Swarthmore Phoenix, March 7, 2019

Today in OPINIONS: Laura Wilcox on Election Fraud A5, Larkin White on Coding A5, Billie Potts on Technology in Daily Life A6, James Sutton on Money in Youth Sports A6

PHOENIX

THE

Dani Marsh

Kristina Stallvik’s photo essay and interview with the

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Ash Shukla reviews the 24 hour show

March 7, 2019

VOL. 147, NO. 6

artist

Bald Soprano

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The independent campus newspaper of Swarthmore College since 1881

After Revote, SGO Announces Support for Board’s Divestment from Israel Bayliss Wagner, Daijing Xu, & Shreya Chattopadhyay Managing Editor, News Writer, & Editor-in-Chief A photo posted by the Swarthmore College Instagram account of a snow-covered Mertz Field accumulated over 80 comments in five hours on the evening of March 4. The commenters refer to the school and its students as “antisemitic,” “fucking Nazi scum,” and “racist bastards.” These were posted less than a day after the college’s Student Government Organization joined the student

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governments of NYU, Vassar, and multiple other colleges nationwide in its decision to publicly call on the school’s Board of Managers for divestment from companies that support Israel in its occupation of Palestinian territories on Tuesday, March 5.

The decision comes after weeks of intense debate among student groups who are invested in the issue, including the college’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Swarthmore Students for Israel (SSFI). Yet students were not the only people to weigh in on

Sunday’s vote — two days before the vote, several anonymous Twitter accounts began an ongoing campaign of targeted harassment towards members of SGO, SJP, and JVP who had spoken publicly about BDS. The first vote regarding this resolution occurred in a closed meeting three weeks ago, on February 3. The vote failed. SGO, however, decided to hold a revote on the basis that student groups had not been heard out evenly or sufficiently.

On Feb. 24, SGO heard student groups on both sides of the issue

discuss their concerns about the resolution. SGO then posted on their public Facebook page about the issue and invited members of the Swarthmore campus and community to attend their meeting on March 3.

On March 1, a public Twitter account calling itself “Stop Hate At Swarthmore” (@SwarthmoreHate) was created. In its tweets, the account called the proposed resolution to divest from companies that support Israel as “antisemitic,” “hateful,” and referred to SJP “an anti-semitic hate group.”

It also repeatedly referenced stu-

dents who had spoken to student publications about the resolution by their full names and Twitter handles.

Another public Twitter account, @Radical Alerts, then tweeted the location and time of the March 3 meeting to its roughly 3,000 followers, calling on them to “show up and protest this hate.” As a result, SGO members asked public safety Officers to be present at the meeting in case of any conflict.

Radical Alerts also called the resolution “an anti-American/Israel continued on page A2

Garnet Men’s Basketball Advances to Sweet Sixteen

Nara Enkhtaivan / The Phoenix

On Friday, March 1, the Garnet defeated Mitchell College 90-73.

Title IX Works With Transition Team, O4S Continues Work Laura Wagner & Maddie Palden Managing Editor & News Writer Just under one year ago, Organizing for Survivors released a list of policy and practice changes as demands to the college. In light of O4S’ demands, the Title IX Office, led by coordinator Bindu Jayne, updated its sexual assault harassment policies and procedures for the 2018-2019 academic year. The changes include creating a witness coordinator role, creating specific guidelines regarding interview length and breaks, extending the appeals period to five days, expanding interim measures, and outlining the rights and options that potential complainants have in the investigative process.

The Title IX Office released a document in September outlining changes to the college’s sexual harassment policies and procedures in an effort make them more accessible to students and to respond to student feedback.

“We did create this standalone document that identified the changes [to the policy], because one of the concerns that I heard from talking to students when I first started was, ‘Yes, I hear that changes have been made, but we don’t have the time and it’s not our expertise to sort of pore over the policy and compare it and understand what the changes are,’” Jayne said. “So I tried to very intentionally make it clear what the changes are so that if people still have concerns, they can address them with me.”

The Title IX office also switched from using internal investigators to external investigators this semester. Jayne created a feedback process about the Title IX adjudication process that allows the Title IX office to address concerns raised around any outside investigators or adjudicators. She said that the Title IX office has used continued on page A2

Swarthmore Adds Applied Mathematics Concentration for Math Majors Jino Chough News Writer

Swarthmore recently announced the new applied mathematics major, a special math concentration utilizing conventional math for use in more specialized fields in many disciplines, including biology, engineering, and physics. On February 8, mathematics professors Nsoki Mavinga and Joshua Goldwyn held an info session for the new emphasis for majors and minors in the Science Center.

“Pure mathematics, statistics, and applied mathematics provide the three primary specializations within the mathematical sciences,” said Professor Victor Barranca. “Considering the higher level facets of applied mathematics are distinct from both pure mathematics and statistics, the department considered it important to represent this specialization in its curriculum. Past course offerings in applied mathematics have been met with great enthusiasm, and a diverse body of students has expressed a strong desire to delve

deeper into the discipline.”

While applied math focuses on the use of the subject in conventional professions, the regular math major is based more on theory — with more emphasis on proofs and explanations.

“Applied math fits well in a liberal arts setting because it is interdisciplinary in nature, and provides opportunities for students to explore connections between their coursework in mathematics, engineering, natural sciences, and other fields,” said Professor Goldwyn.

“The applied math option pro-

vides an additional route through the math major that may appeal to some students with an interest in this area of mathematics.”

Students who are interested in the applied math major must have a mathematics-concentrated schedule, fulfilling the requirements for a regular math major while including other classes such as Differential Equations and Fundamentals of Applied Mathematics. Introduction to Computer Science and Probability in Statistics are also required for the major. “[I encourage] everyone with an

interest in mathematics and how it can be applied in ‘real world’ situations [to apply]. Applied math can be especially rewarding for students who enjoy working across disciplines,” said Goldwyn. “Typical problems in applied math can lead to development of innovative mathematical approaches and uses of advanced computational methods, and these problems can be drawn from physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, data science, and many other fields.” continued on page A2

BEP Phase One Nears Its Finish

Veronica Yabloko News Writer

Since its introduction in 2017, the biology, engineering, and psychology (BEP) building has made great strides toward completion and will be finished within the next two summers. The BEP project was introduced due to high enrollment in biology, engineering, and psychology, leading to a deficit in classroom and office space. Using Eugene Lang’s $50 million donation, the project is being built in two phases.

Janet Semler, Director of Facilities and Services-Capital Planning and Project Management, explained the progression and timeline of the project.

According to Semler, Phase One of the building, which is currently under construction, will be completed this summer, while Phase Two will be completed by the summer of 2020.

Phase One includes what is currently under construction: the portion of the building that will contain classrooms, laboratories, offices, and shared common

spaces. The building will have five floors in total: a ground floor, which will contain all three disciplines and the commons; a second floor, which will contain psychology and engineering; a third floor, which will contain primarily biology with some psychology departments; a fourth floor, which will contain only biology; and a fifth floor, which will have space for engineering and a greenhouse.

Phase One has taken longer than Phase Two will, since it makes up the majority of the project.

“Phase One includes about 75 percent of the total square footage of the project,” said Semler. “The entire program for engineering and all of the labs and teaching spaces for biology and psychology are part of this phase, along with group study spaces, classrooms and seminar rooms.”

This semester alone, vast amounts of progress have been made in Phase One. Though construction is not yet complete, much of the building is nearly finished and departments should be moving in around June.

According to Semler, construc-

tion is ongoing inside and outside the building. Some of the outdoor construction includes stone masonry on the north and east sides and the installation of doubleheight glass entrances. Construction inside includes installation of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems and programming of the heating system.

Much of the construction also puts an emphasis on energy efficiency. The building will utilize different innovations to promote energy efficiency: radiant flooring will be used to directly heat spaces, large skylights and windows will bring natural light into the building, and stormwater management will utilize stormwater for flushing toilets. Like the Science Center, the BEP building also has bird safe window glazing, to prevent birds from flying into the windows.

Phase Two will begin in June, when Hicks Hall will be replaced with the atrium of the building — an area with a common space for students, similar to Eldridge Commons in the Science Center.

The commons will provide writing

Photo courtesy of Andrew Zhu / The Phoenix

space for students, just like the Eldridge Commons, with room to accommodate up to 125 individuals for community events and celebrations. Outside the commons will be a terrace with sheltered outdoor seating and a view of the Nason Garden, which will also be expanded. Above the commons will be rows of skylights and walkways connecting the BEP building currently under construction with the atrium. The atrium will also have an elaborate staircase where the main entrance to the building will be.

According to Semler, the biggest current challenge facing BEP

construction is scheduling. Due to how short the overall schedule for Phase Two is, there is less room for interruptions such as those caused by weather.

“The working space in the Nason Garden for Phase Two construction will be much more limited than what is available along Whittier Place for Phase One, so careful scheduling of the various trades will be required to use the space efficiently,” Semler said.

“The team will continue to be tightly focused on the schedule for final occupancy in summer 2020.”

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THE PHOENIX NEWS

March 7, 2019

SGO, continued from A1 BDS resolution that will force the school to defund from U.S. companies that support the Jewish people.”

With Public Safety officers standing at the back of the room, Swarthmore students gathered at SGO’s open Executive Board and Senate meeting. After discussion on the status of various committees, Fouad Dakwar ’22 and Amal Haddad ’22, members of SJP core, spoke to the Senators, Executive Board members, and more than twenty non-members present about strategies to protect one’s safety and identity when being targeted in organized, politicallydriven online attacks.

“This is not new, this is something that’s been used against supporters of Palestinian human rights,” Dakwar said. “I, as a Palestinian, have witnessed my parents being the victims of these attacks constantly. There have been multiple times my parents’ jobs have been at risk, they have to defend themselves and prove that they weren’t doing anything harmful to anyone else, but only advocating for Palestinian lives, like their own.”

After the presentation, Matthew Stein ’20, co-president of Swarthmore Students for Israel, denied any involvement of him or his organization with the tweets, and emphasized his condemnation of the anonymous accounts.

At this point, SGO had been unclear on whether they planned to hold a revote on the resolution during the meeting. SGO’s president then motioned to hold a vote

among members on whether to make the meeting closed, which succeeded. Once non-members, excluding the press left the room, the Senate began its discussion of whether to publicly support SJP in its demands that the Board divest from seven companies.

