Swarthmore Phoenix, February 7, 2019

Today in OPINIONS: Larkin White on Meal Plans A4, Laura Wilcox on Schultz Candidacy A4, Billie Potts on American Democracy A4, James Sutton on the Humanities A5

PHOENIX

THE

Athlete of the Week Meet Clay Conley of the track team.

VOL. 147, NO. 2

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Days of Swatties

A photo essay about Barkat Sikder ’22

February 7, 2019

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The independent campus newspaper of Swarthmore College since 1881

SBC Funding Stalled After Sudden Resignation of Chair Jino Chough, Naomi Park News Writer, News Editor The Student Budget Committee began the semester as inoperative when Yin Xiao ’20, former Chair of SBC, resigned over winter break and when four other members stepped down at the beginning of the Spring 2019 semester. The student-led committee was left with an interim chair and thirteen staff members — rendering them unable to distribute funds to student clubs and groups for events or activities. Xiao did

The week ahead

not respond to a request for an interview.

“SBC’s role on campus is to connect chartered student organizations to the student activities fund. The Committee’s funding decisions are not subject to the influence of administrators, making it an independent funding organization ran by students for students,” said Thomas Ferguson ’19, the newly appointed chair of SBC. On January 31, Andrew Barclay promoted Ferguson from his previous status as an inter-

im chair to chair of SBC for the remainder of the year. However, this period of uncertainty for SBC has still affected students who have tried to request funding.

“We came back from winter break and requested funding from SBC, but it wasn’t fully operative. We tried communicating with some of the adults from the Office of Student Engagement (OSE), but they told us that SBC couldn’t approve funding at the time,” said Vinay Keefe ’21, treasurer of the Men’s Ultimate Frisbee team. “We still

haven’t received funding yet from SBC, but it’s fine for now because we have our reserves from the last semester. But for our supplemental requests, or any new needs, then we run into a problem.”

Keefe stated that they are uncertain if their normal expenses will covered by what was determined in the spring budgeting last year, or if they will have to ask for supplemental funding. Additionally, the joint Spring Break trip with both the Men’s and Women’s teams has been set back in terms

of planning because of the lack of communication from SBC. “We’ve had to postpone decisions, but some things need to be paid for,” said Keefe. “For instance, we need to pay for the fields now, otherwise we may not get fields… we can’t have a training trip without fields and training.”

Adora Zhang ’21, treasurer of the Women’s Ultimate Frisbee team, added that the time pressure of needing to book continued on page A2

O4S Relaunches Direct Action

Thursday Parlor Party!

9:00 to 11:00 p.m.

Help OSE re-invigorate this Swat tradition of student-led, food-fueled, themed gatherings!

Parrish Parlors Friday Tri-Co Hackathon 4:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

Sci 101 Saturday Parlor Party!

9:00 to 11:00 p.m.

Help OSE re-invigorate this Swat tradition of student-led, food-fueled, themed gatherings!

Parrish Parlors Sunday SBC Weekly Meeting 5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m SBC Committee weekly meeting to discuss budget-related matters and consider supplemental funding requests for the week.

Sharples Room 209 Monday Professor Anita Mannur, Miami University, 2019 Genevieve Lee Lecture in Asian American Studies 4:30 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Anita Mannur is an associate professor of English at Miami University, Ohio. She is the author of Culinary Fictions and co-editor of Eating Asian America. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled Intimate Eating Publics: Food and Radical Forms of Belonging under contract with Duke University Press.

Scheuer Room Tuesday Observatory Open House 8:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

The Physics and Astronomy department hosts a telescope open house on the second Tuesday of each month.

Observatory on the roof of the Science Center Wednesday Valentine-Making Station 12:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m.

Share your LOVE of reading with flowers made from repurposed books. Make your own or take one of ours. While supplies last.

McCabe Atrium WEATHER The groundhog said SPRING

CONTENTS News A1-A2 Arts A3 Opinions A4-A5 Sports A6 Read more at swarthmorephoenix.com Copyright © 2019 The Phoenix

Runa Cheng / The Phoenix

Organizing for Survivors (O4S) placed posters on the walls of Parrish between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning demanding action from the college and advertising their Wednesday evening open meeting. O4S also placed chalkings on the path in front of Parrish and in front of Sharples.

Hebrew Language Program Uncertain After Professor Plotkin to Depart Trina Paul News Editor In December of 2018, Professor Helen Plotkin, a visiting assistant professor of religion, was notified that her contract of employment would not be renewed as of June 2019. Professor Plotkin has taught at Swarthmore as a visiting professor for 18 years.

Plotkin has a B.A. from Swarthmore College and a M.A. from the University of Michigan.

She received her rabbinic ordination and a M.A. in Hebrew Letters from Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She teaches the courses Hebrew for Text Study and Readings in Classical Jewish Texts — both of which are housed in the Department of Religion and are cross-listed in the Department of Linguistics. Plotkin also serves as the Director of the Beit Midrash, a House of Study for Jewish texts.

Plotkin was notified of the religion department’s decision to no longer host her courses in May of 2018. According to Professor Yvonne Chireau, chair of the Department of Religion, Hebrew language courses are no longer being offered for academic credit by the religion department due to a shift in the curricular focus of the department.

Chireau thinks that increasing disinterest in the language courses hosted by the religion department is one of the reasons that Hebrew language courses are no longer being offered by the religion department.

“I think that we’re looking at a potential crisis in the humanities where certain programs and courses are not supported unless they have students in them,” Chireau said. “We used to teach Arabic in this department and it moved out and became a part of what is [now] Islamic studies. The religion department has shifted away from teaching lancontinued on page A2

Sharples Renovation Firm Solicits Student Feedback

Gidon Kaminer News Writer

In recent weeks, another mainstay was added to the motley collection of Sharples presences: a group of architects eager to ask questions about the proposed Sharples renovation project.

The project, approved in May of 2018, will utilize a 2013 $7 million gift (now totalling $9 million) to transform the aging and crowded facility, built in the 1960s to accommodate around 900 students, into a revitalized dining hall and student space.

Embarking on this endeavour, the college hired integrated architecture engineering and design firm “DRL Group.” One of the early steps in the process of developing a plan for the renovation was to gather student input. Representatives of the group spent their Sharples stay running surveys to gather data from students about their experience with the current dining situation and what they would like to see in a redesigned Sharples.

“As designers our process is deeply rooted in understanding our clients in a very personal way before pencil ever touches paper. In this regard we seek to understand the impact of a project from a 360-degree viewpoint,” said Stuart Rothenberger, Principal and Global Higher Education Leader at DLR Group.

To gain the necessary data to achieve this goal, the firm chose to interview students.

“We believe that face-to-face interactions yield the most impactful insight and give a large diverse group of students a platform to voice their opinions and goals in a safe place,” said Rothenberger. “This insight along with feedback from all campus constituents will help the project team and the College define the overarching goals of the project and then prioritize specific program elements to align with those goals.”

Rothenberger stressed that in formulating questions, the firm was careful not ask leading questions. Instead, they sought to ask questions that would elicit meaningful conversations about diversity, social justice, sustainability, community, and food.

Students were involved in this process at multiple junctures throughout. Many of the surveys were administered by paid student helpers, an auxiliary force that Rothenberger partly credits with helping the firm reach its goal of collecting data from 500 students.

Taylor Morgan ’19 was one of the students hired to administer surveys in Sharples.

“I got the sense that the firm wanted to make a genuine attempt to capture the ‘spirit of Swarthmore.’” Morgan said.

“During the training [for survey administrators] they emphasized they were less interested in quantitative data and more interested in the “why,” so they could craft newly imagined dining offerings to the specific needs of the college … The survey also asked about how students thought about what type of dining or

social space they would imagine, what would be ideal. They pitched to us that they would use that data to build and design and craft this new space.”

Morgan did have some criticisms of the process.

“In the training all the [consulting firm] people were white, and only two of them were women,” Morgan said. “I wasn’t surprised because I have had similar experiences with other sub-contracted projects. But it made me realize how homogenous the high-caliber professional consulting world really is, and the harm that could come from creating buildings that aren’t actually tailored to student’s needs because the people taking these data and making decisions with them all look the same and come from the same background.”

Morgan also felt that the discussion should have focused more on accessibility.

“Something that wasn’t asked was how accessible these spaces are,” she said. “There really wasn’t any emphasis on universal design, that all spaces should be accessible to everyone.”

Morgan noted that there was a brief opportunity for the student administrators to give the firm feedback on the survey. “[It was] five minutes to say if there are any questions we think they should add,” she said.

Morgan suggested to include a question asking what division the student’s major is in, which was included in the revised version of the survey. Even being able to put

forth a suggestion that was taken into account, Morgan still felt bothered by the focus on business rather than community at universities.

“A larger issue [is] that universities are becoming more corporatized, functioning more as a business, bringing in outside corporations determining the look of the school and the revenue being generated rather than the community determining it,” Morgan said.

