The Battalion- July 9, 2019

TUESDAY, JULY 9 | SERVING TEXAS A&M SINCE 1893 | © 2019 STUDENT MEDIA

ROOTED IN RESEARCH

Students assisted in research on the Langford roof, testing which native Texas plants could withstand extreme weather conditions.

Meredith Seaver — THE BATTALION

NEWS

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The Battalion | 7.9.19

Congratulations to

Custodial Associate of the Month, Dee Roberts

Associates who receive this award are recognized for going above and beyond their normal duties to promote teamwork, unity, a positive attitude, kindness and exceptional customer service.

Thank you, Dee, for all your hard work and dedication to our Custodial Training Crew!

Meredith Seaver — THE BATTALION

The signs prohibiting graffiti are located in the tunnels between main campus and West Campus.

Washing away Aggie art New signs on Wellborn tunnel passageways prohibit graffiti

Abigail Ochoa, Editor-in-Chief Brian Bass, Sports Editor Camryn Lang, Content Editor Khadeeja Umana, Content Editor

Meredith Seaver, Photo Chief Brady Stone, Page Designer Sydney Clark, Page Designer

THE BATTALION is published once every other week during the summer (except

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By Khadeeja Umana @Khadeeja_Umana Students have used the walls of the tunnels between West Campus and the MSC to express themselves artistically and to advertise for organizations for many years. Recently, signs have been placed along the tunnels to prohibit this graffiti.

The signs were put up after Texas A&M officials reviewed the Campus Master Plan and the recent changes to University Rule 51.99.99.M0.02 which states “Chalking is not permitted on any vertical surface including but not limited to buildings, steps, signs, statues, benches, picnic tables, and walls — including the walls of the Pedestrian Passageway and the Vehicular Passageway, both off of Wellborn Road.”

Kelly Brown, associate vice president of the division of marketing and communications, said the signs were

put up to keep in mind the perspective of the maintenance team that cleans the tunnels.

“Specifically, with regard to the Pedestrian Passageway, while individuals would use chalk for their messages on the walls, periodically we would find someone used a substance other than chalk that would be very difficult to remove and/or cause damage to the brick,” Brown said. “Also, many businesses were using it as a place for their advertising, and that contributed in part to the changes.”

Biomedical sciences senior Ashton Hutcherson is part of an organization on campus called A&M Artists.

“I know most of the time it’s used for advertising, which isn’t really what I want to see when I go under there,” Hutcherson said. “But, a lot of times there’s like really cool murals and interesting pieces, and it all just reflects the creativity and innovation of the students at A&M.” Electrical engineering senior Jordan Klepser was one of the first few students to take to social media about his

thoughts on the new rule.

“I heard rumors about some apartment complexes using paint instead of chalk, which kind of ruins it for everybody else because people have to go down there to clean it and spend money and time,” Klepser said. “But it’s more than just that, I can’t count the number of times that I saw something unique down there that brightened up my day or I thought was creative. It really gave students a platform to express themselves in different ways, ways that you might not expect.”

Klepser said restricting paint and enforcing a fine may solve the issue of maintenance having to do the extra work to clean the tunnels.

“There’s no reason to not use chalk down there. It’s not harmful to the walls, but paint and things like that are,” Klepser said. “It’s definitely become a part of the culture that students get to know when they come here. It’s one of the little things that makes the time that you go here much better.”

NEWS

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The Battalion | 7.9.19

Reevaluating Core Values

Cassie Stricker — THE BATTALION

A&M President Michael K. Young wrote an email to faculty, staff and students on the importance of respect 3 days after a video surfaced on Twitter of an A&M student using racial slurs.

President Young and students discuss racism on A&M’s campus

By Lexi Ellis @lexiellis10 On June 28, a Snapchat video of a Texas A&M student explaining a Punnett square using racial slurs several times was screen recorded and posted on Twitter.

Since then, the topic of racism on A&M’s campus has come to the forefront of conversations between students, professors and A&M’s President Michael K. Young.

“This behavior is abhorrent and against the core values that we share and to which we aspire in all we do, including those of respect, excellence and integrity,” Young said in an email to the faculty, staff and students on July 1.