Around ten minutes after students vacated the meeting room, at 8:26 p.m., Radical Alerts announced that SGO had closed its meeting, criticized it for “silencing out the voices of students,” and demanded the Senate to “vote no on this anti-Jewish resolution.”

Around 8:45 p.m., at the behest of a few Senators, the President and Vice President decided to hold the vote. SGO voted in favor of publicly supporting Student for Justice in Palestine and its divestment campaign. They also voted to draft two separate statements: one in support of the SJP resolution, and another to call the Board of Managers to reverse its 1991 ban on socially-conscious investment. They released the following public statement on March 5 and sent the same statement to the Board of Managers, chaired by Salem Shuchman ’84.

“SGO thus calls on Swarthmore College and its Board of Managers to implement a screen on investments in companies involved in repeated, well-documented, and severe violations of international human rights law in Israel / Palestine, including: Elbit Systems Ltd, Lockheed Martin Corp, Boeing Co, Bank Hapoalim BM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co, Hyundai Heavy Industries Co Ltd, and Caterpillar

Inc,” SGO wrote. “In the near future, we will release a longer statement calling for the removal of the Board of Managers’ 1991 ban on social movements influencing investment decisions.”

SGO Chair of Student Organizations Akshay Srinivasan ’21 explained what he believes is the significance of the resolution. “[The vote] recognizes the marginalized voices of both Palestinian students on campus and also throughout the world. We are showing that we support them,” Srinivasan said. “I think a lot of members of SSFI expressed concerns that this is anti-Semitic, but we are literally just calling for divestment from companies that hurt people.”

In the days after the vote, Stein stated that he feels the voting process was unfairly and poorly conducted.

“SGO decided to tell everyone they were not planning on voting and closed the meeting before voting secretly in favor of BDS. The whole process was messy and concluded in a shameful manner,” he said.

However, according to SGO President Gilbert Orbea ’19, the closed vote was a necessary safety measure as a result of the online harassment.

“We held a closed, anonymous vote for no other reason than to protect our members,” he said.

“Each and every one of us believes deeply in transparency and accountability to votes, which is why they are rarely ever anonymous and meetings are rarely ever

closed. But for this issue, we recognized the heightened possibility of a public vote following members into the future. We did not want to risk members being detained, especially members with ties to the region, or members facing potential harassment or physical violence for any reason. It is unfortunate that voting to support human rights puts our safety in jeopardy.”

Dakwar felt that the result of the vote showed bravery and solidarity.

“I am very pleased with the result, and I am thankful for SGO. I know this is a hard choice to make, especially with the recent organized cyber attacks that we’ve been receiving and what is sure to come.” Dakwar said. “I am so thankful that they join the movement and are willing to put their security on the line for Palestinians all over the world.”

In the wake of the public announcement, criticism of SGO on social media has escalated exponentially, as evidenced by the Instagram comments left on multiple Swarthmore College instagram posts, dozens of retweets on Radical Alert tweets about Swarthmore, and continual Swarthmore Hate tweets targeting specific members of the student government. On March 4, the day after the vote, Chairman of Students for Trump Ryan Fournier, tagged Stein under a Radical Alert tweet.

Stein, however, replied a few hours later, writing, “This ‘radical alert’ twitter account is not helping at all; in fact, as a student, I can say confidently that it’s mak-

Title IX, continued from A1 feedback to avoid utilizing specific external adjudicators that students raised concerns about.

Jayne and the Title IX office have been meeting with the Title IX transition team, the membership of which largely overlaps with O4S, to focus on implementing methods informed by transformative justice, which O4S core member Julius John BalisanyukaSmith ’21 describes as processes for perpetrators of sexual assault to amend their behavior.

“The idea behind transformative justice is that any one harm happens to an entire community,” he said. “There has to be an effort by perpetrators to acknowledge harm and to better themselves, and more importantly the entire community, in the process; there should also be an effort on the part of the community to forgive the perpetrators and to move away from the incarceration method.”

Morgin Goldberg ’19, a core member of both O4S and a member of the transition team, hopes to expand the transition team to reflect more voices on campus.

“We don’t want [the transition team] to be a smaller branch of O4S — it should include people on campus, ideally, and from different communities and a variety of identities who can speak to what

their needs are as well — so we’re hoping to get more people on the transition team.”

One of the tasks of the transition team is to vet transformative justice options to determine whether they would be effective for the Swarthmore campus and community. Jayne asked members of the transition team about helping vet transformative justice options in order to better determine whether they fit the community.

“I did a lot of the leg work in terms of identifying what resources exist within our community that we could incorporate in terms of transformative justice options, but the next step in that is vetting all of them and making sure that they fit,” Jayne said. “I’ve had some conversations with the student members of the transition team about their interest level in participating with that vetting process with me. The next process with that is figuring out what that looks like and the timing of that.

I’m hoping that we’ll do that work this semester,” she said.

Goldberg expressed that in order to be most effective, the administration should allow Jayne to provide input over a wide range of campus issues that intersect with Title IX, like Public Safety, the Dean’s Office, or the fraternities.

“Working with Bindu has been good so far, and I am hopeful — I am sure that she will do whatever is in her capacity to advance what we are trying to do — and I think that we are on the same page on a lot of things,” said Goldberg.

“However, I do think that that has to be paired with the administration’s allowing her to have serious input on serious issues on campus, especially as it relates to other institutions.”

In the meantime, O4S has been directly addressing such issues themselves with corresponding organizations, rather than doing so through the Title IX Office.

One of O4S’ current initiatives this semester has been working with leaders of the ICC and BCC coalitions regarding the external review of Public Safety from last spring. O4S members were concerned about the scope of the review, consultants’ methodology, timing and publicization of the forum, and their own personal experiences with Public Safety.

“We’ve organized a lot of people from groups in the ICC and BCC to voice their concerns about [the review]; together we’ve been discussing our own experiences,” said Balisanyuka-Smith.

O4S’ most public work this spring has been their putting post-

ers up in Parrish for the first few weeks of the semester in an effort to meet with Val Smith and discuss the demands not yet fulfilled.

Despite O4S’ flyering efforts, President Smith did not meet with organization outside of her office hours, which O4S attended. According to Goldberg, however, the fifteen-minute office hours meeting was not effective.

O4S is also embarking on new projects with SGO and Swarthmore Queer Union regarding the review of fraternity life and the expansion of resources for LGBTQidentifying and other students, respectively.

“The [SQU-O4S] collaboration is [about], ‘let’s use this [meeting] time to talk about O4S and how O4S can engage with different student groups in a better way,’ “And just [to] give people the space and time to talk about what their needs are, and then talk about their opinion of O4S and what gap they see O4S filling on campus,” Maya Henry ’20, president of Swarthmore Queer Union said.

O4S announced on Wednesday that they will be re-releasing their demands later this month.

Sharples works within budget to provide locally sourced food Tiara Tillis News Writer Behind the large metal containers filled with the bar of the day and down a hall leading to the kitchen, you can find a team of your fellow peers and community members peeling pounds of tomatillos or baking fresh apple pies.

Every day, Sharples employees and staff such as Linda McDougall, Director of Dining Services, Mary Kassab, Allergen Awareness Coordinator, Benton Peak, Executive Chef, and Joshua Szczypiorski, Production Manager, are working to meet the demands of the school and provide fresh, locally-sourced food to the Swarthmore community under their designated operating budget.

Sharples is a self-operating system on Swarthmore’s campus that adheres to the same budget lines and oversight as any other department on campus. According to Szczypiorski, once their operating budget is determined and awarded, the Swarthmore Dining staff is tasked with allocating funds towards purchasing food for the Swarthmore campus, maintenance within Sharples, and payment for students and staff.

According to Swarthmore’s Institutional Research, food services has been allotted $2.94 million per year since 1999 part of which includes the Sharples budget.

When proposing yearly budgets

to the college in early Spring, Dining Services takes into account the changes in food items, vendors, equipment, and staff that occur throughout the year. Szczypiorski works closely with this budget and fellow staff members. Szczypiorski also utilizes methods such as the Napkin Board to acquire student feedback.

The Napkin Board, a visit to the Sharple’s offices, or an email to Dining Services allows students and community members to provide their opinions and feedback to staff members. From these thumbtacked napkins, including other forms of feedback, the Dining Service team tries to bring in, replace, and try out some of the many suggestions they receive.

“We have a very different clientele here at Swarthmore. Based on what the needs are and how big our international student body is, we try our best to bring different tastes of the world and whatever they are used to,” said Szczypiorski. “Mainly people requesting things and bringing them to our attention is how new foods come into Sharples. A lot of the new things we bring in don’t really rock the budget. In the grand scheme of things, everything levels out and we typically spend the same amount of money”.

Just as new products are brought to the Sharples dining hall, such as sunbutter or a new brand of catfish at fish taco bar, new recipes

flow in and out of the kitchen as well. With help from students and ideas from what Kassab called “the Culinary Team”, which consists of Sous Chefs, the Executive Chef, and purchasing managers, the 4-week rotation of meals receives new additions and changes.

“It really is a matter of us saying here is something we have seen in the culinary world, here is something we have seen in food literature, and here is a bar that is popular, but here are some bones of something that we can logistically change and serve,” said Kassab. “We ask ourselves questions like can we pull this off in this time frame, setting, and with our budget? How can we mix and change things up?”

With Sharples acting as a selfoperating system, the “Culinary Team” is given the freedom and flexibility to try out new bars and food items. As new ideas are presented, Dining Services works with over 25 vendors to collaborate and execute their ideas. The vendors used by the Swarthmore Dining services are based on the quality of the product they are ordering and the long standing relationships Swarthmore has with some of their local vendors.

“In addition to buying directly from local food producers, Dining Services is proud to work with a number of local, privately owned and operated food distributors.

Each of these companies feature

locally produced items, provide employment to area residents, and support their communities. For example our main grocery supplier, Feesers Food Distributors, is based in Harrisburg, PA and in turn provides us with many local brands,” the Swarthmore Dining Services page states.

Just as Swarthmore sources a majority of their products from a series of local vendors, other institutions in the TriCo take advantage of local businesses, but are not as involved. Bryn Mawr, however, “offers local fruits seasonally and are working to increase the proportion of local foods available in the Dining Halls,” as written on the Bryn Mawr Dining Services page. Similarly, Haverford “offers a wide variety of “made from scratch” items daily using fresh ingredients that are local and organic whenever possible,” as expressed on the Haverford Dining Services page.