The architects also held several meetings with various student groups, including an “Open Forum for Student Leaders,” and a dinner with Green Advisors and President’s Sustainability Research Fellows.

“The goal [of the dinner] was to try to get opinions on what matters to our specific groups in terms of what we’re looking for in a new dining hall,” said coordinacontinued on page A2

Karin Nakano / The Phoenix

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THE PHOENIX NEWS

February 7, 2019

SGO Hopes Unexpected Vacancies Bring Cohesion, Enthusiasm Veronica Yabloko News Writer Student Government Organization (SGO) is reforming its policies, and appointing new members to several open positions in a special election after a recent sweep of impeachments and resignations. After the most recent departures as reported by the Phoenix, Dawson Epstein ’21 was promoted to interim Appointments Chair and Zachary Lytle ’21 resigned, opening two At-Large-Senator positions. The current openings include two at-large senators, two class of 2020 senators, the Chair of Student Outreach, and the Chair of Environmental Affairs. In an effort to promote more diversity, SGO will allow all Swarthmore students to apply for these positions, which will be appointed by the body of SGO. According to Chair of Student Organizations Akshay Srinivasan ’21, the typical spring reappointment process would give the SGO president the ability to

appoint people to the open positions.

“The way it stands in the constitution right now, [the SGO president] can appoint people to these [positions] with consent of the executive board,” Srinivasan said. “But it basically gives [the president] a lot of discretion.”

Srinivasan also explained that SGO is trying to make their processes more clear and open to the rest of the student body. He explained that the re-appointment process would reflect this desire for transparency. Additionally, they decided to stray from the procedures the constitution outlines due to the number of vacancies within SGO. “It’s better to be more transparent about how we’re doing it, so what we’re going to do is allow people to apply for the position...and they’ll come in to talk to us about what their platform is, and then we’ll make decisions based on that as an entire body,” Srinivasan said.

SGO also wishes to diversify its current body, as, accord-

ing to Srinivasan, its members feel that crucial viewpoints are missing. To ameliorate this lack of diversity, SGO is reaching out to a variety of groups on campus to request candidates.

“Kat and Gilbert reached out to the Intercultural Center/ Black Cultural Center coalition and a lot of the individual groups in there to request members, and that’s how we got a few of the candidates we’re already considering,” Srinivasan said.

“We’ve talked to all-women’s groups on campus, [and] we’ve talked to a few administrators about candidates we want.”

Gilbert Orbea ’19, President of SGO, and Katherine Capossela ’21, Vice President of SGO, are currently collaborating with the IC/BCC coalition to create permanent relationships with several different affinity groups.

Though the diversification process only began recently, SGO has seen a great spike in diversity among candidates.

“We’re already seeing great numbers of diverse candidates

for the appointment openings.

77 percent of the current candidate pool is female and/or people of color. It’s very exciting to have so many great, enthusiastic people running, and we hope our outreach this semester increases that visibility in time for people to consider running in our elections for next year’s SGO.” The candidates chosen in the re-appointment process will serve until the spring elections, when positions will be elected for the following year.

SGO is also adjusting several of its policies and protocols to prevent these impeachments from happening again. In addition to implementing a more strict attendance policy, SGO hopes to change meeting protocol to promote efficiency and equality. “[We’re] working on the structure of the meetings. The truth is a lot of SGO’s Sunday meetings previously weren’t very productive,” Srinivasan said. “So what we’re focusing on is, one,

making them longer and more frequent, which allows us to add in things like icebreakers, which may seem trivial but are actually pretty effective, and also getting more individual people talking about different initiatives in a meeting.”

SGO is also now requiring a higher level of commitment from its members. While last year the senate met for one hour every two weeks, this semester the senate meets for an hour and 15 minutes every week.

“To ensure our student government has the framework to do good and diligent work, we’ve expanded commitment requirements quite significantly this semester, which resulted in many people having to review their priorities and make adjustments as needed,” Katherine Capossela ’21 and Gilbert Orbea ’19 said. “We’ve already have a great number of people interested in filling voids, suggesting the extra time commitment is paying off and other people are eager to join in.”

SGO is also hoping more students will run for positions in the spring elections, as competition incentivizes those running to be more committed and involved. “[We’re] trying to get more people interested in the Spring elections, because obviously if you’re uncontested it feels like you don’t have any incentives to do anything … a lot of people who do the best work tend to be the freshman, people who had a lot of competition and things like that.”

Though Srinivasan admits that reforming SGO’s policies and protocols is a daunting task, he is optimistic about the future of SGO. “Overall it’s a big task, but what we’re working on is just, first, making the attendance policy clear, which I think has been made clear; and the second thing is just working on a shift in the environment.”

Sharples, continued from A1 tor of Green Advisors Oswaldo Morales Solorzano ’21.

“Basically they gave us an outline that had different sections for how the new dining hall would interact with the community, nature, and campus, and they had points they deemed important and we had to put a marker on points we also thought were important,” Morales Solorzano said.

Morales Solorzano felt that the process was not as collaborative or interactive as it should have been.

“Some of the points were natural foods, no GMOs, other points were community involvement and environmental awareness, and it seemed like they were making us pick between them which were most important, as if they

couldn’t all be important,” Morales Solorzano said.

Morales does not oppose the plan itself, but was just left with a feeling of dissatisfaction after the meeting.

“There’s nothing I don’t like, but the way they phrased it made it seem like they wanted us to choose which points were most important, they had all these things they thought students would be interested in but they wanted us to pick just a few.”

Morales Solorzano said. “I think it was their way of trying to say they don’t have the money or resources for all of that so they’re just going to implement the things that are most important to students. But they’re all important.”

Though Morales was not com-

pletely content with the meeting, he still believes that the project might ultimately go well.

“If the college can successfully let the architects know that we want all the points that they mentioned and more, then I would be optimistic about it.”

Karin Nakano / The Phoenix

Plotkin, continued from A1 guage courses.”

There are 21 students in the two courses that Plotkin teaches.

Ponsa ’21, a prospective double major in Religion and German taking a directed reading with Plotkin, wanted more transparency on the status of Plotkin’s employment and Hebrew language courses at the college.

“I was super shocked [when I found out that Plotkin would not be returning after the 2018-2019 school year] because I didn’t even know it was question that she was coming back. We couldn’t really get a clear reason why it had happened,” Ponsa said. “For someone like me who’s very interested in Hebrew text and that being what I want to study, I really wish there was more clarity and transparency [about Plotkin’s contract not being renewed].”

After Plotkin discovered that the religion department would no longer be housing her courses, she approached both the chairs of the classics department and the linguistics department about having the classics department offer Hebrew language courses and cross-listing those courses with the linguistics department.

According to Plotkin, both Classics Department chair Grace Ledbetter and Professor Linguistics Department chair David Harris offered to welcome both of Plotkin’s courses at the time.

Yet over the 2018-2019 winter break, Provost Sarah Willie-LeBreton notified Plotkin that her contract for employment at the college would not be renewed and that Hebrew language courses at the college would be discontinued.

However, the chairs of the classics department and linguistics department recently revealed to The Phoenix that they would in fact be endorsing Hebrew language courses.

“Under the guidance of the Provost, we plan to continue supporting Hebrew, and an announcement about future course offerings will follow in due time,” Ledbetter and Harris wrote in a joint statement in an email sent to The Phoenix on Feb. 5, 2018.

There have been no public announcements regarding Plotkin’s contract not being renewed, nor about the discontinuation of He-

brew language courses at the college.

Visiting professors at Swarthmore are on a temporary contract and may not have their contract renewed by the college for various reasons. According to WillieLeBreton, the tenured faculty of a department determine whether visiting faculty or assistant professors’ contracts will be renewed.

“There are a number of things that are in the faculty handbook: their teaching, their service, their scholarship, and their overall contributions to the overall health of the department and the community. All of those things are taken into account [when determining whether someone’s contract will be renewed],” Willie-LeBreton said. “They may be weighted equally or differentially and sometimes it has to do with a faculty member or sometimes it has to do with the shape of the curriculum.”

Plotkin shared the news with her students that she would not be returning after the 2018-2019 school year shortly after learning that her contract had not been renewed.

According to Ponsa, shortly after Plotkin had informed her students that her contract at the college had not been renewed, many students wrote to Provost Willie-LeBreton regarding the status of Plotkin’s contract.

For Naomi Bronkema ’20, the news that Plotkin would not be returning came as a surprise.

Bronkema, who is currently enrolled in directed reading with Plotkin and has taken Hebrew Text Study I and II, initially took Plotkin’s courses because she was interested in learning how to translate the Old Testament.

“I got an email around Christmastime basically explaining that she [Plotkin] had been let go starting Fall 2019,” Bronkema said. “I’m a junior and I expected to take Hebrew courses all through senior year.”

Willie-LeBreton acknowledged that students taking Hebrew language courses at Swarthmore may experience interruptions in the courses that they planned on taking.