Young also highlighted the importance of diversity on A&M’s campus and said Aggies should be vigilant to address and confront the cause of hate speech. He said Aggies should

call out hate speech and racism when they see it, and report incidents to Stop Hate, A&M’s system to file reports of hate speech.

“There are so many Aggies representing the best of who we are in serving, loving and respecting each other. Incidents like this hit us at our core. To be clear, those who champion those beliefs represented in this video are not welcomed at Texas A&M University. Please respect and take care of each other,” Young said in the email.

A&M’s official Twitter account responded to the video as well, tagging the Stop Hate website and tweeting a link to Young’s statement.

“As Aggies, we believe in treating everyone with integrity & respect. Help make #TAMU a welcoming place for all and report any incident of hate,” A&M’s tweet said.

Other Twitter users also began tagging A&M in the video post.

“This behavior is abhorrent,” the official A&M Twitter replied to the users. “Thank you for alerting us to it. We have passed this along so Texas A&M officials can look into

it.”

Currently, there is no more information on the student’s case or the steps being taken.

Although this instance happened off campus, students said there are times when they experience racism on campus.

Graduate assistant and professor Vladimir Garcia personally experienced racism outside of the post office on campus during the fall 2018 semester. While he was waiting to meet another professor, a couple of students walked over and began to harass him.

“One of them just looked at me and told me, screamed at me, and said ‘Go back to your country, we don’t want you here’ and when he said that a couple of times that was a scary moment,” Garcia said. “I think it’s important that the student body talks about how to be more inclusive, because I think we are enriched by other cultures and by other points of view.”

Garcia said professors have control over spaces in which students discuss and interact, and they can help by being proactive and allowing positive discussion.

“I think it would be nice to see how the university can create spaces where people feel comfortable being themselves and not being judged because of the color of their skin,” Garcia said.

Jasson Quintanilla, a business sophomore said sometimes he will be asked for his student ID on the bus when no other students are asked.

“I really felt outed for it. Like if you’re gonna ask somebody, you might as well ask everybody, not just the ones who are a different color,” Quintanilla said.

Quintanilla has also been harassed by other students on campus who go as far as to call him a racial slur. However, Quintanilla said he won’t let that take away from his future plans.

“I can’t let this little incident prove their point,” Quintanilla said. “My thing is, I’m going to keep going just to prove these people wrong. It hurt a bit, but I used that hurt to motivate myself.”

LIFE&ARTS

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The Battalion | 7.9.19

To Aggieland and beyond Sixteen Aggies help with making of Toy Story 4

By Khadeeja Umana @Khadeeja_Umana Pixar’s latest installment of the Toy Story series had the help of 16 former students who developed their experience at Texas A&M’s Visualization Lab. Toy Story 4 currently tops the box office with $650 million around the globe, and Aggies played an important part in the film’s success.

The Aggies who helped in the making of the Pixar film’s fourth installment include Jean-Claude Kalache, Jesse Weglein, Austin Goddard, Patrick James, Robert Graf, Chris Chapman, Gary Bruins, David Verona, Laura Murphy, Don Bui, Bob Moyer, Sajan Skaria, Kevin Singleton, Seth Freeman, Jon Reisch and Jonathan Kiker.

The former students held various roles in the movie, from director of photography to effects supervisor and technical director.

Department of Visualization Associate Professor Ann McNamara said the Visualization program at A&M offers a collaborative and interdisciplinary program for students.

“What’s interesting about the Aggies who helped in the making of this movie is a lot of them have very specific leadership roles and supervisor roles,” McNamara said.

“I think what’s interesting about our program is that it allows you to specialize into those roles. It’s really easy for them to take their skills and hone them in one specific area.”

McNamara said she believes both being a Viz student and an Aggie gives students the skills they need to go out into the world.

“One of the things we do here at Texas A&M in the Visualization

program, is we have the technical and the creative in the same department,” McNamara said. “I think one of the major skills that they are able to pick up here is creative problem solving.”

The Visualization program also offers a summer industry course that partners with a big studios such as Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks and Reel FX. “It’s a 10 week course, students work in teams and they have a faculty advisor,” McNamara said.

