way that I look at you already. But the flipside of that is by learning, by doing homework and research—not just within the University but also by traveling, talking to people—knowledge is also power. The more knowledge you gain, the more powerful you are. You can be aware of how power creates knowledge, but you are empowered to create your own knowledge.

Life Advice from a Professor As told by Nitasha Tamar Sharma

”

Slab Font Head Rock It

ABOUT THE PROFESSOR

Nitasha Tamar Sharma is a professor of African This is an amazing story .

American Studies and Asian American Studies. beautiful In 2013, she won the Charlesand Deering McCor- author. BY mick Professor of Teaching Excellence Award.

In addition to a research emphasis on race relations, Sharma takes particular interest in hip-hop music. On the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in her office, she has books ranging from a Hindi-English dictionary to a binder simply labeled “Tupac.”

- Josh Rosenblat

It was written by a talented SOME ONE COOL

Sidebar headline here tktk

T

photo: jenny starrs NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 7

PREGAME

The Purple Train That Could Take a ride through the history of the CTA in Evanston, from Linden to Howard. BY CHRI SSY LEE

I

t’s easy to take the El for granted. Trains rattle by, interrupting our hungry thoughts as we head up Church Street on the way to Bat 17. On the train, the car trudges along at a snail’s pace—or often, stops moving altogether—and while transferring at Howard, the Purple Line to Linden feels like it’ll never arrive.

But within those rickety rails and dilapidated stations lie rich backstories intertwined with a uniquely Evanstonian identity. The suburb-transit relationship has been and continues to be antagonistic at times, with persistent disputes over fares, safety and service levels, but the El’s presence has no doubt shaped Chicagoland’s metropolitan development. Here are snippets of the Purple Line’s varied, century-long history.

Linden Nestled among Wilmette’s tree-lined brick streets, mom-and-pop bakeries and lakefront views, the Linden station appears sweet and gentle. But in 1912? Not so much. Central was the Purple Line’s northern terminus at the time, and affluent Wilmette suburbanites, fearing exposure to city dwellers, fiercely opposed a northern transit extension. Nevertheless, Northwestern Elevated Railroad—the company that owned today’s Purple, Brown and northern Red Line stations—snuck onto Linden Avenue the night of April 1 to hastily build a working platform, commencing rail service the following morning through what is now Linden station. An April 1912 Chicago Tribune headline read, “Night Raid Puts ‘L’ in Wilmette.”

Happy April Fools’ Day indeed!

Landmarks: The Bahá’í House of Worship, one of seven in the world and the only one of its kind in the United States.

Noyes Noyes Street was named after Henry Sanborn Noyes, Northwestern ‘s first mathematics professor and its second and fourth president.

Landmarks: Noyes Cultural Arts Center, an elementary-school-turnedlandmark that showcases Chicagoland talent.

Davis Since its 1908 establishment, the Davis station has undergone multiple dramatic renovations, but the most recent—and groundbreaking—development occurred in 2005 when the CTA installed seven Dunkin’ Donuts kiosks around the El system. Davis became the only Purple Line stop to boast in-station pastries.

Landmarks: Tina Fey’s first post-college employer, the McGaw YMCA.

Main South Blvd.

This station opened in 1931 to replace the nearby, seldom-used Calvary Cemetery station, now demolished. The move offered easier, less spooky access to local commuters, doubling ridership over the following decade.

Landmarks: Calvary Cemetery, one of Chicago’s oldest Catholic graveyards.

Isabella Built in 1912 on largely undeveloped land, Isabella’s ridership was always sparse. Alas, despite impassioned opposition from local commuters, the cash-strapped Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) discontinued the stop in 1973 just months after the stock market began to crash. Before demolition, Isabella was the El’s final remaining “flag” station, on which waiting passengers pulled a special rope to signal their presence to the incoming driver.

Painted signs guided riders through the process: “TO STOP TRAIN PULL AND HOLD SIGNAL ON PLATFORM UNTIL MOTORMAN ANSWERS BY BLAST OF WHISTLE.”

Central The Central stop was rebuilt in 1931, along with the Noyes and Foster stations, as the final part of a 20-year project to elevate the Purple Line from street level traffic. The station also once housed additional ticket booths to accommodate swarms of Northwestern fans on game day, but these were removed in favor of automated fare machines in the late 1990s.

Landmarks: Ryan Field and Grosse Point Lighthouse, the latter of which was built pre-El during the postbellum period under supervision of Orlando Metcalfe Poe, a Union brigadier general and engineer for several Great Lakes lighthouses.

Foster Dempster With consistently meager ridership since 1908, Dempster was one of many stations proposed for shutdown during the 1991 budget crisis. Now, however, it’s part of the CTA’s Red-Purple Modernization Project, introduced in 2009 to repair and streamline existing stations north of Belmont.

Landmarks: Evanston’s first and only Trader Joe’s, outside of which residents and Northwestern students camped for nearly 12 hours before it opened this fall.

Howard First established in 1908, the Howard stop stood at ground level until 1922, when Northwestern Elevated Railroad recovered from the World War I materials shortage and completed track elevation. These renovations transformed Howard into the major transfer site it is today: In 2012, over 2 million riders entered the stop, according to the CTA. Landmarks: A sprawling 659-space Park and Ride, plus a Target.

o

8 | N O R T H W E S T E R N I N D E X | Northwestern’s Program of African Studies was started in 1948, making it one of the earliest formally organized African Studies programs in the United States.

Love of the Game

LZ Granderson brings unique sports journalism experience into his first course as a Medill instructor.

BY KATH ERI N E DE MP SE Y

F

irst-time Medill professor, ESPN senior writer and CNN.com columnist LZ Granderson is debuting a sports journalism class at Northwestern this fall. He won the 2009 Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation award for online journalism and has received recognition from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. A Detroit native and Western Michigan University alum, Granderson sat down with us to talk about his return to the classroom, what he’s learned as a seasoned professional and his experiences as a sports journalist.

Why did you want to try teaching?

One of the words that’s very important in our household, especially to my partner and I, is “servant.”

This gives me an opportunity to serve, to give back. I would not have known nearly as much about writing and how to start a career if it wasn’t for professional journalists coming back to college campuses and sharing the knowledge that they had gained from their experiences.

What types of activities are you doing in class with the students and how are these activities geared toward developing their sports journalism skills?

We do a lot of discussion: philosophical discussions about journalism, the role of journalism and the kind of journalists they would like to be.

There are a lot of economic discussions that are tied to it that we need to be presenting to the viewers and listeners as well. There’s a cultural aspect to it—social change, the historical aspect. There’s a political aspect that I love, the way that so many politicians have used elements of sports or images of sports to help connect with their voter base and get elected.

The class is nuts and bolts: how to interview and understand the type

of journalist you want to be, but then also how to understand that there are many layers and many stories that can come from sports journalism that go beyond playing a sport.

What do you hope students gain from the class?

Three things. Number one is that I want them to know the rule that my mentor taught me, which is never say or write anything in public or in print that you aren’t willing to say to a person’s face. Number two, there is more to sports than just the box score.

[You have] to constantly ask yourself who’s on the field, who’s on the court, why they’re on the court, what are some of the socioeconomic dynamics that help influence the players. And then number three, don’t say stupid shit. That’s really, really important because we are in the industry in a time right now when people are dying to be be famous and it seems like the more crazy or outlandish things you say, the more attention you’ll gain.

How did you initially get interested in sports journalism and what made you want to pursue it?

I grew up as a fan, born and raised in Detroit. Being a sports fan prompted it. When I came out, I kind of knew that that would make being a sports

What Happens if You Actually Give a Mouse a Cookie? photos: jenny starrs (lz granderson); alex zhu

A McCormick professor explains. BY KI MBERLY ALT E RS

T

ake a moment to remember Laura Joffe Numeroff’s children’s story, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. It’s the feel-good tale of a boy who offers a chocolate chip cookie to a mouse, who in turn asks for a glass of milk and a series of other items.

But what would happen if you actually gave a mouse a cookie? We asked Northwestern professor Dr. Robert Linsenmeier, who teaches a class on animal physiology, to deconstruct the logistics of this illustrated classic.

Based on the book’s drawings, Linsenmeier guesses the mouse is eating a Famous Amos cookie, which has about 37 Calories. Estimating the mouse to weigh about 25 grams, Linsenmeier says

he would have a metabolic rate of about 7.3 Calories per day.

Do the math and that cookie would fuel the mouse for five days—and that’s without the glass of milk. Eight ounces of low-fat milk contain about 103 Calories, bringing the total to 140 Calories. That would take the mouse about 20 days to burn.

The mouse does perform several activities, however, like sweeping every room in the house and washing the floors. “He’s working pretty hard, so maybe he could use 10 Calories [instead of the original 7.3],” Linsenmeier says. Still, the cookie and glass of milk would last the mouse two weeks.

journalist more complicated because of the homophobia surrounding sports, but I didn’t realize there would be a straight-up blockade. Me getting to sports journalism was a very difficult process because there were sports editors who straightup told me they wouldn’t hire a gay guy to cover sports. I had to do other things. I was able to kind of craft a little space for myself in covering sports through our features department [at the Atlanta JournalConstitution], and that’s eventually how I was able to take my passion for the field, my passion for the beat, all this information that I had been digesting for decades and decades as a fan [and apply it].

What are some professional or personal challenges you faced as a journalist and how have you tried to overcome them?

I still deal with [homophobia] in various ways—being pigeonholed, for instance, and not necessarily being seen holistically as a journalist but instead as the gay journalist or the guy who’s an expert on gay topics. I don’t want to run away from [that] because I embrace covering those stories and those stories are personal to me, but when it becomes all that anyone sees, it becomes a burden.

It’s constantly wrestling with the fact that once people find out that you’re gay, they discount the other aspects of your being. o

Editor’s note: This interview has been condensed and edited for space and clarity.

Plus, the mouse’s lack of opposable thumbs means he probably couldn’t hold the broom or any other item. He might be able to latch onto the straw he requests for his milk—that action is similar to post-natal breastfeeding—but he likely couldn’t generate enough physical force to actually suck the milk up the straw, Linsenmeier says.

The odds of finding a mouse with a sweet tooth on a sunny afternoon are pretty low anyway. “Mice are nocturnal,” Linsenmeier says.

“They’re not going to be roaming around outside with their backpacks on looking for adventures.”

Despite the various scientific impossibilities, the book’s depiction of rodent fashion might puzzle Linsenmeier the most.

“Where did he get this pair of overalls?” o

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 9

PREGAME

Stranger Than Fiction E Yes, these movies exist—and Northwestern alums created them. BY LUCY WANG

ven if you’re not familiar with the name “Purple Mafia,” you’ve probably heard of its members. Northwestern alumni including director Garry Marshall, The Gersh Agency co-president David Gersh, former Paramount Pictures chairman Sherry Lansing and actors-turneddirectors David Schwimmer and Zach Braff all rep the ‘Cats out in Hollywood.

But for every Oscar-winning, Emmy-nominated School of Communication alum, there are handfuls more who go on to make films that are less Shawshank, more Sharknado. Here’s a look at some of the oddest Wildcat-produced flicks.

Wacko (1982)

Whale Music (1994)

Tornado! (1996)

Bats (1999)

WRITER: DANA OLSEN (Speech ‘80)

DIRECTOR: RICHARD J. LEWIS (Speech ‘83)

WRITER: JOHN LOGAN (Speech ‘83)

WRITER: JOHN LOGAN (Speech ‘83)

The tagline for Wacko reads, “At last! A motion picture made by, for, and about people ... just like you!” Of course, that only applies if you’re a clown-costumed police officer, a serial killer whose weapon of choice is a lawnmower or a polyesterclad high schooler. Character relatability aside, Wacko is Sharknado-esque in weirdness but not in quality. As a precursor to horror spoofs like the Scary Movie series or the Cornetto trilogy, which comprises Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End, Wacko has attracted a sizable cult following.

If you judged Whale Music exclusively by its title, you’d probably expect to be a bit bizarre. However, the film and its original book have won Genie awards and the Governor General’s Award, the Canadian equivalents of the Oscar and the Pulitzer Prize, respectively. That said, there’s still a degree of strangeness to a story about a washed-up rockstar who becomes obsessed with writing music for whales.

Screenwriter John Logan, a 1983 graduate, is best known for writing blockbusters like Gladiator and The Aviator, but his first foray into screenwriting came in the form of Tornado!, a made-forTV movie that’s pretty much Sharknado minus the sharks plus an exclamation mark.

It features meteorologically inaccurate twisters, stilted chemistry between its two leads and the cheesy tagline, “Hell has no fury like a twister.”

Maybe Bats was a money job or maybe Logan had a knack for penning man-vs.-wild Bmovies in the late ‘90s. Either way, his sophomore script, Bats, was just as cringeworthy as Tornado!. As if a government operation involving mutated bats turning carnivorous on a Texas town isn’t awful enough, Logan also threw in a no-nonsense bat specialist and her assistant, who tries to show off his film knowledge by saying, “Houston, we have a problem.”

Unlike Apollo 13, though, Bats isn’t taking flight.

James K. Polk Was @#?!ing Awesome (2009) WRITER, DIRECTOR, ACTOR: ADAM BERTOCCI (SoC ‘05) The production company associated with James K. Polk Was @#?!ing Awesome is called Guy in his Basement Productions. This name seems fitting, considering creator Bertocci had both hands on deck in the making of this short film. A self-proclaimed educational short, James K. Polk Was @#?!ing Awesome mixes historical facts with a strange brand of profanity. No word on whether Bertocci took any American history courses at Northwestern.

YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ANY OF THESE SONGS But here’s when you should listen to them, courtesy of some of WNUR’s most talented DJs.

2013: A music odyssey Name: Gillian Levy Show: The Rock Show (music director) Artist I’d drop out of school to groupie for: Fugazi, since they don’t believe in sex This playlist is what folks in the ‘80s thought the future would sound like, and also a fairly good representation of a Rock Show party soundtrack.

Crystal Antlers - “Andrew” Bad Brains - “Banned In D.C.” Harlem Hippies - “Be Your Baby” Liquid Liquid - “Bell Head” Richard Hell & The Voidoids - “Blank Generation” New Order - “Confusion” Talking Heads - “Crosseyed And Painless” Deuter - “Der Turm/Fluchpunkt” Can - “Future Days” Lou Reed - “Hangin’ Around” Suicide - “Harlem”

Music to power your out-of-shape ass through a night run along South Beach Name: Soren Nelson Show: The Wiggle Hour Genre I’d like to invent: Deep Disco If you’re completely unfit like me, you’re going to need some tunes to help you through your exercise.

Glenn Astro - “Colored Sands” Todd Terje - “Inspector Norse” The Black Madonna - “A Jealous Heart Never Rests” Fuzzy Cuzzin - “Canis (Funkhameleon Remix)” Moby - “A Case For Shame (Sharam Jey Remix)” John Monkman feat. Liz Cass - “Fractured Fate” Harvey McKay - “First Strike From Mars” Don’t Wanna (Leave You) - “Rampue (Sascha Braemer & Niconé Remix)” The C90s - “Shine a Light (Flight Facilities Remix)”

Music to wrap up a party with Name: Jenna Powell-Malloy Show: The Rock Show, Arrhythmia Genre I’d like to invent: Chromo-Power Flannelwave You know that point after you host a party when the crowd dies down? It’s just you and your close friends left hanging out. The rager is over, but everyone wants a little more chill time before they call it a night.

American Football - “For Sure” Dntel - “Jitters (Geotic Remix)” Coastlands - “Home, Again” Black Moth Super Rainbow - “Drippy Eye” Tortoise - “Everglade” Pelican - “City of Echoes” Delicate Steve - “Positive Force” The Album Leaf - “Thule”

10 | NORTHWESTERN INDEX | 3: number of James Bond movies penned and to be penned by Northwestern graduate John Logan (Speech ‘83).

Javier Lom, Bienen senior

Itai Joseph, Communication senior

John Gaffney, Weinberg junior

No Shave, No Problem No longer dismissed to Walden-like hermitage, the folksy flannel wearer strums his guitar under shocks of autumn-colored leaves, serenading squirrels. You might even see him at the occasional party, gripping his PBR like a life preserver.

But bros drink those too—and sorority chicks dig oversized flannels. In the long run, what will separate the hipster men from the boys is neither the thread count of their soft cotton nor the acuity of their musical taste. It’s not even the hoppiness in their microbrew IPA. Centuries after we’re dead and gone, “hipster” historians will emerge bleary-eyed from a 10-hour marathon of Portlandia with a single question: “Did he put a beard on it?”

These men did, even if they aren’t actually hipsters. And now they provide us with a visual guide to facial coziness in the early days of Northwestern winter.

Ben Kemper, Communication junior

Will Champion, Bienen sophomore

Tim Reilly, Communication senior

Amon Jones, Medill sophomore NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 11

PREGAME

You’re Welcome, Coach Fitz

Kain Colter: With Colter under center, the Wildcats struggled at times throughout the season—especially against some of the Big Ten’s powerhouses. Colter’s ‘Cats were demolished by Ohio State 38-7 and lost to Michigan 34-13. However, Colter himself had an incredible season, passing for a school-record 29 touchdowns and more than 3,000 yards. He also rushed for almost 1,000 yards.

Colter’s superb play—at least against teams not named Michigan and Ohio State—lifted the Wildcats to an 8-5 record, including a victory over Oklahoma State in the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl.

With a little help from Xbox, we evaluated Northwestern’s quarterbacks. BY STA N LEY KAY

N

orthwestern football is notorious for its dual-quarterback system, in which Kain Colter and Trevor Siemian share snaps at the quarterback position. The system worked well for the Wildcats in 2012, earning them a 10-win season. (Let’s not talk about 2013.) But if NU were to embrace a standard one-quarterback system, which quarterback should

head coach Pat Fitzgerald start?

To answer this question, we turned to the most scientifically sound method we could think of: Xbox 360. We simulated two 2013 Northwestern football seasons on NCAA Football 14. For one season, Kain Colter alone quarterbacked the Wildcats, while in the other Trevor Siemian exclusively took snaps. Here’s what happened.

Trevor Siemian: Siemian’s Wildcats finished slightly worse than Colter’s, but they still managed to end the season with a decent 7-6 record and a bowl game victory. Siemian’s numbers were outstanding: He threw for a school-record 30 touchdowns, which means that according to our highly scientific research, Northwestern currently boasts the two top passers in its history.

Siemian also had difficulty against a number of Big Ten teams, predictably falling to Ohio State but also losing in embarrassing fashion to Iowa 42-14, surely to the chagrin of the Xbox version of Coach Fitz. Unlike Colter, however, Siemian was successful against Michigan, leading the ‘Cats to a 45-42 victory over the Maize and Blue.

Conclusion: Colter and Siemian both had excellent seasons statistically, but neither team was able to make much noise in the Big Ten. The team records give Colter a slight edge, not to mention Colter’s teams performed better against better opponents. Colter probably benefitted from the fact that injuries were turned off in our simulation; in reality, Colter is more susceptible to injury than Siemian.

Overall, the only real conclusion that we can draw from this study is that the Wildcats seem to be playing better in the world of Xbox than on the real field, if this season is any indication. o

We Will Cheer You All the Time Win or lose, we’ve got you covered. BY ARIC DILALLA

N WI

EITHER

LOS

S

Sleep for the rest of the day (if it’s a night game, Reenact Kain Colter’s sleep for the rest of the game-winning scramble night and following day) on Long Field Drink lots and lots of alcohol Incur permanent brain Take anti-anxiety medicine to Have a celebratory damage after recover from a close finish hookup repeatedly banging Perform in-depth postgame your head on the table analysis on your Xbox Yell “Go ‘Cats” as you Talk back to a professor walk into Cheesie’s Swear to never again get so out of bitterness at 2 a.m. invested in a Northwestern on Monday game (then renege the next Plan to jump into Lake weekend) Jingle your keys Michigan (and then while rocking in a Continue to wear purple for never do it) fetal position the rest of the day, for better Text your high or worse Cuddle up with your school friends who Eat as much Edzo’s perfect résumé and go to other Big Ten as possible internship offers schools and ask “U mad bro?”

Eat your feelings away at Bat 17

12 | NORTHWESTERN INDEX | In both years Northwestern has hosted College GameDay (1995 and 2013), the federal government has shut down.

PHOTO: ALEX ZHU; ILLUSTRATIONS: SARAH TURBIN

W

e laugh, we cry and we get drunk. Win or lose, we all have routines after Northwestern football games. But sometimes our hearts are beating so fast after an exhilarating win or excruciating loss that it can be tough to remember appropriate ways to react. Don’t fret, ‘Cats fans.

We’re here to help.

SPOTLIGHT R I G H T N O W W E ’ R E T H I N K I N G A B O U T. . .

v i v

r u

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l a

BUNKER DOWN pg.14 | RUB SOME DIRT IN IT pg.15 LOCKED OUT pg.16 | SCAREDY ‘CATS pg.18

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 13

SPOTLIGHT

If a natural disaster hit campus, would you know which buildings are best prepared? BY DA N I EL H ERSH After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 took out pretty much all of downtown Chicago, fire security has been a top priority. Tech has fire doors around every stairwell that shut when the fire alarm goes off. Each of these doors is rated to stand strong against a fire for over two hours, giving students and faculty plenty of time to escape. Small plaques on the appropriate doors mark the fire exits.

Of course the safest place to be in the event of a fire is outside, but if you happen to find yourself inside a building, Tech is ideal.

From the fire doors to the sprinkler system, the building is wellprepared to keep students safe from a blaze.

FIRE H T R A E Q UAK E

S

R O T

O D A N

The devastating wind speeds and deafening roar of a tornado ripping through campus could be frightening, but if you’re in Tech, you’re in luck. “[Tech] is a squat building,” civil and environmental engineering professor Charles Dowding says. “It’s not very tall. It has a floor below ground level. The walls are very thick compared to new buildings, and as long as one stays away from the glass, it’s a very wellprotected building.”

Building codes account for wind loads, which translate to how strong of a wind buildings can withstand. According to Dowding, all of the buildings on our campus must be designed to withstand 105 mph winds, as per our location on the coast, but there is only a 15 percent probability that this metric will be exceeded in a 50year period.

With wind loads come regulations on building height. Dowding says buildings in this area are most likely limited to 85 feet tall, which helps prevent tornado damage.