“If visiting instructors or faculty are not renewed, those stu-

SBC, continued from A1 dents have to readjust. We let those students know where else they can take Hebrew,” Willie-LeBreton said. “This is not dissimilar from the fact that every year there are faculty whose contracts are not renewed. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about this.”

Willie-LeBreton recommended that students who anticipated taking more Hebrew language courses look at offerings at Bryn Mawr College and the University of Pennsylvania.

It is currently unclear whether Hebrew language courses will be taught at the college after Spring 2019.

According to Rabbi Michael Ramberg, the Jewish student advisor, the staff of the Interfaith Center offers support to any students currently experiencing Plotkin’s departure as a loss.

Ramberg worked with Plotkin at The Reconstructionist Rabbinical College.

“I found out at the end of last semester that Helen would not be teaching at Swarthmore after this spring,” Ramberg said.

“I was disappointed to hear this because I so deeply value her as a colleague and because by giving students a chance to study these important texts in an academically honest way, she helps some students use their intellectual life to shed light on their own identities.”

When Plotkin leaves her teaching position, she will also leave behind her role as Director of the Beit Midrash.

“The feedback I’ve received about my teaching, from colleagues and students, has been gratifyingly positive. Note that for me personally the provost’s decision not to renew my contract after June 2019 simply means that I will be leaving two years before my planned retirement. While that is disappointing, it is far more important to me that the Beit Midrash, with its methodology of teaching Classical Hebrew texts, remains a part of the College,” Plotkin wrote in an email to The Phoenix. “I believe that the Departments of Classics and Linguistics, as well as the College Library, are committed to the program, and for that I am grateful.”

and pay for things has resulted in members paying themselves.

“We’re relying on members of our team who volunteered to pay those expenses out of pocket and hope for future reimbursement,” said Zhang.

“We’re grateful to have members on our team who can do that, but if we… didn’t have people who could do that I don’t know what we’d be able to do.”

Although SBC has not been functional in these first few weeks and has affected groups like the frisbee teams, Ferguson believes that SBC should remain a student-led organization.

“I think it is important to remember, that the students at Swarthmore directly benefit from SBC being run by students, not administrators.

The committee has remained judicious, generous and unbiased in its funding approvals throughout my three years at Swarthmore. If funding decisions were made by administrators certain external pressures may exist and treasurer proposals may not receive a critically unbiased evaluation, and certainly not by an 8 person committee of peers,” Ferguson said.

Because of the situation, the process of appointing a new chair took longer than expected.

“Given the circumstances, Andrew Barclay reached out to me and asked that I fill in the role. I actually interviewed for the chair position for the past two years in a row, so it was surprising to get it ... senior spring. I also meet the yearlong service requirement to be eligible for the position as outlined in the constitution,” Ferguson said. “This is my third year on SBC, and I have been through two spring budgetings, so I believed I was a natural fit for the chair position.”

Despite the new appointment, SBC has not convened or distributed requested funds, although Ferguson does promise that it will become active again soon.

“For now, I cannot say anything as to what contingencies will be put in place to prevent this from happening in the future,” Ferguson said. “My primary focus is returning SBC to full functionality so that clubs may get the funds they need.

I was also tasked with filling four SBC vacancies, which I have since filled since my appointment as chair. I understand people’s frustrations with the slow start, and apologize for any inconveniences.”

Even though SBC’s lack of functionality has been inconvenient, Ferguson believes that this may serve as a reminder for club treasurers to think carefully through their spring budget.

“An event like this stresses the importance of club treasurers thoroughly thinking through their club’s spring budget so that they have funding going into the year for recurring events or regular club activities. I know it is impossible to completely plan ahead, but a thorough spring budget proposal may have left clubs with some cushion if they needed immediate funding while SBC was not fully functional,” said Ferguson.

According to Zhang, there are unexpected scenarios that spring budgeting cannot account for — which happened to the Women’s team this year and their division into two teams.

“There’s no way we could have foreseen this last spring when we budgeted,” said Zhang. “This is the type of situation that supplemental funding was created for, and the fact that SBC was not functional at this time… was really frustrating.”

While Keefe and Zhang both explained that they do not have negative attitudes towards SBC or the OSE, they stated that there is a need for systems to be put in place to prevent this from happening again.

“I really hope that… mechanisms can be put in place so that the adults in OSE in extreme situations like this

can approve funding if it’s consistent with prior funding and the club’s charter and constitution... so that this doesn’t happen again,” Keefe said.

SBC will convene on February 10 for the purpose of addressing the issues that have arisen from the last three weeks.

ARTS

February 7, 2019 PAGE A3

Days of Swatties: Barkat Sikder ’22 Days of Swatties: this is a project that goes into the hearts of Swarthmore students by listening about their lives. Wholesome, sad, and all other kinds of stories are carried by Swatties. I choose to present as little personal information as possible, because I think the specific backgrounds of students are irrelevant to this series. It is a place for individual people who make up the narrative of Swarthmore as a whole. It is an archive, but also a window into Swarthmore today.

Jeremy Chang Arts Writer

How’s the drinking culture at Swarthmore different from your own culture and country?

The drinking culture differs significantly in Bangladesh compared to the U.S., or Swarthmore specifically. Although founded on secular principles, Bangladesh is predominantly Muslim and so alcohol, although not illegal, is significantly frowned upon by the general population. As a result, no one drinks, at least not on the surface.

Alcohol is either found at institutions such as upscale hotels that cater to the upper class and foreign tourists, or at hole-in-the-wall type stores, often pharmacies. This is mostly because when products, such as medication, are imported from India, among other places, the proprietors also try to sneak in alcohol. People often get pulled over and their cars are searched by the police. When they find alcohol, they often have to bribe the police to get out of the predicament, which is such a strange scene because possession of alcohol over the age 18 is completely legal. However, despite alcohol consumption being legal, there is a huge stigma regarding alcohol.

As you’ve probably guessed at this point, Swarthmore is nothing like that. Despite the legal age of 21, everyone drinks. Everyone talks about it. It’s not a huge deal, as is the case in pretty much the whole country.

It is illegal to drink while underage, but at least people don’t have to bribe police officers when they are of legal age. Also, it is important to mention how much responsibility the school takes in ensuring the students to drink responsibly and trying to make a safe environment for students with drugs in general.

Kamakura: Train, Buddha, People & Town Carrie Jiang Arts Writer

During my winter break, I took a trip to Japan and visited Kamakura, an old city next to Tokyo where tourists from all around the world will pay a visit to as soon as they arrive at Tokyo. The city is famous for its Big Buddha and various Buddhist temples. Although it is now full of tourists, Kamakura has not developed any widespread tourism business; it instead embraces all the visitors and simply exists as itself.

The train tracks spread all across Kamakura, intersecting and connecting with the pedestrian walks.

Every time the train passes by, a track conductor organizes pedestrians by asking them to wait by the side of the road, so that the train can drive through. Upon hearing the ringing sound of the train, people automatically slow down and wait patiently. I found this reaction interesting, and have witnessed it multiple times during trips to Japan. What is particularly unique about Japan is this development of disciplined social order.

As an ancient city, Kamakura has only one train line, and it connects various famous tourist sites. Every day, the old train carries countless visitors to places across the town without fail. I took this photo when I was lining up at the platform, and although the crowds were a little overwhelming, the people were still orderly and polite, waiting patiently for the doors to open. It was a warm winter day, when everyone was comfortable enough for a visit in this old and beautiful city.

Kamakura is famous for its Buddhas, large and small. The most renowned site is the Big Buddha, which many people list as a priority in their visits. While the Big Buddha spreads Kamakura’s name across the world, the city also consists of various smaller, cute Buddhas that are randomly placed at the tourist sites.

Although the famous Big Buddha does express a sense of solemness and sacredness, the little Buddhas light up the whole mood of the space and greatly attract people with their adorable designs.

The combination of the two styles enhances the impression that Kamakura leaves on world visitors.

Convenience stores are another highlight of Kamakura and Japanese cities in general.

These stores normally sell local snacks and all kinds of food, and stand by the neat streets of the town while welcoming all passers-by. Throughout my multiple trips to Japan, I have taken many photos of these convenience stores, probably because they form a uniquely peaceful vibe when combined with the tidy street settings.

Eastern Mythology Meets Western Horror in ‘The Wailing’

Shane Jung Arts Writer

“The Wailing,” written and directed by Na Hong-jin, was a huge hit in South Korea when it was originally released in May 2016. For the few Western audience members who saw the film, it became an instant cult classic; no Hollywood studio would have had the knowledge or the nerve to put its horrifying and fascinating depiction of Asian mythology on screen. As American horror continues to churn out uninspired remakes and sequels, many of which are based on Asian horror movies (“The Ring,” “The Grudge,” etc.), horror and foreign film enthusiasts have turned to the East for their dose of scares. However, “The Wailing” is interesting because it combines Eastern mythology with archetypal Western horror tropes to create a truly unsettling yet more accessible experience. Viewers will notice plenty of obvious

nods to the infamous “The Exorcist” while still appreciating the film’s wealth of unfamiliar mythos and culture. Now “The Wailing” is available on Netflix. Proceed with caution.