“The studio will send artists to work on the ground with students in the Visualization department, they work hands on to create 30 second animations in 10 weeks. It really emulates a production environment and I think that’s really helpful when they move into their careers.”

Department of Visualization Associate Professor and Director, Tim Mclaughlin said the movie making process has a lot of different roles that people play from early on, including story development and visual elements.

“One of the beautiful things about Toy Story 4 is just the richness of the materials and the lighting, the environment, the sky, grass and the objects,” Mclaughlin said.

“If you look at the objects they interact with, every object appears to have had a history — there’s weathering and age and paint.”

Mclaughlin said incorporating creative artistic ability with technical skills is what got these Aggies the important position they have in the Toy Story franchise.

“It requires the ability to look at the world around you and convert it into computer graphics,” Mclaughlin said. “And, maybe that’s one of the biggest things our students learn here - how to collaborate with a big team and being able to observe the world and turn that into art with a computer.”

Meredith Seaver — THE BATTALION

The Living Wall can be found spanning the side of Langford Architecture Building B facing Building A.

A&M students and professors create living wall with native Texas plants

By Khadeeja Umana @Khadeeja_Umana

Creative Commons

“Toy Story 4” contains the work of 16 Aggies and premiered in theaters June 21. The film tops the box office at $650 million globally.

Architecture students and staff teamed up over several semesters to build a Living Wall outside of the Ernest Langford Architecture Center, the first of its kind in Aggieland.

The wall is a product of the teamwork between assistant professor Ahmed Ali and associate professor Bruce Dvorak from the College of Architecture. The wall is constructed from 20 tons of sheet metal byproduct from the automobile manufacturing process donated by General Motors, and it houses native Texan plants that reduce the effects of heat

in and around the building. The Living Wall was funded with the help of General Motors and the Tier One Program Grant from Texas A&M. Ali reached out to Dvorak once General Motors donated the scraps of metal used to build the modules that now make up the wall.

Ali has been teaching at A&M since 2015 and has always been interested in sustainability of materials that are sometimes considered as waste or excess.

“Resource-based design is looking at our available resources and design with its limitations and properties, instead of starting with abstract ideas and then later select materials without being environmentally conscious to the amount of solid waste that we generate everyday,” Ali said. “We are drowning into an unprecedented amount of waste, and design

plays a very important role in diverting that waste from landfills.”

Before Ali and Dvorak began the project together, both worked separately on research.

Dvorak had set up several green walls on the roof of Langford.

“None of the [previous] systems really survived for us, when Ahmed Ali came to me he said ‘we have this material... I think we can design a new kind of living wall system,’” Dvorak said. “So we got together with a couple students in the fall semester of 2017 and we worked with those students in terms of coming up with a design for the new system.”

The students then began working in 2018, by folding each piece of sheet metal in the A&M Automated Fabrication and Design Laboratory to create modules. They then painted the modules at a local auto body shop

and filled them with soil and native Texan plants.

“The sheet metal is unique, I’ve never seen that used on a living wall before,” Dvorak said. “I think something else that’s unique is it’s designed for the plants to grow straight up so they have plenty of soil. We designed it for native plants of Texas - that was our goal for this project.”

Ali said he hopes to use the wall to remind students and faculty how easy and beautiful sustainability can be if people make room for it.

“Design thinking can transform what once was perceived as waste into beautiful and functional systems,” Ali said. “Sustainability must be both visible and beautiful to earn the public interest in raising the awareness of our environmental problems.”

LIFE&ARTS

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The Battalion | 7.9.19

The ‘wacky and wise’ words of an Aggie Aggie transforms blog into a book to raise money for Afghan students

By Camryn Lang @CamrynLang

PROVIDED

Margo DeKoch wrote her book, “The Misadventures of Margo Marie,” after years of blogging on MargsWithMarge.

After graduation, Aggies continue to uphold the tradition of selfless service, but one former student created her own way to help those in need.