FL OO D N

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RR

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Earthquakes are uncommon in this part of the country, but despite the miniscule odds, the buildings must be up to code by law.

In Evanston, that means they must be designed to withstand the magnitude of an earthquake that has a 1 percent chance of happening in 50 years. This quake would be caused by a slip in the New Madrid Fault, which is located in southeastern Missouri. Because of stronger building codes, new buildings would not fall down if this fault slipped, but the fates of older buildings would depend on their construction.

The worst place to be caught during an unlikely earthquake?

Norris, due to the landfill soil on which it rests.

“Landfill is extremely poor soil,” says geological sciences professor Emile Okal. “It has the capacity to amplify seismic vibrations and liquefaction quite significantly.”

While rain might not appear harmful, a flood has the potential to devastate, particularly on Northwestern’s terrain.

Because all of campus is east of Ridge Avenue, water naturally flows toward Lake Michigan when it rains, Dowding says. “That’s the good news,” he explains. “The only problem is getting it to the lake without having it go through Northwestern buildings.”

According to Dowding, the two driveways on either side of Tech have been built up to prevent flooding.

“They put about four to five feet of asphalt at the northern part of Tech, and completely redid that driveway,” Dowding says.

In any campus building, stay out of basements during flood watches.

1 4 | N O R T H W E S T E R N I N D E X | Percent of applicants admitted to Northwestern’s Class of 2017: 13.9; 1997: 42.3; 1987: 58.3; 1977: 61.9; 1967: 59.6

illustrations: sunny lee

Bunker Down

ave for blizzards, Chicago isn’t known for being prone to natural disasters. But if some sort of natural disaster or freak storm descends upon the Chicago area, would you know where to go or what to do? We take a look at some different emergencies—some more realistic than others—and give you a few keys to on-campus survival. (Hint: When in doubt, take shelter in Tech.)

THE WORD

Rub Some Dirt In It

B

efore current head football coach Pat Fitzgerald led the Wildcats to the Rose Bowl as a player in 1995, Northwestern’s football team hadn’t experienced double-digit wins in a season since 1903.

Fitzgerald showed that to be a Wildcat is to be gritty, dedicated and tough. Since then, ‘Cats fans have seen their players fight back from injuries that could have ended their careers, only to be stronger as a result.

Here are some of the most impressive injury comebacks in Wildcat history.

illustrations: sunny lee

Pat Fitzgerald (1993-1996) Pat Fitzgerald is synonymous with Northwestern football. His 1995 leg injury is also Northwestern’s most famous athletic injury and subsequent comeback story.

In his first two seasons with the program, Northwestern won just five games combined, but in 1995, Fitzgerald led a dramatic turnaround that culminated in a Rose Bowl berth.

Unfortunately, Fitz had to watch the end of the season from the sidelines, because in the penultimate game of the regular season against Iowa he broke his leg.

Despite missing the final Big Ten game against Purdue, Fitzgerald was named First Team All-American and Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year.

15 | F A L L 2 0 1 3

Injuries couldn’t slow down these Wildcats.

BY LUKE SRODULSKI

Slab Font Head Rock It

He also earned both the Bronko Nagurski Trophy and the Chuck Bednarik Award, both given to the best defensive player in the nation.

Duplicating those feats would be near impossible under any circumstance, but Fitz also had to recover from a very difficult injury. Even so, he accomplished every one of them yet again the following season. To date, he is the only college football player to ever win both the Nagurski Trophy and the Bednarik Award twice.

D’Wayne Bates (1995-1998) Considering the numbers and achievements that Bates racked up in his time as a ‘Cat, it’s remarkable that he did it all in just three years.

As a true freshman wide receiver, Bates earned All-Big Ten Second Team honors and tallied 145 yards in the 1995 Rose Bowl. His second season was even better: He was named to the All-Big Ten First Team after 1,196 yards and 12 touchdowns, both Northwestern records.

In the first game of his junior year, the All-American candidate broke his fibula and ankle, which kept him out for the remainder of the season. But he came back reenergized in 1998 and toppled his own record by accruing 1,245 yards while also scoring nine touchdowns.

Bates then moved on to a short yet significant stint in the NFL, mostly with the Minnesota Vikings, but he’s most remembered for holding nearly every receiving record in the NU books.

Tim Long (1996-1999) Coming back from a torn ACL is tough enough, but for a kicker whose success is predicated almost solely on his leg, it’s even more difficult.

Rehab and regaining leg strength are challenging processes that can sideline some players permanently.

That was the road Tim Long walked after tearing his ACL in 1997, just before his sophomore season. After missing that year and not seeing much action the next, Long hit his stride his senior year. As the starting kicker, he connected on 12 of 18 field goals and 11 of 12 extra points.

Mark Philmore (2002-2005) Few things are more frustrating to a player than dealing with the same injury multiple times. Philmore, a wide receiver, didn’t let injuries get the best of him. Instead, he came back even better.

Nine games into his sophomore season, Philmore injured his knee and missed the rest of the regular season before coming back and catching

CAPTION LEADIN Dummy text here.

This is the caption.

The person in this photo is great. Maybe it’s not even a person.

This is a radio!

three passes in the Motor City Bowl.

Late in his junior season, Philmore hurt his knee once again, but this time he didn’t see any action for the rest of the year.

He responded by returning to the field for his senior year stronger than before. In 2005, he made the All-Big Ten Second Team with 662 receiving yards and six touchdowns before heading to Europe to continue his football career.

Nick Roach (2003-2006) If one were to look at his time at Northwestern, it would be fair to say that Roach, a linebacker, had his career derailed by injuries. But he’s managed to come back and make a name for himself in the NFL. In Roach’s first three seasons as a Wildcat, he suffered a concussion, a sports hernia, a back injury, a bout of dehydration and several other dings and bruises—yet he still played in every single game. As a senior, he was named the team’s co-MVP, but his collegiate career was cut short by a broken leg.

That injury caused Roach to go undrafted, but he found a place with the Chicago Bears and eventually earned a starting role. He is now the starting middle linebacker for the Oakland Raiders. o NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 15

SPOTLIGHT

Locked Out

For five days, one of our writers survived on campus without a bed or money for meals. BY ORKO MANNA

F

rom Oct. 7 to Oct. 11, I lived for free on campus. The rules I laid out for myself were as follows: give up my residence hall key, spend no money on food, attempt to not sleep in residential halls or colleges and tell no one about my situation. I acted as if my WildCARD had no meals on it. Needless to say, my week was difficult, awkward and at times comical.

I’m a bit nervous about this whole experiment. It’s a cold day despite the fact that the weather was decent two days ago. Walking to the El station for class, my friend looks at me and says that I look “grumpy.” I think I’m pretty grumpy all the time, so I don’t think too much of it.

Fast-forward to lunchtime: We walk into Allison Dining Hall. I say that I lost my WildCARD. “Can I have a guest meal?” My friend on the block plan can’t help me. As I begin to wonder whether everyone is on the block plan, my friend with 14 meals per week saves me. I’m also carrying around fresh undies, shirts and a blanket in a giant blue bag, which is more than half my size. I say it is “journalism equipment,” and no one questions the wrath of Medill.

For dinner, I go to a Peer Adviser reception, where there is free food and hot cider. As I leave, I try to take a tray of uneaten food so I don’t die of hunger that night, but the security guy doesn’t let me. It’s just broccoli, but he still confiscates my contraband.

Feeling rejected, I go to the McCormick Tribune Center to do work.

I have a friend here who gives me crackers. Suddenly it’s 1 a.m. and I realize I’ve just been sitting here avoiding the cold. Where am I going to sleep? I feel my eyes start to flutter.

Day 2

I awaken to the sound of breathing close by. It’s only the McTrib cleaning staff, but I’m frightened.

They leave really quickly, and I look out the window. The sun is ready to rise and I realize I’ve spent the first night in an academic building. I follow another student—not creepily, I swear—into Allison, and she unlocks the door to the main lounge. I sit on the couch and do some reading.

16 | FALL 2013

Apparently I pass out at this point, according to a friend who saw me sleeping on the couch. I do not recall this, but I do recall going to lunch.

I use a different friend’s guest meal— I’m trying to avoid asking the same people over and over again.

I edit a journalism story and attend some meetings. The time passes by quickly, and I realize I haven’t eaten dinner. I find a bag of nuts on the side of the street—unopened, thank goodness. I leave no nut uneaten.

I realize I didn’t shower the night before. That’s awkward, but at least I was saving water? I am on South Campus and I don’t want to hike to SPAC, so I use one of the McTrib bathrooms. I take some paper towels, douse them with water and rub only my arms, legs and face.

There’s a group project crisis. I go to someone’s room to work on it, but it’s late and I start to doze off. I sleep on the foot of my friend’s bed, thinking about how the rest of this week is going to go.

AND SO

A LONG

NIGHT B

THE INFAMOUS BLUE

EGINS.

BAG.

Day 3

I wake up to the realization that I am super gross. I leave my friend’s room and go to Allison to change. I end up half-naked in the third floor bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror. Someone is coming in, and to save myself from embarrassment, I shove my bag under a stall and trip over the toilet as my shoulder hits the wall. Ouch.

It’s time for my journalism class, which requires a trip to Edgewater. I have no motivation for this right now.

I lug my giant bag to the Davis El stop.

When I go through the turnstile, it gets stuck. It takes me a few tries to get through. All week, I’ve avoided explaining what’s in my bag. I’ve been saying it’s “journalism equipment,” but as journalists, these kids are not going to believe me. “It’s a bunch of

BUT TION HALL A R D HY ING R THE R THE DIN O F L KFU L FO THAN THANKFU MORE PASS. T GUES

photos: jenny starrs; orko manna

Day 1

sports balls,” I say. I like sports, but I wouldn’t lug a sports bag with me around town. No one questions me though, so I’m safe. The professor brings free doughnuts to class. I could not be more thankful.

Back on campus, I use another guest meal. My friends urge me to buy a new WildCARD. After lunch, as I carry my plate to the washing area, my bag slips and falls to my arm, sending the plate of food flying. My leftovers are on the ground, on my bag and on me.

For dinner, I ask a random girl at the check-in counter if she would be willing to give me a guest meal. She hesitates, but then says yes. Small acts of kindness make such a difference.

Kresge is closed. McTrib is closed.

Where am I going to sleep? I find myself in a seminar room on the fifth floor of the library. I eventually hear, “The library is now closing.” I start to doze off when the door opens. I throw my bag under the table and launch myself under there too. A janitor takes the garbage out, turns off the light and I am alone once again. I get in a chair, try to hide myself and fall asleep.

Day 4

I wake up at 8:10 a.m. The library opens at 8:30 a.m., so as soon as the building opens I run down the stairs and exit unscathed. I go to class and then trek all the way up north to shower at SPAC, which I’ve never done before. Everything goes well, although one kid judges me hard for trying to stuff my enormous bag in a locker.

My face is getting furry—I need to shave. I don’t have lunch, but I go to Norris to recuperate. Then I have a meeting up north again. Get at me, blue bag.

I go to my friends’ dorm and swipe some of their food—probably far more than they would have liked.

My dinner is Cheetos and Doritos. At least I’ll have a bangin’ bod at the end

of the week?

It’s late and I’m still hanging out with my friends up north. One of them lives off-campus and decides to leave.

I say that I want to visit his apartment because I haven’t done that yet. This is true, although the real reason is because I want to sleep there.

I get to his apartment, say hi to his roommates and quickly fall asleep on their couch. Last thought: How will I get back to campus for class?

Day 5

I jolt awake, freaking out that I missed my 9 a.m. discussion section.

I go to the door. One of my friend’s roommates taught me how to unlock it so I could leave, but I totally forget how, so I jiggle a couple knobs, make the loudest sounds possible and finally escape. I see a shuttle sign and it’s one of the buses that goes to campus.

I get to Kresge and then realize that I’m 30 minutes early.

Later in the day, I go to cover an event for my job. I work for University Relations, so I sometimes film campus events. I go to the Block Museum for its preview of the Block Spot Lounge, a new hangout space for students. The event volunteers get free Jimmy John’s at the end of filming and I casually ask if I can have a sandwich.

It works! I carry my sandwich to Norris and eat it alone on the staircase between the first and second floors.

I then go to another group meeting looking tired and disheveled. By the time dinner hits, I feel really bad asking for another guest meal, so I hide behind a crowd of people approaching the Allison counter. I sneak behind the wall at the right moment and get in. At least two people give me the up-down glare and walk away.

As if I care. I just want food.

It’s time for A&O Fall Blowout. I really don’t want to miss it, so I slap myself in the face and say that I will have a good time.

Reflections

I learned a lot about myself during my week of free living. I learned that I’m not as mean as I think I am. By Friday, I felt bad mooching off people— and this is coming from me, probably the biggest mooch ever. I also learned how hard it is to lie. I almost accidentally let my free living plans slip a few times.

Furthermore, I realized our perceptions of people are not always correct. If I saw someone I didn’t know lugging around a giant bag, half-asleep, unshaven and generally disheveled, I would probably be guilty of judging him or her. We tend to think we know everything, but newsflash: We don’t! When people looked at me in a you-are-weird sort of way, I thought, “You don’t know my life!” I think I might have said it out loud on multiple occasions, too.

After spending a week without room or board, I can say that my bed and the janky dining hall orange juice are my two best friends. We often take dorm rooms and dining hall food for granted when we should be thankful to have them at all. After sleeping in the library and literally eating food off the streets, I can honestly say I’ve never been more thankful for what I have in my life.

o

NALISM EQUIPM CARRYING “JOUR S.” LL AND “SPORTS BA

ENT”

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 17

SPOTLIGHT

Scaredy ‘Cats Beware the ghosts of Evanston’s past.

B Y ZA C H A R Y W O Z N AK

F

rightening tales of ghosts and ghouls are an autumn tradition, but spooky Northwestern stories are surprisingly hard to come by. We dug deep into the past to bring you two haunting Evanston legends.

Dearborn Observatory

M

ore than 100 years ago, supernatural activity was reported outside of Dearborn Observatory. A 1907 edition of The Northwestern—the former title of The Daily Northwestern—describes a group of students witnessing “a tall black figure stalking solemnly parallel with the frightened watchers” late at night.

As the group continued to walk, they kept an eye on their frightening visitor. When the figure approached a bright, moonlit spot, the group eyed it eagerly, hoping to catch a glimpse of who it was. Instead, the figure stopped just short of the light, stood perfectly still and sunk into the ground.

Skeptics emerged as the tale spread around campus the following day. But few doubted the story after students at the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary were able to confirm the incident and assured others that the figure was in fact a supernatural being.

No other mentions of the story or the figure itself appear in any campus publications since the initial 1907 report, and no one at the observatory has even heard of the incident, let alone seen the figure.

The article ends by stating that several “liberal arts men are planning a nocturnal investigation.” Yet despite the efforts of these intrepid ghostbusters, the supernatural forces evidently proved powerful enough to elude their detection.

Late-night noises in the dorms can come from anything. Usually it’s just a roommate stumbling to bed around 3 a.m., but one group of Willard Hall residents once reported a series of noises in the building that left them a little shaken up.

A 1931 article in The Daily titled “Ghosts Invade Willard Hall; Moan Nightly” explains the incidents. “One girl with an especially keen sense of melodrama states that a shrill whistle rents the air at exactly four minutes after 11 every night,” the author wrotes. “Later in the evening the creatures get together and shuffle outside the bedrooms, emitting low whistles.”

Students immediately wanted to know what these supernatural beings desired with the then-all-womens dorm. One theory took a moralist approach, claiming that “the sins of the freshmen women are at last being repaid in full.” Others believed that the intruders were seeking revenge on the final witness of an unknown incident in the building. Perhaps the most popular explanation asserted that Frances Willard herself had returned to her namesake to haunt the students who had involved her in the cigarette wars, an early anti-smoking reform movement.

18 | NORTHWESTERN INDEX | $36,152: average starting salary for NU journalism graduates in 2010

While Willard residents were quick to label the episodes as clear evidence of a haunting, campus skeptics raised other possibilities.

Many simply brushed the sounds off as wind while some suggested that the noises existed only in the heads of nervous students steeped deep in Northwestern exam season.

Eight decades later, Willard Hall seems to have quieted down considerably.

“I live on the first floor,” says SESP freshman Robert Bourret. “And I haven’t heard anything that would imply supernatural beings living in W i l lard.”

photos: university archives

Willard Hall

Y O U R G U I D E T O L I V I N G S M A R T.

genius The best-looking couple at Northwestern.

plus:

Photograph by PRISCILLA LIU

NOM NOM NUPTIALS pg.20 | THE OFF-CAMPUS MEAL PLAN pg.21 SATIATION SHOWDOWN pg.21 | THE ODD COUPLE pg.22 | SPIKE IT! pg.22 BREAKFAST LIKE BECKHAM pg.23 | WELCOMING WILDCATS pg.23 | THIRSTY? pg.24 WANNA GET AWAY? pg.26 | BYE BYE, BAKE SALE pg.26

19 | F A L L 2 0 1 3

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 19

eat Breakfast

Dinner

Ultimate Peep Gooey Breakfast Sandwich The Combo: Le Peep Gooey Buns + Burger King’s Ultimate Breakfast Platter

The Mega Diablo-Tacorrito The Combo: Taco Diablo’s three-taco plate + Chipotle quesadilla

Rise and shine, amigos.

Put those cornflakes down because this take on the Egg McMuffin will change the breakfast game.

Le Peep serves its Gooey Buns—a broiled English muffin with cinnamon, brown sugar and almonds— with cream cheese and its signature “Mom’s Sassy Apples.”

Sorry Mom, but your fruit has no place here.

Kick out those Sassy Apples and stack on the entirety of Burger King’s Ultimate Breakfast Platter. This includes hash browns, a sausage patty, some scrambled eggs and three pancakes. It comes with a biscuit too, but throw that out with your Sassy Apples.

The result is a collision of breakfast food that makes your Nutella on toast look like a sugary bitch. All this between two Gooey Buns? Totally worth the gooey buns you’ll have later.

Lunch Joy Malnati Garlic Chicken Deep Dish Pizza The Combo: Joy Yee Garlic Chicken + Lou Malnati's Cheese Deep Dish + Sriracha sauce

Evanston food is served best in pairs.

BY T YLE R DASW ICK

L

adies and gentlemen, it’s time for a wake-up call. We do food in all kinds of ways here at Northwestern, but we fail to do food right.

We routinely leave ice cream off our waffles. We forget to combine lemonade, Sprite and iced tea to make carbonated Arnold Palmers with every meal. And most tragically, we only enjoy one Evanston restaurant at a time.

Why would you ever settle for just one dish per meal when you can take two of your local favorites and mash them into marriages of insane foods? Sure your stomach won’t settle for several weeks following your greasy conquest, but you ‘ll never again settle for regular food.

Prepare yourself for a our fantastical food journey through Evanston, one that takes all of your favorite restaurants and pairs their specialties with one another. The result is a full slate of meals that can only be described as legendary, must-be-seen-to-be-believed plates of pure awesome.

Mid-Afternoon Snack The Cheesie’s Superburger The Combo: Char Burger with everything + Two identical Cheesie’s sandwiches of your choice God bless America. Only in this land of opportunity can you display your colors by slapping the best cheeseburger in Evanston between two grilled cheese sandwiches, which themselves are stuffed with even more greasy treats.

Remove the buns from the burger, obviously, because this is a civilized

Are you ready to rain hellfire on your bowels? Taco Diablo certainly is, especially when you take three of their eleven varieties of tacos (which include Catfish, Crispy Almond Duck and Potato) and cram them inside a quesadilla made from one of Chipotle’s gargantuan tortillas. What’s that?

Chipotle doesn’t have large quesadillas on their menu? Go up to the counter like a big kid and ask for it, noob.

It’s been done.

Now, instead of having Chipotle’s no-longer farm-fresh ingredients in your boring old flour shell, you have three money-in-the-bank Taco Diablo tacos blanketed by your quesadilla exterior. Talk about an upgrade. That’s like five Taco Bell meals in one. Like a drunken Fourth Meal followed by an entire day of stomach irregularity, it will totally be worth it.

Dessert society, and it’s important to watch those carbs. Aside from that, no alterations are necessary—just enjoy the complete immobility you’re going to experience for the rest of the day.

But hey, at least you can still watch football, shoot an oversized firearm and let an eagle rest on your shoulder from your seat. What better way to honor this great nation than to participate in this food-match made in heaven? Land of the free and home of the brave, indeed.

Andy and Clarke’s Throwdown Brodown Apple Pie Milkshake The Combo: Large Andy’s Vanilla Custard + Clarke’s Baked Apple Pancake (a la mode, because of course) If you’ve ever felt like your vanilla milkshake was missing something, it’s probably because it didn’t have a gorgeous mass of baked apples and fluffy pancakes blended up inside. The Andy’s custard lends your shake a serious boost in creaminess, and if you want to really go all-out, you can add cinnamon and ice and milk and all that culinary stuff.

You can blend your shake into oblivion if you want, or you can go halfway and savor the bits of chunkage at the bottom of your glass. And you aren’t even allowed to say it’s gross—look at all the crap you’ve eaten already.

photos: priscilla liu

What are you having for lunch?

Dining hall pizza plus a backup bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch? Maybe some fries? Oh, sorry: I didn’t realize we were in the fourth grade.

Prepare yourself for some nextlevel lunch maneuvers, and ante up with an East-meets-West-style pie.

It’s understandable that Asianinspired chicken on top of marinara sauce is unusual, but that’s where your Sriracha comes into play.

Skip on down to Trader Joe’s, buy some spicy goodness and mix that with Lou’s tomato mixture.

Then go all-in with the dead bird. You’ll feed your dorm for a week.

Nom Nom Nuptials

20 | NORTHWESTERN INDEX | Percentage of female faculty in 1973: 13.1; 1983: 16.4; 1993: 22.5; 2003: 34

The Off-Campus Meal Plan You should probably learn how to feed yourself before you graduate. BY EMI LY WI CKWI RE

N

othing strikes fear into your heart (and stomach) like moving off-campus with absolutely no idea how to cook, leaving you to polish off boxes of Special K alone in your room.

You’re probably regretting every complaint you ever made about Northwestern meal plans.