For years, Dining Services has been sourcing local food vendors and items to bring to the Swarthmore community. As new items are purchased, new ideas are pitched, and food options expand, the Swarthmore Dining Service team is working to utilize their budget to accommodate the evolving needs of their students.

ing everything worse on so many levels. Please don’t tag me on this post.”

In an email to the Phoenix, Stein also stated that he believes the Twitter attacks impacted the decision-making process negatively, both ethically and in their impact on the result of the vote.

“The tweets were wrong, plain and simple,” he wrote in an email to The Phoenix. “Individual members of Swarthmore should obviously not be called out from anonymous twitter accounts and right wing Twitter accounts should not be calling for protests against a college student government meeting; the whole thing was absurd. In terms of its impact ... this was terribly negative to SGO’s deliberation. On one hand, some members likely felt intimidated to pass the resolution and risk being called out publicly, but on the other hand I think the much stronger effect was that all anti-BDS arguments were associated with these twitter accounts in the minds of SGO members and that primed them to vote in favor of BDS.” Srinivasan believes that the scope of the public online attacks comes from the influence of right wing lobbying groups that distribute misinformation.

“The reason why so much misinformation exists, and why people perceive this as anti-Semitic, and why there’s so much backlash against this, and why, I’m assuming, some SGO members voted against this is that these groups, which are powerful right-wing lobbying groups that exist in the

United States right now have waged basically a campaign of misinformation against this and have been so effective at it that people are so afraid to speak out,” he said. “I think that definitely influenced people’s vote, but I also think it’s important because SGO is in itself in a position of privilege on this campus, and so while there are members of community who can’t speak out, because they are worried for their safety, that’s where we step in. it is important for us to take that step for them.”

In response to criticism from within and beyond the community that the vote quelled discourse, Orbea contends that SGO made the decision from a place of respect, not dismissal.

“What I hope is that people realize on both sides how much listening we did, how much conversation we engaged in,” he said. “I hope [people] take what JVP said at our meeting, which is that this vote isn’t against Israel existing as a state, it is not against Jewish Students or Judaism, it is not against those beliefs. It really was just a call for a movement of harm to not be perpetrated against a group of people.”

The President of the College, Valerie Smith, and the Board of Managers have yet to respond to SGO’s entreaty that the college divest. SGO will soon release a longer official statement about 1991 ban on socially conscious investment in the coming week. The Phoenix will continue to cover this story as it develops.

Applied math major, continued from A1 Julia Dalrymple ’21, however, is not quite ready to jump into the new course of study.

“The reason I’m not just automatically switching over to the major is because it’s too new,” said Dalrymple, who is majoring in math with an emphasis on statistics. “From what I’ve seen, all of the classes are pretty new.

I’ve never even heard of some of them.”

According to Dalrymple, students should do their research before committing to the necessary classes.

“One of the classes, I think it’s called ‘Stochastic and Numerical Methods,’ you can’t take at Haverford or Bryn Mawr because there is no equivalent to it and no precedent. If the people taking the classes say they are good, then I would recommend it,” Dalrymple said. “If I had gone into school already hearing about it, I probably would have gone into the major.”

Barranca describes that class in particular as a core class in providing a novel perspective on previous coursework.

“Stochastic and Numerical Methods (MATH 66) addresses a fundamental issue typical in modern applications of mathematics: since real-world problems are generally so challenging that they lack exact quantitative answers, there is a significant need for mathematical modeling and developing approximate solutions,” said Barranca. “Numerical analysis and stochastic processes together provide a strong and broad framework for studying such multifaceted phenomena.”

The major may be of more particular interest to those who wish to use math in applicable professions. According to Goldwyn, applied math majors will have more opportunities to study fields of mathematics based in differential equations, models, and numerical methods.

“I always liked the applied part of math over the theoretical,” said Dalrymple. “Coming here, I knew that meant working with statistics, which is used in everything.

I’m also a biology minor, and we use stats all the time.”

According to Professor Barranca, what distinguishes the statistics concentration from the applied math concentration is the perspectives and techniques used to approach issues.

Photo courtesy of Hyeyun Chae

“Since the real-world applications that motivate mathematical endeavors are inherently complicated, applied mathematics often involves constructing models to capture the essence of phenomena and uses them to make predictions or understand underlying mechanisms,” said Barranca. “In applications that directly involve data, applied mathematics and statistics demonstrate particular synergy, granting a complementary set of tools commonly used together in important emerging interdisciplinary fields, ranging from atmospheric science to machine learning to computational biology.”

Even though the statistics and applied math majors have more readily conceived applications past college, some people may opt for the more traditional math major to appreciate the ideas and theory behind the ideas.

“I am personally interested in understanding the theory behind mathematical concepts and engaging with rigorous and precise mathematical proof. As such, my interests align more with the conventional math major than the applied math major,” said Tarang Saluja ’22. “I would encourage students to major in applied mathematics if they want to learn about how they can use mathematics to work on solving problems in the real world.”

The implementation of the concentration is still a step forward in offering Swarthmore students the chance to experiment with what they might enjoy.

“The applied math major is great for students who want to find connections between mathematics and other disciplines as opposed to finding connections mostly within mathematics. It is great that Swarthmore is offering a mathematics track for students who enjoy applications more than theory and want to experiment with both sides,” said Saluja.

Regardless of the students’ choices, the Swarthmore math department will advise and support all students under its wing.

“The math department is committed to being a supportive and inclusive department, and we seek to provide many ways for students to further their mathematical education,” said Goldwyn.

ARTS

March 7, 2019 PAGE A3

A Feat of Absurd Proportions: The 24-Hour Bald Soprano Ash Shukla & Youogo Kamgaing Chief Copy Editor & Arts Writer It was 2:00 a.m. on Saturday, March 2nd, and a wall of round analog clocks, all ticking away and gradually running their circuit, stood adjacent to the entrance of the Frear Ensemble Theater. The clock in the center of the wall had several of its hours blacked out and obscured beneath a layer of black marker on its surface. Beyond the clockfilled wall, a life-size diorama filled the stage. The left side of the diorama showed a darkened kitchen that served as a sort of backstage for the production.

The main room, centered in the theatre, showed a simple English living room, complete with bright yellow wallpaper, unremarkable furniture, and an even less unique front door. In this centermost space, an equally unremarkable English family, the Smiths, began to converse amongst themselves. “The Bald Soprano” had begun, and nobody in the audience had any choice but to become an integral part of it.

“The Bald Soprano” is the English translation of “La Cantatrice Chauve”, written by Eugène Ionesco. The premise of

the absurdist comedy revolves around two English families, the Smiths (Emily Uhlmann ’19 and Max Marckel ’19) and the Martins (Shelby Billups ’20 and Arijit Nerurkar ’19). The Smiths have invited the Martins over for an evening, and before the Martins arrive, they argue amongst themselves about a deceased friend’s widow. When the Martins arrive, the maid, Mary (Josephine Ross ’21) announces their entry. The Smiths exit the stage, and the Martins, believing themselves to be strangers, engage in a lengthy conversation during which they come to the realization that they are husband and wife. When they find peace in the fact and fall asleep, Mary informs the audience that they cannot, in fact, be husband and wife. The Smiths re-enter, and during their conversation, the Fire Chief (John Wojciehowski ’19) arrives at their house, hoping for there to be a fire. When he finds out that there is no fire, he becomes disappointed, but the Smiths promise to call him in the case of a fire. Mary then re-enters and informs the two families that the Fire Chief is her lover. After the Smiths force her and the Fire Chief to leave, the two families argue about no issue in particular. They reach no

conclusions, and the play ends with an uncomfortable lack of resolution. The lights die down, and when they come on again, the Martins are in the Smiths’ living room saying the Smiths’ lines from the beginning of the show, having switched places. In the production on Friday to Saturday, this cycle continued for 24 full hours.

It made no sense. It was never supposed to make any sense.

“The Bald Soprano,” if nothing else, is a play that openly acknowledges its own absurdity.

Several run-throughs contained new “Easter eggs,” so to speak, of which most of the cast remained unaware before its occurrence. The interchangeable nature of the two main couples further removed any sense of stability or closure from the show. Between the twenty-four unique iterations of the same piece, some more unbelievable than the others, the seeminglypredictable cycle turned into one that made the audience howl with laughter, even during the twenty-fourth showing.

The pure absurdity that ensued among the two average English couples masterfully eliminated any chance of meaningful interpretation of the piece, leaving the audience to wonder what the

Photo courtesy of Juliane Ding / The Phoenix

hell just happened. For audience members who stayed to watch multiple cycles of the show, the performance became like a game to spot the differences.

Uhlmann, who played both Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Martin, said that the Easter eggs worked to keep the cast awake and engaged throughout the cycles.

“We knew the Easter Eggs were coming, but, unless we were assigned to carry them out, we did not know when they were coming or what they would entail. There was one Easter Egg in which the doorbell quacked like a duck instead of ringing. The improvisation that my cast members came up with made me completely break onstage ... I think I held it together better for the other Easter Eggs — except for the one in which Max was in a Speedo.”

The show also displayed a fascinating contrast between the disconnected nature of the characters in their environment, and the evident togetherness of the cast, crew, and audience. The characters within the play displayed no understanding of each other, often spouting long chains of non-sequiturs in conversations that led to absolutely nowhere. When they argued, they not only talked over each other, but displayed a flagrant lack of willingness to engage in any fort of meaningful communication.

The characters of “The Bald Soprano” talked for no other reason than to talk, and when they did speak to each other, they seldom faced each other. Instead, they stood straight forward when they spoke, as if to address the audience. This detachment from each other not only contributed to the uncomfortable nature of the piece, but amplified it to its level of nonsense.

This detachment and sense of disfunction, according to Uhlmann, was deeply intentional.

“One of the most important things we worked on in the process leading up to the performances was learning to be especially precise with our movements,” she said. “Our director would be able to explain this more eloquently, but we talked about how we were playing “paper cut-outs” and not actual, living people. Every move we made needed to be intentional.”

