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Thursday November 14, 2019 • Volume 73, Issue 11
Emerson College’s student newspaper since 1947 • berkeleybeacon.com
Marlboro Town Meeting addresses plans for merger Jacob Seitz, Beacon Staff MARLBORO, Vt.—Marlboro College President Kevin Quigley informed his community members Wednesday that it is not up to them to decide the fate of the campus— directly addressing concerns students raised about the future of the small liberal arts school on Potash Hill. “I want to be really clear with the community: This is a decision that is going to be made by the Board of Trustees,” Quigley said at a Marlboro Town Meeting. “This is their decision. This is not a community decision.” The decision made by the Marlboro Board of Trustees must then be approved by the Emerson Board of Trustees. The meeting follows the announcement last week of a proposed merger between Emerson and Marlboro where the Vermont institution will donate its $30 million endowment and $10 million worth of real estate to the Boston school. The deal is in its early stages with many pressing questions left unanswered.
Town Meeting is a weekly forum of the Marlboro campus and the surrounding townspeople, where the community makes recommendations to the college through Selectboard, a group of Marlboro students and faculty who get elected to lead the meeting. Town Meeting Clerk Felix Bieneman, a junior at Marlboro, said Town Meeting started because Marlboro did not originally have staff. Instead, the faculty all had administrative roles and voted on college-wide decisions in Town Meeting. To receive accreditation and federal aid, the college created a staff, which now takes recommendations from Town Meeting and attempts to act on them. The meeting then went to their scheduled agenda, which included a transition update from Quigley. The update included an announcement that several senior administrators including President M. Lee Pelton from Emerson would be on the Marlboro campus Nov. 20 to attend Town Meeting and do a campus visit. See town meeting, page 6
“There’s such a wide range of emotions—excitement, despair, fear—[and] I just want to acknowledge that those are all valid.” -Charlie Hickman
Head Selectperson Charlie Hickman (center left) addresses the Town Meeting Wednesday. Lizzie Heintz / Beacon Staff
State primed to ban flavored tobacco and vaping products
Bright Lights screens controversial film ‘Adam’
Max Carter, Beacon Correspondent
Taina Millsap, Beacon Staff Emerson College screened Adam at the Nov. 12 Bright Lights Film Festival—students attended to watch and criticize the film on its allegedly inaccurate portrayal of the LGBTQ community. “[The author] wrote this for herself, it was her own personal project, and she was way too defensive, she was not open to criticism,” junior Kyle Eber said in an interview after attending the screening. “He was like, ‘Adam is similar to my friends, and I don’t feel like Adam is a satirical character,’ and the satirical characters are the queer people, and I’m like, ‘Oh, honey, you have a lot of internalized homophobia and transphobia to work through.’” When the 2019 comedy film Adam premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January, it immediately drew negative attention from the LGBTQ community. Many queer people criticized the film for being homophobic and transphobic, with many calling for bans on the film with petitions. See ‘Adam’, page 4
Lions swept in conference championship By Lara Hill • p. 12
Grace Tepper (left, No. 21) jumps up for a kill in the quarterfinal matchup against MIT. Cho Yin Rachel Lo / Beacon Staff
INSIDE THIS EDITION
International news is worthy of our students’ attention.. Pg. 9
The Beacon online
A24 at Emerson organizes advance screening of ‘Waves’. Pg. 5
berkeleybeacon
BEACON HILL—The House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday banning the sale of all flavored tobacco and vaping products in the Commonwealth. The legislation, introduced by Rep. Danielle Gregoire in January, expands existing bans on flavored tobacco to encompass flavored vaping products and closes a loophole that exempted the sale of menthol-flavored tobacco products. The bill, which passed on a vote of 126-31, also introduces a sales tax on vaping devices, whether they’re single-use or reloadable. If the Senate concurs with the House, Gov. Charlie Baker will have to sign it into law before the ban takes effect. Baker recently placed a four-month ban on all vaping product sales in the state in response to a number of related health issues across the nation. His executive order will expire in December, and proponents on both sides of the issue are battling it out in this new wave of legislation aimed at dealing with the public health crisis. See tobacco, page 2
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