But before you succumb to a nutrient-poor, alcohol-heavy diet, consider this: You can make good food, even in college.

And you don’t have to be Gordon Ramsay to do it. You don’t even have to branch out from your typical collegiate staples.

Long Island Iced Tea

BEFORE AFTER

2 shots Absolut Citron Lipton’s Cold Brew iced tea 1 lemon 1 mint sprig Ice cubes

Ramen 6 oz. rice noodles 1 egg, scrambled K tsp. garlic 2 tbsp. edamame, shelled 2 tbsp. red bell pepper, chopped 2 tbsp. carrots, cut julienne-style 1 tbsp. olive oil 2 tsp. fresh cilantro, chopped 1 tbsp. green onions, chopped 2 tsp. peanuts, chopped (optional) cooking spray

Sweet Sriracha Soy Sauce 3 tsp. Sriracha sauce 2 tbsp. low-sodium soy sauce 2 tbsp. teriyaki sauce 1 tsp. garlic, minced K tsp. sugar 2 tsp. rice vinegar

Boil rice noodles in a saucepan. While noodles cook, crack egg in small dish and beat with fork or small whisk. Pour egg in small skillet coated with cooking spray. Scramble over medium-low heat until egg is done. Remove and chop into small pieces.

In another pan, heat oil and garlic over medium heat. Add carrots, peppers and edamame and sauté for three minutes or until done. Remove from heat.

After noodles are done, remove from heat and drain.

Put noodles into large dish and toss with chopped egg, carrots, peppers, green onions and edamame.

Make sweet Sriracha soy sauce by combining all ingredients in small bowl and stirring well with a whisk. Add sauce to noodle-vegetable mix and toss.

Top with fresh cilantro and peanuts.

photos: alex zhu (ramen); jenny starrs (jewel)

Satiation Showdown

We compared dinners, gorged ourselves and depleted our finances. B Y K E V I N KRYA H

U

Make iced tea according to package instructions. Once tea is done, pour vodka and ice cubes in a large glass with tea.

Squeeze three tablespoons. of lemon juice into drink. Stir, and top glass with slice of lemon and sprig of mint.

sing vigorous scientific research (our taste buds), we compared two of Evanston’s finest neighborhood grocers. To determine the price and quality of Whole Foods versus Jewel-Osco, we made the exact same meal (a roast beef sandwich with an apple, baguette and cinnamon twist). Here are our tasty findings.

Hot Cookie Bar 1 pkg. refrigerated sugar (or snicker doodle) cookie dough K cup vanilla ice cream ¼ cup pecans, chopped 1 egg white, beaten ¼ cup sugar ¼ cup coconut, shredded cooking spray Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Cut out two cookie’s worth of cookie dough. On a cookie sheet coated with cooking spray, place cookies on one end. Combine sugar and beaten egg white in a small dish, then

Jewel-Osco

Cost: $13.23 Taste: Filling and rich, the sandwich didn’t disappoint. But the apples did; an apple a day keeps the doctor away, goes the old adage, but this particular apple made us a doubter. The cinnamon twist was OK as well, although it wasn’t quite fresh when we bought it. The sugar had hardened by the time it reached our teeth, but the sheer strength of cinnamon pulled me through.

Whole Foods

Cost: $28.87 Taste: The roast beef sandwich was a work of art,

use the mixture to coat pecans. On the other end of the pan, spread coconut and sugared pecans.

Bake until coconut is lightly browned and pecans are toasted, and until cookies are slightly gooey and undercooked. Baking times for each will differ, so you could also use separate pans.

BONUS: While cookies and toppings are in the oven, make rum-caramel sauce. Heat rum, caramel and sugar in a small saucepan on low heat, stirring frequently. Place cookies in a dish and top with ½ cup vanilla ice cream. Sprinkle with coconut and pecans, and then top with rum-caramel sauce.

the flavors of the organic vegetables, whole grain bread and succulent roast beef danced on our taste buds like a ballerina. The apples were sensationally rich in flavor, the baguette was tasty and the cinnamon pastry was still warm.

Conclusion

After analyzing the data, the dichotomy between Jewel and Whole Foods was clear: Jewel was cheaper while Whole Foods had better ingredients.

Both, of course, are better choices than the meal plan.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 21

drink

The Odd Couple C

An NU junior and trained bartender pairs crappy college foods with classy drinks.

BY D EREK T UCKE R

ollege dining is code for cheap eats: That means dining halls, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and late-night pizza. But you can still class things up a bit with a nice drink—even if you’re just eating canned soup in your bed alone. Maybe filet mignon and ahi tuna are a bit beyond your budget, but your microwaveable frozen dinner should pair perfectly with these simple beverages.

Papa John’s Pizza Oreos

You can’t do Oreos without milk, so pair these sweet sandwiches with a White Russian.

1 ¼ oz. vodka ¾ oz. Kahlua ¾ oz. milk or light cream Shake ingredients up with ice for a cocktail straight into which you’ll be hard pressed not to dip Milk’s Favorite Cookie. If you’re thinking you might prefer a warm drink with your late night cookie, consider a splash of Rumchata in coffee or hot chocolate.

Papa John’s is a staple of late night delivery at Northwestern. It’s fast, cheap, greasy and open past midnight. Turn a good thing into a great thing with some red wine sangria. It’s simple to make, although it does require a little thinking ahead of time.

Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Kraft Macaroni and Cheese is absolutely essential for anyone who has moved off-campus (as well as for many of those living in dorms). Pair this classic entrée with a nice dry white wine. Mac and cheese is often buttery and filling, so a drier white wine will refresh your palette. On a college budget? No problem. Any inexpensive chardonnay will do the trick. To amp up this pairing, consider adding some bread crumbs to your mac and cheese or upgrading to a sparkling white wine.

Spike It! I

1 bottle cheap red wine ¼ cup triple sec ½ cup orange juice ½ cup cranberry or pomegranate juice 1 handful of your favorite diced fruit Mix everything together, then refrigerate for 24 hours. This will pair perfectly with a nice slice of late night delivery pizza. No time to prepare sangria? A cold beer or hard cider will do the trick as well.

Burritos and Quesadillas Whether you’re picking it up from Chipotle or stopping by Plex to grab and go, nothing pairs better with average Mexican fare like a quick and easy margarita.

1 ½ oz. tequila ¾ oz. lime juice ½ oz. triple sec 1 splash orange juice Shake ingredients well with ice, and you’ve got a simple margarita that’s sure to hit the spot when paired with a burrito bowl or even just Cstore nachos and queso. No tequila?

Whip up a quick cocktail with your favorite fruit-flavored vodka, Sprite and splashes of lime and orange juice.

Sorry, Frances Willard.

BY TAYLOR T HOMAS

Andy’s Frozen Custard

Mumbai Grill

Andy’s and Andes: There’s no such thing as too much mint, especially when it’s combined with custard and alcohol. For an Evanston rendition of the grasshopper, add créme de menthe or créme de cacao to an Andy’s Mint Chip Concrete. For an added burst of mint chocolate, top with Andes mints or something comparable, like York Peppermint Patties.

Classy Lassi: Lassi is a sweet yogurt drink—think Yoplait smoothie—that can be flavored with all sorts of fruits. Mumbai Grill makes a great mango lassi, but you can make it even better by adding vanilla vodka.

For a fruitier taste, try Grand Marnier to create an orange-mango smoothie. If you’re looking for acheaper liquor, try a lower-shelf raspberry vodka.

Joy Yee

Unicorn Cafe

White Sangria: You could order sangria at a bunch of restaurants in Evanston, but then someone else will decide how much wine goes into the cocktail, and that’s no good. While red wine sangria is more commonly served, white sangria is just as tasty. Order the peach strawberry freeze and add white wine until you’re satisfied.

Cider with Whiskey: Everyone else at this Evanston favorite might be quietly working on papers, but there’s no reason you can’t get your drink on while they toil away. For a special fall drink, skip the pumpkin spice latte and order an apple cider. If you take your cider cold, add Fireball Whisky. If you want a warm cocktail, get hot cider and add spiced rum.

22 | NORTHWESTERN INDEX | Morty will come to your house for dinner if you ask him in advance.

photo: priscilla liu; illustrations: sunny lee

t’s pretty easy to fall into a rut, cocktail-wise: Muddling, shaking and stirring are hardly worth it if you’re casually drinking or catching up with friends. Luckily, some of the best cocktails in Evanstons are restaurant specialty beverages waiting to be improved with some creativity. Get to know our favorite booze-infused Evanston drinks.

Breakfast Like Beckham

Enjoy the beautiful game with Chicago’s most diehard soccer fans.

BY STANL E Y K AY

I

t’s 9 a.m. on a Saturday and the fans are on their feet, joyfully singing and chanting in unison. They clink beer glasses and ignore their breakfasts momentarily to taunt opposing fans, high five one another and gleefully praise their team.

No, it’s not a tailgate for a Northwestern football game. This scene of song, beer and sport takes place nearly every weekend at one of Chicago’s many soccer bars.

Walk into one of these bars on a weekend morning—when, due to time differences, European matches are played—and you’ll be swept up by emotion and passionate cheering for teams playing thousands of miles away from the Second City. Here’s a look at our favorite Chicago soccer-viewing venues.

The Globe Pub | 1934 W. Irving Park Rd. The Globe is king of Chicago soccer bars. The U.S. Soccer Federation has even recognized it as the best soccer bar in America on multiple occasions. The bar attracts herds of soccer fans—supporting a wide variety of teams from around the world—for all types of matches.

You can practically hear its patrons singing and chanting from the nearby Irving Park Brown Line El platform, as if you were approaching an English stadium rather than a North Center neighborhood pub.

Prominent patrons: Arsenal, Manchester City, basically any team Don’t wear: Anything Tottenham or Manchester United Atmosphere: Boisterous Pro tip: On the day of a big match—the UEFA Champions league final, for instance—get there well in advance before it fills up.

A.J. Hudson’s | 3801 N. Ashland Ave Only a short walk from The Globe, A.J. Hudson’s is another fixture of weekend soccer ritual in Chicago. It’s impossible to miss from the street: The outside of the bar is painted a vivid blue, much to the delight of the many Everton supporters who congregate there for matches. Inside, television screens cover the walls. The atmosphere is not raucous, but fans cheer loudly and proudly when their team scores.

Prominent patrons: Everton and Liverpool Don’t wear: Anything Manchester United Atmosphere: Festive Pro tip: When it’s baseball season, watch a match in the morning and then head to Wrigley Field for an afternoon Cubs game.

Atlantic Bar and Grill | 5062 N Lincoln Ave. No Arsenal supporters allowed. The Chicago Spurs—Tottenham’s Second City supporters club—pack the Atlantic Bar and Grill during matches as if it were a cold, rainy afternoon at White Hart Lane (Tottenham’s home ground in North London) rather than a dreary morning in Lincoln Square.

Welcoming Wildcats You don’t have to be in Evanston to watch the ‘Cats, thanks to these three. BY SHANNON LANE

photo: jenny starrs

Jason Trost, President, NU Club of the UK, London: The NU Club of the UK is the London-based branch of the Northwestern Alumni Association.

When Jason Trost became its president, he noticed London was decidedly lacking in Northwestern sports presence. So he brought a little piece of Evanston across the pond.

Trost sets up his laptop either at a bar (usually Sports Bar and Grill Farringdon) or in his flat and invites Wildcat faithful to watch.

“It’s a nice, laid-back way to interact with people

The Temple Bar | 3001 N. Ashland Ave. If you’re not a Manchester United supporter, stay away from Temple Bar on match days: The British expats don’t take kindly to overeager fans of Man U’s opponent. But if you do support United, you’ll love the apparel and memorabilia adorning the walls. Members of the Manchester United Fans of Chicago belt out a barrage of songs and chants throughout the match.

Prominent patrons: Manchester United Don’t wear: Anything Manchester City Atmosphere: Spirited and partisan Pro tip: If you’re not a United fan, at least wear red.

And make sure that red doesn’t include an Arsenal or Liverpool logo.

Prominent patrons: Tottenham Don’t wear: Anything Arsenal Atmosphere: Passionate Pro tip: Follow the Chicago Spurs on Twitter @chicagospurs to get updates on match viewings, Tottenham news and other events.

you went to university with,” he says. “It’s just the enjoyment of watching sports.”

Don Davis, Co-owner, The Republic, San Francisco: Ever since Northwestern alum Don Davis moved out to San Francisco in 1996, he’s been laboring to make sure Northwestern fans have their own personal Ryan Field.

“I am a rabid Northwestern football fan,” says Davis, one of The Republic’s four co-owners. “There was no way I was going to have a sports-focused bar without making sure we are a great home for Northwestern football.”

Anywhere from 35 to 85 NU alumni call The Republic home on game days.

“People rally around the football team,” he says.

“It gives people a reason to think about Northwestern and keep it at the top of their minds with a large group of other alumni.”

Patty McGreevey, Owner, Blondies Sports Bar, New York: Blondies Sports Bar in New York has been around for 23 years, but its reputation as a Wildcat den continues to grow. The original 10 or 15 Wildcat supporters have evolved into nearly 250 Northwestern fans that pack Blondies every Saturday.

“Northwestern has taken over Blondies,” says Patty McGreevey, the bar’s owner. “Northwestern has become the number two most important thing after the NFL.” Table reservations for the night of this year’s Ohio State game filled up almost two weeks before kickoff.

The bar gives out purple shots to fans whenever Northwestern scores a touchdown. But McGreevey does make one request.

“They have to sing the fight song first,” she says.

“There’s 250 people, but we still do it.” o

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 23

drink

Thirsty? S We’ve compiled the most comprehensive research to date on Northwestern’s water fountains.

BY ST E VE N GOLDST E IN AND STANLE Y KAY

Patten Gym

taying hydrated should be part of any Northwestern student’s daily routine. Luckily, Northwestern’s campus brims with water fountains, providing endless streams of water to dehydrated Wildcats. But you should absolutely never settle. We thoroughly tested Northwestern’s most prominent water fountains, enjoying the finest water campus offers and persevering through the worst. Drink it up.

Technological Institute

Who says the dual-fountain system can’t work?

Normally serving as a thirst-quenching oasis for parched gym rats, Patten’s two main water fountains tout cold streams Evanston usually doesn’t see this side of December. Heads up on the splash: The taller one may leave a few stray droplets on your cheek, so go with the shorter fountain if it’s not already occupied by a sweaty Bobb resident. Patten may seem out of the way, but your time isn’t as valuable as a good gulp.

Just like doing anything in Tech, it’s easy to get lost looking for a drink. Both first floor water fountains are off the beaten path, and they’re nothing spectacular when you finally get to them. The fountain south of the main lobby has a vicious stream. Perhaps more importantly, the hydrogen-to-oxygen ratio is clearly skewed. H2OK at best.

TEMP: 9 TASTE: 8 STREAM: 7

TEMP: 7 TASTE: 5 STREAM: 4

Ford Design Center

Beyond the overpriced sandwich bar and overexcited partygoers lies a secret fountain privy only to those true to the water fountain game. Another double fountain, and the shorter one is damn near perfect: The crisp, clear stream flows into your mouth like a serene New England autumn creek Thoreau could only dream of. The taller fountain picks up a current, so if you plan on swimming in this volatile beast, you best bring a lifejacket.

Warning: This fountain is not for beginners. If you value sleek, modern fountain design, though, you’re in for a treat. Both the fountain and its trigger are circular, and those willing to take a risk in the name of creativity will be rewarded. Good taste, good temperature and a damn good time—but nothing exceptional.

TEMP: 9 TASTE: 9 STREAM: 5

TEMP: 6 TASTE: 7 STREAM: 7

SPAC

Annenberg Hall

While conducting our investigation, we stumbled upon a water-related scandal unparalleled since Watergate itself: The main fountain by the weight room was out of order. Woodward and Bernstein missed the scoop, but we were still able to test the first floor fountains, which have unpredictable streams that either come in too weak or hit you like the third rep of a 30-pound dumbbell curl. The water tastes good, and if you can reign in this unharnessed aquatic force, you’re in for a great post-workout swig. If you’re not up for the challenge, take the short walk over to Frances Searle, known within the water fountain community as Saint Frances.

If you’re in the area and thirsty, you’re better off taking a drink from the Lakefill than from a fountain in Annenberg.

When you reach the ground floor, you’re immediately met by two “water fountains” on either side of the foyer. The more northerly of the two has a pitiful stream and spews out sludge water comparable to the Chicago River in the aftermath of Saint Paddy’s Day, minus the green tint. The more southerly starts warm but actually gets colder as your drink progresses. Stay away from the fountain on the first floor—it’s about as reliable as Blackboard the night before finals week.

TEMP: 8 TASTE: 9 STREAM: 2

TEMP: 3 TASTE: 2 STREAM: 3

Frances Searle Building

Norris University Center

Hundreds of years after Ponce de León began his quest for the Fountain of Youth, it has become apparent that the infamous conquistador was terribly misguided. Turns out the best fountain in the Western Hemisphere lies in Frances Searle, offering the perfect combination of luscious taste, smooth texture and frosty temperature. If you have no other reason to go to this building, at least show up for this New World wonder.

We braved a leaky ceiling that dripped next to the ground floor fountain by the bathrooms, and we were pleasantly surprised by the addition of a new Elkay brand fountain.

Its consistent flow and modest arc signal a top-notch stream. Norris purified its water game since last school year, and the fountain by the food court maintains its tradition of providing transportable gulpage. The first floor fountain past Norbucks is another hidden gem. Northwestern’s prayers for better water fountains in the student center appear to have been graciously answered by Poseidon himself.

TEMP: 10 TASTE: 10 STREAM: 10

TEMP: 8 TASTE: 8 STREAM: 9

24 | FALL 2013

photos: aimee hechler

Lisa’s Café

University Library

Kresge Hall

There’s nothing worse than trying to study while parched. Thankfully, University Library offers the best stream on campus by the InfoCommons bathrooms.

Arcing like a foothill of the Appalachian Mountains, this fountain’s stream will impress even the most studious water drinkers on campus. With a temperature as cold as your TA’s grading scale, you’re bound to give this fountain an A (curved to an A- at Northwestern).

If you just look at the stream, you may expect a fountain the quality of Frances Searle’s. But if you want to do more than just look at the fountain, you’ll realize that the water is as hot as the building itself. It doesn’t matter what language class you’re here for, there’s only one word for this atrocity: Bleh. The stream is solid, but it goes to waste on this fountain. We sympathize with those that have class in Kresge four days a week and a good sip zero days a year.

TEMP: 8 TASTE: 7 STREAM: 10

TEMP: 1 TASTE: 2 STREAM: 8

University Hall

Fisk Hall

Would you ever subject yourself to chugging the boozy sludge left in a beer pong water cup? If your answer is yes, then University Hall just might have the water fountain for you. But if barely legal water quality isn’t exactly your thing, find another fountain. With a bronzed and dirty base, the first floor water fountain seems to be as bad as it can get. But a quick walk up the stairs will have you drinking your words. The second floor fountain tastes like Frances Willard’s backwash and has a tragically lazy stream. Gross.

The gem of South Campus, Fisk’s ground floor fountain hits your taste buds with more rigor than a good investigative story in the Sunday paper.

Those lucky enough to regularly traverse Fisk Hall can take solace in sipping from the finest fountain south of Norris, with a vintage circular button that has you longing for the days of a post-recess slurp in elementary school (scientifically proven to be the peak of your water fountain-drinking career).

TEMP: 1 TASTE: 1 STREAM: 2

TEMP: 8 TASTE: 8 STREAM: 8

McCormick Tribune Center

Harris Hall The main water fountain looks as if it was designed by the Romans themselves. Unfortunately, the water also looks like it is delivered by ancient Roman aqueducts somehow still in operation. Major disappointment. The stream is as nonexistent as Wildcat basketball in March, and the basement fountains aren’t much better.

Triple-fountain alert! McTrib’s ground floor has not one, not two but three remarkably average water fountains. The streams’ arcs mimic the rise and fall of the industry of print journalism, but the temperature leaves something to be desired. Full disclosure: As McTrib was our final stop on this epic research endeavor, a few stray tears may have mixed in with our drinks.

TEMP: 2 TASTE: 1 STREAM: 1

TEMP: 4 TASTE: 5 STREAM: 7

COMPARING THE STREAM

TASTE TESTING

TECH Stream Score: 4

SPAC Stream Score: 2

LISA’S LIBRARY Stream Score: 5 Stream Score: 10

FORD MCTRIB FISK Stream Stream Stream Score: 7 Score: 7 Score: 8 KRESGE PATTEN ANNENBERG Stream Stream Stream Score: 8 Score: 7 Score: 3

FRANCES SEARLE Stream Score: 10 NORRIS Stream Score: 9

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Poseidon’s tears Holy water Imported Pure Michigan commercials in liquid form Meh Lake Michigan Lakefill water with the slight taste of mutant fish Beer pong water cup The permanent puddle next to Sheil Frances Willard’s backwash

UNIVERSITY HARRIS Stream Score: 2 Stream Score: 1

TEMP SCALE

10

ICY COLD

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

BOILING

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 25

do

Get out. (Leave!) Right now. BY DA N A DRI SKI LL

S

RIP GT LON

N

orthwestern’s extracurricular offerings are doubtlessly diverse, but there’s one characteristic that unites them: insufficient funding.

Chances are your organization needs more money—and in your desperate scramble for dinero, you’ve inevitably resorted to that diet-killing classic, the bake sale.

You weren’t wrong to try this.

The business model for bake sales is sound. Volunteers drop a little time and money, and the benefit organization rakes in raw profit. Better yet, since the desire for doughy, fattening carbs is a basic American instinct,

baked goods never go out of style. But if your student group finds itself disenchanted with the constant cookie flow, here are some new ideas for fundraisers that are sure to surprise and excite both your team and your student benefactors.

1. Sheridan Grand Prix Draw two lanes in chalk down the Sheridan sidewalk starting by the Arch and ending near Tech. Keep it on the west side of the street, mind you—it’s far less populated, though it is fairly narrow. Set up two shopping carts side by side and grease the wheels. Friends walking to class to-

26 | FALL 2013 | Average Greek chapter sizes | PHA: 125; IFC: 81; MGC: 14; NPHC: 8

S

Give your oven a break with these semirealistic fundraisers. BY SA M FREE DMAN

gether can now pay $5 for a morning race. Members of your organization— preferably those who’ve visited SPAC before­­ —will push the participants down this endless stretch of concrete at breakneck speeds, simultaneously quickening patrons’ commutes and providing them with jolts of adrenaline. Winner gets a lollipop and a Xanax. OPTIONAL: Race strangers.