Despite the disjunction among their characters, the six-member cast showed an extraordinary level of togetherness of the production. Of course, involvement in a 24-hour production like “The Bald Soprano” demands

Photo courtesy of Juliane Ding / The Phoenix

nothing less than utmost collaboration and sensitivity to other performers, but the synchronization and compassion that the performers showed for each other brought a new level of depth to the piece. No actors seemed to miss a line, and if they did, then the other cast members worked around the error in a manner that made it undetectable. In addition to the closeness between the actors, the audience consistently engaged with the show. The audience broke down in peals of laughter at times, and loudly gasped at others. The more seasoned audience members cheered during the very last show at every actor’s entrance, as well as chanting along with the cast during the ending refrain of “It’s not that way, it’s over here!”

It is difficult to begin to imagine the amount of labor and dedication that led to the final 24-hour performance. The most obvious physical toll is the exhaustion that one would experience after hours and hours of performing, but Uhlmann detailed other sacrifices as well.

“Our rehearsal schedule was pretty intense as we had to cram a semester’s worth of rehearsals into the first half of the semester. We rehearsed from 5:00 p.m. [to] 10:00 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays and 12:00 p.m. [to] 6:00 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.

In addition, we were all required to go to the gym regularly and eat healthily. All members of the cast were asked to give up coffee and any other form of caffeine.

Our director explained that the performance was going to be a marathon, and we needed to prepare our bodies accordingly.” She added, “The lifestyle changes (no coffee, exercising, eating healthily) were ... difficult at first, but I ended up appreciating the impact these changes had on me and I am still maintaining them

now — except for the coffee; I am so drinking coffee again.

Alongside the level of sacrifice involved in the show, Uhlmann commented on the euphoria and elation that she felt once the production of Herculean scale finally closed after 24 hours.

“Oh my gosh,” she said, “it was one of the best moments of my entire life. Words cannot describe the sheer joy and immense release I felt. I was shaking uncontrollably and could not stop smiling. The audience reaction was incredible; they shouted the last lines of the play with us and then gave us a roaring standing ovation. It was the most rewarding feeling. I was so grateful and filled with the most amazing sense of accomplishment.”

The 24-hour run of “The Bald Soprano” will perhaps be remembered as one of the most ambitious, if not the most ambitious production of the Swarthmore theatre department to date. The cast and crew deftly wove together the utterly absurd, nonsensical, undecipherable play into what became a once-in-alifetime performance to attend — not only the play as a whole, but each individual hour with its quirks and eccentricities.

When asked if there was anything else that should definitely be mentioned, Uhlmann gave a warm acknowledgement to the unity that she and everyone involved with the production felt as it took place.

“I would love to express my gratitude to everyone involved in the process and production, and to everyone who came out and supported us. I think we averaged about 33 audience members per show with a final view count of over 700. I am so honored and grateful that we received such a positive response.”

Solange Says Less, Feels More on “When I Get Home”

Max Gruber Arts Writer

The accompanying short film to Solange’s most recent album, “When I Get Home,” opens with the artist draped in jewels, standing motionless in front of an imposing painting by Mark Rothko. The spectacle undoubtedly calls to mind Beyonce and Jay Z’s recent staging of their “Apesh*t” video in the Louvre, where their presence alongside some of western art’s most coveted objects spoke to the Carter’s celebrity while proclaiming the right of black bodies to coexist and occupy those spaces.

In her short film, Solange is similarly interested in representation, with numerous shots of black cowboys, dancers, and performers in various location in Houston, Texas, including the Rothko chapel sequence which opens the film. In many ways, the film builds off of the videos to 2016’s “A Seat at the Table,” which featured Solange and her ensemble in a number of architectural and natural landmarks across the southwest United States.

“Obviously with ‘A Seat at the Table’ I had so much to say,” the artist told curator and critic Antuan Sargent. “With this album I had so much to feel. Words would have been reductive to what I needed to feel and express. It’s in the sonics for me.”

In this context, “When I Get Home” makes sense. Listeners expecting an accessible album will be sorely disappointed here. Instead, Solange has delivered a dreamlike soundscape of angelic vocal refrains and ethereal instrumentals. “When I Get Home” delivers a vibe in spades, one which lulls the listener into a state where the album’s understated moments will either speak to the listener or leave them scratching their head.

On first listen, listeners might be confused by the album’s lyrical content. Solange’s declaration that she had less to say is certainly present in the album’s serial repetition. On numerous tracks such as “Time (is),” “Things I Imagined,” and “Way to the Show,” Solange appears content to fall back on a phrase or a hook and simply ride the instrumental. Oftentimes this makes the album feel like a collection of sonic motifs, which can work to the album’s benefit or its detriment depending on the listener’s perspective. Admittedly, a number of tracks have little staying power outside of the context of the record, as their sub-twominute runtime prevents them from saying anything meaningful on their own. However, it is clear based on the album’s sequencing and the way that each track’s instrumental bleeds

into the next that this is a project whose merit should not be judged merely as the sum of its parts. Even some of the album’s more gripping standalone tracks such as “Almeda” fade seamlessly into the next.

At its best, “When I Get Home” coaxes listeners into a trance through the combined force of Solange’s repetitive, angelic humming and instrumentals which are understated without being bare.

The album truly clicks when listeners are engulfed in the experience. Before long, listeners may find themselves nodding their heads to Solange’s playful verse at the end of “Biz” or delighting in the bass licks which color “Way to the Show.” Other instrumental highlights on the record include “Sound of Rain” and “Stay Flo.” Several of these beats come courtesy of a number of high profile collaborators, with Devonte Hynes of Blood Orange, Earl Sweatshirt, Steve Lacy, Tyler the Creator, and Pharrell numbering among the album’s songwriters. The vocal features are equally eclectic, with Atlanta rap giants Gucci Mane and Playboi Carti lending verses alongside British singer and songwriter Sampha.

Ultimately, these vocal features are a mixed bag, something which can be said for a number of other moments in the tracklisting as well. While

the Carti feature meshes quite well on “Almeda,” the song that Gucci appears on, “My Skin My Logo” takes its off-the-cuff approach a little too far. The song’s casual and improvised verses plod along to a relatively inconsequential instrumental that leaves little impact on listeners. While the record features some striking highlights among these low-key tunes, a number of tracks are simply boring. The opener and the closer are both frustratingly low-impact and similar. Some critics have pointed to this as a strong point, a sort of reinforcing of the dream-like elements of the record. I disagree. While the album draws its strength from some of its quieter moments, moments such as these are too quiet for their place in the tracklisting and marr the otherwise excellent sequencing of the record.

“When I Get Home” is a confident album from Solange who, after her breakout success in 2016, seems to feel confident stripping things back topically and at times vocally. At various moments, Solange’s delivery can feel merely pretty, with her vocalisations blending into an agreeable if forgettable instrumentals. These tracks, however, are not a majority in the tracklisting, and the album’s best moments should be celebrated for how much they deliver with-

in such an ephemeral window.

Those planning on giving this album a shot should listen to it from front to back. It really is a record where one needs to sit back and tune out to tune in.

Listeners’ enjoyment will ultimately come down to whether they find the general atmosphere and aesthetic of the album compelling. It’s not often that I come across an album that I want to like without being sure if I do. “When I Get Home” holds a great deal of promise

and a number of genuinely excellent moments, but I doubt it will be remembered as great.

Author’s note: For those interested in an album which explores short musical themes with a similar neo-soul and R&B twist, I wholeheartedly recommend Blood Orange’s 2018 release “Negro Swan.” It delivers a similar experience to “When I Get Home” with sharper tunes and a more cohesive aesthetic.

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THE PHOENIX ARTS

March 7, 2019

Dani Marsh: The “Odd and Melancholic” Femininity of Fashion Illustration Kristina Stallvik Arts Writer This past July I met the brilliant illustrator and animator Dani Marsh at an annual queer art event hosted by the Tate Britain. Eager to contribute to my project exploring the presence of gender norms, expressions, and dynamics in differing professional industries, she invited me over to her dorm room at the London College of Fashion in North Acton, London to chat. The following interview from Dani gives a glimpse into her artistic practice as she discusses the gendered implications inherent in the bifurcation of her work, embracing dualities of beauty and oddity, an expectation of sexualized bodies amongst fashion illustration, and more.

All photos courtesy of Kristina Stallvik

DM: Primarily, I’m trained as a fashion illustrator, but I would like to create more animation and moving image storytelling. Hopefully once I’ve made some money and gone freelance, then I can start making a lot more films.

In regards to animation, I think gendered assumptions about creativity are dependent on the field and types of work. The more “mathematical” creativity like graphic design, animation, architecture, stuff that involves you being quite technical — not that drawing doesn’t require intelligence — are thought of as male. But then my other work, like watercolors or stuff like that, is seen as feminine based creativity.

Often times people don’t take my work seriously because it’s feminine. It seems quite twee to some people. But if you look closer, I think it’s quite creepy and little bit off. I mainly draw women, and it’s great because you can really just celebrate womankind. I’m exploring different bodies, gender nonconformity, this massive spectrum of different people... You can create the people you want to see represented. It’s not even conscious most of the time, I’m actually trying to be more conscious about it. Creating work of women who are quirky-looking has helped me embrace that about myself.

So in a lot of my drawings they’ve got spots on their skin, gaps in their teeth — a lot of my own insecurities coming out - but then it looks really good. It’s quite empowering, actually.

I draw a lot of naked women, but nudity doesn’t have to be inherently sexual. My final major project was about longing and happiness you feel when you’re nostalgic — so it was aligned with my work’s theme of both beauty and feeling somewhat off.

When I was in the process, everyone told me to make it more sexual and I was like, ‘This is a personal project about childhood and feelings I had about finishing uni and moving on.’ There [is] a lot of demure work in fashion illustration and I think I sit somewhere in the middle. Sexuality is a very important part of most people’s lives, but my art doesn’t need to always be about it. I found it quite infuriating the amount of people who were like, ‘Yeah your work is a bit safe and naive.

When I started to get more confident in myself, my work changed massively. Definitely. My whole drawing style changed completely from wanting everything to be perfectly in proportion, to disregarding the rules and really going full “ugly.” This kind of drawing motif I’ve become obsessed with, pig nose girls, is like super fucking weird! I love the dynamic of being really feminine but at the same time, being a little bit uneasy, weird, and melancholic. That’s something I try to explore in the characters I create. A lot of “feminine” art is thought of as not as important. You get stick from people for being too “girly,” and they say “girly” like its a dirty word. My work is all about embracing skewed, odd features within tropes of traditional beauty.