Margo DeKoch, Class of 2018, began her blog, MargswithMarge in the fall of her junior year. Several years later, DeKoch would continue to collect her stories until she transformed them into a book with the support of her friend Metra Mehran, Class of 2018. The book: “The Misadventures of Margo Marie” contains 12 essays that detail what DeKoch defines as “hilarious and somewhat awkward transition we all make from adolescence to adulthood.”

DeKoch created the book to raise money to pay for the nursing degree of Afghan student, Alia and to aid the Tasahol Library located in the capital of Kabul, Afghanistan. By August 1, DeKoch hopes to raise $3,000 through donations and selling copies of her book for $10. Since the book was made available on June 17, the project has amassed $410.

During the conception of the project, DeKoch reached out to Mehran who was working for several aid organizations in Afghanistan and was connected to Alia.

Through their collaboration, DeKoch was able to find a purpose for the book.

“I reached out to [Mehran] and asked, first, if she would write the foreword for the book,” DeKoch said. “She also happened to know of a young woman who is from Afghanistan and...was going to go to nursing school to become a midwife for her village.

She is approaching her final year and she was going to need help with tuition.”

Mehran pushed further by suggesting to DeKoch that she also aid the Tasahol Organization. From there, DeKoch set out to raise $1,000 for Alia’s education and $2,000 for the Tasahol Library. “[The Tasahol Organization’s] job is essentially to provide resources for young scholars traveling from outside villages and provide a place where they can study and

have access to internet,” DeKoch said.

“They are newly established; within the last two years. Their goal is to set up a library.”

DeKoch spent the past 10 months teaching English in Morocco, which gave her a large amount of free time to continue

PROVIDED

Margo DeKoch, Class of 2018, published “The Misadventures of Margo Marie” June 17.

writing.

“The book is divided into two halves: section one is wacky and section two is wise,” DeKoch said. “The wacky [section] is tales from elementary school, middle school, and high school; some are from Morocco. The wise section [stories] are personal reflections.”

DeKoch said that her book was the perfect combination of her love for storytelling and advocating for women across the world.

“This is a way for me to combine my hobby with my passion,” DeKoch said.

“My hobby is creative writing and that’s why I had a blog. I’ve always enjoyed story telling… My passion is advocating for women’s rights nationally and internationally. I saw it as an opportunity to combine the two, do something I love and benefit a cause I care about.”

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ANSWERS

Both Texas A&M and Georgetown University are involved in a financial investigation by President Trump’s administration for allegedly not reporting foreign gifts and contracts to the government.

Under federal law, colleges are required to share their earnings from foreign sources with the government. Most recently, the Trump administration has been monitoring the international money flow towards American colleges; two in particular have caught their attention. A&M and Georgetown have been asked to disclose financial records as both universities are suspected of not reporting all of their foreign gifts and contracts to the federal government.

On June 13, the two universities received a letter from the U.S. Education Department ordering them two universities to disclose their foreign funding, warning that the universities could be referred to the attorney general in order to comply. The letters claim that while the universities have reported their foreign funding, they have not shared all of the information surrounding the matter.

A&M and Georgetown have said they take the matter very seriously and hope to resolve the issue quickly.

Georgetown has reportedly received more than $415 million from foreign sources since 2012, while A&M has received $285 million since 2014, according to the Associated Press. For both universities, most of the reported foreign money came from the Qatar campuses that they have established overseas.

According to the Associated Press, who have obtained the letters sent to the institutions, investigators are ordering disclosure of funding surrounding the Chinese companies, Huawei and ZTE. These tech companies have previously been labeled as a national threat by some U.S. officials.

China isn’t the only country involved in the investigation. Georgetown, specifically, is being investigated about receiving funding from Russia and Saudi Arabia, which includes the Russian cybersecurity company of Kaspersky.

According to Politico, these investigations come after a bipartisan report from the Senate that accused American colleges of not reporting the money given to them by the Chinese government. Congress has held multiple hearings of the potential spying performed by the Chinese when it comes to the relationship between Chinese firms and American colleges.

More colleges will most likely be questioned, with universities having to report foreign donations that exceed $250,000 in one year, according to NBC Dallas-Fort Worth. The Trump administration looks to continue heavily monitoring foreign funding, viewing the matter as a national security concern.

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The Battalion | 7.9.19

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