“The Wailing” begins with a verse from the book of Luke in which Jesus asks his followers: “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see.

For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.″ The entire film is littered with religious and cultural references, along with traditional folklore regarding spirits, demons, shamans, rituals, and the possessed. It blends and associates all of them in a way that both the viewer and the protagonist, Jong-goo, have no idea what or who to believe, if we can even trust anything or anyone at all.

Jong-goo is a police officer and a doting father who halfheartedly serves his small town in the mountains of South Korea that is plagued by perennial thunder-

storms. It is evident that he and the police force have little experience with serious crimes, let alone the supernatural. In this case, the supernatural comes in the form of a zombifying disease, a horror trope adopted from the West.

This disease causes the infected (or possessed?) to develop severe rashes over their whole body and express extreme antagonism toward anyone in their proximity, particularly those closest to them.

Several cases throughout the rural town reveal the aftermath of unspeakable acts of violence inflicted on their own families. As these horrifying incidents pile up, the movie turns into a mystery as the faint-hearted but observant Jong-goo eventually tries to find the source of the disease when its symptoms begin to appear in his increasingly malicious daughter.

Ghost stories and superstitions fueled by fear and xenophobia begin to spread as all signs point to a Japanese man who recently

moved into a remote cabin in the outskirts of the town.

At 156 minutes long, “The Wailing” is a horror epic, which is not a phrase you hear every day. Despite its daunting runtime, Na allegedly cut out a considerable amount of the film to make the story as cryptic and unpredictable as possible; the film is in fact quite disorienting in more ways than one. However, although its confusing and hermetic story may be frustrating for some, obsessing over the plot is beside the point. In this case, knowing what happens is secondary to knowing how the film makes you feel and why it makes you feel that way. For “The Wailing,” Na cleverly takes advantage of his final cut’s lack of exposition and repeatedly plays with expectations in order to turn the audience on its head. Jong-goo and, more importantly, the viewer are perpetually left in the dark as the initially passive Jong-goo is forced to make desperate decisions that

make him a fascinating character to study. And if horror movies are good at one thing, it’s exposing humanity at its most defeated and macabre. During these moments of desperation is when suspicions begin to arise and the supernatural becomes more credible. But unlike the commonly frustrating decisions made by characters in lowbrow horror movies, e.g. checking the closet to see if anyone’s in there or running into the basement to hide, Jong-goo’s actions are justified and define his character. Empathizing with Jong-goo is actually quite easy, considering the fact that the viewer is forced to confront pure evil alongside him.

If you have ever wondered what pure evil looks like, look no further than witnessing the sanctuary of the home tearing down from the inside as Jong-goo’s family falls apart.

“The Wailing” dodges the use of cheap thrills and jump scares and instead relies on atmospheric

direction, beautiful cinematography, impeccable production/ costume design and makeup, and stellar acting to achieve its visceral impact. Beyond just scaring me, however, this movie left me heartbroken. Although its sounds and images were hellaciously unsettling, it was the story’s characters and what they experience that was truly upsetting and unforgettable.

Most horror movies, especially the ones worth watching, are morality tales and are often allegorical.

“The Wailing,” on the other hand, is an unforgiving experience. Any moral underpinnings, at least for this particular viewer, were left unclear. But maybe that’s the point. Perhaps that’s what makes the movie so traumatizing. Perhaps evil just ensnares anyone that takes its bait.

OPINIONS

February 7, 2019 PAGE A4

Larkin White Op-Ed Contributor I remember being told back during orientation that I would never run out of my meal swipes, and that I should choose the meal plan with the fewest. As a freshman, that meant choosing the Garnet Plan — 275 swipes instead of the roughly nine swipes a day provided by the Phoenix Plan.

In light of my three-full-mealsa-day schedule during high school, 275 meal swipes seemed like a reasonable amount to use per semester. There were even a couple of times in September when I calculated how many I had left to make sure I wasn’t going to run out. Yet, as the semester dragged on, I was surprised by my inability to put a dent in my remaining swipes; by the end I still had over 120 left.

I rarely eat a full breakfast, instead opting for fruit from Sharples dinner the night before, and often grab lunch at Sci or Kohlberg since it is easier and the offerings are more predictable. This doesn’t mean that I spend my own money — last semester I managed to stretch my Swat Points and Dining Dollars all the way through finals. I simply have more swipes than I

need. The same is true for just about everyone else I have talked to. At the same time, almost everyone I know, freshman or not, runs out of their Swat Points and Dining Dollars.

Without financial aid, all of Swarthmore’s meal plans cost $7,536 a year, by no means a negligible amount. The breakdown of all that money is rather surprising. Take the cost of each individual meal swipe. Before I tell you, think of a value that you would find reasonable to pay for a Sharples meal if it were a restaurant. Is it more than $10? Depending on your plan, you could be paying far more. Your swipes become more expensive the fewer you buy.

Garnet Plan swipes are worth only $12, Phoenix Plan swipes are about $14, and Parrish Plan swipes are nearly $18. To be fair, you are trading for more Swat Points and Dining Dollars, but the tradeoff is far from equal. For 125 less meals, you get only $400 more points. Even these seemingly high numbers are deceiving. Given that most students have leftover swipes at the end of every semester, the amount they pay for each meal is technically higher. For me, with my 120+ leftover swipes, over $1400 worth of my meal plan went down the drain last

semester. As someone on financial aid, this is not the price I paid, but much of Swarthmore’s financial aid comes from donors and I know of many other students in similar situations.

If I eat at Sharples the same amount this semester, another $1400 will be wasted.

According to the operating budget available on Swarthmore’s website, the school brings in roughly $12 million a year from the meal plans, including the subsidy of financial aid. Yes, the college has to pay to run Sharples, but all food establishments have maintenance costs, and many do so with lower prices and (dare I say it?) better food. It seems logical that the scaled-up food service at Sharples even helps with individual meal costs. If all that money is actually needed, students should have greater control over how their money is spent.

Swarthmore has a reputation for a commitment to the economic well-being and equity of its students. This is apparent from its “cash-free” campus to its unique need-blind admissions and loan-free financial aid. In this context, the meal plans are perplexing. Why are they so expensive and why do students have such limited con-

trol? Private colleges are known for their exorbitant price tags, but in no way does that mean the details of their expenses should be ignored.

The fact that all meal plans have a standardized price is a wonderful product of this commitment, but forcing students to pay for meals they will never use is unnecessary and abuses the standardization. I am not proposing having differentlypriced meal options, but students deserve more control over what they are buying. Allowing students to choose the exact amount of money they allocate towards swipes, Swat Points, and Dining Dollars would be easy and far superior.

There could simply be a minimum number of swipes and Swat Points students have to buy to sustain Sharples and the other food services.

At the very least, the college should stop limiting first-years to the two meal plans with the most swipes. It is wholly unnecessary and forces them to spend money on something they will not use. Just because a minority of people may need all the swipes they can get does not mean everyone should be forced to pay for the same.

For the handful of first-years who may run out of their meal

THE

Swarthmore’s Meal Plans Are Inefficient and Overly Expensive

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PHOENIX

Shreya Chattopadhyay, Editor-in-Chief Bayliss Wagner, Managing Editor Laura Wagner, Managing Editor NEWS Naomi Park, Editor Trina Paul, Editor ARTS Esther Couch, Editor Nicole Liu, Editor CAMPUS JOURNAL Dylan Clairmont, Editor OPINIONS Shelby Dolch, Editor Max Katz-Balmes, Editor SPORTS Jack Corkery, Editor Ping Promrat, Editor

swipes, an on-campus meal swipe donation system could be set up at the end of the semester to ensure other students have enough Sharples meals, something other colleges such as Wesleyan have.

My knowledge of the breakdown of Swarthmore’s food costs is far from comprehensive, but it forces me to pay a lot of money for something I don’t use or value much. Meal plans are meant to simplify the eating process for college students and prevent them from spend-

Schultz Candidacy Might Prevent a Trump Defeat Laura Wilcox Op-Ed Contributor

Howard Schultz, the former CEO of Starbucks, recently announced in a 60 Minutes interview that he is “seriously considering” running for president as an independent in 2020.

While we should hope that the field of candidates running against Donald Trump is large, diverse, and talented, we don’t need another businessman with zero political experience to run for president.

Even more importantly,

Schultz’s decision to run for president will only increase the chance that Trump wins a second term. Polling by Schultz’s own campaign shows that he would win less than a fifth of the popular vote in a three-way race, and Trump would win the election.