Nothing bonds two jaded Wildcats quite like a near-death experience.

2. Waa-Mu ticket scalping Given our theatre department’s stellar reputation, it may come as a shock that Northwestern has yet to make the shift to StubHub. Your group could pioneer this transition. Buy tickets in bulk—20 or so should do­—and jack up the prices three to fourfold. If the parents of ensemble members don’t buy them, nostalgic Chicagoans will.

OPTIONAL: Sell tickets to Fundraiser 1. Nothing says community like co-

RIP

Bye, Bye, Bake Sale

Take on St. Louis, 2 days, East Missouri St. Louis is a five hour car ride away, but it’s a great place for a quick weekend vacation. Check out the top of the Gateway Arch for a bird’s eye view of the city, visit the St. Louis Zoo, tour Forest Park (home of the 1904 World’s Fair and a plethora of museums) and check out the nightlife at Westport Plaza. The following day, visit the St. Louis Science Center and Art Museum, walk around the Delmar Loop and compare Ted Drewes Frozen Custard to Andy’s before heading back to Evanston.

TT

Voyage to Indiana Dunes, 1 day, Northeast Indiana Indiana Dunes, located on the southern end of Lake Michigan, is approximately an hour-long car ride or roughly an hour-and-a-half Southshore train ride away. You can spend the day hiking, paintballing, hanging out at the beach or playing sports at one of the various parks.

If the outdoors and athletics aren’t your thing, the state park also has an opera house, a drive-in movie theater and various places to shop and eat.

Eat dinner at Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder Co., 4 hours, 2121 North Clark St., Chicago, Ill. If you’re ready to take a break from deep dish, look no further than Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder Co., a three-story restaurant in Lincoln Park. It serves pizza pot pies and “oven grinders,” a cousin of the calzone. The restaurant also has a claim to fame: The building was the site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Take the El Purple Line, switch over to the Red Line at Howard and get off at Clark and Division. If the Purple Line Express is running, you can hop off at Armitage for a quicker walk.

OR

Take a Pedal Tavern tour in Milwaukee, 9 hours, Southeast Wisconsin An hour-and-a-half car ride can get you to Milwaukee, land of cheese, beer and Midwestern hospitality. Check out the Harley Davidson Museum, the Riverwalk and the Frank Lloyd Wright homes— but most importantly barhop in a 16-person bicyle on a pedal tavern tour. You’ll see the sights of the city and enjoy some of Milwaukee’s best bars and local breweries. Drink responsibly!

Tour the Chicago Botanic Garden, 3 hours, 1000 Lake Cook Road, Glencoe, Ill. The Chicago Botanic Garden is the perfect trip for a Saturday afternoon. You can either take a roughly 25-minute Metra ride to the Braeside stop or take Pace Bus 213 from the Davis El stop. Admission to the Botanic Garden is free and includes rotating exhibitions throughout the year, ranging from student art to model railroad gardens. You can spend a few hours here and get back to campus with plenty of time still left in your day.

SH

Tour the Bahá’í Temple, 2 hours, 100 Linden Ave, Wilmette, Ill. Many Northwestern students are enamored by the architecture of the Bahá’í Temple and charmed by the tranquil surrounding gardens, but few actually explore inside. Take a tour to learn more about its history as well as the Bahá’í faith. Hop on the El to Linden. It’s a short walk from there.

T

ired of taking the same old selfies near the Bean in downtown Chicago? Take advantage of the Midwest, from the Indiana outdoors to beer-soaked Milwaukee and beyond. Whether you want a quick two-hour adventure or a full weekend voyage, our road trop guide can help you do it.

Travel to Indianapolis, 2 days, Central Indiana Indianapolis, another two-day trip, is a three-hour-and-20-minute car ride. Spend the first day checking out the city’s sports claims to fame: Lucas Oil Stadium, Victory Field and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The next day, walk around Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis, soak up the arts and entertainment on Mass Avenue and shop in the Wholesale District.

o

sponsored events.

3. Pear-squeezing station Hear me out. Pears are bulbous toward the bottom, so if you hold one upside down, it fills up the space in your palm. At the top, it thins out, thus keeping stress off the weak outer portion of your hand. Ripe pears are the perfect consistency for stress squeezing. Considering there’s something inherently fulfilling about turning a solid object into obliterated mush, set up a station that allows students to pay $4 in exchange for a pear that they can squeeze right there. Provide water, paper towels and a trashcan, and remind them that they can eat the mashed fruit if they so please. OPTIONAL: Sacrifice one of your group members as a target. The only thing more satisfying than squeezing fruit is nailing someone with it—so charge an extra $5 and warm up your arm. o

illustrations: sunny lee

Wanna Get Away?

WHAT ’S GOING ON AROUND CAMPUS.

Freshmen Tanner Howard and Isabel Sturla embrace for the first time, marking the anxious moment when their Facebooksparked relationship transcended laptop screens.

PLUS:

Photograph by LUCY WANG

A MATCH MADE ON FACEBOOK pg.28 | LOVE, ON THE ROCKS pg.29 CHICAGO’S IVY LEAGUE TEAM? pg.30 | ONE IF BY LAND, TWO IF BY MOPED pg.30 I ALMOST DROPPED OUT OF NU pg.31 | THE MUSIC MAN pg.32 | IS THIS ACTIVISM? pg.34 CROSSING OVER pg.35 | WILDCAT WILDLIFE pg.36 27 | F A L L 2 0 1 3

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 27

CAMPUS

Tanner Howard was tagged in Isabel Sturla’s life event.

A Match Made on Facebook Don’t ignore your notifications. BY LUCY WANG

M

edill freshman Tanner Howard straightens his collar and wipes his palms on newly-ironed dress pants.

First impressions matter. Except in this case, as he waits for Weinberg freshman Isabel “Isi” Sturla on the first day of Wildcat Welcome, Howard is not exactly making a first impression. Although they have yet to meet face-to-face, Howard and Sturla are already old friends—sweethearts, even—Facebook-to-Facebook.

A few minutes later, she runs up to him and they embrace tenderly, wordlessly. They’ve never spoken a word to each other in person, but for now, they don’t need to. They simply hold each other close.

As members of the Class of 2017, Howard and Sturla took to Facebook after their acceptance to find roommates, ask questions and bemoan CAESAR. “I think everyone was really bored and really excited this summer,” Sturla says. “It was actually pretty common for most people to write posts and friend request others in the Northwestern groups.”

Sturla actively read, wrote and

friend-requested in these groups. In one of them, “Northwestern Roommates - Class of 2017,” she and Howard first crossed paths.

“I posted my biography for the roommate group and got a couple of friend requests,” Howard says. “One of them was from her.”

That post, chock-full of quirkiness and music references, struck Sturla as being “very witty, very clever and political in an interesting way.” Among other introductory topics, Howard jokingly called himself a “Reformed Communist” and mentioned his plans

to bring vinyl records to college. After his post went live and his account lit up with likes and friend requests, he was eager to get to know these new Facebook friends.

“At that point, I did what everybody does: a little bit of Facebookstalking. Isi liked a couple of bands on Facebook that I’m a fan of. She seemed interesting, and I got that vibe from very limited interaction with her,” Howard says. “So I just sent her a message.”

Howard wrote, “Hi! Just wanted to say hello, you seem really interest-

The First Messages...

Tanner Howard: Hi! Just wanted to say hello, you seem really interesting! See you next year!

Isabel Sturla: I thought that about you when I saw your roommate post!! You too and thank you!!

Tanner Howard: glad to hear that! thanks! how excited are you?

Isabel Sturla: overly excited!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tanner Howard: yes! it’s going to be so great! what are you going to study?

ing! See you next year!”

“I thought that about you when I saw your roommate post!! You too and thank you!!” Sturla responded.

That was April 16, 2013.

The pair began Facebook-messaging daily for the next few months, eventually supplementing those exchanges with text messages and Skype sessions.

“It’s one of those things where you start talking to somebody and you don’t want to stop. You keep the conversation going. It’s just one thing after the other,” Sturla says. “Every time you have to go to bed, it’s like, ‘Damn it, I want to continue the conversation.’”

During their third Skype session on June 5, Howard plucked up his courage. “We’d been Skyping for two and a half hours. It was really good.

We were both smiling,” he recalls.

“Right after we signed off, I messaged her and told her to sign back on again.

She did, and … I just said, ‘Hey, I like you.’”

After their Facebook beginnings, they were finally on the same page. “I didn’t know that was going to happen, so beforehand I was just like, ‘Oh God,

28 | NORTHWESTERN INDEX | 2005: year that Arcade Fire‘s Will Butler graduated from Northwestern with a poetry degree. Butler was heavily involved in WNUR and used a summer undergraduate research grant to study rock and roll under Communist rule in the Czech Republic.

photo: lucy wang

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photo: nate bartlett (left); colton maddox (right)

what if?’” she says. “Luckily, though, he said what he felt and it was what I felt.”

Both Sturla and Howard kept a few friends at home in the loop throughout their blossoming relationship. Sturla’s friend Laura Goetz says the couple was aware of the online nature of their relationship.

“Their friendship was confidential information at the time because she thought people might think it was silly that she was spending so much time talking to someone she’d never met,” says Goetz, a freshman at Yale University. However, Goetz and Sturla’s other friends were always supportive, never judgemental. “I was excited to hear about him,” Goetz says. “The more she told me, the more I thought that he sounded like a really special guy.”

Sturla and Howard both initially held off on telling their parents, but for reasons unrelated to Facebook.

Eventually, they brought their parents into the loop.

“I just felt like I wanted things to be a little more definite before I told my parents,” Howard says. “But when I told them, they didn’t have a negative reaction to it being on the Internet.”

With their mutual feelings confirmed and their parents clued in by mid-July, the rest of summer was a waiting game to not only go to college but also to meet each other in person.

“There were more than three months of talking daily and Skyping a lot and just waiting to finally see her, to finally be in the same place,” Howard says.

They agreed on an exact time and location: 3 p.m. on Sept. 16, at the circular nook between their respective dorms of 1835 Hinman and East Fairchild (CRC).

“I remember I was freaking out beforehand. My heart was racing. It was definitely very anxiety-provoking,” Sturla says. “It was something I had been waiting for, just waiting for.

Week by week, day by day. And finally having that was mind-boggling. I gave him the biggest hug, and I couldn’t let go.”

Their online compatibility translated effortlessly into real life, and two days later on Sept. 18, their friends’ newsfeeds blew up with a like-worthy update: Howard and Sturla were Facebook official. o Full disclosure: Tanner Howard began contributing to North by Northwestern this fall.

Love, On The Rocks For several Wildcat couples, the Lakefill holds a particularly special meaning.

BY PREETI SH A SEN

F

rom watching the sunrise over Lake Michigan to painting rocks before graduation, the Lakefill plays host to many Northwestern memories. But for some Wildcats, the Lakefill is even more sacred: It’s the site of their marriage proposal.

Katie Wells, who expects to graduate this March, had no idea that the Lakefill would be so important when she took a walk around campus with her boyfriend Keegan Dunn (McCormick ‘13) this past summer. As they strolled along the Lakefill rocks, Wells realized she never got a chance to paint a rock before graduating. This gave Dunn the perfect opportunity to take her to a rock he had pre-painted and pop the question.

“We had talked about [marriage] but I wasn’t expecting it anytime soon,” Wells says.

Dunn planned the proposal by painting “Will you marry me?” on a rock beforehand, and Wells painted on the date after accepting the proposal. Dunn says he thought about proposing for a couple of months before settling on the Lakefill because it’s a “Northwestern tradition.”

Dunn even arranged for a friend to take photos. The weather was on his side, too.

“It just happened to be a really, really nice day,” Wells says. “The sky was really clear and you could see the city really well. It was great.”

Even without a painted rock, the Lakefill is still a perfect proposal spot for many couples. Margaret Kaliski (WCAS ‘92) said “yes” to her now-husband there in 1990.

“The skyline of Chicago is absolutely beautiful,” Kaliski says. “Having that in the backdrop was just lovely.”

Since that day 23 years ago, Kaliski has returned to campus a few times because her daughter, Paige, is now a student. Kaliski says she has been to the Lakefill on these visits, and she has noticed that the rocks are used a lot more now than they were while she studied here.

“They were painted [when I was here], but I think you guys are a lot more creative now,” Kaliski says.

With more than 150 uniquely painted rocks dating back to 1970, the Lakefill caught the eye of local freelance multimedia journalist Brian Cox. He published a book in 2009, Imprinted on This Rock Forever in Love, which is updated annually. Cox has seen a number of proposal rocks and talked to many who have painted them.

“One of the things I kept seeing over and over was this theme of love for each other,” Cox says.

The marriage-themed rocks vary from a simple, “Will you marry me”? to designs that include dates of the proposals and subsequent marriages.

While the Lakefill’s location makes for an idyllic proposal site, Dunn had other motives as well. Because Wells will spend the next few months in the Evanston area while he works in Seattle, Dunn wanted Wells to have something at Northwestern to remind her of him.

“I thought it’d be fun to have the rock there so she could go look at it while I’m away,” Dunn says.

A painted proposal on the rocks endures as a physical testament to lifelong commitment.

“I think the people who did the rocks deserve a lot of credit,” Cox says. “They didn’t just go up here and do it in a messy way. It’s a testament to the power of love.” o

MARRY ME? Painted rocks like this one appear all along the lakeshore.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 29

CAMPUS

One If By Land, Two If By Moped The athletes are coming ... to practice. BY SHA NNON LANE

A

s many students have learned on game days, the walk to and from the athletic facilities—Ryan Field, Welsh-Ryan Arena and other venues—can feel long, cold and hopeless. Now imagine having to get there for an 8:50 a.m. practice. You can’t be late, or you’ll risk being on the receiving end of the coach’s wrath. Somehow, these student-athletes have found ways to master the trek.

Sam Hatfield Women’s Soccer, Goalkeeper Senior How she commutes: Motor scooter How often: Six days per week Her secret to transportation success: While Hatfield doesn’t have to go quite as far as Ryan Field most days, she does have to maneuver through SPAC’s construction and consider the unreliability of campus shuttles. Plus, there are very few parking spots. The solution? A motor scooter, which she rides to Lakeside Field.

“I usually just park it by the bikes and it’s fairly small so it can fit into gaps,” she says. “I don’t think you’re supposed to, but I haven’t been towed or anything.”

Austin Carr

Maggie Burnham

Football, Wide Receiver Redshirt freshman How he commutes: Carpooling with the wide receiving corps (Rashad Lawrence, Tony Jones and Mike McHugh to name a few) or linebacker Joseph Jones; occasionally bikes How often: Six or seven days per week Advice for future athletes: Carr has tried several methods of travel up to the football facilities, including taking the Ryan Field or Intercampus Northbound shuttles (though they’re often late) or walking when the shuttles don’t show. But being late in exchange for a free shuttle ride isn’t worth getting in trouble with his position coach, Dennis Springer. Plus, he’s found that nothing really beats a good old-fashioned carpool.

“Coming from someone who doesn’t have a car here, it’s better to have your own and drive yourself… or carpool with a timely and reliable person,” Carr says.

Even now, Carr says he’s seen the occasional unfortunate freshman sprinting up Sheridan Road, hoping a shuttle will magically appear but knowing deep down he better hustle.

Volleyball, Middle Blocker Redshirt sophomore How she commutes: Her mom’s minivan with the team’s six freshmen How often: Six days per week Why she now has a car: One weekend during Burnham’s first year, the team went on its first road trip of the season. Coincidentally, the football team played a home game, too.

Those with Ryan Field parking passes know parking spaces are reserved for season ticket holders and tailgaters on game days. The team’s freshmen knew no such thing. Instead, an upperclassman mistakenly told one of the freshmen that her Jeep Wrangler could

Chicago’s Ivy League Team?

N erds can’t be good at sports. That’s how it’s always been. Pocket protectors and pocket passers aren’t found in the same places. Sure, Northwestern’s recent success on the gridiron and lacrosse field might suggest otherwise, but academic standards and athletic success usually just don’t mesh.

The Wildcat football teams of the late 1970s were prime examples. These teams weren’t just bad. They were awful. And constant failure caused some to question Northwestern’s Big Ten membership.

As ESPN College GameDay’s production trucks rolled onto Northwestern’s campus for an Oct. 5

stay at Ryan Field for the night.

“She told us the wrong lot and we came back at like three in the morning, went to go hop in the Jeep and the car was not where it was parked before,” Burnham says. Turns out an unknown Good Samaritan towed the car over to the correct lot without the players even knowing. Today, Burnham drives the new batch of freshmen, hopefully to save them from the same panic. o

Thirty years ago, Northwestern considered leaving the Big Ten. BY ARIC DILALLA

matchup with the third-ranked Ohio State Buckeyes, Evanston became the center of the college football universe. Thirty years ago, Northwestern students would never have thought this possible. Long before Pat Fitzgerald led the ‘Cats to the Rose Bowl as a player following the 1995 season and to victory in the Gator Bowl as a coach, Northwestern’s football program was the laughingstock of the nation.

With the 1949 Rose Bowl victory ancient history, the 1970s were a dark time for Northwestern football. Led by coaches John Pont (1973-1977) and Rick Venturi (1978-1980), the Wildcats struggled to an abysmal 13-74-1 record over the course of eight seasons. In 1977, a fan in the stands held up a sign

that read “Mom: I don’t need money. Send a team.”

But even these horror stories hardly illustrate how bad the Wildcats were about to become. After a Sept. 15, 1979 win over Wyoming, the Wildcats lost their next 34 games, a national record that still stands today.

Before Dennis Green—the Big Ten’s first African-American head football coach—finally led Northwestern to a 31-6 win against NIU in 1982, the Wildcats didn’t manage a victory for three whole years.

A 61-14 pasting at the hands of Michigan State in 1981 marked Northwestern’s 29th consecutive loss, which set a new NCAA record for futility.

I Almost Dropped Out of NU One student recounts why he stayed, despite great opportunities elsewhere.

BY SEA N G R A N S E E

O photos: priscilla liu (car); colton maddox (gransee) illustration: julie kukral (big ten)

n a quiet night in mid-July, my computer displayed a page on Northwestern’s website titled “Withdrawal from the University.” I was ready to give up my senior year of college and walk away from a degree.

I’m a software engineer. I love working for small tech startups more than anything else. It’s what I’ve done for the past three summers, which were some of the happiest times of my life. Most of the time I was working, I felt like there was nothing I would rather be doing. Instead of completing (or half-assing) schoolwork that is looked over once and graded, I built products that thousands of people use every day.

This past summer, I lived in San Francisco and worked for an online payments startup with fewer than a dozen people. Most of the team was

very close to my age, and we quickly started to feel like a family. The company offered me the opportunity to keep working with them indefinitely instead of going back to school.

It was an offer that led me to the toughest decision of my life.

I’ve already reached most of the goals that I set when I first marched through the Arch three years ago. I made a lot of friends. I networked. I built up a valuable skill set. I got my foot in the door of an awesome industry, and I received a ton of work experience. Most importantly, I had the time of my life and made some unforgettable memories.

So what was left? A degree? People in the tech industry, especially in startups, seem to view college degrees as more of a congratulatory note than any real indication of one’s abilities. Startups move very quickly with constantly evolving technologies that aren’t comprehensively covered at traditional schools. In this industry, degrees get completely overshadowed by relevant technical experience. And I’d get a hell of a lot more experience by spending the next year working full time instead of sitting in a classroom.

I had the opportunity to jump right into my career a year short of graduating, to keep doing what I love all day with some of the smartest, most fun people I’d ever met. Most of the people I talked to, including some of my greatest mentors, suggested

Without a winning team to support, Northwestern fans began chanting, “We’re the worst!” The Wildcats were outscored 505-32 that season. At one point, someone altered an Interstate 94 sign by painting “Northwestern 0” underneath the original lettering, poking fun at the ‘Cats with a fake boxscore.

Surprisingly, the administration didn’t seem too concerned. Though former University President Robert H. Strotz fired athletic director John Pont and head coach Rick Venturi after the 1980 season, he had previously made comments implying the football program wasn’t a priority for the University.

“I think having a bad football team can help academic standards,” Strotz said, according to Larry LaTourette’s book Northwestern Wildcat Football.

The road to recovery was difficult, and at one point the athletic director even alluded to the eventual possibility of the ‘Cats leaving the Big Ten. “It will take three to five years—and I really believe it will take us that long—before we can move from a noncompetitive status to a competitive status and win three to five games a year,” Northwestern athletic director Doug Single said in October 1981. “Getting out of the Big

that I stay out west and keep living the startup life.

But I didn’t take their advice. I ignored the near-unanimous opinion that I should drop out of school. I decided to come back to Northwestern.

Why? Because I don’t see college as a pre-professional step at all. I don’t see it as a stepping stone to anything. It’s not a precursor to so-called “real life.” There is no real life; there is just life. Sure, being away from school feels incredibly different than being in school. But elementary school felt quite a bit different than high school, and high school felt like a different world than college. All of these steps were equally important periods of the

Ten should not be an option unless and until five years from now we can’t compete on a Big Ten level in football and [men’s] basketball.”

Opinions like Strotz’s caused Northwestern to at least weigh the option of departing the Big Ten. One thing was certain, though: Northwestern wouldn’t compromise its academic standards to win games. Prominent alum Mike Wilbon was among those to protest such a strategy.

“I’m sick of hearing you say…that Northwestern has to lower its requirements to admit first-rate student athletes. Lies. Lies. Lies,” Wilbon wrote in a letter to the school.

And, ultimately, Wilbon was right. Northwestern continued to struggle for years. But the Wildcats recovered. The ‘Cats wouldn’t accomplish anything spectacular until the 1995 Rose Bowl season, but their improvement was noteworthy. After a 34-game losing steak, almost anything constitutes noteworthy improvement.

As the students piled behind the GameDay set in 2013, it’s likely none of this crossed their minds. For those old enough to remember the dark ages, however, these recent successes mean just a little bit more. o

same life, each a chapter in the story that shaped me into who I am today.