People perceive the commercial side of fashion illustration to be all about photorealistic beautiful women with long hair. But people who work in the industry actually want it to be “edgier.” This idea of edge, which is usually synonymous to sexualization, has been haunting me for years. I hear, ‘you should look more edgy, dress more edgy, make more edgy work’ and that bothers me because not everyone’s work needs to be the same or totally infused with sex.

I’m bored of it, I find it exhausting. There’s already a lot of sexualing a certain type of body in fashion illustration and a demand that women be represented in a certain way.

After our discussion, Dani graciously offered me a bright pink beverage and the time to investigate and photograph her living space. As these photos depict, her work is a compelling exploration of not only fashion, but what it means to exist as a womxn. Her integration of the playful and uncanny create new and compelling worlds which I’m sure will flourish in her future animation pursuits. Dani’s work is a much needed interrogation of fashion illustration’s oftentimes-singular narrative of womxnhood.

Grappling with Gauguin’s Primitive Depictions at the Barnes Foundation Elena Moore Arts Writer

I first came across a Paul Gauguin painting at the Barnes Foundation. I was astounded to see Gauguin’s depictions of Tahitian coastlines juxtaposed starkly against the peachy nudes of voluptuous English women and the intricate Dutch wrought-iron metalwork. In each gallery at the Barnes Foundation, his pieces leapt out of their frames — their vibrant color harmonies and flattened planes immediately caught my eyes. While numerous works from Gauguin’s vast ouvre are displayed at the Barnes Foundation, I was drawn to one — “Haere Pape.”

In “Haere Pape,” Gauguin invites us into a picturesque scene of the Tahitian coastline — a young topless woman washes her vibrant cloths against a backdrop of native wildlife, rippling and reflective ocean water, and a shining azure sky. “Haere Pape” is one of many paintings Gauguin created in Tahiti after leaving Europe in search of an unsullied, natural paradise with fewer uptight social conventions.

When first gazing at the painting, the colors grabbed my attention. Gauguin repeats hues throughout “Haere Pape,” creating

an echoing effect between the colors in the subject’s body and garb and the colors in the Tahitian environment. We see the deep midnight blue of the woman’s skirt — a traditional Tahitian pareo — as well as the rusty terracotta hue of her chest reflected in fur of the dog-like creature sipping by the shore. This same terracotta hue is also echoed in the dusty terrain as well as in the shimmering reflections in the water. In addition, Gauguin plays with the sunny yellow color, apparent in the woman’s floral pareo, the grassy hill, and the shoreline opposite of the subject. This color play draws our eyes in a meandering pattern, alternating between colors in the woman’s form and colors in the landscape.

Gauguin’s sweeping, organic outlines further set the painting apart from its surroundings in the gallery. Gauguin builds up the small hill of the shoreline in accordance with the shape of the Tahitian woman’s body. The curving, meandering lines of the small shrubs seem to outline the woman’s form, encapsulating her within the forest green foliage. After a few glances, I also noted that the shape of the woman’s bent right arm was echoed in the angular beachwood near her feet, and the

reflection of the angular beachwood in the seawater mimics the position of the drinking dog as well as the branches of the shrubs in the distance. Gauguin creates a natural progression for the viewer to observe; our eyes are carefully led from the woman to nature and back again.

While stunning in appearance, the painting also alludes to Gauguin’s identity as a primitivizing and colonizing painter; while Gauguin’s aesthetic choices depict his subject as at ease with nature, his inaccurate proportions, painterly strokes, and use of primitivizing imagery render the scene as an evocation rather than a realistic, ethnographic depiction of Tahiti.

As in many of his paintings, he glorifies and exaggerates her “natural” inclinations, highlighting his colonial lens. I found myself caught, dancing between the two intertwined narratives of lauded painter and primitizing painter.

Furthermore, while Gauguin’s color and geometric choices highlight the harmony between the Tahitian woman and the Tahitian landscape, his odd proportions and apparent painterly strokes reminded me that “Haere Pape” is an evocation, a glorification rather than an ethnographic portrayal of Tahiti.

Rather than craft a painting with

hidden paint strokes and acute attention to detail like many others in the Barnes Foundation collection, Gauguin seems to highlight his painterly qualities; when viewing the painting in Room 6 at The Barnes Foundation, the application of the paint and the brushstrokes are immediately obvious.

Gauguin’s selection of imagery similarly hints at the primitizing nature of “Haere Pape” that I struggled with. Gauguin includes the Tahitian words “Haere Pape” in the bottom right hand corner of the painting. While the use of written language in a painting —I saw it in many others at the Barnes Foundation — may be common, the specific employment of the Tahitian language suggests Gauguin’s self-identification as “primitive.” His claim to the language in addition to the aforementioned heightened colors and schemative anatomy suggests that Gauguin may claim to be an islander himself. Even Gauguin’s choice of pose for the subject alludes to the primitizing nature of the painting. The subject appears to be holding an indiscernible object, possibly a drapery or a flower. Regardless of the identity of the object, the woman’s hands are clasped together in an almost prayerful gesture. In addition, the

woman’s head rests in a bowed position; this choice of imagery constructs her as a pious, religious figure — a trope of colonialist thought.

After observing the hues, the outlines, the proportionality, and the imagery, I was left with a decision — whether to appreciate “Haere Pape” solely as an aesthetic masterpiece or whether to consider the colonial, primitivist ideologies that fueled its creation.

Ultimately, I could not separate the painting from the personal and political constructs at play.

While cultural appreciation in art is important, exaggeration and romanticization of cultures outside of the dominant culture is what ultimately perpetuates the myth of primitivity; this concept reaffirms the distinction between the “us” and the “them.” I left the Barnes Foundation with one important thought: Gauguin’s artistic endeavors in Tahiti serve as a reminder to look beyond the aesthetic choices of a painting and to instead critically analyze the ideologies at play. We must grapple with the myth of painters like Gauguin to shed light on the unchallenged power of Gauguin — and white male painters in general — to exploit indigenous identities and culture.

Today, the rise of the #MeToo movement provokes necessary dialogue about the intersection between the art world and sexual harassment. There have been calls to remove paintings by the Paul Gauguins of the world. Yet stripping museum of these artists would diminish these imperative conversations. We must make room to discuss the aesthetic qualities of paintings in conjunction with their history and their context.

Visit the Barnes Foundation at 2021 Benjamin Franklin Highway in Philadelphia to view “Haere Pape” and other Gauguin pieces.

OPINIONS

March 7, 2019 PAGE A5

So You Like Coding?

Larkin White Op-Ed Contributor

T

oday’s tech industry is given a mysterious glow by popular culture. Coders are seen as prodigies creating a newly imagined future whose mechanisms the rest of us no longer understand.

This exciting and secretive position can be extremely alluring for math-inclined college students unsure of their professional path. Yet colleges who produce computer science majors should be doing a better job of forcing them to truly reckon with the ethical consequences and implications of their post-undergraduate work.

Being from San Francisco, I am familiar with seeing bus-loads of 24-year-olds who make hundreds of thousands of dollars for engineering my phone and the myriad other technologies I rely on every day. I am also familiar with the corresponding gentrification and job displacement due to automation, unanticipated consequences of tech

industry work. Given the state of the modern tech industry, I propose that Swarthmore’s computer science department add a required class to its major regarding the ethics and implications of work in the fields of tech and computer science academia.

Computer science is similar to other S.T.E.M. departments in its straightforward teaching of the skills and technical concepts involved. Yet I would argue that the nature of computer science in today’s world distinguishes it as an academic subject from departments like biology or math. The newness of the tech industry and its rapid rate of change make societal consequences hard to predict, but the national and global effects make it doubly important that they are accounted for as much as humanly possible. Tech workers have already brought with them enormous automation and job displacement, a fake news epidemic, machine bias that perpetuates racism and misogyny, serious threats

to data privacy, and automated or more easily used weaponry such as drones. It is imperative that the further development of these technologies not be guided solely by pursuit of quarterly returns and innovation, but rather by apprehension of their consequences. This will become increasingly important as the tech industry continues to take a more invasive role in social infrastructure — just look at China’s new social credit system. That is not to mention the extreme gentrification and job displacement that can occur simply from an influx of tech employees to seemingly any city.

Nonetheless, computer science remains an easy choice of major and career. The cuttingedge future being created in Silicon Valley is compelling for anyone who likes math and has no clear professional leanings.

Majors are in such high demand that it is easy to get serious, high-paying jobs straight out of undergrad. The median salaries at Google, Facebook, and

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Netflix are all near or over the $200,000 mark and the median age of their employees is only late 20s. Swarthmore students may likely be swayed less by factors such as these, but even those incentivized by their love for math and coding or desire to innovate the future are disconnected from the ethical implications of the work that it leads to. The incentives make it extremely easy for students to major in computer science and even enter the field without considering their accountability to the American and global public. Other S.T.E.M. departments such as engineering may also permit high-paying jobs soon after undergrad, but the unregulated power granted by their jobs is significantly less.

The power of the tech industry makes it important that those entering the industry have carefully considered their reasons and understand the impact of their work.

Considering the current popularity of computer science at Swarthmore it is essential that

Hyeyun Chae / The Phoenix

PHOENIX

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the class I am proposing be a mandatory component of the major. There is already a philosophy and computer science first-year seminar titled “Ethics and Technology,” yet the small class size and its self-selecting nature suggest that not enough people, and especially not those who might benefit most, are taking it. Even for Swarthmore students pursuing work outside of Silicon Valley or Ph.D.s, the new class could be an invaluable way to shape the nature of their studies and teaching as well as influence their future interactions within the field.

The specifics of my proposed course are not as important as its creation, though there are several conditions that it should fulfill. The course should be focused on the ethics of computing technologies, largely revolving around reading and discussion. Stanford’s “Ethics, Public Policy, and Technological Change” along with Swarthmore’s pre-existing first-year seminar could be used as a jumping off point.

Given the S.T.E.M. inclination of many computer science students, the class would not need to involve overly difficult social science or humanities work, but neither would it be a write-off class; the point is to require rigorous consideration of the end for which a computer sci-

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ence degree is pursued. Ideally, it would be a capped seminar of 25 students or so to facilitate every student’s engagement, although the multiple sections and professors required might prohibit this. The class would be a full credit for majors, though perhaps a half-credit class could be offered for the minor. It would exist either as a prerequisite to the major or as one of the 12 credits. Computer science faculty are spread thin, so staffing would be a problem, yet the class would not necessarily need to be taught by computer science faculty alone, or even at all. The philosophy and political science departments stand out as possible collaborators or alternatives.

