SERVING THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN COMMUNITY SINCE 1900 @THEDAILYTEXAN | THEDAILYTEXAN.COM
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 24, 2018
VOLUME 118, ISSUE 87
N E WS
O PI N I O N
LI FE &A RTS
SPORTS
A book filled with stories of African American UT alumni will be published later this year. PAGE 2
Students should praise UT’s rejection of foreign funds. PAGE 4
Cryptocurrency craze hits UT, with two opposing coins struggling for dominance. PAGE 8
Texas basketball must get the most out of its entire rotation to sustain excellence. PAGE 6
NATION
Like most students, Yanelly went home for the holidays. But she couldn’t come back to UT-Austin.
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ver the last year, protections for undocumented students, known as DREAMers, have become leverage for negotiating border wall funding and immigration reform in U.S. politics. This is what these federal negations look like for the UT community. This story is the first installment of a semester-long collaboration between The Daily Texan and UT’s chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Through Negotiating Dreams, NAHJ members and The Daily Texan will share stories of UT’s
DACA students.
*Editor’s note: Some last names have been omitted out of respect for the privacy and safety of our sources. Yanelly lies on her queen-sized bed. A rustling of keys is heard from a distance as Yanelly’s mom, Juana, walks into their home. She calls for her but walks into Yanelly’s bedroom a couple of minutes later, laying next to her daughter and a Bevo stuffed animal on the bed. Their white poodle trails in next. They look at the small dog, nicknamed Panda for Pandora, and laugh together.
As Panda cuddles up next to them, they turn their gaze back to each other and begin to talk about their day. Now that Yanelly is home, this is their daily routine. But these are the moments they could have lost if Yanelly returned to UT-Austin this spring. When the Trump administration announced the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals last September, Yanelly was forced to choose between studying at UT-Austin and seeing her family. Former President Barack Obama’s DACA policy, which prevented
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juan figueroa | the daily texan staff As a DACA student, Yanelly’s dream to study at UT was put in question by national politics this year.
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CAMPUS CAMPUS
UT directory may face restrictions By Anna Lassmann @thedailytexan
The Office of the Registrar and UT Police Department urged students through Twitter last week to look over their personal information on the UT directory and restrict any details they do not want to be viewable online. “Having public information out there that is not absolutely necessary, you don’t want it to fall into the wrong hands,” Samantha Stanford, sergeant in criminal investigations for UTPD, said. “People have ulterior motives, you never know what people are going to do with that information.” The information made available to the public is called directory information, which does not include educational records. Directory information includes a student’s name, local and permanent addresses, email addresses, UT EID, telephone numbers, place of birth, field of study and participation in officially recognized activities and sports. Last year, the Office of the Registrar and UTPD modified the UT directory to be more mindful of students’ and faculty’s privacy. In April 2017, home addresses and telephone numbers were taken off the online directory for all students and employees, said C. W. Belcher, associate director of Information Technology Services. “This change was made to provide greater privacy for our campus community,” Belcher said. Cam Beasley, chief
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SG works to increase civic engagement, voter turnout By Katie Balevic @thedailytexan
The Student Government Assembly had its first meeting of the semester on Tuesday, when it passed a resolution establishing the UT at Austin Civic Advisory Board to increase civic engagement on campus. “There are people that we will never be able to reach by tabling in West Mall,” said university-wide representative Charlie Bonner, an author of the resolution. “So by combining forces, we can look at what the University can do and what Student Government can do to change the way that we are doing things.” Assembly Resolution 15 formed The Civic Advisory Board, which will bring together representatives from political organizations on campus to work on increasing engagement and voter turnout, Bonner said. “(This board) would bring together the different political voices on this campus in order to support initiatives within student government and on
alicia smith | the daily texan staff After a presentation from Charlie Bonner and Sophie Belton, Student Government votes unanimously for an increase in campuswide student engagement by implementing a Civic Advisory Board. campus … and to reduce barriers to civic engagement across the board in systematic ways,” said Bonner, Plan II junior. While other campus organizations work with political engagement, Bonner said this
board will focus on the systemic issues that prevent students from registering to vote. “There are other committees that focus on voter registration, but this would have a broader reach for civic engagement,”
said speaker Madison Huerta, management senior. “It would be getting people from all across campus together to talk in a productive way.” Resolution co-author Sophie Belton said the board will ad-
dress problems from both sides of the political spectrum and bring together those who want to talk through the issues. “In the past few years at UT, I’ve seen so many contentious issues come up, and groups — instead of working together to talk about their ideological differences — just bicker about it,” Belton, mechanical engineering senior, said. The board, which will meet regularly, hopes to get voter registration up to one hundred percent participation from eligible students, according to the legislation. Huerta jokingly referred to A.R. 15 as “the resolution that never dies” because of its many revisions, which Bonner said was because of its structure. “We’ve added two different clauses to clarify that the board will be chaired by the Chair of the Student Government Committee on Governmental Affairs … and then the first board that is set up will establish its own rules and regulations as to how it will govern and how often it will meet,” Bonner said. The resolution passed unanimously with 28 votes in favor.
STATE
Abbott faces nine Texas Democrats in gubernatorial race By Raga Justin @ragajus
With the 2018 Texas gubernatorial election looming, nine Democratic candidates are gearing up for the primary in an attempt to dislodge Republican Governor Greg Abbott. Josh Blank, manager of
6611/Dobie Twenty21; Process color
polling and research at the Texas Politics Project, said he attributed the crowded ballot to lack of a clearly publicized front-runner, even near the end of the filing process. “At the last minute, there was a pretty big burst of interest,” Blank said. “Some people who maybe would’ve been less inclined to run, had a strong candidate jumped in earlier, ended
up running. That seems like that was the case here.” Sherri Greenberg, a clinical professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, said the Democratic candidates’ inexperience is because Republicans have held the majority of statewide offices for years. “The Democrats have really been out of power so long in
statewide offices,” Greenberg said. “There aren’t folks ready and waiting in the wings who clearly command the stage, and you’re seeing that with the governor’s race. There’s not really been somebody who’s lining up and groomed. Because of that you see this situation where you have quite a few people entering but nobody who has been thought of and discussed for
a long time as the Democratic nominee for governor.” However, one candidate has recently generated buzz. Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez, one of two female sheriffs in Texas and the only openly gay female sheriff in Texas, made headlines when she filed her candidacy in December.
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