I wouldn’t have skipped past any of it even if I had the option. Looking back, the purpose of each chapter of life wasn’t to reach the end and move to the next step. It was to experience each moment along the way.

There’s something special about college life that made me want to come back. As a student, unlike an employee, my primary function is not to operate on behalf of a company, but rather for myself and the people around me. Here in Evanston, I’m surrounded by countless peers who all share a common bond. These thousands of lives will go off into thousands of different directions, but right now we’re all in this together. We party together and have fun together, but more importantly, we learn together and grow together.

Northwestern is worth experiencing for another year, even if there’s nothing practical career-wise for me to gain at the end of it.

A good friend of mine once said something that really stuck with me: “The happiness you get from everything you will ever work for or want comes from the journey, not the destination.”

So why am I still here? Because even though I’ve reached the goals I set when I entered college, this journey isn’t quite over yet. There are still way too many memories to be made in Evanston during my senior year.

And instead of giving them up, I’m going to be living it up. Northwestern gave me the best three years of my life thus far.

That’s why I’m going for four. o

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 31

PROFILE

The Music Man Despite starting out with no space, no patrons and no money, Gary Geiger directs more than 100 children in the Evanston Children’s Choir. BY JON ATH A N PALME R

32 | FALL 2013

directing], but I found that it came naturally. After working in voice studios at Northwestern for so long, I knew what to tell vocalists,” Geiger says.

After getting the opportunity to direct a few performances with the Chicago Children’s Choir, Geiger decided he wanted to try his hand at starting his own group. “There were at least two or three performances where I directed from the piano and I just got the bug,” Geiger says. “I was so electrified by it.”

Through friend and fellow Northwestern graduate Rick Ferguson, Geiger was able to secure a practice space for the choir at Ferguson’s Evanston venue, The Musical Offering. Despite spending the first four months with an average of about five children in the choir, Geiger decided to stick with it. Soon the choir started to grow rapidly—as did its popularity in the community.

In 2009, singer-songwriter Barry Manilow’s team contacted the choir for its support on the song “Because It’s Christmas” for three nights when he played at the Rosemont Theatre.

The choir also later received the Mayor’s Award for the Arts.

Geiger divides the choir into three groups: the Junior Choir, Intermezzo and the Concert Choir. All three choirs perform and develop the children’s musical skills, but they do so with varying degrees of intensity. The Concert Choir is the highest level—and thus plays at the highest profile gigs, such as performing with the Apollo Chorus of Chicago. “That’s where those I consider to be our most serious musicians go,” he says. “It is also serious in the sense that it is a place where kids can really use music and choral singing as a tool for self actualization. It’s not that they’re just doing it for fun, they’re doing it for personal achievement.”

The groups are split by ability

rather than age. Geiger stresses that skill, focus and willingness to commit to the choir are the main factors in selection to the Concert Choir. “In the arts they always say age does not matter,” he says.

Northwestern students also play a role in the growth of the choir.

The Concert Choir’s current pianist, Evelyn Dias, and assistant director, Madelyn Ross, are both students. Additionally, Northwestern allows the choir to use the Alice Millar Chapel for its annual Christmas shows. “The community at large has been so enthusiastic about us,” Geiger says. “In order to make it you need that grassroots support for something like this.

It has been excited seeing that grow.”

Dias, a Northwestern doctoral

candidate in piano performance, says, “I think it affords children the opportunity to be exposed to a very high standard of music. They are learning musical concepts and have wonderful opportunities to perform.”

Bienen senior Madelyn Ross admires Geiger’s leadership style, saying that he creates a sense of fun while still striving for musical excellence. “I’ve really seen him work on making our choir sound in tune with accurate rhythms, accurate notes, but in the most fun an energetic way possible,” Ross says. “As a result he’s created a choir that’s both really engaging for the kids and a wonderful musical experience.” o

photo: samson fong

Y

ears ago, with no money, borrowed space and barely any customers, Northwestern University alumnus Gary Geiger chased his goal of establishing a children’s choir in Evanston. Now Geiger and his team work with more than 100 children in the Evanston Children’s Choir nearly every day at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center.

Geiger enrolled at Northwestern in the fall of 1986. “I was actually undecided as a major,” he says. “I let people convince me I couldn’t make a living as a musician so the smart thing was to not do it.”

During his freshman year, however, Geiger misssed playing the piano and began practicing to audition for Northwestern’s School of Music, now the Bienen School of Music. The school rejected Geiger on his first attempt, so the next year he decided to take lessons from a graduate student.

That spring he auditioned once again and was accepted.

“The same guy auditioned me and I remember him saying ‘You must really want to do this,’” Geiger recalls.

Throughout his time at Northwestern and DePaul University, where he earned his master’s in piano performance, Geiger worked at the voice studios at Northwestern to earn money. But Geiger questioned his choice of career throughout this period.

“I was being the starving artist,” he says. “In addition to doing some menial piano accompanying in which I was earning five or six bucks an hour, and doing piano teaching, I was doing messenger work in my car [and] babysitting my piano teachers’ kids.

Anything I could [do] to scrape by.”

After graduating from DePaul, Geiger began to work at the Chicago Children’s Choir as an accompanying pianist. It was here that Geiger was asked to help direct. After a few years, he realized he had a knack for it.

“I didn’t go to school for [choral

CAMPUS

Is This Activism?

Students protest on Facebook and Twitter—but the streets are often empty.

BY ANNE LI

W

ith the help of sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, Tumblr and Instagram, social media users everywhere can become activists, or “slactivists,” depending on perspective. All it takes now is one click.

Activism no longer requires physical protest. Students are often content to share the latest New York Times op-ed to support a particular view or change their profile pictures to express solidarity with a cause. But that doesn’t mean Twitter is replacing the picket sign.

According to Sebastian Valenzuela, a professor at the Pontificial Catholic University of Chile who has done extensive research on online activism, people today often use social media to help bolster traditional activism, and vice versa.

Northwestern has seen its fair share of traditional protest: In May 1970, students barricaded Sheridan Road outside of Scott Hall for a week to protest the Vietnam War. Last February, student group Alianza led a walkout from Tech to the Rock, which was painted black in support of a Northwestern employee who experienced racism at work. Coverage of the protest spread on social media, generating a ripple effect throughout the community and bringing greater attention to the issue.

Activism is evolving because of the Internet’s ability to spread information, facilitate discussions and spark action. Valenzuela says social media acts as a news hub for seasoned and unseasoned protestors, helping spread information about events. Then, individuals trade opinions or join causes online before taking their interest to the street.

“You can read about stuff, but if you don’t engage in the content, it’s less likely you’ll protest,” Valenzuela says. “Just because most people are on social media doesn’t mean they’ll protest.”

But some are skeptical of social media-based activism, calling it “slactivism.”

Critics say those who protest using social media do so regardless of whether their efforts have any effect.

McCormick sophomore Boochi Kashinkunti admits he has “supported” causes by “liking” them on Facebook.

“It’s a minute effort that makes you feel better about yourself,” he says.

Valenzuela questions the notion that online activism is inferior to offline activism and that online activists are lazy. If it’s more convenient to donate online, he asks, why walk to the nearest donation box to give the same amount of aid?

He says regardless of technology’s presence, individuals who

claim to support a cause will always exist. But there will also always be those like Mauricio Maluff Masi (WCAS ‘13), who says social media enables protesters to be “little journalists” who broadcast what they witness to the world. Masi has been politically inclined since age 14, when he lived in Paraguay and protested an initiative to change the country’s constitution. This past summer, he participated in fast food workers’ national wage protests, even helping to shut down a Subway restaurant in Chicago for a day by convincing employees to walk out.

But Masi doesn’t consider himself an activist when he posts a status or changes a profile picture. Instead, doing so means he’s supporting the work of another.

Regarding the recent controversial abortion bill in Texas that state Sen. Wendy Davis famously filibustered, he says the Internet allowed him to identify with the cause from afar.

“I can’t go to Texas, but [social media] is a way for me support activism,” he says. “I see it [more] as solidarity with their activism than as me being an activist.”

According to Valenzuela, online activism is not a replacement for offline activism—rather, an online protest can be a complement. Sometimes, online activism serves to generate offline action, like in an election. At other times, online activism can do the bulk of the work, such as its role in protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act. In that case, big-name sites like Wikipedia protested through blackouts.

But there is a danger to online activism. This form of activism can threaten the foundations of a democracy, Valenzuela says. People often forget that social media sites are run by private companies who have their own interests—for example, Google agreed to be censored by the Chinese government in order to have access to consumers in China, Valenzuela says.

Another danger is that a socioeconomic gap emerges when activism requires access to a computer. The opinions of Internet users typically do not accurately reflect the whole.

Furthermore, online activists often end up simply preaching to the choir. Spreading a message among like-minded individuals doesn’t actually accomplish anything. In fact, Valenzuela says that it actually drives groups apart because people tend to “reject dissent.”

That’s why Masi urges activists not to forget the power of traditional activism. “Who cares if you change your profile picture? Groups of friends are segregated by political opinion already,” he says. “If you change your profile picture, your friends probably already agree with you.

When you’re at the march, people on the street have to hear you.” o

3 4 | N O R T H W E S T E R N I N D E X | 2: Number of 20th-century African revolutionaries with NU Ph.Ds—Jan Carew and Eduardo Mondlane.

Crossing Over Some students seek social circles different from the ones they would presumably belong to. BY SYLVAN LANE illustrations: chrissy lee (activism); sarah turbin (crossing over)

H

annah Dunn knows her way around the Northwestern theatre community quite well. A Weinberg junior, the Spooner, Wisc., native has served in various stage managerial roles on campus, works as the assistant director for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and will work as a stage management intern for the Chicago revival of Wicked this winter.

Not bad for a former aspiring doctor.

Northwestern isn’t short on extracurricular opportunities. The school offers clubs devoted to happiness, business consulting, Quidditch, drug policy reform and eating. Every so often a passion can take hold of a student so intensely that his or her academic path veers to accommodate it.

That’s how Dunn became a history major and theatre minor, departing from her original pre-med track.

“I don’t know if I was ever fully committed to it,” Dunn says. “I think a lot of people, when they come in, they think pre-med is the thing to do. You were really smart in high school, you got into Northwestern and you’re like, ‘Oh, I should be a doctor.”

Dunn says that stage management was only one part of a busy extracurricular schedule in high school.

Now she says it’s what she wants to do when she graduates.

Even if an extracurricular activity doesn’t drastically change a student’s career path, it might still relate to an individual’s discipline.

Emm Fulk, a McCormick junior majoring in chemical engineering from Minneapolis, says that her coursework and job as technical director for Spectrum Theatre Company require similar approaches.

“It’s not directly like ‘I’m going to take this equation I use in engineering

and use it in theatre,’” Fulk says.

“But the idea of taking a problem and looking at the people surrounding it and building a solution based on human actions and interactions— that whole process is manifested in a very different way in theatre than it is in engineering, but you still have a problem or a goal, and you have to put that together and find some creative, artistic way of getting around it.”

The crossovers aren’t just reserved for building and designing. For Michael Bartello, a McCormick sophomore, joining ReFresH Dance Crew has greatly improved his selfesteem. The Chicago native says he didn’t have much dance experience but was drawn to the hip-hop group because it was an easy way to get involved in something he “admired but feared.”

Now, it’s empowered him in ways beyond the stage.

“Dancing has helped me get rid of self-consciousness,“ Bartello says. “And that’s a thing I want to get rid of, so confidence helps.”

Whether finding a new major, honing an old hobby or conquering a fear, Northwestern provides plenty of opportunities for students to cross over into new fields. Some students just take advantage more than others. o

HOME

Campus pets pose for the camera.

BY PRISCILLA LIU AND JENNY STARRS

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Clockwise from top left: Emerson, fancy rat (owner: Joy Le, Weinberg senior); Clover, Flemish Giant Rabbit (owner: Rachel Janik, Medill junior); Fluff, Chinchilla, (owner: Michelle Lega, Weinberg junior); Archimedes “Archie,” Brittany Spaniel (owner: Cassandra Rommel, McCormick senior); Cornelius, corn snake (owner: Angela Song, Weinberg senior); Huckleberry “Huck,” Medium Hair & Tabby mix (owner: Mike McMullan, Medill senior).

3 6 | N O R T H W E S T E R N I N D E X | A partial list of A&O performers in years past: Violent Femmes, Dave Brubeck , B. B. King, Eddie Murphy, Ramones, Ziggy Marley, Jerry Seinfeld, Phish, Bob Dylan, Duran Duran

photos: priscilla liu (rat, snake); jenny starrs (rabbit, chinchilla, cat, spaniel)

Wildcat Wildlife

FIVE days in may LESS THAN A WEEK BEFORE SHOWTIME, DILLO DAY’S HEADLINER CANCELED. HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED NEXT.

BY KIT FOX AND BEN ORESKES PHOTOS BY AIMEE HECHLER

37 | F A L L 2 0 1 3

Monday, May 27, 2013 11:42 a.m.

Jeremy Shpizner is halfway to tipsy before noon on Memorial Day. Outside, the temperature climbs to around 60 degrees, there’s no class and work can wait until tomorrow.

The senior performance studies major is the cochair for Mayfest, the student-run organization that plans and produces Dillo Day, Northwestern’s annual music festival. With Dillo Day only five days away, Shpizner is about to start the busiest week of his school year. But for now, in his girlfriend’s apartment on the last day of his last long weekend in college, he sips margaritas with friends.

The tequila intake and small talk stop when his phone buzzes. An email pops on the screen at 11:42 a.m. from the manager of Dillo Day’s nighttime headliner. Holding his margarita in one hand and phone in the other, Shpizner reads that the nighttime headliner no longer plans to come to Dillo Day. They committed to perform weeks ago, but the artist has decided against signing the actual contract.

Five days before Dillo Day, Mayfest does not have a headliner.

F

ormed in 1974, Mayfest comprises seven standing committees. The heads of each committee and two cochairs—Shpizner and senior economics major Wil Heintz—make up the group’s executive board. Dillo Day is a yearlong effort that takes up the majority of this roughly 70-person organization’s time and budget.

In order to bring artists like Lupe Fiasco, Steve Aoki and Nelly to Northwestern, Mayfest regularly works with some of the music industry’s largest agencies. “I am well aware of Dillo Day as one of the premier college events, even back from when I was in school,” explained Peter Schwartz of The Agency Group in an email several months after Dillo Day. He represents artists like Big Boi and Macklemore.

During interviews with current and former members of Mayfest, the organization asked to keep the original headliner and details of artist contracts off the record because of the included confidentiality clauses.

Mayfest never announces an artist to the student body before both Northwestern and the artist have signed a final contract. At any point before a signature legally binds the two parties, the artist can cancel. Last winter, Macklemore canceled a show at Williams College in Massachusetts before the contract was completed— but after an announcement was made to the student body. In the apartment on this holiday, the nighttime headliner’s cancelation is a prime example of why Mayfest maintains this policy.

Shpizner doesn’t want to spread panic throughout the organization.

Mayfest members who don’t deal directly with booking or contracts usually don’t find out an artist is coming until the contract is signed. Shpizner wants members of Mayfest to focus on their specific jobs for the week instead of worrying about booking and planning for a new artist. He decides to tell only the members of the organization who absolutely need to know.

2 p.m.

Xander Shepherd surfs the web and occasionally checks his email inside the Mayfest office. The junior political science major is picking up flyers, but otherwise he has no real reason to be in the office, which is tucked in a back corner on the third floor of Norris University Center. As Mayfest’s concerts chair, his job is nearly done.

Five months ago, Shepherd’s committee created a Google Spreadsheet, titled “Xertz,” listing hundreds of 38 | FALL 2013

so no agents will be in their office to respond to urgent emails. And five days before the concerts are set to begin, he has no idea who will close out Dillo Day.

9 p.m.

xander shepherd Currently: Weinberg senior 2012-13: Mayfest Concerts Chair 2013-14: Mayfest Co-Chair bands and artists. That was the time to dream and the time to strategize: Dillo Day had no lineup and Shepherd wanted his committee to understand that in this early phase, any artist could potentially come to the Lakefill.

European tours eventually deleted some names from the spreadsheet, as did conflicting late spring music festivals.

But as Fall Quarter sped toward final exams, names in spreadsheet cells turned into inquiring emails to agents, which turned into official offers, which turned into contracts.

Walk the Moon, Danny Brown, Smash Mouth and Lunice have already filled the lineup by this afternoon. The nighttime headliner still hasn’t signed a contract—which is a bit unusual—but as far as Shepherd is concerned, the lineup is an all-butdone deal that hinges on a pen sliding across the bottom of a sheet of paper.

At around 2 p.m. Jeremy Shpizner arrives and shuts the office door. He pulls a chair across the room, facing Shepherd. They are the only two in the office.

“I have to tell you something and I don’t want you to freak out,” Shpizner says. He doesn’t mince words. The artist booked as the nighttime headliner isn’t coming.

For 10 seconds Shepherd’s heartbeat elevates. His first thought: “Let’s fix this.” His second: “I need to pee.”

He walks out of the room.

In the bathroom, the gravity of the situation sinks in. It’s Memorial Day,

Shepherd sends a Gchat message to Shpizner with a random assortment of letters in all caps. Something like “DJKLLKJDKLDJ.” Sitting on the floor in the Mayfest office during an executive meeting, they must pretend nothing is wrong.

The rest of the executive board gives updates about details for the upcoming week. Dillo Day preparation can’t stop. Safety protocols with University Police still need finalizing.

Promotional materials still need distributing. The second stage—a new addition to the festival—still needs booking.

Shpizner doesn’t want to distract the organization with the stress of a canceled headliner, so only four of the 12 members present know about the situation. Production co-chair Demetrios Cokinos, a junior RTVF major, and the other Mayfest co-chair, Wil Heintz, were alerted earlier in the day.

Promotions Co-Chair Bri Hightower gushes over The Underground Dillo, a booklet of information on the day’s artist and events. She tells the rest of exec that distribution will happen on Wednesday.

The glossy, stapled booklet full of geometric patterns and vibrant colors took months to design. On the cover, a translucent armadillo covers a purple-hued shot of a starry sky. In the centerfold, a short bio above a quarter-page photograph introduces the evening’s headliner—a headliner that’s no longer coming.

The meeting adjourns and exec members trickle out of the office.

On a worn black leather couch against the back wall of the office, Patrick Leonard stays behind. Leon-

ard, a junior mechanical engineering major, is the productions co-chair, working alongside Cokinos.

With the other members aware of the cancellation by their sides, Shpizner and Heintz initiate the fifth member into the situation.

“We can still have the show, right?” Leonard asks after hearing the news.

Under normal circumstances, the production committee’s work peaks the week before Dillo Day. It ensures the logistics of the event run without a hitch. From overseeing the stage’s construction to picking up artists from the airport to installing security fences, every physical aspect of the show runs through production.

That process starts months in advance with contract negotiations. In a contract, if an artist asks for specific lighting and sound equipment, production makes it happen. If an artist wants a bottle of champagne, production must go back to the agent and say that the university can’t supply liquor, tobacco or energy drinks. According to Mayfest, when one artist asked for some bubbly in his contract in 2012, they had to compromise and contractually guarantee him a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne.

In the Mayfest office after Leonard processes the news, someone suggests taking a cigarette break. The five head to the porch in the back of Norris, where a few of them enjoy a smoke.

Tuesday, May 28 11 a.m.

Behind a wooden door with a thin, eye-level window-slit on the second floor of Norris, the five members of Mayfest responsible for booking a headliner wait. They have four days until the show.

They wait for agents in Los Angeles and New York to arrive at the office and respond to an email with a

subject line that starts with “Urgent.”

“I apologize for sending this to you so last minute but…” the email begins.

The agents will scan the message and find a list of artists they represent. The email will ask whether any of these artists are available in four days.

Three hours earlier, after the facilities staff unlocked the front doors of Norris, Shepherd, Shpizner, Cokinos, Leonard and Heintz plotted out the rest of their day. While enjoying iced coffees and Einstein’s everything bagels in the Mayfest office, they came up with two options: Start from scratch and book a new artist, or try to renegotiate the contract with the original artist who dropped out.

Shpizner takes charge of renegotiating with the original artist. In correspondence with the apologetic agent, Shpizner probes for a way to get them to reconsider signing.

Shepherd takes charge of looking for a replacement. Sitting in a circle with a shared Google Doc open on everyone’s computer, the five of them throw out names like 50 Cent and Wiz Khalifa as Shepherd sends emails to agencies across the country.

The waiting begins. By 11 a.m., as other members of Mayfest file into the third-floor Norris office, the five have booked the Northwestern Room on the second floor for the rest of the day. They name it the “Situation Room.”

Shepherd gets a response from Wiz Khalifa’s agent, Peter Schwartz.

The rapper is free that weekend, but the availability of his band is unknown.

Having so few leads on new artists only increases the urgency of negotiations with the original headliner, who wants more money. This amount is confidential because a contract was never signed, but it is 27 percent more than the starting offer. It’s an impossible amount for Mayfest to front.

But within the budget of ASG’s Student Activities Finance Committee—which finances Mayfest and other campus organizations—is a little known pool of money called the “emergency fund.”

According to Siddiq Ather, the financial vice president of ASG and chair of the SAFC, the $65,000 emergency fund exists to help student groups survive debilitating financial woes. If, for example, a group damages equipment or receives a fine after an accident, the emergency fund acts as a safety net. The fund is almost never used.

On Tuesday afternoon in the Situation Room, the five members of

Mayfest learn that they can potentially take advantage of the emergency fund to pay the original headliner more money. But there is one major catch: Mayfest would need to replenish the fund using future budgets over the course of several years.

The co-chairs, Shpizner and Heintz, decide to approach SAFC to discuss how the emergency fund can be used. It’s a risky bet. The upcoming Dillo Day would have a headliner, but Mayfest would be saddled with a smaller budget for several years as the organization paid off this loan.

9 p.m.

Torrential rain pounds the windows of Swift Hall as all of Mayfest waits for the pre-production meeting to start.

At the annual all-organization “Pre-Pro” meeting, the Mayfest cochairs pass the reins to the co-production chairs—Leonard and Cokinos. The meeting marks the shift from planning to execution. In the next few days, a stage will arrive in a massive black semi-truck on the Lakefill. Artists will touch down on runways at airports around Chicago. Vendors will arrive to install lighting and sound systems, a beer garden and a security fence. The Pre-Pro meeting ensures everyone knows where to be and when.