I do not fault the computer science department for so far merely focusing on the skills and theory involved in computer science — after all, that is what most fields do, and reasonably so. Yet I do believe that the current environment of the field of tech requires altering the ruling approach of computer science instruction. It seems opposite Swarthmore’s Quaker, liberal arts values not to.

Stop Conflating Election Fraud with Voter Fraud Laura Wilcox Op-Ed Contributors Months after the midterm elections in November, North Carolina’s 9th District still does not have a representative in Congress. The election in this Republican-leaning district was one of the closest in the country, with Republican Mark Harris recorded as winning 905 more votes than Democrat Dan McCready. However, before the election was certified by the state’s Board of Elections, allegations about election fraud on behalf on the Harris campaign began to surface. The election fraud in the 9th District is real, albeit very rare, but it should not be confused with voter fraud, which includes attempts to vote by noncitizens, and is often used to call for more legal restrictions to voting. It is

important to note that election fraud and voter fraud are separate issues, and laws claiming to address voter fraud only serve to prevent low-income people and people of color from exercising their right to vote.

The allegations of election fraud in the 9th District were stunning: under the direction of already-notorious political operative Leslie McCrae Dowless, campaign workers illegally collected absentee ballots and even filled out unfinished ballots in favor of Republican candidates. Statistics about voting patterns in the district also raised alarms. In Bladen County, the part of the district where the election fraud investigation has been focused, absentee-bymail ballots favored Republicans by 24 points. Throughout the District, however, absenteeby-mail ballots favored Demo-

crats by 23 points. The Republican lean in Bladen County’s absentee-by-mail ballots looks even more suspicious considering that only 19 percent of the county’s absentee-by-mail ballots were cast by registered Republicans. Investigators believe that more than 1,000 absentee ballots may have been tampered with, a number greater than Harris’s margin of victory in November.

In response to the findings of the investigation, the state Board of Elections has called for a new election. According to “FiveThirtyEight”, this is the first “do-over” congressional election since 1975. Since the race was already so close, it’s possible that the tampering with absentee ballots changed the outcome of the election.

Luckily, it was caught, and residents of the 9th District

Rejecting Swarthmore Hate EDITORIAL

On Sunday March 3, SGO voted to support Students for Justice in Palestine’s resolution to “ban the ban” and to end the college’s investments in seven companies involved in the occupation of Palestine. That same day, Swarthmore Hate, an anonymous Twitter account, began targeting leaders of SJP and SGO. In a series of tweets, they shared The Phoenix’s news articles, photos, and information about the ongoing SGO vote. They called students antisemitic and dangerous, tagged their personal Twitter accounts, and compared them

to KKK leader David Duke. As a board, we condemn these unfounded attacks on student activists and organizers and the use of our publication to reaffirm their message of hate.

The Phoenix aims to serve the student body and Swarthmore community by providing news, relevant information, and the general feelings of the campus on a wide range of issues. Nowhere within that mission supports hatred and the encouragement of violence against anyone.

Journalism is about accountability — of institutions, of political and social actors, of individuals. At its core, it is

oppositional to power. In making information accessible and available in its appropriate context to the community, journalism disseminates power.

The reporting that The Phoenix publishes is designed to inform the community on the issues that affect them most. The opinions section is designed for students and community members to discuss those issues openly. We are committed to providing a space for these dialogues. We are not committed to publishing opinions that are not substantiated in facts and personal experiences, that call for violence or hatred against any group or individual, or that

have the opportunity to vote again, but they will not have a representative in Congress for months.

This rare and egregious example of election fraud must not be conflated with voter fraud and used as an excuse for more restrictive voting laws.

Republicans are already guilty of this: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last week, “for years and years, every Republican who dared to call for common-sense safeguards for Americans’ ballots was demonized by Democrats and their allies. We were hit with left-wing talking points insisting that voter fraud wasn’t real...That modest efforts to ensure that voters are who they say they are and are voting in a proper place were really some sinister rightwing plot to prevent people from voting.” Senator McCon-

nell shamelessly used the election fraud in the 9th District to justify years of Republican efforts to pass voter suppression laws, their solution to a problem experts say is nonexistent.

It is deeply misleading to use the events in the 9th District to call for laws that target voter fraud, a non-problem, and only serve to disproportionately prevent low-income people and people of color from voting as these groups are less likely to have photo identification. Election fraud and voter fraud are completely separate issues: requiring stricter identification for in-person voting will do nothing to prevent political operatives from illegally collecting and altering absentee ballots. Since what happened in North Carolina seems to be the closest thing we have to fraud in our election system, the Re-

publicans who profess to be so committed to the integrity of elections should do everything in their power to investigate the events in the 9th District thoroughly, prohibit Harris from running again, and make sure any necessary legal action against the Harris campaign is taken. Implying that election fraud is the same as voter fraud to justify laws that prevent Democratic-leaning groups from voting is deliberately disingenuous. Equally important, we should recognize the election fraud in the 9th District to be the exceedingly rare event it is and take care elections maintain their perceived legitimacy.

deny the lived experiences of others.

Swarthmore Hate has not said who owns the account or why they will not share their views publicly; it is part of a coordinated, political attack that weaponizes a very real issue — antisemitism — to attack students. Anonymity can have a purpose in dialogue. It can ensure the safety of an individual or protect students from retribution. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that.

Anonymity, however, is not meant to be a shield from accountability. If you want to say something that is harmful or controversial that is not a just

reason for being anonymous.

Threatening the physical and psychological safety of fellow students is not a reason to be anonymous. There is a difference between fearing for your safety when speaking about your beliefs and being afraid of being held accountable.

The harassment of student leaders is not a matter of free speech. Spreading lies under the guise of a personal opinion is not a matter of free speech. As students, we owe it to each other to genuinely engage in conversation in a way that is based in facts and mutual respect. We need to create an environment that encourages activism, that

encourages students to speak out about what they believe in.

The Phoenix will not be weaponized to attack students for doing just that.

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THE PHOENIX OPINIONS

March 7, 2019

The Implications of Realizing our Cyborg Nature Billie Potts Op-Ed Contributor

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ccording to Pew Research Center, 94 percent of adults ages 18-29 own a smartphone. This puts most of us just seconds away from the internet. On average, according to the University of Southern California Annenberg, we spend 24 hours online every week. Given how inseparable we are from our digital devices, I would call ourselves cyborgs — beings with biological and mechanical parts. Our smartphones are a technological extension of our bodies, and the internet an extension of our minds. This has implications for how we should understand smartphone apps and our relationship to the Earth.

The sense of panic a smart-

phone user feels when the device is about to die, the way that we talk about the battery running out of power, and the loss of self we feel when separated from our smartphones reveal our cyborg nature. The needs of our smartphones become our needs as well; charging our smartphones becomes more than habit. Similarly, many of us turn to the internet when we have a question about the world. The internet is our second brain. These trends are not new. The smartphone is just the newest iteration of a tradition of blending technology with our biology. We used primarily to consult books or each other. Now, we have the internet as well.

The idea that we are cyborgs precedes the rise of the internet and smartphones. For example,

Donna Haraway’s 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” draws on the idea of humans as cyborgs to extend feminist thought; she is able to do this due to the 20thcentury collapse of boundaries between humans and animals, organisms and machines, and the physical and non-physical.

Cyborg imagery allows Haraway to productively challenge dualisms like nature/culture and male/female. While Haraway does not connect the cyborg to the inseparability of humans and technology, her manifesto seems prescient in beginning to consider the feminist implications of the cyborg.

Because our technology is inseparable from us, we should treat the nonliving world with care and care about how we are designed. Animism provides one method of acknowledging

Look Back to Look Forward Giorgia Piantanida Op-Ed Contributor

History is our past, the present, and the creation of our future. It is what has shaped us into the people we are today.

The places in which we stand right now is a result of the millions of years and millions of actions that led up to this exact moment, and the rest of our lives are to be shaped in a similar way. The effect history has on our lives is completely inevitable. We cannot pretend that what has come before us will have absolutely no effect on the choices we make every single day. And this is why we have to know our history in an unbiased way — the history that defines us as individuals, as well as the history that has created the complicated society we exist in today. Without such knowledge, we cannot hope to move forward and affect any kind of substantive change.

History is a key part of our knowledge base because it gives us a blueprint off of which we can improve and make better choices than our predecessors.

It is especially important that it is taught and learned without

strong biases, as that is the only way we can hope to receive the full picture.

Speaking about history, or even bringing it up as a topic of interest, is something that often elicits annoyed groans. History textbooks are dry, unexciting, and written from the point of view of the victor, lacking facts about non-Western, nonwhite countries and cultures.

It is not exactly what people reach for in their free time. And that is understandable — history will never be of immense interest to everyone. Expecting everyone to want to dig deep into the trenches of the past is simply too much. Having a basic understanding of the past, however, can be of massive help in making future decisions.

Here in Northern Ireland, where I am studying abroad, societal history is of the utmost importance. The bulk of the history the students learn in schools, however, is centered around England and its path to empire building, which ties in nicely with why Northern Ireland belongs to the U.K. at all.

Students never had the chance to learn an unbiased version of their land and their coun-

try. Instead, Protestant Unionists who believe they must remain part of the U.K. celebrate historical events such as the Siege of Derry, in which they defended their small Protestant settlement from the dethroned Catholic British king. Catholic Nationalists, who wish to unite Ireland, remind their people of the historical struggles they had to endure against the Brits, from oppression to murders.

The histories these two opposing groups rely on are not only in direct conflict but also lead to the creation of more conflict as time goes on. After all, you don’t have to look back very far to see the most violent time of conflict — the Troubles, three decades of intense violent conflict between the Catholics and Protestants, were only about 30 years ago.

How can primary and secondary schools limit students’ knowledge only to the history of England and its empire? It is not uncommon for Northern Irish students to come out of school and barely know anything about the Holocaust, a disastrous event in world history that impacted the shape of the Middle East and Europe

the relationship we have with our technology. The religious belief of animism treats both living and nonliving matter as alive. For instance, Marie Kondo’s tidying methods, which incorporate aspects of Japanese Shintoism, require you to thank the items you discard. In doing so, we recognize that everything has a spirit. By adopting practices that reject the object/ subject dualism and insist on respect for all, living and nonliving, we can address many of society’s ills. For example, the linear lifecycle of products cannot be sustained on a finite planet. By respecting all matter, living and nonliving, we can begin to develop a consciousness of where our goods came from and where discarded goods go.