The fact that Schultz’s own polling shows him doing so badly may be because the electoral college system makes it extremely hard for independents to do well in presidential elections. Except for Nebraska and Maine, states award all of

their electoral college votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote in that state. This means that Schultz would have to win the popular vote in several states to even just prevent any candidate from gaining a majority of electoral votes.

Given how reliably people tend to vote with their parties, it’s highly unlikely that he would win a significant percentage of the popular vote in any state, so Schultz may not win any electoral votes. Even very few selfdescribed independents are swing voters. History is a good indicator of how difficult an independent bid for president is— according to the Washington Post, only four minor party candidates have won more than 10 percent of the popular vote in the past 150 years.

There’s no chance Schultz could win the presidency, but he could certainly affect the outcome of the election, which is why his candidacy is so dangerous. He’s already positioned himself as a centrist alternative

to the Democratic nominee for voters who don’t want Trump to be reelected. He’s admitted that his strategy is to replace the Democratic nominee as the preferred candidate for anti-Trump voters. The consequence of this strategy is that he has spent much of the time since announcing his presidential bid attacking Democrats.

He called Medicare for All, a government-run health insurance plan, “not American,” and other progressive policies “ridiculous” during interviews with “CBS This Morning” and NPR’s “Morning Edition.” If Schultz spends enough time criticizing Democratic candidates and policies, he could splinter off enough votes to allow Trump to be reelected.

This could create a division in the Democratic Party between liberal voters and more centrist voters who would be more likely to support Schultz.

Schultz says that the Democratic Party has shifted left to the point that it no longer

Remaking American Democracy Billie Potts Op-Ed Contributor

Is the way that we currently elect representatives just? In this piece, I will argue that it is not, and advance certain solutions. Currently, we live in a representative democracy, where we come together to vote on particular candidates every couple of years. Notably, we have a two-party duopoly, in which only the Republican and Democratic parties are major players. This is partially the result of our first-past-the-post system, in which people vote for a single candidate, and the person with the most votes win.

In first-past-the-post, thirdparty candidates can cause candidates with majority approval to lose by splitting the vote. This is notoriously known as the spoiler effect. One viable alternative to this is approval voting. Instead of voting for a single candidate, under approval voting people vote for as many candidates as they want, and the person with the most votes wins. This eliminates the spoiler effect and is not as complicated as Maine’s ranked-choice voting system.

Under ranked-choice voting, voters rank candidates, typically three, from their first choice to their third. If no candidate has a majority of the votes,

then the last-place candidate is eliminated, and the votes are allocated to voters’ next choice.

This repeats until one candidate has a majority of the votes.

While this system eliminates spoilers, it can have counterintuitive outcomes. For example, it is possible for ranking a candidate higher on the ballot to cause that candidate to lose, and it is possible for ranking a candidate lower on the ballot to cause that candidate to win. Still, ranked-choice voting remains superior to first-pastthe-post, though I would argue that approval voting is better than ranked-choice voting.

Like ranked-choice voting, approval voting would be used for voting for specific candidates within specific districts, which are currently drawn by political parties. These parties have their own interests, and this often distorts representation in a process known as gerrymandering.

Gerrymandering causes unjust outcomes in the way we elect representatives through dilution and concentration of voters. In this way, political parties in charge of redistricting can easily create unrepresentative results that favor them. A solution to gerrymandering might include having districts crafted by independent commissions rather than politi-

cal parties. I argue that while this would be superior to the current state of affairs, proportional representation has the potential to solve even more problems. Proportional representation, the system where seats are allocated based on the percentage of the vote received, is especially promising because it would make legislatures better represent the wide spectrum of voter opinions rather than simply the majority. The alternative leaves situations in which a large minority of voters within a district lack a voice.

The presidential election is a special case in which a candidate that has a majority of voter support can lose.

The Electoral College has become notorious in recent years for creating undemocratic outcomes in presidential elections by contradicting the notion of one person, one vote. The value of a vote in California is much less than a vote in Iowa because we base the Electoral College on the U.S. Congress. Because Congress gives two senators and at least one member of the House to states regardless of their population, the Electoral College is profoundly undemocratic. The Electoral College was established as a process to serve as a compromise between the people or Congress electing the president. Since then, we

have moved closer toward the people electing the president through popular vote, as states have moved towards binding electors based on the popular vote within their states. In 2016, President Trump lost the popular vote by a wide margin but was elected to the presidency via the Electoral College.

Swing states cause candidates to neglect the majority of the population in favor of courting voters in contested states.

These issues might be solved through the elimination of this archaic system altogether in favor of a national popular vote.

Even if we succeed on this front, low turnout remains a major issue in elections.

Low turnout for elections might be solved through an opt-out voting system similar to Australia’s mandatory voting system. This would be best done alongside reforms such as making election day a national holiday, expanding early voting, and automatic voter registration. These efforts would counter the problem of voter suppression, which entails unjust barriers to voting such as voter ID laws, purging of electoral rolls, and the barring of felons from voting in certain states. The latter is dangerous in a country that criminalizes black and brown people and political dissent.

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ing lots of their own money, yet Swarthmore does not seem to be accomplishing those goals.

Perhaps the most dismaying way of looking at the cost of my meal plan from last semester that I found was to calculate what portion of my plan went towards each swipe that I did use: over $21. That is the true cost, not only of each Sharples meal, but of every Crumb Café bubble tea or avocado toast, and even that one time I swiped into Sharples just for a banana. $21 for a banana.

represents his views, and that a liberal Democratic nominee couldn’t win against Trump. He claims that he is more electable and can run as a consensus candidate. This view doesn’t make sense, as progressive policies, such as higher marginal tax rates on the wealthy, are quite popular.

Additionally, Schultz’s criticism of progressive policies such as Medicare for All and higher marginal tax rates on the wealthy as “ridiculous” creates a false dichotomy between the Democratic and Republican platforms. In a “60 Minutes” interview, Shultz characterized the two parties as “extremes on both sides.” If he portrays the Democratic platform as extreme, as he’s been doing, people may begin to see the two parties as equally extreme.

In reality, the Republican platform is extreme and endorses hateful policies, while the policies proposed by Democratic presidential candidates so far are progressive, bold,

and grounded. It would be very dangerous for voters to see the two parties’ policies in the same way. There’s simply no comparison between the party of family separation at the border and the party of Medicare for All. Overall, we should hope that a large field of candidates runs in the Democratic primary so that the strongest possible candidate can run in the general election and deny Trump a second term. This does not, however, extend to independent candidates like Shultz who would fracture the Democratic Party and potentially siphon off votes. Every 2020 presidential candidate’s primary responsibility is to do everything in their power to ensure that Trump does not win a second term. Schultz has said that “no one wants to remove … President Trump more than me.” If this is true, he needs to recognize how his candidacy could help Trump and decide not to run.

The internal logic of an ideal representative democracy is premised on the notion of meritocracy, the idea that those with power should be selected on the basis of ability. The problem with meritocracy is that those deemed to be without ability are left unrepresented. Instead, a system that leads to the representation of all people, regardless of ability, such as sortition, might be worthy of advancing. Under such a system, our representatives would be selected at random from the general population.

Since people are influenced by their position in society when making decisions, a system built on rule by all people rather than an elite few would be best positioned to advance our collective interests. I am arguing that meritocratic rule, even under perfect conditions, would advance the interests of elites at expense of everyone else, cementing an elite ruling class.

A real-world example of this is U.S. Congress, which has many more lawyers, millionaires, and white men than the general population. Even if these representatives intend to represent their constituents, their position within society factors into their decision-making. While this may be slightly less terrible under ideal conditions, it would still result in a Congress that is

much more educated than the general population, leading to the neglect of everyone else.

Sortition would best be used through issue-specific legislatures, empowering ordinary people to make informed political change by specializing on a single issue. These would accompany or ultimately supplant proportional representationbased legislatures, allowing for greater political participation by ordinary people.

I argue for legislatures elected on the principle of proportional representation accompanied by issue-specific legislatures run by ordinary people selected by sortition. For elections involving candidates, such as mayoral, gubernatorial, or presidential elections, I argue for approval voting within an opt-out voting system. For presidential races, I argue for the national popular vote over the Electoral College. The voting systems we use are not the only barrier to multi-party democracy; thresholds for access to debates, lack of public financing of elections, and unequal media attention also play major roles. So while none of the reforms I argue for here will be enough to fully cleanse the political system, they are an important first step toward making our democracy function better.

February 7, 2019

THE PHOENIX OPINIONS

On Belonging EDITORIAL

As students of the college, we are often privy to “imposter syndrome” — the feeling of not belonging and being an “admissions mistake.”

The Orientation Play serves to preemptively combat the presence of imposter syndrome on campus, reassuring students — mainly the incoming ones — that they deserve to be here and are allowed to make mistakes without being the mistake.

While students internalize this message to different degrees on their own time, it remains difficult to always feel fully confident in your competence and rightful place at Swat. It is hard to grow out of the mindset that you have to constantly prove to the people around you — even your friends — why you deserve to be here.

