SERVING THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN COMMUNITY SINCE 1900 @THEDAILYTEXAN | THEDAILYTEXAN.COM
FRIDAY, MARCH 23, 2018
VOLUME 118, ISSUE 124
N E WS
O PI N I O N
S CI E NCE &TE CH
S P ORTS
LIFE&ARTS
Austin’s “bathroom bill” may have hurt the city’s chances for Amazon HQ2. PAGE 3
Fine Arts students deserve all the resources of a library collection. PAGE 4
An artist lives in an engineer’s office as part of a collaboration between art and science. PAGE 5
Women’s basketball looks for sweet success at Sweet 16 in Kansas City on Friday. PAGE 7
RTF graduate student film to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. PAGE 8
STUDENT GOVERNMENT
SG ELECTION ENDS: COLTON, MEHRAZ WIN
anthony mireles | the daily texan staff Colton Becker, right, celebrates with Mehraz Rahman as the Election Supervisory Board announce their runoff victory on Thursday afternoon at the Flawn Academic Center. The results come after three separate elections and nearly 15,000 voters participated, making this election the biggest turnout in the history of student government elections at UT.
Divisive SG executive alliance election at las comes to a close. By Katie Balevic @thedailytexan
A
fter a turbulent campaign period — which had not one, not two, but three elections — Colton Becker and Mehraz Rahman won the executive alliance runoff and will be the next student body president and vice president. Becker and Rahman received 8,250 votes — the highest number of votes in UT history overall, according to the Election
Supervisory Board — which totaled 56.18 percent of the vote. Candidates Guneez Ibrahim and Hannah McMorris secured 43.67 percent of the vote with 6,413 votes. “I feel relieved that it’s over but also excited for what’s to come,” said Rahman, a marketing and Plan II junior. “There’s a lot of work to be done in terms of addressing campus climate … now it’s part of our job to help address that.” Although they lost the election, Ibrahim and McMorris said they spread the message that marginalized voices on campus will be heard. “We are rallying together,”
Election Results 44%
56%
Colton & Mehraz 8,250 Votes
Guneez & Hannah 6,413 Votes
said Ibrahim, a sociology and design senior. “We did not need to win this election to win.” After a trying six-week campaign period, the Becker-Rahman team will attempt to unify the student body by reaching out to students that identified strongly with the Ibrahim-McMorris campaign, Becker said. “We just have a lot of work to do mending the wounds of this election,” said Becker, a nutrition senior. “We’re so glad that it’s over, and we want to start reaching out to the other side of the aisle.” The first election was nullified and the second
resulted in a runoff that led to tonight’s final election. The drawn-out election period reflected how hard marginalized students have to work to challenge the norms on campus, said McMorris, a political communications and African and African diaspora junior. “I think it’s a testament to how much harder women of color have to work than the mainstream tickets at UT and how much more we had to go through just to get to where we are,” McMorris said. Becker said the Ibrahim-McMorris campaign was motivated by legitimate
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CAMPUS
CAMPUS
Graduate students fend for themselves as they look for gun-free office spaces
SSD helps students find employment By Stephanie Adeline
By Rebecca Stanley
@ stephadeline
@sissyphus_
When two guns were left unattended in UT bathrooms last month, the issue of campus carry was ushered back into the spotlight, and some graduate students — who act as teaching assistants — are voicing their discomfort with current policy regarding their office spaces. Professors possess the autonomy to declare their private offices a gun-free zone, whereas graduate student TAs — who share their office spaces — do not have this authority. As a result, many graduate students hold office hours in designated gun-free zones such as the Cactus Cafe and the Student Services Building. History graduate student Rebecca Johnston said that for the past two years as a TA, she’s made this choice. “I’ve been TA’ing, and I’ve chosen to do what I can to have a space where no one can bring in a firearm,” Johnston said.
jeb milling | the daily texan staff “My advisor lets me use her office because it counts as single occupancy. Changing my office space was one of the ways I’ve wanted to assert that I think this is an unacceptable law in a civil society.”
Johnston, who has been an active member of Gun Free UT, said the University has not addressed graduate students’ concerns on the issue. “We were constantly advocating for a provision that
would allow teaching assistants to have some kind of space that would be gun-free if they chose,” Johnston said. “We made ourselves very clear. It
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Like many students, Caroline Graves is concerned with trying to find internships to enhance her career. But as a student with a disability, Graves also has to ask questions on how accommodating the workplace will be. “I don’t feel like I have the knowledge and skills directly related to disability-related matters,” government sophomore Graves said. “I go to career services for my college and … they touch on that a bit but not a ton.” Like Graves, many students with disabilities have concerns related to employment. To address these questions, UT Services for Students with Disabilities started “Disabilities and Employment” workshops in February to help disabled and differently-abled students make an easier transition from school to work life. The workshops will
continue every Thursday until early April and cover topics such as resume writing, job interviews and disability rights in the workplace. In April, students will have an opportunity to meet with some company representatives at the Texas Recruitment + Interview Services, said Chelsea DeSimone, SSD intern and workshop leader. DeSimone, a social work graduate student, said the workshops were a result of demand from disabled and differently-abled students. Some of the most common challenges students with disabilities face in the workplace include not knowing when and how to tell their employers about their disabilities, DeSimone said. “There’s a lot of concerns around … how to disclose if you have a disability,” DeSimone said. “Do you do it in the cover letter, do you do it in your resume, do you talk about it in the interview?”
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