We must take seriously how parts of ourselves and our

world are being designed. Not only for the sake of the environment, but for the sake of ourselves. For example, social media is used by 88 percent of those ages 18-29 and plays a major role in our lives. Yet, we do not formally learn about how to use these parts of ourselves in a constructive way. Social media is designed to keep us hooked. The barrage of likes and favorites and retweets is meant to keep us coming back.

If we really are cyborgs, this becomes a question of bodily autonomy. Corporations are designing our cyber body parts with the intention of keeping us from living offline lives. It is our responsibility to hold them accountable for doing this.

As cyborgs, we should reconsider the ever-blurring relationship between our technology

and ourselves. Animism provides a useful framework that allows us to avoid destroying the Earth. Inquiries into how our cyber bodies and minds are being designed are crucial to understanding ourselves and what we should do.

forever. Not only that, but it is a catastrophic period that can draw serious parallels to the Troubles and that can be used to learn how to move forward and avoid such heinous violence in the future, by understanding why people were pushed to it. The students that come out of school today with limited knowledge of history are the same adults that will be impacting their society in a few years. If they don’t have the tools available to them to predict what the consequences of their actions might be, then the decisions they make will not be as informed.

Lack of historical knowledge is not limited to Northern Ireland. In fact, it has replicated itself in so many other parts of the world. Take a look at Italy — before World War II, Italy was the first country to elect a fascist leader, Benito Mussolini.

Mussolini was elected because people were desperate for their economy to be revived and their living conditions to improve, which Mussolini promised.

While some argue that he did improve the country, anyone who has any understanding of world and European history

will know that his accomplishments were far outshadowed by his failures, especially as Adolf Hitler stood by his side in 1930s and 40s.

This past has created the Italy of today. In the country’s most recent election, in May 2018, Lega Nord, the party that was voted in, can be described as a pseudo-fascist political party.

Much of the historical knowledge held by the voters was focused on the wins of Mussolini rather than structuring a full picture of the country he was running. Lega’s speeches often cite Mussolini’s ‘great Italy’, and their party leader has even gone on the record calling for an ethnic cleansing of any nonItalian in Italian streets.

Being Italian and having voted in these elections, I look at what my country has produced and am baffled by it. Initially, I wondered whether anyone had even bothered learning from history. I now realize that voters may not even have fully understood what that history meant. Many Italians understand the pretty side of fascist Italy, in which all the trains ran on time. What is overlooked is the pain and suffering so many

endured during this time, or just how many lined the streets to watch Mussolini’s head be paraded on a bloody stick. This history is what people need to understand in order to make the best decisions possible for their future.

When I was quite young, I heard the phrase, “You must learn from history before it repeats itself.” Since then, I have seen it proven true time and time again. People do not want to sit and discuss something that happened in a forgotten past world because it may seem irrelevant, or maybe just plain boring. They want the quick facts that help them pass the big test, but this often comes with strong Western biases and tales from the point of view of the victor. But we have to destroy these beliefs to make improvements in our future because although tomorrow is uncertain, we can make decisions today to not lead us down a road we have already walked. With the knowledge of our ancestor’s mistakes, we have an obligation to do better than them.

ally glancing up from a newspaper. Then again, my athletic career was pretty mediocre.

The explosion in cost of youth sports is partly a symptom of the modern obsession with getting kids into the best college possible. The NCAA gives out three billion dollars in athletic scholarships each year, and parents afraid of rising tuition fixate on sports as a discount. Of course, the vast majority of athletes don’t get scholarships. The tens of thousands some families spend on the hope of scholarships might be better spent actually saving for college.

But sports do provide a boost in admissions, often for wealthy, white, students. Even at selective, non-scholarship colleges and universities, recruited athletes tend to have lower standards for admission.

Sports function, much like legacy admissions, as affirmative action for the wealthy. So parents send their kids to development camps and private coaches.

And even though the increasing intensity of youth sports is largely driven by good intentions — kids and parents both want to succeed — it’s bad for the athletes. Focusing primarily on one sport leads to far higher rates of burnout and stress.

I grew up playing tennis, and for many of the best players, matches were tortuous. Kids as young as nine or ten would scream at themselves for miss-

ing serves, throw rackets, and obsess over their rankings. Early specialization also leads to overuse injuries like tendinitis and stress fractures. And specialization means missing out on opportunities to play other sports that are just as fun.

Sports are valuable — they teach values like teamwork, hard work, and grace under pressure. But fixating on competition and improvement, in effect making the sport an end in itself, subverts those goals.

When a player’s success is paramount, spending whatever it takes to get better makes perfect sense. But that individual achievement comes at the expense of communities: the elite travel baseball team takes away the best players from four Little League teams, the advantages gained from a private shooting coach pushes players who can’t afford one down a depth chart.

There’s no simple solution.

Parents are willing to spend money, and the market accommodates them. One “easy” thing to do would be for nonscholarship schools to stop giving athletes preferential admission. But no single school is willing to take that plunge alone. It wouldn’t be a total fix at all, anyways. Exactly like the college admissions process, it looks like competition and investment will continue to increase in youth sports, only with sports psychologists replacing S.A.T. tutors.

Money is Ruining Youth Sports

James Sutton Op-Ed Contributor

America is known for its obsession with sports. We have four of the five largest professional sports leagues in the world and by far the largest system of collegiate athletics. Children tend to play more sports as well; very few other countries have youth leagues as well established as Little League, and sports are more intertwined with high schools than any other country.

You might think, then, given America’s history and culture, and the dominance that professional sports exert on TV, that youth sports would be booming.

If you only looked at the financials, you’d be right. According to The Atlantic, American youth sports leagues had a 17 billion dollar market valuation in 2017, a number greater than that of Major League Baseball.

But like so many other parts of modern American life, economic growth in youth sports hides deep and growing inequality. There are two diverging populations: the wealthy who are more likely to play sports, and the underprivileged, who are less likely to. The first group, made up of kids from families making over 100,000 dollars a year, has seen increasing sports participation since 2011, according to the Aspen Institute. The same study notes that participation has fallen in families making less than

50,000 dollars. What’s even more shocking is the disparity in participation rates, defined as playing a team sport for at least one day: 34 percent in families making below 25,000 dollars a year compared to 69 percent in families making at least 100,000 dollars.

Sports were not always the province of the wealthy. For most of American history, kids played sports primarily with friends, in backyards and sandlots. When athletics were organized, it was through neighborhood leagues and local associations, like Little League, the YMCA, and CYO. The only options for older kids were high school teams. Playing a sport year-round was very rare — the best athletes tried to play as many sports as possible.

In the last seven years alone, the number of sports played by the average young athlete has dropped from 2.3 to 1.8. These structures meant there was some measure of economic integration (obviously divisions by class and race still existed), and, most importantly, the vast majority of kids shared the same athletic background.

But that world is going away.

Little League participation peaked in the 1990’s with three million players. Around 2.4 million play today. Amateur Athletic Union basketball has risen at the expense of parochial and community leagues. Popular high school sports like football, baseball, and basketball have

all experienced decline. Like so many other “mainstream” institutions (those that incorporate people from many sectors of American life), the local team, coached by parents, is slowly dying.

There isn’t one reason for this drop. A generation that grew up “fully digital” means more kids are spending more time indoors. The childhood obesity crisis could be a factor as well, though it just as easily could be an effect. The biggest reason, however, is that parents have figured out that sports, supposedly meritocratic, can be bought.

Wealthy families are spending an increasing amount of time and money on their children’s athletic pursuits. Families whose children play hockey and lacrosse, for example, spend an average of around 7,000 dollars yearly, factoring in travel, equipment, and private coaching. The most committed spend over twice that. Wealthy families not only spend more money than working-class ones, but they also spend a larger share of their incomes, according to The Atlantic.

Money in sports doesn’t just mean better equipment. It means private coaching (which runs about 100 dollars an hour in many sports), access to elite travel teams, and time for parents to drive their kids from tournament to tournament.

This all translates to huge advantages for wealthier kids, and

the creation of a parallel world of elite athletics. In my high school, for example, elite twosport athletes were very rare. If you were very good at a sport, say basketball, you would play for your school for the winter, then spend the rest of the year working out with trainers and competing on AAU travel teams. If you were really excellent, you’d only spend part of the season on your school’s team, or maybe not at all.

There’d be better competition and coaching in private academies or travel teams.

This dynamic, where seeking better competition takes precedence over all else, decimates local sports. The best players concentrate on one sport, concentrating talent narrowly.

And the kids who can’t compete with the elite teams are often discouraged from joining at all. The parallels to political debates about the economy are striking: there are fewer and fewer “middle-class” sports teams, just the successful, sheltered wealthy and everyone else.

Why do parents do this?

Driving hundreds of hours, spending thousands of dollars, the massive emotional investment in watching teeenagers run around on field — it doesn’t seem to be how most adults want to spend their time. My own parents certainly didn’t want to. Most of my memories of them at my Pop Warner football games are them occasion-

SPORTS

March 7, 2019 PAGE A7

Men’s Basketball Cruises to Sweet Sixteen James Sutton Sports Writer

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Nara Enkhtaivan / The Phoenix

idway through Saturday’s game against MIT, Cam Wiley ’19 sized up his defender, sent him lurching to the right with a crossover, then snatched the ball back to his left and drained a step-back three. In any other game, this would be one of the highlights of the night. But on Saturday, threes were so easy to come by that the daring move by Wiley faded into a blizzard of jumpers.

Earlier, on Friday evening, the Garnet dispatched Mitchell College as expected, cruising to a 90-73 win. The Mariners did put up a fight in the early going, leading by two midway through the first half. But Swarthmore clamped down shortly after, ending the half on a 8-0 run capped off with a buzzer-beating, half-court heave from Ryan Ingram ’21. The Garnet settled in, and held a sizeable lead for the rest of the game.

MIT was supposed to be a far tougher challenge. Coming in ranked No. 12 nationally, with a championship in the formidable NUMAC under their belts, they were easily the most daunting opponent Swarthmore had faced this season.

The Engineers, however, failed to live up to expectations from the start. Swarthmore began the game with an incredible

stretch of offense.The Garnet jumped out to a 17-7 lead by the first timeout, and the lead never dipped below thirteen points after that. They were up by 25 at halftime, leading by 40 with eleven minutes to go in the second half.