We also become accustomed to reassuring the people we care about that they do have a place here and are flourishing before our eyes. We see the best in them even if we can’t envision it for ourselves.

However, the insecurities about being an imposter in conjunction with hyper-awareness of how involved and successful the people around us are creates a nagging, lingering feeling that we are not doing enough. We then keep trying to do more: academically, extracurricularly, any type of involvement both on and off campus. We forget along the way that the connections we make with the people here will be Swat’s most lasting impact in the years that follow. This isn’t to erase the importance of grades, classes, and being involved, but rather it is a displacement of those aspects to highlight the importance of the

lasting impressions and relationships we are making while here.

Research shows that what college students remember from their experience the most are connections with professors and their friends. Frank Bruni cites results from the Strada-Gallup Alumni Survey, writing that “establishing a deep connection with a mentor, taking on a sustained academic project, and playing a significant part in a campus organization” had the highest correlation with postgraduate satisfaction with life and career.

So, we’re stuck in this vicious cycle — a cycle that prevents us from fully appreciating the faculty and students who are around us, driving us to do more work in an isolated way from other incredibly bright, valuable people.

As we develop socially, it is easy for us to feel as though our priorities are out of order. Instead of feeling secure in being well-balanced individuals, we are led to expect that that is unrealistic because of he pressure to be stressed and constantly productive. When we can’t maintain a balance, we end up feeling like we don’t deserve to be here.

This perception of inadequacy, on top of our overloaded schedules, prevents us from having the mental and emotional capacity to process and grow.

But grow we must. Our social selves are just as legitimate an endeavor as our academic and extracurricular selves — an endeavor that requires time, reflection, and care — and it’s time that we as a community acknowledge that.

FACTS ABOUT THE SWARTHMORE COLLEGE BOARD OF MANAGERS

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How We Talk About the Humanities James Sutton Op-Ed Contributor

The humanities — defined as the “big four” of English, languages, philosophy, and history — are in decline. Intellectuals and the public have been warning about this shift for decades and have pushed a wide variety of explanations for the decline: ballooning student debt, the perception of poor job prospects, and an apparent liberal bias in humanities classes. The problem with all these narratives is that they are generally self-serving, and tailor-made to confirm the prior beliefs of whomever is making them. What is really happening is a decades-old shift to a far more careerist view of education, with recent economic disasters acting as fuel for the fire. Students are deserting the humanities because the division no longer fits into the role our culture assigns to education.

No matter how dubious the reasons given are, the decline is real.

In 1970, 14 percent of degrees were given in the humanities. The number today is halved, at seven percent. The humanities have been declared to be in crisis since at least the 1950s, but actually saw growth from the mid-fifties to the early seventies, and enrollments were steady from about 1985 to 2008. The Great Recession, however, kicked off a serious and sustained decline in majors

and course enrollment. Even the absolute number of course majors in the humanities is lower than it was four years ago.

Swatties just learning of this drop may think it’s just something that happens to other schools.

After all, Swarthmore has a long history of intellectual rigor and commitment to the liberal arts.

The humanities have always been at the core of the liberal arts. But for all the talk about academic ideals, Swarthmore and its peer schools are some of the main sources of this decline. “Elite” — those ranked in the U.S. News and World Report top thirty — liberal arts colleges have seen the humanities drop from about a third of all majors to under a quarter, and the decline is just as steep at elite research universities.

So why are people giving up Emerson for electrical engineering? Historian Benjamin Schmidt has done the most work on the subject, and provides most of the statistics in this article. He says that the main driver is a changed perception of the job market. After the economic crash of 2008 and the achingly slow recovery, students started leaving the humanities en masse for more “practical” S.T.E.M. fields. At the top 30 universities, computer science has as many majors as history, English, religion, philosophy, linguistics, and area studies combined. The fastest growing majors are all in S.T.E.M., or business and

economics. Fear of student debt, high housing prices in major cities, and slow economic growth have caused students to leave philosophy seminars and enter into engineering classes, from diagramming Greek verbs to drawing supply-and-demand graphs.

Setting aside concerns about the humanities themselves, student fears of unemployment are basically unfounded. Schmidt’s data is somewhat mixed, but differences in income and employment between S.T.E.M. and non-S.T.E.M. majors tend to fall within the margin of error. In fact, humanities majors under 35 have been found to have higher employment than life science and social science majors. At elite colleges, the fear of impractical degrees is even more unfounded. It’s clear that what you study in college is hardly relevant to your future employment. Most of what American college students learn will be completely forgotten within ten years, according to research done

by Bryan Kaplan at George Mason University. Instead, colleges and universities act as credentialing institutions, with a degree as a certificate of general intelligence.

And a diploma from an elite college is, of course, the best kind of credential you can have.

Of course, the fact that students feel so pressured to get a “practical” degree means that an important battle has already been lost. Until 1970, a large major-

Let’s Improve Body Positivity Giorgia Piantanida Op-Ed Contributor

Celebrities are not the body positive role models women need. I recognize that they have the easiest, fastest access to the mass public and that they may feel as though they are in the best position to point out the inherent flaws that exist within our fashion industry. They are, however, simply not the best people for the job, no matter what size or race they may be.

When women have body image problems, they often do not stem from the fact that women were born with a natural aversion to their body shape. They do not begin at birth and grow from there: they are instilled in women as they grow, as they watch their bodies change.

When girls are young, they are rarely criticized for being chubby or too skinny. Rather, they are praised as miracles of life and seen as some kind of proof of the relentless continuation of humankind. Girls don’t spend time in front of a mirror picking apart their flaws and comparing the size of their thighs with those of

other girls. Instead, they spend their time learning, playing, and enjoying the mere fact that they are alive. They don’t learn the art of disliking their body until they are a bit older.

When puberty strikes and bodies suddenly learn to shift their shapes to accommodate all sorts of new changes, that is often the first time a child will look at their body more closely than ever before and start picking it apart.

Perhaps hesitant at first, they gain new techniques and master new insults for themselves with astonishing speed, until all they know is how to spot the flaws in a mirror before anyone else can begin to think about them.

Not every woman goes through this process, and it’s most certainly true that not every woman encounters the same amount of distaste for themselves, or for the same reasons. It is, however, a prevalent problem in today’s society, and the fact that celebrities are trying to step up to the plate to promote the idea that every body is beautiful seems a little ludicrous to me.

First of all, most of the women who have been able to spearhead

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the movement seem to be occupying the very bodies that many young women who are just learning to hate their shapes aspire to have. Take Jameela Jamil, an actress and influencer, for example. She is a beautiful, strong, tall, and skinny woman who has spent countless hours spreading the body positivity movement.

While she has spoken about her struggles with eating disorders during her teen years, her words about learning to love your shape seem to fall a little flat. She is a woman who seemingly has it all: the perfect body, a beautiful husband, and massive personal success. And yet, she wants to stand up for “normal” women who do not have the “ideal” body, with dating lives that are barely hanging together, and are struggling with day-to-day life. Perhaps her message is not falling on deaf ears, but it certainly is not helping the countless women who wake up in the morning and try to teach their bodies to change to her shape and size.

I understand her argument that oftentimes, women of her shape get shamed out of speaking up, and I am by no means saying that

ity of students polled responded that the primary purpose of a college education was to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life.”

But as the economy slowed down and the cultural shifts of the 1960s became entrenched, that response declined. Today, a majority of students say that education is best for “making more money.”

There are many reasons for this careerist shift. One of the most important is the decision by postwar policymakers to start treating colleges as launching pads for economic productivity (they are) and social mobility (they aren’t).

Large research universities ballooned and technical degrees spread. Eventually, the focus on “useful,” or economically productive jobs trickled down to high schools, with the expansion of S.T.E.M. and “pre-college” programs. Instead of creating citizens or intellectuals, schools were tools of economic policy. Preparing students for the “modern” or “knowledge” economy is the main way we talk about high school now, and that mindset is carried into college.

So students now are formed in a culture of ceaseless competition and striving for success, leading them to flock to what they perceive are the safest degrees.

Why, then, is the decline in humanities steeper at the top colleges? It might have something to do with the fact that expectations for high-achieving students

are higher than ever. Funneled through SAT prep classes, club sports teams, and the hellish circus of the college admissions process, their educational experience orients them towards external, objective concerns: grades, scores, internships, and scholarships.

And the competition is greater the higher you rise.

But these objective concerns are exactly the inverse of what humanities deal with. Broadly speaking, the humanities are concerned with the interiority of the individual: character, moral choices, values, aesthetics, those attributes that make up what could be called the soul. David Brooks often writes about the difference between “resume” and “eulogy” traits — what an employer will read on your resume versus what will be heard at your funeral. The humanities are concerned with the latter. To study the humanities is to learn how to be human.

It’s in the name, after all.