As 9 p.m. turns into 9:05, half of Mayfest’s executive board is not there.

Leonard and Cokinos finish up a Keynote presentation they should

demetrios cokinos Currently: Communication senior 2012-13: Mayfest Production Co-Chair

have started presenting five minutes ago. They’ve been too busy dealing with the headliner situation.

Shepherd hits send on a polished email to Peter Schwartz of The Agency Group with an official offer for Wiz Khalifa attached. He joins Bri Hightower for the trek to Swift Hall in the storm. Lightning strikes uncomfortably close to the path leading to the building.

“Well if we die at least we’ll die together,” Hightower, who learned the situation earlier in the afternoon, yells at Shepherd over the pouring rain. “We’ve been through this much already.”

Cokinos and Leonard transfer their slideshow to a thumb drive and sprint in the rain from Norris to Swift.

They arrive 10 minutes late. Heintz and Shpizner exit the stage, leaving the soaking wet pair to take charge.

Leonard rips off his dripping jacket and speaks first. “Alright, let’s hop to it,” he says. “Here is what you can expect this weekend.”

Wednesday, May 29 12 p.m.

Four baby ducks scramble across rocks in a manmade bowl that drains water into Lake Michigan from an inlet on Northwestern’s campus. Water rushes down the edge of the bowl, then runs between the cracks of the rocks under a bridge into the lake. The mother duck rests above, waiting for her young to make the treacherous climb. One baby duck falls though the cracks between the rocks. Then a second. Then a third. Only one makes it safely.

Watching from above, Shepherd thinks he is going to snap. Leonard starts taking his shoes off, ready to climb over the edge for a rescue.

Cokinos, Heintz and Shpizner yell at the mother to help, to change direction, to do anything that will save her young.

Out loud, Shepherd imagines the headline if a member of campus media happened to walk by: “’Mayfest exec loses it screaming at ducks.’”

Earlier that morning, Wiz Khalifa’s agent responded to the previous evening’s offer. One by one the agent needs to contact Wiz’s band members. But as late morning arrives, many members are not yet awake to answer the call on the West Coast.

The original headliner also emails the group, but with an ultimatum: The artist needs to know if Mayfest can produce the extra money by 2 p.m. today.

On a rolling whiteboard in the cor-

patrick leonard Currently: McCormick senior 2012-13: Mayfest Production Co-Chair 2013-14: Mayfest Co-Chair ner of the new Situation Room—the Big Ten Room on the second floor of Norris—the five write down pros and cons for each scenario.

The old headliner would hedge the monetary future of Mayfest on a guaranteed act—one that needs to have an answer in the next few hours.

But booking Wiz Khalifa depends on whether sleepy bandmates can make a trip to Chicago in three days.

They need a break to forget about headliners, agents and contracts.

The five leave Norris for a walk on the path toward the Lakefill. At the bridge on the southern edge of their walk, they watch three baby ducks fall through the cracks.

2 p.m.

Wiz’s agent, Peter Schwartz, responds to Shepherd. The band can come, but Wiz wants two of his friends, Tuki Carter and Chevy Woods, to perform as well.

After last night’s Pre-Pro meeting, Shepherd met with the rest of his committee. He didn’t explain the situation to them, but simply asked them to continue booking artists for the second stage.

Now Shepherd tells his team to stop booking the second stage. He then sends offers to Schwartz for Wiz, Carter and Woods.

The original headliner’s ultimatum passes and Shepherd hears nothing. Not wanting to wait any longer, he calls Schwartz’s assistant.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 39

Wiz Khalifa is willing to come to Dillo Day. The assistant says a contract will be sent over.

Shepherd hangs up the phone and buries his face in his hands.

After three days with little sleep, largely fueled by delivered wings and pad thai, the five members of exec pose for a photo in front of the whiteboard in the corner of the room. Each smiles through differing phases of facial hair, showing off their preparations for Mayfest’s annual mustache competition. They don’t need to borrow money from the emergency fund in SAFC’s budget. A contract isn’t signed yet, but Dillo Day has taken a giant step toward having a nighttime headliner.

Thursday, May 30 9:57 a.m.

The phone in Cokinos’ right jeans pocket buzzes. He shifts his gaze from the group presentation in front of him toward his lap as an unread email pops across the top of the screen.

From: Xander Shepherd Subject: Fwd: WizKhalifaOffer_ June1_DilloDay Content: Go go go go go Shpizner, who is in the same Language Evolution class, sits next to Cokinos. Ten percent of their grade is based on the notes they take on other people’s presentations, but Cokinos turns to Shpizner and mouths, “We need to go.” When the group on stage finishes, they both approach the back of the classroom where the professor sits.

Bri hightower Currently: Communication senior 2012-13 and 2013-14: Mayfest Promotions Co-Chair

“We are producing Dillo Day and there is a huge emergency,” Cokinos tells the professor. They leave.

Under normal circumstances, an artist’s contract takes three weeks to process. It passes from Mayfest to Assistant Director for Student Involvement Jude Cooper to Northwestern’s Office of General Counsel to Vice President of Student Affairs Patricia Telles-Irvin. Then it goes back to legal, back to Cooper, back to the students and back to the agency.

The contract is reviewed and edited every step of the way. Clauses are deleted by striking out text with a ruler for neatness. Addendums are suggested in the margins. The students and Cooper use black ink, Northwestern’s legal counsel uses red ink and the agency uses blue ink. If there are more changes, Cooper uses purple ink on the final pass.

As the co-production chair in charge of the nighttime headliner, Cokinos escorts the contract through the negotiation and editing process.

When he enters the Lake Room in Norris with a printed copy of the contract, he sees a black semi truck in the distance to the left of a grassy field.

The main stage has arrived.

Cokinos puts on black Bose headphones and spreads the 20-page contract out on a table. Talent agencies tend to draft similar contracts for all their representatives. By referencing a previous contract from another artist at Wiz’s agency, Cokinos is able to more quickly make edits and add phrases with a black pen.

In 45 minutes, he finishes making standard edits and scans the document for Jude Cooper’s approval. She okays the edits, so Cokinos walks the document to the Rebecca Crown Center for the legal counsel to review.

On the front of the contract, which is stuffed inside a manila envelope, a cover sheet says, “Date Received: May 30, Date Needed: May 30.”

The contract then goes to Vice President of Student Affairs Patricia Telles-Irvin, who signs it in the afternoon. Finally, it’s scanned and emailed off to the agency for another review.

The agency, Cooper and Northwestern’s legal counsel negotiate clause changes over email rather than by marking up and scanning the physical document—and unconventional but time-saving method. At 10:07 p.m., Cooper sends another round of changes, but she won’t hear from the agency until morning.

11 p.m.

Mayfest doesn’t have a signed contract and the student body wants 40 | FALL 2013

CONFIRMED Members of Mayfest pose after they booked Wiz Khalifa.

Photo courtesy of Mayfest.

Note: Whiteboard altered for confidentiality.

to know why.

The headline of an article posted

by The Daily Northwestern earlier in the day reads, “More transparency, variety needed in Mayfest’s selection process for Dillo Day.” Hours earlier, Shepherd’s classmates pestered him with questions.

“Is there going to be an artist? Why hasn’t Mayfest announced anything?”

Earlier in the week, a student reporter called Hightower at 2 a.m., and during the day, campus media wait outside the Mayfest office to ask her questions.

While sitting on the floor in the Armadillo Room in Norris on Thursday night, the Mayfest executive board decides to write a press release.

“We want to take a moment to address the concerns about our delayed announcement of the 2013 Dillo Day nighttime headliner,” the document begins.

For more than an hour, members of the executive board write, trying to explain their lack of transparency.

“Rest assured, we are doing absolutely everything in our power to announce our headliner and finalize contracts as soon as we possibly can,” the press release reads. “This year’s contract process has been uniquely demanding; please know that we would not be waiting this long to announce unless we had absolutely no other choice.”

Friday, May 31 12 p.m.

Inside a white tent with three walls and a pointed roof are two cardboard boxes and a metal trashcan with chipping purple paint. Inside the

two boxes are 2,000 Underground Dillo programs. The old headliner’s name still graces the centerfold in white bold letters and red trim. The name also appears two pages before, on the day’s schedule.

While seven members of the promotions committee file into the entrance of the small white enclosure, Hightower kicks a second trashcan repeatedly 100 feet toward the tent.

The Underground Dillo is made of spreads—glossy sheets of paper that span the width of the open program.

A spread holds four pages: two on the front and two on the back. The two mentions of the old headliner appear on the same spread, and removing just one spread could salvage the document.

On Wednesday night, the lead designer of the program, Shelly Tan, launched Adobe InDesign on her computer, highlighted the old headliner’s name with her cursor and pressed delete.

On Thursday afternoon in the Mayfest office, Hightower discovered the best way to swap the pages.

Pinching the top of the center spread in the middle along the crease, she pulled, letting the page pop off the two staples. The only vital information missing from the rest of the intact document was the day’s schedule.

On Friday morning, Quartet Copies in Evanston printed 1,000 individual pamphlets with an updated schedule on one side and a map of the Lakefill on the other.

On Friday afternoon, the promotions committee forms two assembly lines. One person holds the open Underground Dillo. A second tears out the center spread and throws it into

one of the two purple metal trashcans. A third stuffs the document with the one-page insert. A fourth files the finished product into the original cardboard box.

Wiz’s agent, Schwartz, still hasn’t returned a signed contract. The agency needs to review a few more details, and Cokinos checks his phone obsessively as he helps Shepherd, Leonard and other members of Mayfest set up security fences. Wiz Khalifa’s team has already reached out to plan the details of the stage and get an address to use to ship merchandise.

While the rest of her committee expunges the old headliner from The Underground Dillo, Hightower heads to Norris with Heintz, Leonard, Shepherd and Shpizner to tell the press that Dillo Day has a headliner.

1 p.m.

Hightower opens the press conference by addressing reporters from The Daily, North by Northwestern and Pulse. Next to her, members of the Mayfest executive board sit behind tables, facing the reporters.

“The information we are about to tell you is embargoed because we are waiting to announce it at a certain time,” Hightower says. “That time is conditional upon Residential Housing Association reaching a certain number of likes on Facebook. They will post their own announcement. Once that happens you are free to publish.”

Residential Housing Association has sponsored the Dillo Day headliner for a number of years. The student -run organization, which oversees oncampus housing, partners with Mayfest and uses the co-branding opportunities to spread the RHA name. In the weeks before Dillo Day, Hightower worked with RHA President Ariel Malloy to craft a headliner announcement strategy that would boost Facebook likes for the organization.

As the show drew closer, however, RHA still couldn’t announce anything to the student body. Each time Malloy asked Hightower why RHA couldn’t

announce, Hightower’s response was the same: “We are still working on the contract.”

The press conference ends with questions from the three reporters.

Then Hightower and the other members of the Mayfest executive board move rooms to meet with RHA. The meeting starts out tense. On RHA’s Facebook page, students have been complaining that the organization is withholding the information, but now Shpizner reveals that Wiz Khalifa will headline the stage. RHA can officially ask for likes on Facebook, and once it breaks a certain threshold, it will reveal the artist. As Hightower exits the meeting, the mood seems to change. RHA looks excited.

3:38 p.m.

Cokinos shouts after he reads an email on his phone. A signed contract is attached. Around him members of Mayfest set up the beer garden on the grass in front of the stage.

Leonard sees Cokinos and walks over. “Project executed?” Leonard asks.

“Fully executed,” Cokinos says.

4:45 p.m.

In the Starbucks on Sherman Avenue, Gabe Bergado, the editorin-chief of North by Northwestern, watches the loading bar on his browser window inch slowly along the top of his screen.

Bergado is prepared for the impending announcement of the headliner from RHA. The story submitted by his reporter is on the content management system, and he just has to hit “publish” for the story to go live.

On his Facebook feed, a post pops up linking to a tweet from the independent sports blog Inside NU. “Confirmed: Wiz Khalifa is performing at Dillo Day,” the tweet says.

Bergado believes Inside NU is a student publication with access to the embargoed information. Thinking the embargo must be over, he hits publish and North by Northwestern’s story

appears on the website’s home page.

Inside NU co-founder Kevin Trahan explained later that an Inside NU contributor received a tip about the upcoming performance from a staff member working for Wiz Khalifa.

Trahan, who was a sophomore at the time, didn’t release the name of the staff member. He says he didn’t know about Mayfest’s embargo, and that he knew little of the partnership between RHA and Mayfest in general.

Hightower’s phone rings while she sells Dillo Day apparel by the front entrance of Norris with Co-Promotions Chair Louise Hunter. Heintz is on the other end of the line. North

by Northwestern just tweeted the article about the headliner. He tells her to “get on that.”

Hunter calls Bergado, who apologizes and removes the story and accompanying tweet. By then, The Daily has gone live with its own announcement story.

“Once an embargo is broken by anyone, it’s broken,” says Michele Corriston, editor-in-chief of The Daily. “The Daily’s policy is to not take down anything unless it is factually inaccurate.”

Around campus, thousands of students browsing social media read the news. Hightower hears the same words spreading around campus through statuses, tweets and excited mouths. “Wiz Khalifa is coming to Dillo Day.” Ariel Malloy, the RHA president, is in disbelief when she finds out the news has broken. “We had been to so many meetings and gone through so much paperwork with Mayfest that it seemed that all of our time, effort and funding had been in vain,” she wrote later in an email.

The publications knew the headliner before RHA, and even with the embargo, she says that Mayfest “did not follow good business practices.”

8 p.m.

“Let It Die” by Feist is a slow song with consistent, deep bass notes and crooning female vocals. The combination of sounds is perfect for testing audio levels on large speakers.

As the sun begins to set behind the stage, Patrick Leonard listens to an alto voice hit high notes. “The saddest part of a broken heart isn’t the ending, so much as the start,” Feist wails. At full volume, the song reverberates around the grassy field.

Before every show, Leonard experiences a moment of peace when he knows the concert is going to happen.

He feels that moment today on a rock under an overhanging tree facing

the lake. Sitting next to him, Cokinos and the rest of their committee watch the ripples of water disappear into the horizon.

The contract is signed and Dillo Day has a headliner. The foundation of the stage is in place. The beer garden is set up. Leonard knows now that after months of preparation and days without a headliner, the concert is going to happen.

The sun sets behind campus buildings as Leonard and the rest of the productions committee pose for a photo in front of the water. Cokinos is in the back, wearing a backwards red baseball cap, an open-mouthed grin on his face between black scruff.

Leonard hunches in the front row at the edge of the group, peering through the top of his black-framed glasses.

“This is so beautiful,” Leonard thinks to himself. “It’s perfect.”

They don’t know that tomorrow, rain will cancel one artist’s whole set.

They don’t know that police will force Wiz offstage because Evanston has a 10:30 p.m. noise curfew.

Leonard, Cokinos and their team know only one thing as they smile for the photo: Tomorrow, on the grassy field in front of them, thousands of students will wave their arms and jump in unison to live music. Live music played by a band. A band represented by an agency. An agency that signed a contract and sent it to a university.

A university attended by students who plan and produce an all-day music festival for their peers.

Full disclosure: Ben Oreskes, who first pitched this story to NBN, is roommates with Xander Shepherd. The editorial staff felt Oreskes’ reporting was integral to the story, and it also placed Senior Editor Kit Fox as the lead writer. Fox alone interviewed Shepherd.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 41

the income

gap

Their Northwestern lives certainly aren’t uniform, but for many low-income students the college experience is marked by feelings of disconnect and isolation. by kimberly alters • illustrations by sunny lee

S

tudents from 6,500 different high schools across the country applied to Northwestern last year. They wrote essays, listed basic personal facts and submitted myriad forms, hoping to receive the “big envelope” of acceptance in return. Many of these students completed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and the College Scholarship Service Profile, requesting monetary assistance to cover the costs of university tuition. Northwestern has one of the largest financial aid programs in the country for a private university, so applicants sold on the “Northwestern experience” ideally receive the financial assistance necessary to afford enrollment.

The problem is that this optimal experience costs more than just tuition. While flyers, tour guides and university websites tout participating in Dance Marathon or attending a boat formal as essential activities, they neglect to mention the monetary requirements. Most Northwestern students have the financial cushion necessary to partake, but a small subsection of campus often does not: low-income students.

Roughly 15 percent of Northwestern’s undergraduate population receives a Pell Grant, which is awarded to students from families with income levels around $40,000 or less. There is no prototype of the low-income Wildcat; he or she can be found in every school, club or residence hall and can represent any race, ethnicity or religion. What binds these students together is the fact that the experience they were promised upon acceptance can unravel once they arrive on campus.

42 | FALL 2013

Tessa D’A gosta: Isolated by Income Level One night well into her sophomore year, Tessa D’Agosta was playing pool with another resident in the basement of Public Affairs Residential College. During the game, she made an offhand remark about how her Virgin Mobile cell phone wasn’t working properly.

“He just looked at me and said, ‘Virgin Mobile? Why do you have that? Why don’t you just ask your mom to buy you a new phone?’” says D’Agosta, now a junior in Medill. “I was like, ‘I don’t even want to have this conversation with you right now.’”

D’Agosta is a recipient of The Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Family Scholarship. Founded in 2006, the scholarship program replaces the loan in top low-income students’ aid packages with a grant, allowing recipients to attend Northwestern debt-free. In total, D’Agosta receives about $60,000 in financial aid each year.

Last spring, D’Agosta attended a focus group meeting specifically for Ryan Scholars. The meeting was organized by the administration with the goal of learning more about the low-income student experience. Participants’ answers were recorded and meant to be kept private, although a few select questions were asked to the whole group. One of the group questions asked where the students felt they fit in on campus.

“Someone answered first and was like, ‘I don’t really have anyone on this campus.’ And then slowly, four, five, six more people said the same thing,” D’Agosta says. “That’s exactly how I feel.

I don’t feel like I fit in anywhere. And it was really weird to me—and kind of awesome, in a bad way—that OK, maybe I’ve found the reason.”

D’Agosta hasn’t spent a lot of time with her fellow Ryan Scholars. Once, they went to a Cubs game together; the University bought their tickets and provided them with $20 meal vouchers.

Yet at that focus group last spring, she found herself relating to the Ryan Scholars in a way that has been difficult to do with other Northwestern students.

“The socioeconomic background is such a key part of who I am, the relationships that I form and the way I think about everything,” D’Agosta says.

“It’s hard to make new relationships with people when they don’t understand where I’m coming from.”

Greg Shanahan: Culture-Shocked Weinberg junior Greg Shanahan attended what he calls a “blue-collar high school” and did not expect to be accepted to Northwestern—to the point where he didn’t even apply for financial aid from the University. After receiving his acceptance, Shanahan filed late financial aid paperwork and was eventually awarded free tuition. He decided to attend, passing up an offer from the University of Nebraska that included free tuition, money for books and a housing stipend. When he arrived at Northwestern, however, Shanahan experienced a major culture shock. “I immediately

“There have been a few times where I’ve tried to talk about this, and I’ve had people tell me to ‘shut up and have some school spirit.’” noticed that there’s a lot of money thrown around,” he says. “There’s a general attitude of elitism.”

Early in his freshman year, Shanahan and several of his suitemates were sharing their previous summer’s job experiences. Shanahan mentioned he had lifeguarded at home in Omaha, Neb., while a friend said he had done park maintenance in his own hometown. One of their other suitemates then asked why they would ever work for their own money when their parents could provide funds instead.

“He follows that up by going, ‘Why would you like mowing grass? That’s what wetbacks are for,’” Shanahan recalls. “The worst part was I didn’t even say anything to him. I didn’t argue with him or try to express my opinion or reprimand him because I felt like I was in the minority.”

Shanahan also says that classism drove him to quit the men’s club soccer team at the end of his first season. During the spring of his freshman year, the team stopped at a Culver’s restaurant on the way to games in St. Louis, Mo. While at the restaurant, Shanahan recalls, one team member said he would “feel like such a failure” if he ever brought his family to a restaurant like Culver’s.

“They don’t even consciously realize the effect that their words are having on other people who may not have had the same experiences in life,” Shanahan says. “You can’t really hold that against them, but at the same time it makes you cock your head and wonder.”

Shanahan felt so uncomfortable at Northwestern by the end of his freshman year that he filed to transfer to Nebraska. His two best friends had decided to transfer, and he hadn’t fit well with the campus culture. These setbacks, plus two bad roommate experiences in two different residence halls, had Shanahan ready to leave Northwestern for good. Ultimately he decided to stay, saying that he didn’t want to feel like a “quitter.”

Shanahan knew the opportunities Northwestern offered were superior. He studied abroad in Turkey this past summer, is currently studying in Scotland and will be in Washington, D.C. next quarter as part of the Medill on the Hill program for non-majors.

But while he’s met some of his best friends on this campus, Shanahan doesn’t quite bleed purple.

“While other people are already dreading the end of college and worrying about being out in the real world, I’m kind of loathing having to be at Northwestern before graduation,” he says.

Shanahan only has four quarters left on Northwestern’s campus. In that time he wants the Uni-

versity to start creating a space for a larger contingent of low-income students—or, at the very least, a platform for these students to voice their experiences. Each time he found himself frustrated with the state of affairs on campus, he would complain to his friends before miserably deciding to “suck it up and deal with it.” At the end of this past summer, he reached out to Tessa D’Agosta, and the two of them made plans to found a publication, which they plan to call The N’Dependent—a name that pays homage to their shared Nebraskan roots. The idea is to contact individuals who have experienced struggles with classism, racism and other issues on campus and ask them to share their personal stories in hopes of generating a discussion.

“There have been a few times where I’ve tried to talk about this, and I’ve had people tell me to ‘shut up and have some school spirit,’” Shanahan says.

“They just didn’t want to listen to why somebody might not feel Northwestern is as awesome as they think it is.”

Amanda Walsh: Pushed to the Limit When Amanda Walsh first arrived at Northwestern a year ago, she was embarrassed to tell people she was a low-income student. Instead, she tried hard to keep her socioeconomic background a secret, struggling to keep pace financially as her roommate and friends were going out downtown and indulging in expensive activities.

