The Daily Texan 2018-09-06

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serving the university of texas at austin community since

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1900

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2018

volume

119,

issue

NEWS

OPINION

LIFE&ARTS

SPORTS

Acessible Pedestrian Signals installed near UT for visually impaired students. PA G E 2

Students: do yourself a favor, and go to sleep. PA G E 4

Eminem delivers impressive bars and lays blame in surprise album “Kamikaze.” PA G E 8

After two weeks on the road, Longhorns host Texas State for home opener. PA G E 6

17

CAMPUS

Life after Santa Fe UT freshman adjusts to college life after high school shooting.

By Megan Menchaca @meganmenchaca13

Like many students, undeclared freshman Kennedy Rodriguez spent her senior year enrolled in dual credit classes in a community college before she attended UT. Because of this, Rodriguez attended high school later in the day. She would have likely been sitting in one of those dual credit classes on the morning of May 18, 2018, if her community college had not wrapped up for the spring semester. At 7:30 a.m. that morning, Rodriguez was still getting ready for school when she got a call from one of her friends. “She was just like, ‘Please don’t come to school,’” Rodriguez said. “She said, ‘I have a feeling that there is an active shooter,’ and I immediately called my best friend. I was worried about her because I knew she was there that day.” By the time her best friend finally answered the phone, the eighth deadliest school shooting to take place in the United States had already begun at her school, Santa Fe High School. “I could hear people screaming and it was just chaos in the background,” Rodriguez said. “It was really, really scary.

SANTA FE

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juan figueroa | the daily texan staff Undeclared freshman Kennedy Rodriguez received a call from her friend warning her to not go to school during the Santa Fe High School shooting in May. Rodriguez co-founded Orange Generation to increase awareness of gun violence and raise money for victims and their families of the Santa Fe shooting.

WEST CAMPUS

UNIVERSITY

West Campus real estate goes from rags to riches with redevelopment program

Gender pronoun addition aims to make UT students comfortable By Savana Dunning @savanaish

By Raga Justin @ragajus

West Campus today is not the West Campus it has always been. Fifteen years ago, ambitious high-rises were almost nonexistent. Features such as bike lanes and street lighting were yet to be improved, or even added. Architecture professor Jake Wegemann stayed in West Campus in 1996, and when he returned nearly 20 years later, he said he was surprised by what he found. “When I came back to Austin in 2014, I was just mind boggled at the change,” Wegemann said. “There are just more people and more businesses and more activity, which I think is fantastic. I love the energy.” After almost 10 years of efforts by UT, Capital Metro and University Area Partners, a West Campus neighborhood association, plans were made in 2004 for University Neighborhood Overlay. UNO was the program that would kickstart more than a decade of development in one of Austin’s most

anthony mireles | the daily texan file As West Campus continues to grow, more construction projects will take place, causing a changing landscape and incoveniecies for students living there.

populated neighborhoods. Mike McHone, a real estate broker and founding member of University Area Partners, said UNO is an incentive-based redevelopment plan. Developers opt in to play by UNO’s rules, which include providing a

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specific small percentage of affordable housing in exchange for permission to “build up,” McHone said. Developers have taken advantage ofthose conditions, McHone said.

REDEVELOPMENT

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A new addition to syllabi across campus might make it easier for transgender and nonbinary students to communicate their gender identity with their professor. The Faculty Innovation Center, a center that seeks to improve the learning environment on campus, added a recommended section on pronoun use to their widely used syllabus template last spring. The new section says faculty members will honor any student’s request to be addressed by an alternate name or gender pronoun, if they advise them of their preference. “Research shows that educational contexts tend to mirror inequities and can foster those,” said Adria Battaglia, FIC’s curriculum and instructional designer. “We’re trying to figure out ways to reduce those barriers so that students can cognitively achieve what they’re meant to achieve in the

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classroom, connect with their community and feel a part of UT.” Battaglia said although the section is not required, it creates a better learning environment for transgender and nonbinary students by signaling to them that a professor is willing to talk about issues related to gender. “If there are students whose pronouns don’t match what someone expects them to be for cultural reasons, (the new syllabus) statement signals to them that they have a safe space to talk about that with their faculty member,” Battaglia said. Dallon Freeman, a nonbinary linguistics junior, said while it does not largely impact their academic life, they usually felt uncomfortable addressing pronoun usage with their professors. “Up to this point, none of my professors have ever openly discussed pronoun usage,” Freeman said. “There is an element of dread knowing that

PRONOUN

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