This focus is fundamentally subversive of “practical education.” W.H. Auden, who taught at Swarthmore for over a decade, warned of technical education eliminating the sense of “vocation”, of having a passion that you were willing to follow your whole life. He was not saying that your vocation had to be for the humanities, but that your education had to give you the tools to discern it.

Without the humanities, all

that education does is form students who do what other people think is best — “men and women who are trained for yesterday’s problems and yesterday’s jobs,” as Wesleyan president Michael Roth writes. They’re probably going to be a lot more boring, as well.

The only solution I see going forward is for humanities to recover or create an evangelistic, confident spirit. It would be helpful for administrators to act like they believe in their historical mission too. Swarthmore hiring new computer science professors as they attempt to push out the Classical Hebrew program does not exactly signal institutional confidence.

But far more importantly, the case needs to be made that the humanities are important to our lives; that they’re not only for fun or intellectual exercise. It’s not that this doesn’t ever happen. I still think about a lecture Professor Craig Williamson gave about how the final confrontation with the dragon in Beowulf is like the confrontation with death that we will all face — a deep insight that challenges the priorities of the technocratic, meritocratic culture that dominates so much of American life. This challenge can only come from the humanities. If we can articulate a mission of discovery and moral growth and a certainty that in the humanities, we are playing for stakes, then maybe students will start to return.

is why she needs to step down from her position. Rather, I am saying that she represents an image, an ideal for countless women around the world, that they wish to strive for. When Jamil speaks, women could hear her words but filter them through her life position. By life position, I mean her celebrity status and her physical appearance. Once they filter her words through this, they could jump to the conclusion that the only way they can achieve the body confidence and positivity she advocates for is by achieving her same life — looks included.

Jamil is not the only celebrity who does this. There are other celebrities who try to become leaders of this movement in hopes of helping other women find more self love, but who themselves seem to have it all. It is for this reason that I simply do not understand how we can post such successful, beautiful, and famous women at the forefront of such a massively important movement.

These women that we look up to are wealthy and highly privileged. They have the time and money to afford personal trainers and crazy new health trends,

which are simply not available to the mass public. Most women struggle with just trying to get through their work days without falling apart by the end, not to mention making fancy meals and going to work out for multiple hours a day. These massive wealth and class disparities cannot be ignored in this discussion, as they make up a large portion of the problem.

The women who deserve to be at the head of this movement are those who wake up each and every morning and have to remind themselves that although they may not be rich and beautiful with a seemingly perfect life, they are still perfect just the way they are. The women who deserve to be raised to a higher pedestal are those who can’t look in mirrors without shedding some tears.

Those women who have bounced back after a series of eating disorders and still remember what it was like to hate their body, because it just happened last night.

The women who are real, and who are raw, who are just like the majority of us. Women of all shapes, colors, and sizes. Women who are relatable and walking among us,

not those who can easily project their voices unto the masses through a massively followed Instagram account with perfectly curated content that’s meant to look “just candid enough.”

We as women can no longer allow those who have the easiest access to such fundamentally important campaigns to take the reins and try to lead us. While they may understand the struggles that have to do with accepting and loving your body, they are not relatable enough, nor do they always feel attached to reality.

They live in a world of glitz and glamor that the majority of us will never be able to understand.

Instead, we must consciously choose to elevate those women who are among us and struggling to find inner peace, yet have chosen to not give up yet. They have chosen against all odds to make it their mission to love the home they were born into. It is those kinds of women who should be able to spearhead the movement meant to make us feel at home in our own skin, not those who are almost always impeccably perfect.

SPORTS

February 7, 2019 PAGE A6

How Coaches Maintain Their Success: An Inside Look into Swarthmore Athletic Recruiting Ben Lau Sports Writer Swarthmore Athletics has recently seen an upswing in the success of many sports teams. Last year, the men’s baseball team won the Centennial Conference and made it to the Division III World Series, while men’s basketball made it to the NCAA Elite 8. To fuel and maintain their success, Swarthmore coaches use recruitment to bolster their lineups and add individuals of high academic and athletic quality to the Swarthmore community. But has admissions started catering more to athletic teams as those teams have become more successful?

Women’s volleyball coach Harleigh Chwastyk doesn’t think there has been a difference in how the admissions department treats recruitment. “[Athletic performance] doesn’t change anything with admissions; what changes is that talent and success attract talent and success,” Chwastyk said. “Us going to the Elite 8 a year ago has really catapulted us into another level.”

Athletic reputation attracts stronger recruits, which in turn increases or at least maintains success.

“The better we are, the better our recruits are going to be,” Chwastyk said.

Men’s soccer coach Eric Wagner has noticed this upward trend this as well.

“Because of the success as a school and because of our success of our program, we’ve continued to recruit good players,” Wagner said.

He believes that the only change in admissions with recruitment has been the implementation of the early read process about five years ago.

“There’s no more power or no difference in the way admissions treats us except for the early read process,” Wagner said.

According to Vice President and Dean of Admissions Jim Bock ’90, the early read process includes a transcript, test scores, and a list of extracurricular activities. It doesn’t include personal information, recommendations, character, or essays, so the early read is not a guarantee that an applicant will be admitted or denied. But it does allow coaches to vet their prospective players and determine if the recruits’ chances of getting in are positive or negative.

“We alert the athletic director to those who are likely to be competitive in the process and who coaches should keep recruiting,” Bock said. We have been doing this for more than five years, and it is standard practice among our peers…

In essence, the Admissions Office determines [admissibility], and the coach determines athletic talent and potential.”

The application process is getting more competitive every year.

Swarthmore’s overall acceptance rate dropped from 17% to 9% in

the past four years following increases in the number of applications received. The class of 2020 was selected from 7,717 applications, while the class of 2022 was drawn from 10,749. Athletic Director Adam Hertz explained that the increasing competitiveness has also been reflected in recruiting.

“There have not been any significant changes in the application process,” Hertz said. “In fact, due to the increase in overall applications, the recruiting process has become more selective. Coaches are working harder to identify students who can help their programs and thrive in the Swarthmore environment.”

But this doesn’t mean recruited athletes are exempt from a complete evaluation by admissions.

“There are no guarantees of admission at Swarthmore,” Bock said. “Recruited students must still submit a full application for admission, and they will be reviewed among all other applicants in a holistic manner.”

Outside of admissions, Wagner feels that there have been other significant changes within the athletics department that have allowed Swarthmore teams to thrive.

“Strength and conditioning has improved dramatically… Coaches have evolved, and are doing a better job recruiting, and are doing a better job in coaching,” Wagner said.

Hertz goes on to explain the benefits of the strength and condi-

tioning program.

“The Matchbox has allowed us to fully develop a strength and conditioning program that now has two full-time coaches,” Hertz said. “Team buy-in of that program has gone a long way to improve our success. The benefits of that program are tangible and visible when we prepare for competition.”

In addition to the revamping of the strength and conditioning program, Hertz has noticed a change in the commitment of studentathletes that has contributed to their teams’ success.

“We now see students who understand that intercollegiate athletics requires so much more than just showing up for practice and games,” Hertz said. “It is a yearround commitment to technical, tactical, strength, and intellectual training.”

With recruiting, Wagner commented that the use of technology, including online databases and recruiting videos, has expedited his recruitment process, enabling him to be able to connect and identify with prospective players through text messaging and online databases.

“I think all the programs have been getting better and better since I’ve been here. And that’s just a result of the coaches’ working harder,” Wagner added.

Wagner and Chwastyk started coaching within weeks of each other. According to Chwastyk, they were both brought in as full-time

coaches after the cut of the football program in 2000. She believes that this cut allowed for more equitable resources across the remainder of the sports programs.

“It allowed all the programs to have full-time coaches,” she said.

Since then, the college has also gotten two full-time strength and conditioning coaches, added the matchbox, and provided resources to recruit and see potential players.

Recruitment continues to promote athletic achievement across the department. Recruitment relies largely on finding a fit for the student-athlete. Chwastyk believes that selling Swarthmore is playing a large role in establishing that fit.

“The big thing is recruiting kids who could possibly play Division I as a backrole player, but finding them and say[ing], ‘Hey, you want to play all around for four years?’”

Chwastyk said. “That’s the selling point for Division III, and academics is just the icing.”

For Chwastyk, the school should be a fit for the students both athletically and academically.

“It’s gotta be a fit for you as a student first and then an athlete.

Because I don’t want a happy volleyball player and an unhappy student,” Chwastyk said.

While coaches attempt to find a fit for the student’s academic and athletic interests, they also try to ensure that the student-athlete will fit in and positively contribute to the school.

“We dig a lot deeper now when

recruiting,” Wagner said. “We dig into the character of the people we’re recruiting. We know that is such an important part of the ultimate product that we get out of our players. If someone comes in here and they’re just not going to be a quality person, it makes it a lot harder for us to have them be a quality team member.”

Students who have an athletic talent add to the student body’s variety of talents. The college’s efforts to support recruiting stem from an attempt to increase campus diversity.