“I dug myself into a hole because I felt like I had to in order to make friends,” says Walsh, a Communication sophomore. “The first quarter, I ended up having $0.08 left in my bank account because I was trying so hard to keep up with everyone.”

Walsh attends Northwestern as a Quest Scholar and with the help of a Good Neighbor, Great University scholarship. When she did try to avoid expensive activities, she still felt too uncomfortable to admit her income status. Instead, she devised other reasons to explain her absence to her friends— which resulted in precisely the social backlash she had tried so hard to elude.

Last year, Walsh’s friends signed up for Northwestern Ski Trip as soon as tickets became available. They proceeded to badger her about why she hadn’t done the same. Unwilling to tell her friends that she couldn’t afford the trip, she cycled through several excuses. First, she didn’t like skiing, then she was no friend of the cold. When her friends refuted all of her excuses—Ski Trip is about more than skiing, they said, and as a Chicago native, Walsh can-

“I ended up having $0.08 left in my bank account because I was trying so hard to keep up with everyone.”

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not cite cold weather as an excuse—the conversations turned more personal.

“It got to the point where they were like, ‘Oh, you’re being a baby, just sign up. Why don’t you want to be with us?’” she says. “They were almost attacking me because they felt I was attacking them [by not going].”

Around that same time, one of Walsh’s other friends was planning her half-birthday celebration downtown. The celebration’s agenda included a dinner in the city followed by a night out, complete with VIP tables and bottle service. When Walsh hesitated about going due to the expensive nature of the activities, the friend started arguing with her.

Eventually, Walsh ended up attending the celebration to avoid upsetting her friend, receiving the necessary funds as an early birthday present from her parents.

These incidents were rooted in Walsh’s discomfort with her low-income status. But as she became more involved with Northwestern’s chapter of Quest, a low-income advocacy group that comprises roughly 300 students, she realized that she was not alone in her monetary struggles. After she joined Quest’s executive board as treasurer last February, she had a conversation with a fellow exec member that inspired her to embrace her lowincome status.

“I broke down and said, ‘I feel so uncomfortable being a low-income student at this institution and telling people that I am a low-income student because I feel like I will never have friends.’ She told me that the most important thing is to just be yourself and to be comfortable with who you are,” Walsh says. “From that point, it was like a complete 180 for me.”

Daniel Flores: Misled by False Advertising

Communication senior Daniel Flores felt out of place the first day he moved into Northwestern three years ago. As his peers hauled huge television screens into their dorm rooms, he brought only two suitcases. He says the feelings of unwelcome were intensified because he is a Hispanic male—not exactly the type of person most students visualize as the prototypical Northwestern student, Flores believes. He was routinely asked for his WildCARD 44 | FALL 2013

by police to prove he belonged on campus and was even questioned by the community service officers who monitor the residence halls after dark. Once, Flores recalls, another student asked him for his food, implying that the student thought Flores was his delivery man. Flores was even wearing a Northwestern sweatshirt at the time.

“My freshman year was horrible,” says Flores, who is co-president of the Northwestern chapter of Quest. He says that despite promises of “One Northwestern,” his first year in Evanston in particular didn’t live up to its billing.

Flores supported himself by working multiple jobs at once during his freshman year, which prevented him from participating in potential memorymaking activities and caused him to question his own identity as a student. Coupled with the fact that others sometimes didn’t see him as a Wildcat either, Flores began to wonder whether he should have just stayed home and worked. “I wouldn’t have had to deal with all of this other stuff that makes me feel less human than everyone else,” he says.

A greater presence of low-income students at Northwestern might help students like Flores. Increased admission of low-income students would be a possible solution—but it’s not that simple.

Northwestern claims need-blind status when it comes to admissions, which means the school does not consider an applicant’s financial situation during the decision-making process. That works both ways: Not only is the University prohibited from rejecting a student because of his or her level of need, but it also cannot see an applicant’s financial statistics at all. As a result, making a concerted effort to admit more students from lower socioeconomic statuses is virtually impossible.

Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Christopher Watson says that demographics do factor into admissions decisions, albeit indirectly: Certain inferences can be made based on an applicant’s personal information. The Office of Undergraduate Admissions buys data on high schools across the country every few years, so admissions officials may be able to identify students from modest backgrounds based on their high schools or hometowns.

“We work really hard to get to schools where we know they’ve got a number of high-achieving, lower-socioeconomic students, but sometimes that’s difficult,” Watson says.

At the end of the day, the primary goal of Northwestern’s admissions office is to find the next batch of freshmen to march through the Arch,

“People give Northwestern so much shit and expect it to be this utopia, but I feel like we’re supposed to be the generation that changes it.”

not to appeal specifically to students from lower socioeconomic statuses. There’s a difference between recruitment and outreach, Watson says.

“Recruitment is recruiting a class of 2,025 every year for Northwestern. Outreach is just trying to get some high school students to think about college,” he says. “Our main role is obviously recruitment.”

But for someone like Flores, who says he is and will be the only person from his high school to attend Northwestern, standard recruitment may not be enough. “Northwestern is one of the worst places for a low-income student,” he says. “You are not set up for success.”

Kyle King: Inspired by the Future Even low-income students who feel a sense of allegiance to Northwestern struggle at times. Communication junior Kyle King, who is in the process of transferring to Weinberg, appreciates the opportunities Northwestern has afforded him. But getting started at Northwestern proved difficult—even before he arrived on campus.

For King, acquiring the financial aid package he needed to attend Northwestern was complicated because his parents divorced when he was 14 years old. While his father’s income is higher than his mother’s, King was not going to be receiving funds from his father. Thus, he could only afford to attend a university that would waive his father’s wages when considering financial aid. One of King’s final choices, Williams College, was not willing to waive his father’s wages.

King had to submit court papers to Northwestern detailing the circumstances of his parents’ divorce, including notes from his mandated therapy sessions from the time of the divorce. These notes proved his lack of a relationship with his father.

Once Northwestern agreed to consider only his mother’s income, King gave up on pursuing the wage waiver from Williams; the process was simply too exhausting to complete again.

But King says he is incredibly thankful to have had the opportunity to attend Northwestern. While he has had his fair share of alienating experiences— one of his friends shops at Burberry, for example, which makes him feel awkward—King says Northwestern has provided him opportunities he wouldn’t have had otherwise. He is currently abroad in Italy, a venture funded by his financial aid. Northwestern allotted him $4,500 per quarter; he says his living expenses amount to about $2,000 per quarter, with roughly $1,275 of that total comprising three months’ rent. As a result, King has had funds available for additional travel, which has allowed him to have a fulfilling study abroad experience.

King says that while many students complain about the state of affairs in Evanston, it’s up to them to spark discussion about these issues. “People give Northwestern so much shit and expect it to be this utopia, but I feel like we’re supposed to be the generation that changes it,” he says. “As much as I feel uncomfortable, I’m also going to be the one that’s going to call someone out if they make me feel uncomfortable.”

DivestNU takes a unique approach as it campaigns for a greener endowment.

O

n Nov. 20, 1985, Northwestern University President Arnold R. Weber issued a statement to the public about South Africa. He decried the country’s apartheid-based society to be “unjust and oppressive” and “cruel and pernicious.” He proclaimed the need to eliminate apartheid. But the crux of Weber’s statement concerned the estimated $100 million Northwestern had invested in companies operating in South Africa, a substantial chunk of the University’s $613 million total endowment.

Weber’s message followed years of controversy about whether Northwestern should sell its stock in these companies, which included names like Ford and Xerox. Divestment—the sale of stock holdings— was favored by a majority of students, who argued it would strike an economic blow against a clear injustice. The opposition to divestment asserted that the University should not get involved in political matters, as Northwestern ought to remain a vehicle for independent thought and debate. Some of those opposed said apartheid was a problem better combated by government action.

At the time, divestment movements on campuses across the country were starting to explode.

Before April 1985, only 53 collegiate institutions in the United States had moved to partially divest their

BY STANLEY KAY

holdings; that number increased to 155 just three years later. Students protested for several years, demanding that administrations and trustees divest from South Africa. The situation reached a boiling point, and school administrations across the country were forced to take a stand. For years Northwestern resisted drastic action, taking small steps but never fully committing to substantial divestment.

Though a related statement from the Special Trustee Committee on South Africa established stricter policies for investment, created new South African study initiatives and recommended a new committee to review individual stocks, the movement to fully divest Northwestern’s holdings from companies involved in South Africa failed. The committee concluded that divestment would set a poor precedent.

“An investment policy that seeks economically to impose an institutional solution on an ideological or social issue would cast the University into the political arena, severely compromising its special claim as a unique forum for free inquiry,” the committee wrote. “Total divestment would be inconsistent with the Trustees’ duty to invest the University’s assets in a prudent manner producing reasonable income and safety of capital.” In other words, divestment was bad business.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 45

W

hen the South African system of apartheid collapsed in the 1990s, many believed divestment played a leading role. Nelson Mandela acknowledged the University of California school system’s divestment of roughly $3 billion from South African companies as a significant domino in apartheid’s fall. Debate continues over how big a role divestment played. Some argue that it was a leading factor, while others say it did little to harm the South African government. But most agree that it at least galvanized the public and helped the issue gain prominence.

Nearly three decades after Northwestern rejected total divestment from South Africa, another major divestment campaign has sprung up on campus. Its target: fossil fuels.

Last November, a small group of Northwestern students attended an event called “Do the Math” at the Athenaeum Theatre in Chicago. The students were a collection of Northwestern’s leading environmental activists on campus, representing groups such as Students for Ecological and Environmental Development (SEED) and Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW). The event featured Bill McKibben, a journalist-turned-activist who founded the climate action organization 350.org in 2008. (The name of the organization refers to the safe amount of carbon dioxide—350 parts per million—that scientists say can exist in Earth’s atmosphere. Earth’s carbon dioxide levels currently hover around 392 parts per million.) McKibben was speaking as part of a nationwide tour in which he called for action on climate change. If we didn’t act now, he warned, the planet’s future would be unsalvageable.

There was no need to convince the environmentally-conscious Northwestern students in attendance that climate change was a pressing issue.

What piqued the group’s interest was what McKibben said about fossil fuel divestment, a major initiative he had started to push around the country.

350’s Fossil Free Campaign advocates that institutions like local governments, religious organizations and schools divest their fossil fuel stocks. By divesting, the Fossil Free Campaign argues on its website, organizations that contribute to “the public good” can help drive a campaign against an industry that is “destroying our future.” When McKibben spoke in Chicago last November, divestment campaigns were taking hold on a number of college campuses.

The goal: Take school endowment money invested in fossil fuels and reinvest it elsewhere.

“Going into that event, I wasn’t sure divestment was the absolute best route,” says David Snydacker, a Northwestern Ph.D candidate in the Materials Science and Engineering Department and a campus environmental leader. “But we realized we could make an impact and bring climate change to the forefront.”

After hearing McKibben speak, the group of Northwestern students agreed that divestment would be a smart strategy to pursue on campus.

This decision spawned the creation of the DivestNU campaign as part of the Northwestern Responsible Endowment Coalition.

“When the students approached me with the idea of this, it seemed like a clear-cut home run,” 46 | FALL 2013

MOVEMENT During the height of South African apartheid, Northwestern students organized marches and protests. DivestNU has taken a different approach. Photo courtesy of the University Archives. says Rob Whittier, Northwestern’s Director of the Office of Sustainability. “It’s hypocritical of us to talk about climate change and energy in our curriculum—and it’s part of our strategic plan—and then not act in a similar fashion.”

Northwestern’s endowment fund totals $8.7 billion, according to Chief Investment Officer Will McLean. The fund is a massive pool of money that provides a constant source of income to the University, its programs and its investments. It allows the University to function while also supporting future improvements, like construction of new facilities and programs. The fund is integral to the stability, health and interests of the University.

There is a strong correlation between a school’s prestige and its endowment size; Harvard’s endowment totaled over $30 billion in 2012, making it the largest in the country.

Though Northwestern’s administration has some input, the Investment Committee, made up of 31 University trustees, makes big endowment decisions. The Investment Office, led by McLean, plays an equally large role in the decision-making process by advising the Investment Committee on big decisions and working to update Northwestern’s investment portfolio. McLean’s job entails growing the pool of money and thus supporting the school’s financial lifeblood.

The goal of any campus divestment campaign is to alter the makeup of the endowment. Advocates say by ridding the endowment of particular controversial investments, Northwestern can make a financial impact, send a message and align the fund with the University’s educational goals. A divestment campaign’s ultimate mission is to use endowment alterations to help achieve some larger end, like the destruction of apartheid or drastic reductions in fossil fuel usage. The problem is in many cases, these investments are very profitable for the school.

Because of the endowment’s importance to the school’s financial health and stability, divestment doesn’t happen overnight. It took years for Northwestern to agree to a limited policy on South Africa. Fossil fuels present challenges that previous divestment campaigns didn’t have.

Even though McKibben predicts

2028 will be the year our climate becomes catastrophic, climate change is difficult to conceptualize. All of the effects of global warming—massive floods, rising seas, droughts, extreme temperatures, storms and more—still remain locked in the future. No one is getting shot. There isn’t racial discrimination. Evidence that climate change is a human rights issue exists, but it still feels theoretical.

It hasn’t really hit us yet.

“It is a challenge to get support keyed in to climate change as much as some of the other issues,” admits Paige Humecki (McCormick ’13), former copresident of Engineers for a Sustainable World. “It is a social justice issue, though, and it is a major one.”

The ubiquity of fossil fuel companies is another challenge. Energy proliferates throughout all aspects of society. While it might be simple to find companies related to apartheid-era South Africa, it’s more difficult to decide from which companies to divest in the case of fossil fuels. Every company uses fossil fuels in some way. Should Northwestern divest from just standard oil and gas companies?

Should it limit divestment to coal? To what extent should the campaign focus on utilities? These were questions environmental leaders had to answer before they could truly pursue divestment.

The last major challenge—beyond getting people to understand or care about the pervasiveness of fossil fuels—was determining how to grapple with the fact that Northwestern’s fossil fuel stocks generate a lot of money for the University.

“Frankly, I understand oil and gas [stocks] do perform well historically,” says Mark Silberg, a SEED co-chair and leader of the divestment effort. “I want to respect the process of making wise investment decisions.”

A divestment campaign’s ultimate mission is to use endowment alterations to help achieve some larger end. The problem is that in many cases, these investments are very profitable for the school.

When DivestNU decided to pursue divestment, it entered the process with a good understanding of the endowment and how it works. The group also understood that fossil fuels make up a significant portion of the fund. With this knowledge, DivestNU made two decisions that shaped the rest of the campaign. The group decided to not wage an aggressive, confrontational battle against the administration or Investment Office, and that the primary initial divestment push would be limited to coal and additional investment in clean energy.

What makes the decision to avoid conflict unique is that environmental activism maintains a long tradition of confrontation. Bill McKibben was arrested in 2011 at the White House while protesting the potential construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, a continental crude oil pipeline that environmentalists and other opposition groups say will have disastrous effects on the climate. Many of McKibben’s undergraduate follower have taken part in similar protests, such as a group of Rhode Island School of Design students who organized a sit-in at the school president’s office to demand divestment.

Similarly, more traditional forms of protest were also prominent at Northwestern during the push to divest from South Africa.

But Silberg says that DivestNU believed from the start that confrontational tactics would not work well at Northwestern. He would rather work with the administration and Investment Office rather than against them. “We aren’t picketing and having sit-ins in Norris and we’re not chaining ourselves to the Rebecca Crown Center,” he says. “We understand that adversarial diplomacy may not be productive.”

Secondly, the group decided that coal divestment and additional investment in renewable energies would be the primary focuses of the initial campaign, while complete fossil fuel divestment would be a long-term goal. Total divestment was not a short-term goal simply because it would be a much tougher sell. The coal industry, Silberg believes, is on the way out in the United States. A combination of new stringent Environmental Protection Agency regulations and new forms of energy like natural gas have combined to take down coal. Silberg argues that coal is a poor investment

due to regulatory, political and economic pressures, and that divesting from coal is simply a smart business move, even without taking into account coal’s damage to the environment. And while other institutions have set total fossil fuel divestment as a goal, DivestNU decided to focus on coal divestment and further investment in renewable energy, which are considerably more attainable. McLean says Northwestern’s endowment fund has over a billion dollars in energy-related assets.

These two choices—avoiding confrontation and pursuing limited divestment—have led to a far different campaign from what might be expected, especially considering the gravity of the issue. Rather than strictly repeating the moral argument that divestment is the University’s obligation to both the planet and its own educational mission, Silberg and the rest of DivestNU have pursued divestment with the bottom line in mind. Divestment should make sense not only for the environment but also for the endowment. That’s why DivestNU has pushed coal divestment—yet the financial concerns still remain for many.

Even though divestment has received tremendous credit for helping to bring down apartheid—as well as for assisting in efforts against other issues such as tobacco and the Sudanese genocide—debate persists about how big an impact the efforts actually had. Disagreement about divestment also endures among those who believe climate change is a pressing issue.

A recent University of Oxford study helps explain divestment’s potential impact. While the study concludes that the financial effect on fossil fuel companies is relatively minor, it also notes that other results, like political isolation and stigmatization of companies engaging in certain harmful practices, are more likely. The report also concludes that divestment would hurt coal valuations more than those of oil and gas. But most significantly, the study concludes that the “stigmatization process” will have a much greater impact than the actual financial aspects of divestment, and that stigmatization “poses the most far-reaching threat to fossil fuel companies and the vast energy value chain.”

DO THE MATH DivestNU formed after seeing Bill McKibben speak in November 2012 in Chicago. Here, he speaks in Salt Lake City on his “Do the Math” tour. Photo courtesy of 350.org, licensed under Creative Commons.

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Northwestern officials are understandably concerned about divestment’s consequences on the endowment’s growth and stability, but Silberg counters that coal divestment is a smart strategy for the endowment’s financial health. “The skepticism I’ve received has essentially been economic,” Silberg says. “Will this hurt our portfolio? Will this hurt our endowment? The answer is definitely no.”

One issue is that very few institutions have been willing to divest. Harvard has been most prominent in rejecting divestment; in early October, its president released a statement that closely resembles President Weber’s statement on South Africa. The statement cites a number of the same reasons against divestment as Weber’s 1985 statement on South Africa, from political independence to the need to engage rather than castigate companies on the issue.

Whittier says the divestment campaign is already making an impact. “I think this is the start of a good and valuable step for Northwestern as a whole to start thinking a lot more critically about where we’re investing and what industries we’re backing,” he says.

Northwestern has not made any official decisions on divestment. But last year saw some progress, most prominently at the end of January when ASG passed a resolution calling on the University to divest from coal immediately, invest in more clean energy and decrease future fossil fuel investments.

A week later, ASG backed a petition to divest, which more than 2,000 people signed. Representatives from DivestNU have held a number of meetings with the Investment Office as well as some members of the Board of Trustees.

Even if students support divestment, the movement’s success hinges on the wishes of the Board of Trustees. Though aware of the divestment campaign, the Board of Trustees hasn’t been presented with a plan. Silberg hopes to present an official proposal to the Investment Office and the Board of Trustees within the academic year.

To help guide the Investment Office, DivestNU is constructing a decision tree, a document which will aim to help the Investment Office determine a smart path of divestment. The decision tree will allow the Investment Office, if it chooses to use it, to ask questions about a company and decide whether divestment is a good overall strategy for each individual case. But the decision tree is just the next step in a long road to possible divestment.

As the divestment process inches along, DivestNU continues its unorthodox form of activism—not making a lot of noise, but quietly working with the Investment Office to push divestment as a sound strategy for the University.

“We’ve been successful enough at Northwestern because we’re not out picketing at Norris, because we’re not making out the Investment office or the University to be evil—because that’s not our position,” Silberg says. “As a matter of fact, I don’t think most companies at all are evil. I don’t think the BPs or Exxons are evil. But it’s our money, and it’s our choice where we invest it.”

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Northwestern's 2014 football recruiting class might be the school’s best ever, but history shows high rankings don’t necessarily guarantee success on the field.

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N photos: natalie krebs (green); katie tang (peters); gus wezerek (ebert); kimberly alters (colter)

Northwestern running back Treyvon Green took the handoff in the shotgun, slipped through the inside gap in his offensive line and turned on the jets, sprinting past Cal’s secondary for a 33-yard touchdown. Wide receiver Kyle Prater, who has yet to reach the endzone in an NCAA game, watched from the sidelines.

According to college football scouts, this wasn’t supposed to happen. A few years ago, both players were high school standouts, although one stood out far more than the other. Prater was given a perfect five-star rating by Rivals.com, the popular Yahoo!

Sports recruiting site. Green was given just two stars. But expectations don’t always match reality.

Green, a Rowlett High School product out of Texas with only three NCAA Division I offers, scored Northwestern’s first points of the year, keeping the offense rolling despite an injury to All-American running back Venric Mark. Prater, a transfer from USC and the third-ranked high school player in the country back in 2010, didn’t hit the field the entire night. In a sport dominated by statistics, football recruiting throws numbers right out the window: Prater’s speed and physicality drew comparisons to current star NFL receivers A.J. Green and Julio Jones, while Green’s 5-foot-10 frame looked undersized for college ball.

“Early on, I wasn’t highly recruited. Northwestern gave me a chance,” Green says. “I still always walk around with a chip on my shoulder.”

He’s not the only one. Green’s 2011 recruiting

Rivals.com Rating Rivals.com Rating

Treyvon Green

Running Back Hometown: Rowlett, Texas High School Class of 2011

class produced starters Nick VanHoose, Christian Jones, Jack Konopka and Geoff Mogus, though none of the Wildcats’ 17 commits from that year were ranked higher than three stars by Rivals. It’s a consistent theme throughout the entire roster; even Northwestern’s biggest names were unheralded prospects, from three-star Kain Colter to two-star Tyler Scott. Mark didn’t even crack the top 100 rankings in his state. Only a handful of players earn perfect five-star designations, but almost 300 are given four stars. The others are given an average three stars, an underwhelming two stars or just one star, meaning the player is unranked.

But more highly-touted prospects are paying attention to Northwestern’s program. The Wildcats’ 2013 recruiting class featured four-star dual-threat quarterback Matt Alviti, a redshirt this season, and as of now the 2014 class boasts three four-star recruits. At one point in May, Rivals ranked the 2014 class 15th best in the country.