Swarthmore’s offense was, in fact, historically good: the thirteen threes that opened the game broke the DIII record and tied the NCAA record for consecutive threes made. Guard Conor Harkins ’21 led the way by shooting 100 percent for the night on sixthrees. Three other Swarthmore players, all guards, made multiple treys: Ryan Ingram ’21, George Visconti ’22, and Wiley. Overall, the team shot a jaw-dropping 82 percent from three and 72 percent overall (no, those numbers aren’t backwards), both Centennial Conference records.

The Engineers simply could not stop Swarthmore — the threes seemed to come as easily as layups for the Garnet. The performance from outside also set up scoring inside. When MIT committed to running Swarthmore off the three-point line, the Garnet would simply dump the ball into the post. Forwards Zac O’Dell ’20 and Nate Shafer ’20, bigger and stronger than anyone the Engineers could throw at them, scored easily as extra MIT defenders watched helplessly, afraid to abandon

their man and give up the three.

Head coach Landry Kosmalski claims that he was unaware of the of ruin his team was unleashing on MIT. “I don’t always know what’s happening during the games because I’m watching other stuff ... I didn’t put [it] together until after the game, because I didn’t look at the stat sheet at halftime ... I’m watching other stuff, making shots is a bonus.”

It must have been a titanic act of concentration for Kosmalski, because everyone else in the gym was acutely aware of Swarthmore’s dominance. Tarble Pavilion was the loudest it has been all year as Swarthmore fans displayed a decidedly unQuaker bloodlust. Chants and heckles rained down on a bedraggled MIT squad, and Public Safety officers had to intervene to keep fans from spilling onto the court. Sawyer Lake ’20, a proud member of Swarthmore’s rowdy front-row cheering section, said “My thought was that [since] we were up so much, people would leave, or lose intensity, but we were up by so much, we just wanted to destroy them.”

Visconti led the team with 22 points, closely followed by Wiley with 21, Harkins with eighteen, and Shafer with sixteen.

Wiley, who also had five assists, passed the 1,500 career points mark on a driving layup early in

the second half.

Following these two wins, Swarthmore is less of a sprinter racing toward the finish line than a runaway freight train.

In their win streak of twelve games and counting, their average margin of victory has been twenty points. The Garnet are peaking at the exact right time; MIT was both their highest ranked opponent and their season high in points. They still have to win another to match their Tournament performance last season — reaching the Elite Eight — but the team, mostly made of players with last year’s trip under their belts, looks to be executing on an even higher level than last year. Wiley believes there is more going on than experience, however, saying “Experience certainly helps, but our team spirit and cohesiveness is why we’re playing at such a high level” The Garnet head north to Amherst for their next matchup, against sixth-ranked RandolphMacon College. Kosmalski figures they’ll be a tough challenge. “They’re a very physically tough team, a very mentally tough team, they’re going to defend us really well ... offensively they’re going to attack us.” Randolph-Macon does boast the nation’s fourth-ranked defense, but after this weekend, stopping the Garnet looks like a tall order for anyone.

Photo courtesy of Swarthmore Athletics

The Realliance of American Football The Champions League is Magic!

Adam Schauer Sports Writer Denard Robinson, Christian Hackenberg, Zach Mettenberger, Aaron Murray, and Trent Richardson were names that once struck fear in the hearts of their opponents on college football fields. The star quarterbacks produced two NCAA national championships, perennial conference championships, numerous FBS season records, and high draft selections. All were highly touted NFL recruits with the potential to continue their success after careers at elite and well-respected football schools.

Yet Robinson failed to convert to a premier running back with the deep Jacksonville Jaguars backfield, Richardson started for the Cleveland Browns and Indianapolis Colts mustering only 3.3 yards per carry, Mettenberger and Murray played exclusively as backups, and Hackenberg never even played a regular season game. Their names were soon forgotten, and they quickly fell from the public eye. With them are a plethora of other NFL busts with recognizable names like

Matt Asiata, Zac Stacy, and Nick Novak.

This ragtag hodgepodge of former Division I college stars looking to make a name for themselves professionally, NFL players hoping for a final send off, lifelong football journeymen, and hungry young talent have become the makeup of an up and coming professional spring football league: the Alliance of American Football. The controversial startup has given new life to many player’s careers, both young and old, hoping to showcase some of this talent by taking advantage of the spring lull of the NFL’s offseason. Offering standard contracts of nonguaranteed 250,000 dollars over three years provides a modest compensation with the precedent expectation that some players may leave to pursue the NFL once again. In this regard, many have dubbed the league “the NFL’s development league.” It would undoubtedly be different from the MLB’s minor leagues or the NBA’s G-League due to its independence from the NFL, but would produce the same talent and feeder system that the high-

er professional leagues enjoy.

Despite starting its inaugural season just a few weeks ago after the Super Bowl, however, the league has already faced numerous controversies. Before even coaching a game, well-respected former NFL coach Brad Childress stepped down from the Atlanta Legends with numerous eventually disproven reports that Michael Vick was leaving with him. Then, the league received 250 million dollars in emergency funding as a last ditch effort to be able pay its first payroll. This led many players and fans alike questioning the league’s sustainability and leadership.

And the legacies of predecessors to the AAF as professional leagues under the NFL do not exactly instill confidence in these constituents. The AAF will have a lot to prove, more as a business than as a sports league. The Arena Football League’s attendance has been in decline and further shrank this past season from nineteen active teams at its peak to just six. The United Football League of the late 2000s only continued online

Ankur Malik Sports Writer While the best domestic European leagues like the Premier League and La Liga boast an incredibly high standard of soccer, the UEFA Champions League has always had a special place in the hearts of soccer fans who follow teams in Europe. Before every Champions League game, the Champions League anthem is played as the players from the participating teams walk onto the pitch and line up in front of the crowd. The anthem is so majestic that when it reaches the final line of its chorus, “The Champions,” it gives fans goosebumps, myself included. I can’t imagine what it must be like for the players standing out on the field — they must feel invincible.

One of the greatest soccer players of all time, Zinedine Zidane, said of the anthem: “magic... it’s magic above all else. When you hear the anthem it captivates you straight away. You just want to see what is going to happen.”

Lionel Messi, arguably the greatest player of all time, was also full of praise. “When you’re

on the pitch and you listen to the anthem you know it’s an important and special match.” His teammate at FC Barcelona, Luis Suárez, added: “even from the stands, from the outside, it’s incredible.”

The Champions League is not just the pinnacle of European club soccer, but also the ultimate stage for club soccer worldwide.

This annual competition is where the top clubs from the best European leagues compete for the right to call themselves the best team in Europe that season. Every four years, the FIFA Club World Cup is played, where the most recent champion from each soccer confederation participates. The most recent Champions League winner represents Europe in this unique tournament.

The format of the Champions League is fairly straightforward.

UEFA, the Union of European Football Associations, organizes the competition. Entry is based on a team’s performance in the previous season in their domestic leagues. The first phase is the group stage. Thirty-two teams enter, and are divided into eight groups of four teams. Dur-

ing the group stages, in every group, each team plays the other three on two occasions — once at home and once on the road. The number of teams gaining automatic entry to the group stage is based on the country’s coefficient. Countries that have strong leagues and national teams have high coefficients, and as result multiple teams from these countries receive automatic berths.

The top four ranked associations — currently Spain, Germany, England, and Italy — receive four automatic spots, filled by the four highest finishing teams in those leagues the season before. With 55 member countries in UEFA, for many countries, teams must go through a series of qualifying rounds just to earn their spot in the group stage. For example, Tottenham Hotspur FC, who finished fourth in the Premier League last season, automatically received a place in the group stage even though they were nowhere close to being ‘champions’ of the English league. On the other hand, the league champion from a weaker nation, like continued online

Athlete of the Week: Jeremy Rockaway ’22 As the Men’s Varsity Swimming Team wrapped up their conference play with a Centennial Conference championship win at Gettysburg College, Jeremy Rockaway ’22, a first-year student from Oviedo, FL, took home the Most Outstanding Rookie award for exemplary first-year performance.

Rockaway took home gold in the 400 IM and 200 Fly events, bronze in the 200 I.M. and gold in the 400 medley relay team. The Garnet won the Centennial Conference Championship for just the second time in the history of the program, and look to send swimmers to the NCAA championship on March 20.

Ping Promrat: What is your intended major, and what interests you about that subject?

Jeremy Rockaway: I’m still undecided, but I’m really enjoying the math and economics courses I’m taking right now. Seeing how math is applied to create realistic models has been really fun.

PP: What made you choose Swarthmore?

JR: The combination of great academics and a friendly, welcoming team led to me choose Swarthmore.

PP: What was your favorite moment outside of swimming with the team this year?

JR: We have team dinners in Media or Philly occasionally and those are always a blast. But my favorite moment was probably watching a handful of us attempt the Morton Monster eating challenge during a breakfast at The Coffee Station.

Atziri Marquez/ The Phoenix

PP: You won gold in three events at the conference championships.

How are you able to combine your personal goals and achievements with the success of the team? What are your goals for the rest of the season?

JR: Everybody swims faster when we compete as a team, so my personal goals were made possible through supporting my friends and teammates around me. My goals for the rest of the season are to have some great relays at the NCAA Championship meet in Greensboro.

PP: Who is your role model in the sport and why?

JR: Our seniors (Jeff Tse, Michael Lutzker, Chris Smith, Chuck Yang, Jerry Gu, and Doug Leonard) have been my role models this year because they truly lead by example in and out of the water.

PP: Favorite place to study?

JR: My favorite place to study is anywhere in Cornell because I can always find a group of friends there.

PP: Favorite Sharples bar?

JR: My favorite Sharples bar is definitely the salmon dinners because the potatoes they serve with the salmon are the best.

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

JR: I would add a few new meal options at Sharples for some more variety because I think everybody could appreciate that.

PP: What are the team’s goals for the NCAA meet?

JR: Jeff Tse, Chris Smith, Tom Ward, Alec Lawless, and I will all be heading to the NCAA meet in two weeks. This is the largest group we have ever sent to nationals (and the meet itself just keeps getting faster) so it’s really cool to see how much the team is improving. Our goal is to score points for Swarthmore at the national level, whether it be on relays or individually.

March 7, 2019

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