“In a similar manner, we also offer reviews of arts supplements during the admissions process for studio arts, music, dance, theater, and creative writing,” Bock said.

“All of these efforts contribute to building a diverse and intentional community. As we have become more selective over time, our coaches have remained critical partners in finding talented scholar-athletes. We enjoy our work with the department and watching our students compete.”

For now, the admissions policy hasn’t changed. Coaches continue to recruit as well as utilize resources like the strength and conditioning coaches to develop their programs and aim higher every season.

“We still have a lot of work to do, but these changes in culture lay a solid foundation on which to build,” Hertz said.

Should Swarthmore Join NCAA Division I Athletics?

Adam Schauer Sports Writer

Perhaps not so coincidentally correlated with President Val Smith’s arrival at Swarthmore, see my 2016 article online, entitled “President Val Smith and the Importance of Swat Athletics”, Swarthmore has matched its academic rigor with unprecedented recent athletic success.

The women’s soccer as well as the men’s basketball, tennis, and swim teams all frequent the NCAA Division III’s top 25 teams in the country. Likewise, new teams to the party include the men’s lacrosse team with their 2016 ECAC championship, the numerous new record holders on the track and fields teams, and the baseball team with their Centennial Conference championship and ranking as high as #6 in the country. This only covers the tip of the iceberg, as many teams project to perform even better in the 2019 seasons. While these positive performances speak to the hard work of the studentathletes and administration alike, it has sparked a foreign conversation to many on campus: should Swarthmore participate in NCAA Division I athletics?

The simple argument for this major movement would be that Division I provides a higher level of competition that these teams could now hold their own

against. The college boasts that athletics and physical wellness are integral parts of any educational experience, justifying the physical education requirement for all students. If athletics are included in this academic experience, why should student-athletes not seek to compete at the highest level possible as well? As the third-ranked liberal arts college in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report rankings, Swarthmore boasts a world-renowned curriculum. Why should our athletics be any different?

Looking more deeply into the implications of a move to Division I, the line between pros and cons becomes more blurred. First, the main change for studentathletes would be the allowance of dedicated funding for athletic scholarships. The NCAA upholds federal Title IX mandates that require men’s and women’s teams to receive the same number of scholarships proportional to team size, sport, and other factors. However, there are certainly major politics at play in the dedication of scholarships. For one, many have claimed that athletic scholarships without actual salary compensation at the Division I level is a mechanism for exploiting athletes, mainly minority athletes. Furthermore, the involvement of money in the college recruitment process complicates the already tense back-and-forth

between student-athletes and the numerous coaches recruiting them. It lends itself to corruption and the abuse of student-athletes.

On the other hand, it recognizes the merit, contributions to campus life, and extra work that student-athletes must undertake to master their sport.

The bigger issue on this campus would be about the tradition of the current need-only scholarship system. The institution of athletic scholarships would likely bring about a conversation over the creation of merit and academic-based scholarships. On top of this, the funds need to come from somewhere, potentially detracting from need-based scholarship availability while potentially drawing from other budget and endowment allocations. While there is little precedent for scholarships on campus that are not need-based, the McCabe scholarship is an example.

The NCAA’s justification for these scholarships is that Division I athletes both debatably devote more hours, and draw in greater money for their respective schools. This increased revenue could pay for the scholarships entirely and also liven up the surrounding Swarthmore environs with a new exciting entertainment option. Our sporting events would draw greater crowds, our fanbase could support a more dedicated

alumni network, and our popularity as a school would grow, bringing in notoriety and an even more competitive applicant pool.

This improvement in popularity would only make the school better, bringing on new applicants with their unique perspectives and improving the metrics that these rankings use to judge schools. A legitimate sense of school spirit and this stronger student body could also attract better professors, which, in turn, would also improve the school’s standing further. The transition could create a cycle of improvement for the school’s student body and national standing — especially since it has slid in recent years.

But if sports and rankings are not for you, there are other reasons still to support a transition to Division I athletics. For instance, a simple transition to Division I would improve the long soughtafter social scene on campus, creating more exciting athletic events for students and the surrounding community to get behind. The new funds from athletics revenue could go towards improved facilities, other athletic programming, or even non-athletic related endeavors entirely. Tongue in cheek, the procyclical nature of such a move could actually work out in this case.

Placing the obviously complicated issue of a transition to Di-

vision I aside, there are still other questions at play. One of the most interesting would be to see what conference Swarthmore would play in. The Patriot League seems like the easiest solution with a small geographic spread of schools across the Mid-Atlantic and New England. Swarthmore would be the smallest member, but only by roughly 1,000 students, which would only be reduced by the Swarthmore’s stated desire to increase the student body soon anyway. Another option would be to mimic what many consider to be the closest schools to Swarthmore at the Division I level, places like Davidson, Furman, Duke, the Ivy League, and others. A direct transition to any of these school’s conferences would be challenging for a multitude of reasons — namely geographic stratification and competition disparity. Furthermore, any existing Division I program would have far better facilities already in place, potentially creating greater discrepancies in competition level.

Other less traditional options would include acting as an independent school, unaffiliated with a conference (like Notre Dame football), or creating an entirely new conference of schools new to Division I from the NESCAC and Centennial Conference (and naming it, I don’t know, maybe, the Little Ivy League?) This process

would require approval from the NCAA but could prove to be the most successful for all parties involved.

And perhaps the best solution to all of these problems of a transition would be to simply wait, at least until Swarthmore experiences more consistent success across the various teams and the administration further proves its desire to emphasize athletic success. In that case, the school could pilot the transition with increased funding, assess the community’s response, and potentially move further from there. The endeavor may ultimately prove fruitless, but would give student-athletes and administration alike the knowledge of Swarthmore’s standing in NCAA competition and its athletic reputation.

In any case, Swarthmore athletes and administration alike have done commendable work to change the state and perception of athletics on this campus. Their work, even if not through scholarships, deserves respect, and enriches student life here. A shift to Division I could continue that enrichment, and deserves sincere consideration given all of its nuances and difficulties.

Athlete of the Week: Clay Conley Clay Conley ’20 made headlines at Haverford’s McElligot Invitational with their performance in the shot put event. Conley, a junior from New Canaan, Connecticut, recorded the Centennial Conference’s top shot put throw of the year at 13.00 meters. Conley’s throw was more than two meters further than the second-place finisher at the McElligot Invitational, and finished 14th overall in marks in the all of Division III this athletic year. The Garnet will compete next on February 16 at the Keogh Invitational at Haverford College.

Ping Promrat: What is your major and what motivated you to choose it?

Clay Conley: I’m a music and gender and sexuality studies double major. I came to Swarthmore as a math and music double major. However, three things changed: I stopped being cisgender, I stopped being straight, and math got far too difficult.

PP: What made you choose Swarthmore?

CC: I was a recruited track athlete for regular decision. I fell in love with my coach, Lauren Lucci; my host and future teammate, Maggie O’Neil, showed me how at Swarthmore you can do music, sports, and schoolwork, and I listened to a recording of Swarthmore’s Orchestra performing “Scheherazade” by RimskyKorsakov, and I was sold.

PP: How did it feel to record the top conference shot put throw of the season?

How do you balance motivating yourself on a personal level with the combined team aspect of the sport?

CC: Shot put is my baby. Of all the events I compete in, shot put is my favorite and I care the most about my performance. I’m chasing Nationals this year, so getting the top throw in the conference is, I guess in some way, just the first step. Track is a very individualized sport.

The throws [are] particularly [individualized] because there are no relays to compete in. It is every person for themselves.

Between my teammates, we have really healthy competition. We all want each other to do our best (e.g. PR), but we also all simultaneously want gold. I’d say we feed off of each others’ craving for first place.

PP: What led you to originally com-

pete in track and field as a kid?

CC: I started track my senior year of high school, because my best friend was a captain. I was the captain of the softball team, so I only intended to compete in indoor. However, I ended up winning counties, states, and broke my school’s indoor school record. Also, I was deferred from my ED school and saw track as a new avenue to get into college beyond academics. I then subsequently quit softball and fell in love with track and field.

PP: If you could change one thing about Swarthmore, what would it be?

CC: If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing about Swarthmore, I would remove all exclusive spaces that are rooted in the privilege of its members.

PP: Favorite spot on campus?

CC: Underhill seminar room. I’ve cried in that room, had existential crises in the room, had class in that room, and had amazing conversations in that room.

PP: Favorite Sharples bar?

CC: Indian bar! My teammate Naomi Bronkema doesn’t get the hype. It’s okay though, she is still perfect.

PP: What are your personal and team goals for the rest of the season?

CC: I feel like our team goal, specifically the throwers’ team goal, is to reach our personal goals. Track is so individualized that we just want everyone to excel personally. Like I said before, I’m chasing Nationals. But I care about shot put so much that I get really anxious and nervous when competing so if I can work through that this season...I guess we will just have to wait and see!