“A lot of people have started noticing what Northwestern is doing,” says Ben Oxley, who committed to the ‘Cats in April. Oxley, an offensive tackle from Avon Lake, Ohio, began “buying into what Pat Fitzgerald was saying” about Northwestern’s program and culture after watching the Wildcats end a 64-year bowl drought in the Gator Bowl on New Year’s Day. Much like a student choosing a college, football recruits are sold not only a school’s compatibility with their talents, but also where they feel most comfortable. Fred Wyatt, a defensive lineman who pledged to the Wildcats in May, says that Northwestern ditches many of the platitudes that come with recruiting—form letters, corny videos and Photoshopped flyers—in favor of a more individualized approach.

“They take the time to get to know you as a player and as a person. They get to know your family, and they also want you to get to know the program and get on campus,” Wyatt says. “They don’t send a whole lot of mail, which is nice. What they send is real personal, handwritten stuff. They like to talk to you as much as possible.”

Those persistent recruiting efforts have pieced together a lauded class of 2014, but hype from recruiting websites won’t mean anything once the players arrive at practice. Four of Northwestern’s most recent alumni to reach pro football—Brian Arnfelt, Jeremy Ebert, Brian Peters and Drake Dunsmore—were two-star recruits before coming to Evanston. While higher-ranked recruits could produce even more college success than previous standouts, they could also foster unreasonable expectations.

Fans of a program get understandably excited about recruiting triumphs. No team can remain successful without an influx of new talent. Every school

Rivals.com Rating

Jeremy Ebert

Wide Receiver Current: Jacksonville Jaguars High School Class of 2008

Rivals.com Rating

Brian Peters

Safety Current: Saskatchewan Roughriders High School Class of 2007

Rivals.com Rating

Kain Colter

Quarterback Hometown: Englewood, Colorado High School Class of 2010 NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 49

needs to constantly reload its arsenal after players graduate, transfer or head for the NFL draft. If nothing else, recruits represent an unlimited ceiling, a staggering potential that leaves those tracking the recruiting process dreaming about how good these new players could be.

Like everything in sports, recruits don’t always turn out as expected. Reigning Heisman Trophy winner Johnny Manziel was a three-star recruit for Texas A&M in 2011, while five-star receiver George Farmer has just five career receptions in two years at USC. He’s missing the entire current season with ligament tears in his left knee.

This unpredictability continues at Northwestern. Since Pat Fitzgerald took over as head coach in 2006, the school has attracted four four-star recruits (not including the class of 2014) and one five-star transfer, Prater. Of those five, only Patrick Ward, an offensive tackle who graduated in June, has started a game for the Wildcats. And in Fitz’s first recruiting class, four of the five two-stars eventually became regular starters; of the 39 twostars that have arrived with Fitzgerald at the helm, 18 developed into regular starters. That gives twostar recruits in the Fitzgerald era a 46 percent shot at starting, compared to a 20 percent likelihood for four and five-stars (though the latter is a much smaller sample size).

But beyond the rankings lies a group of young football players who can impress as much off the field as they can on it. If there’s something to celebrate about this new class, it’s the players’ enthusiasm for the future of Northwestern’s football program, which can’t be measured in stars.

The 2014 recruiting class began in December with a commitment from Jordan Thomas, one of the top-ranked defensive backs in Texas.

Three months later, four-star quarterback and Illinois native Clayton Thorson joined, spurring a sequence of nine more impressive commitments in April and May. The Wildcats had 10 newcomers locked down before Memorial Day. At this point last year, the 2013 class had only two.

More compelling is the list of schools that Northwestern’s commits were passing on—running back Auston Anderson declined offers from Texas, Arkansas, Stanford and UCLA, while receiver Dareian Watkins skipped over seven other Big Ten programs. But Northwestern isn’t out-state schooling the state schools; it’s recruiting in its own nuanced way, and it’s finding players that fit the offensive and defensive schemes without overvaluing star rankings. The Wildcats aren’t stealing recruits, they’re earning them.

“Two stars, five stars, zero stars, six stars, seven stars, I couldn’t give a rat’s tail about that stuff,” says Mick McCall, Northwestern’s offensive coordinator.

“Our entire program doesn’t care about that. It’s about getting guys that fit our program. We know what we’re evaluating: Can he play in our system?”

McCall and Northwestern’s recruiting coordinators seem to think the 2014 class can play in their system, but we may not see them on the field for a while. Perhaps the biggest hurdle between a good high school recruit becoming a good college football player is the grind of redshirting, toiling away 50 | FALL 2013

WILDCAT WUNDERKINDS Ben Oxley and Fred Wyatt are just two of Northwestern’s impressive 13 commits so far for 2014. Meet the three four-stars who have generated the most hype.

Clayton Thorson, QB Wheaton, Ill.

Forget Colter and Siemian: Thorson and current redshirt freshman Matt Alviti could team up to be one of the best quarterback tandems in the country. The four-star Thorson played high school ball in the Illinois suburbs, tallying 22 passing touchdowns to just one interception in his first season as a starter. He also added seven rushing scores, and could play some wide receiver with the Wildcats.

Dareian Watkins, WR Galion, Ohio

Watkins, a four-star athlete who projects as a wide receiver in college, runs a 4.5-second 40-yard dash and passed on big offers from Wisconsin, West Virginia and Michigan State. He’s tall, versatile and extremely fast; he is one of the most promising skill position prospects in the Pat Fitzgerald era. He also plays quarterback and defensive back for Galion High School.

Justin Jackson, RB Carol Stream, Ill.

The combination of Justin Jackson and fellow recruit Auston Anderson at running back? Watch out. A four-star running back that cracked Rivals’ Top 250, Jackson could become a dynamic force in a future Northwestern run-first offense. He went off for 381 yards and five touchdowns in a game to top Naperville Central, at the time the No. 11 team in Illinois. If injuries continue to hobble Venric Mark, Jackson could compete for carries as a freshman.

on the scout team and spending Saturdays on the sidelines. Only four members of the 2012 recruiting class saw playing time as true freshmen last season.

“When you come out of high school, you’re a young man at best. We get a lot of good young men coming into our program,” McCall says. “Then all of a sudden, they’re trying to get in and get a rep—a single rep, if they can. They’re going to sit, and most of them haven’t sat once their entire lives. They don’t know what that’s like. We teach them how to grind through the tough times.”

Fred Wyatt says his class has experience riding the bench. Everyone’s been at the bottom of the totem pole at some point, he says. NU’s recruiting class of 2014 will leave decorated high school careers for an offseason of learning the playbook, watching film and hitting the weight room. But above all else, Northwestern’s “Wildcat Way” attracts high-character players who are willing to put in the necessary work.

“If coaches think I’m ready to play my freshman year, I’ll go in and work my butt off. If not, I’ll be playing my butt off in practice,” Ben Oxley says.

“I’m not concerned about playing. I’m concerned about my team getting the win. I know it’s cliché, but it’s true.”

It starts in the weight room, Green says, but much of the first-year progression comes from trusting “the brains they have upstairs.”

The first signs of devalued star rankings will come next fall, when a select few freshmen will earn reps based on position need. Four-star quarterback Thorson is bound to redshirt because either Alviti or Trevor Siemian will start, and both Oxley and Wyatt are long-shots to play right away with NU’s crowded offensive and defensive lines. Anderson, meanwhile, joins a backfield already crowded

by Green, Stephen Buckley and Venric Mark, who will likely return for a fifth year. Then come position changes, which many members of the new class will face from the beginning. Oxley could see a shift to defensive tackle, and Thorson may be moved to wide receiver. A year from now, Rivals’ scouting reports will be woefully out of date.

Years down the road, we won’t remember the players of the class of 2014 as the one that chose Northwestern over bigger, more established programs. We also won’t remember those players for their star rankings. We’ll remember them for their hustle. McCall says he’s oblivious to rankings, but clearly the Wildcats don’t recruit players with anything less than five-star work ethics.

ONE LAST THING.

CHECKOUT Life moves pretty fast. But did Ferris Bueller’s life move impossibly fast?

BY TYLER DASWICK

F

erris Bueller’s Day Off is the perfect combination of silly antics, memorable characters and genuine comedy. But the flick is best remembered for its commitment to a simple yet outrageous plot: Ferris Bueller wants to skip class, so he concocts an elaborate scheme to dupe adults and have some fun in Chicago.

But is it truly logistically possible for Ferris to accomplish his legendary day off?

Using the latest technology—Netflix and Google Maps—we investigate.

The Departure

PLUS:

Illustration by SARAH TURBIN

COLOSSAL CREATIONS pg.53 DINE AND DASH pg.54 SCHAPIRO’S (FAKE) FACEBOOK FEED pg.54

Ferris begins his day on the later side, according to two well-placed clocks that appear in the film. Before Ferris and Cameron leave the house to pick up Ferris’ girlfriend Sloane, our hero calls a few freshmen to spread the word about his “sickness.” During the call, a clock in the background reads 11:40 a.m. Ferris still hasn’t left the house, and his parents will be home at 6:00 p.m. sharp.

Jump ahead. Ferris and Cameron have picked up Sloane and are headed into downtown Chicago. In the next scene, we return to Ferris’ sister at the school. There’s another clock in the background that reads 11:50 a.m.

Looks like they’re driving a fast car.

Ferris attends Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook.

The parking garage where he and his friends leave their borrowed Ferrari is on Washington and Wells, a 33-minute car ride away. But according to the movie, the trip took only 10 minutes— which would mean Ferris was driving 136 mph. His day of hooky is not off to a realistic start.

Ferris and his friends spend the next six hours and 10 minutes touring iconic Chicago landmarks. Based on the scene where their taxi pulls up next to Ferris’ father at the red light, we can assume that they use a cab for transportation. Still, the schedule looks pretty tight. (Continued on page 52)

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It’s a four-minute drive from the Washington/Wells parking lot to the gang’s first stop, the Sears Tower (now called the Willis Tower). According to the Skydeck’s Administrative Office, most people stay on the top floor for about an hour and the elevator rides take one minute. With the rest of the day in mind, it seems logical that Ferris and Co. wouldn’t linger, so we assume they stayed for half an hour. That means by the time they leave, it should be about 12:45 p.m.

2. The Chicago Board of Trade

The next stop is only about two blocks east of the Sears Tower. We assume the gang walked to avoid the cab fare; the walk takes about four minutes. The Chicago Board of Trade conducts tours for educational groups, so the teens could have snuck onto one of these and looked around.

They’re alone when the film catches up to them, so it seems they broke off to goof around. Given that the guided tours take about an hour, allotting the kids about 45 minutes seems fair. At 1:35 p.m., it’s time for them to schmooze their way into a fancy restaurant anyway.

3. Chez Quis

Chez Quis, where Ferris commits fraud and pretends he is “Abe Froman: the Sausage King of Chicago”, is an actual building, but not a real restaurant. The exterior is a private home just south of the Lincoln Park Zoo, only a ten-minute drive from the Chicago Board of Trade. After all the finagling and police officer impersonations, the fine dining experience must have taken at least an hour. Ferris and Co. didn’t go through all that trouble to just fill up on bread. Instead, they probably stayed for the meal and then likely dine-and-dashed, because what’s one more crime? That puts the clock at 2:45 p.m.

4. Wrigley Field

Wrigley Field is where things get tricky. The gang’s cab should arrive at Wrigley around 3 p.m., which is surprisingly impeccable timing considering most Cubs home games in 1986 began right around that time.

But the problem lies not in when they arrive, but when they leave. To determine that, we have to check on

5. The Art Institute of Chicago

After another drive, the trio should arrive at the Art Institute around 5:25 p.m. The museum offers guided tours that last about an hour, and there is even an “express tour” that takes only 45 minutes. For the sake of time, we have to say that the kids went with this option.

You see the problem though: Ferris and Co. are totally busted. Even with the express tour, they aren’t leaving the museum until 6:10 p.m., and with the parade, the drive back to the suburbs and the glorious wreckage of the Ferrari all left to go, there’s little hope in salvaging the day. Still, let’s ride this thing out to the end.

6. Twist and Shout

The parade scene, when Ferris commandeers a float and sings “Danke Schoen” and “Twist and Shout,” portrays a real celebration of German-American heritage that takes place in Chicago every year. The fanfare happens on Dearborn Street, and Ferris in fact sings “Twist and Shout” in front of 33 North Dearborn—you can see the sign in the background.

So how long did this take? The walk from the Art Institute is about seven minutes, and the songs are about five minutes altogether. We generously assume that Ferris joined the parade, hopped on the float, rocked the Second City, dropped the mic and hustled back to the Washington/Wells garage (another seven-minute walk) in about 20 minutes. At best, the gang leaves Chicago at 6:30 p.m.

7. The Ruse Completed

Here the movie begins to explore Cameron’s psyche, but let’s skip that and take care of business. The car has to get back to Cameron’s. Cameron’s house is also on-location—it is 370 Beech Street in Highland Park, about 35 minutes from the parking garage. With some urgency, the gang could have dropped off the car by 7:05 p.m. Then, it’s time to ditch Sloane in the middle of nowhere and hightail it back to Ferris’ house.

We assume that Ferris lives near his best friend, and after leaving his girlfriend to walk home alone in the middle of the evening, hopping a couple of fences, talking to some bikiniclad babes and hearing out the end of that goofy ‘80s soundtrack, we guess he makes it home by 7:25 p.m. That estimate doesn’t take into account the gang’s swimming break or the Ferrari crashing through the window of Cameron’s house.

All in all, not bad. The movie sets the locations in a logical order, with Ferris taking the shortest route possible between the destinations, preventing backtracking or illogical scheduling.

The kids packed a lot into less than eight hours, and they gave us one of the best teen movies ever in the process. Despite the Hollywood timing throughout the flick, the idea of a day off is something that Northwestern should keep in mind. In times of stress, remember the words of our favorite ‘80’s mischief-maker: “The question isn’t what are we going to do. The question is what aren’t we going to do." o

5 2 | N O R T H W E S T E R N I N D E X | $15 million: estimated annual income of Medill alum George R. R. Martin, author of A Game of Thrones.

illustrations: sarah turbin

1. The Sears Tower Skydeck

Ed Rooney, dean of students at Ferris’ high school.

While following the trail of the truants, Rooney looks away from the televised baseball game and misses Ferris catching a home run. From the TV, the broadcaster declares, “That’s the first hit they’ve had since the fifth inning.” It must be least the seventh inning—if it was just the sixth, the hit wouldn’t be such a big deal.

According to an article in the Boston Globe, baseball games in 1986 averaged 2 hours and 44 minutes.

That’s about 18 minutes an inning.

Knowing that the gang stayed at least through the seventh, we can infer that they were at Wrigley Field for roughly two hours and six minutes.

That means that by the time the gang left, it was 5:10 p.m. at the earliest—50 minutes until the crucial 6 p.m. deadline.

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Make the most out of your meal plan. BY JON AT HON MCBRIDE y now, the dining hall pizza is starting to taste like cardboard and the french fries don’t fill you up, no matter how many plates you scarf down. That’s OK, because we figured out how to make meal time more awesome. We went into the dining halls, filled up nearly 20 plates of food and combined them to make dining hall dishes you’ll actually love to eat.

The Breakfast Big Mac 2 waffles from waffle maker Eggs Bacon Pancakes Syrup Lucky Charms

This is the way breakfast was meant to be eaten. Seriously, you’re never going to separate your breakfast foods again after this. Make your first Belgian waffle, and then prepare to stack the goodies on top. Start with a layer of eggs—nothing too crazy. Add a short stack of pancakes and top that with bacon. Put another waffle on top and your sandwich is complete. Sprinkle with Lucky Charms, drizzle with syrup and enjoy this Big Mac of the breakfast world. We used a fork and knife and eating it was still no easy task, so props if you can do it with your hands.

Words of Caution: People will probably be suspicious when you make two waffles at the waffle maker, but ignore their looks and make them wait. It’s worth it.

Cheeseburger Salad 2 double cheeseburgers 1 piece grilled chicken Chili Ranch dressing Croutons

photos: priscilla liu

Jungle Juice N cup lemonade N cup orange juice N cup cranberry juice N cup apple juice

With this dish, you’ll actually want to go to the salad bar.

Grab a bowl of mixed greens and add in two chopped up cheeseburgers (with the bun and whatever other dressings you like) and a piece of grilled chicken. Add a bowl of chili from the soup station. Dress your salad with ranch and croutons. Toss and enjoy.

Words of Caution: Careful with the chili and croutons: Less is more.

This is the only beverage worth drinking in the dining hall.

If you can sneak some out in a Nalgene, it’s a great mixer too. It works at breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Words of Caution: Absolutely none. This is perfect.

Pizza Sandwich

Freshman Fifteen

1 piece flatbread pizza 1 piece ratatouille pizza 1 plate french fries 1 plate green beans 1 bowl pasta Dinner combines all the best parts of the dining hall into one meal, but be warned: This dish is a monstrosity. Your base is the flatbread pizza. Pile on a layer of french fries followed by the heap of green beans. The “meat” of the sandwich is the pasta. Top it off with another layer of french fries and the piece of ratatouille pizza. This was easily the craziest of the three full meals.

We hid in the Ayers dining room in Sargent so that no one would judge us.

2 chocolate chip cookies 1 caramel brownie Nutella spread Whipped cream Craft a dessert better than dining hall soft serve. Make a cookie sandwich with a brownie and Nutella in between the sugary “bread.” Top with whipped cream.

We highly recommend adding ice cream (inside, outside, on top, next to, wherever your heart desires).

Words of Caution: We tried using our hands, and the pasta-frenchfry green bean stuffing ended up everywhere. Stick to the fork and knife approach. Also, we won’t be offended if you take out the green beans.

If they aren’t serving ratatouille pizza, feel free to pick your favorite kind. But while ratatouille pizza isn’t necessarily an NU Cuisine fixture, it was surprisingly delicious.

Words of Caution: Even though you might be full after a few bites of this mountainous dish, power through this dessert and you won’t regret it.

NORTHBYNORTHWESTERN.COM | 53

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President Schapiro’s (Fake) Facebook Feed Dine and Dash Don’t worry, your walk of shame is totally worth it.

BY SARAH EHLEN

T

he Evanston restaurants we crave come with consequences of the specifically “extra pant size” nature. But don’t worry. Enterprising Wildcats can have their cake—or Andy’s or Edzo’s—and eat it too, if they burn it off with these NU-inspired exercises.

EAT One Andy’s small vanilla custard, 525 Calories DO 10 walks of shame from Elder to 1835 Hinman Everyone loves a good cup of frozen custard from Andy’s, but something that delicious comes with a price. A small cup of vanilla custard without toppings contains approximately 525 Calories. To burn off this sweet treat, ten back-to-back 12-minute walks of shame (or maybe strides of pride) at around 3.5 mph are necessary. Who knew a walk of shame could taste so good?

Our friends at Sherman Ave imagine Morty’s newsfeed.

BY SHERMAN AVE STAFF John Evans Man, instituting the quarter system at the university level sure was the most heinous thing I ever did in my life.

6 hours ago Like · Comment Arthur Butz likes this.

Multicultural Student Affairs ..................

6 hours ago Like John Paul Stevens Seriously bro?

6 hours ago Like Morty Schapiro Oh hey, the new student center will feature a two-story bar!

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Elizabeth Tisdahl likes Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

The University of Chicago is in a relationship with Its Right Hand.

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A burger and fries is a classic American combination. It’s also a perfect way to ingest about half of your daily caloric intake in one meal. Though we love Five Guys, this 700-Calorie hamburger and 526-Calorie french fry meal is huge. Five Guys brags that there are more than 250,000 ways to order their burger, so there are probably just as many ways to burn it off. One method is to attend four hours of hip hop classes with Northwestern’s Fusion Dance Company. Yes, you’d need to twerk for straight four hours to compensate for this savory Evanston go-to. It’s unclear if that’s terrifying or wonderful.

EAT One slice of Lou Malnati’s deep dish cheese pizza, 470 Calories DO All four floors of stairs in Kresge, 30 times We get it. You can’t say no to Lou Malnati’s deep dish pizza at your 20th PA group reunion this year. Throwing back slices may offer solace as your peers recall embarrassing Wildcat Welcome moments, but realize that a single slice of deep dish has about 470 Calories. With that in mind, imagine how taxing a jog up all the stairs to the fourth floor of Kresge would be. Now imagine doing that 30 times. That’s right: It would take nearly 30 trips up and down all of Kresge’s stairs to burn off the Calories from one slice of deep dish.

EAT One full serving of Le Peep’s blueberry pancakes, 1,027 Calories DO Five straight hours of intramural volleyball Le Peep is one of the best brunch places in Evanston. Unfortunately, while Le Peep advertises “the best breakfast food in the country,” it also has some of the town’s most unhealthy food. The blueberry pancakes, for example, contain 1,027 Calories. To burn off Le Peep’s enchanting pancakes, you would have to play moderate-intensity intramural volleyball nonstop for 300 minutes. And as much as NU students love their intramural sports, that’s a lot of bumping, setting and spiking in the hottest depths of hell (aka Blomquist Gym), and for much longer than is comfortably acceptable. o

No one likes this.

Morty Schapiro I always knew you guys leaned a little to the right...

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Jim Delany attended Sell Your Soul to the Devil.

Judy Fiske Just another Wednesday night in this godforsaken degenerate abode of a college town!

Driveway photos

6 hours ago Like · Comment SHAPE at Northwestern likes this.

Burgwell “Burgie” Howard She doesn’t even go here 6 hours ago Like Write a comment...

John Michael Bailey likes The Home Depot.

ETHS Student Body likes The Keg of Evanston.

Frances Willard attended NU Nights Presents: Sobriety!.

Pat Fitzgerald is now friends with Crushing Disappointment.

6 hours ago Like · Comment The Ohio State University, University of Minnesota and 9 others like this.

College GameDay Oops.

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54 | FALL 2013

photos: priscilla liu (dine & dash); washington post on wikimedia commons (stevens); gabe bergado (schapiro); urban on wikimedia commons (u of c); julie beck (fiske); wikimedia commons (driveway photos); john palmer (howard); bryan huebner (gameday)

EAT One Five Guys hamburger with fries, 1,226 Calories DO Four free Fusion Dance Company classes

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