The Flat Hat
Vol. 107, Iss. 12 | Tuesday, April 25, 2017 | The Weekly Student Newspaper of The College of William and Mary
Hundreds of students raised over $8,000 as they walked Saturday morning in the second annual Out of Darkness walk at the College of William and Mary. page 4
STUDENT LIFE
GREEK LIFE
Environmental protest fills Duke of Gloucester Street March focuses on EPA budget cuts MADELINE MONROE FLAT HAT ASSOC. NEWS EDITOR
Saturday, April 22, student activists, College of William and Mary faculty and community members took to Duke of Gloucester Street to support science and to protest U.S. President Donald Trump’s cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and threats to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Catherine Carey, a resident of Williamsburg, organized the event in conjunction with Democracy First, a local progressive organization of which she is a member. “We’re all here today because science is so important in our lives,” Carey said. “I mean, it keeps us healthy, it keeps our environment clean and I think everyone here is disappointed that the administration hasn’t recognized the importance of science. We want fact-based policies to support our children and our communities.” The DoG Street protest was one of approximately 600 taking place Saturday worldwide alongside the
March for Science in Washington, D.C. The March for Science emphasizes “the very real role that science plays in each of our lives and the need to respect and encourage research that gives us insight into the world,” according to its website. According to Carey, approximately 60 people were expected to participate in the local protest. Because Democracy First did not have a permit, protesters were restricted to units of 15 individuals. Waverly Garner ’17 said he believed that the protests signify the resolve of the scientific community and its supporters to come together and “speak their minds.” “If you don’t communicate with somebody, with anybody, you’re never going to be able to have a conversation,” Garner said. “That’s how people learn things — from each other. I actually think that’s a dialogue that really needs to happen. We need to be more vocal and listen but also speak and make sure it is a conversation See EARTH DAY page 4
Party elicits response Annual PIKA event prompts student reports SARAH SMITH // FLAT HAT NEWS EDITOR
More than 10 years ago, members of the College of William and Mary’s Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity promised local reporters that they would rename their annual “Vietnam” party, after VietnameseAmerican students raised concerns that the party was offensive. When the party was first held in 1964, it was done as a send-off for College students leaving to fight in the Vietnam War. In 2006, Nam Ly ’06 told the Daily Press [SS1] that it was an offensive depiction of Vietnamese culture, because the party featured bamboo huts and camouflage costumes. Now, the fraternity has pushed efforts to re-brand the party as a “camo party” at the end of their Military Appreciation Week — their spring philanthropy event. However, this too has raised student concerns. To Student Veteran Association President Tim Beck ’17, this party is an offense to veterans who have served in the U.S. military, especially those who live in the City of Williamsburg and fought in the Vietnam War. For this reason, Beck said he chose to report this year’s party to the College’s Student Leadership
Development office, and that he hopes the Interfraternity Council and the SLD office will take action. “Essentially the big picture here is that the efforts I have made on campus as the president of the veterans group on campus, [are] to help student veterans and traditional students understand each other and blend into the same community as one,” Beck said. “When we have veterans that are coming back from combat that our traditional student body doesn’t understand, we have aided that blending with storytelling events, our military appreciation games, encouraging our veterans to get involved — we created an intramural sports team so that they can meet each other — you decrease this stigma that is associated with being a combat veteran. When we have these events, like the PIKA ‘Vietnam’ party, it derails all of the progress that we’ve made.” As of the 2016-2017 academic year, there are 32 undergraduate student veterans at the College. Overall, there are 251 student veterans, although the majority of them attend the Mason School of Business and the Marshall-Wythe School of Law as
graduate students. According to research done by the Veterans Task Force, between one-third and one-fourth of the student body is associated with the military; this means that these students are active duty, in the reserves or have parents or children who have served. Beck said he first heard about the party last year when he saw fraternity members promoting it on Twitter. He said he did talk with PIKA members last year, but that they were unwilling to make changes to the event. This year, he and other Reserve Officers’ Training Corps cadets ran into PIKA members the night of the party, and he said he told them why them wearing military uniforms was offensive to him and potentially offensive to other veterans. “I told them that what they were doing isn’t acceptable and that the military doesn’t appreciate it,” Beck said. “No one is fooled by this cultural appropriation. It’s a disgrace to the uniform, it’s a disgrace to the people who died while wearing this uniform. It is also a disgrace to the veteran population living in this See PIKA page 3
HIGHER EDUCATION
WILLIAMSBURG
Researchers propose solutions to higher ed challenges April 21 CWA lowers Privatization, social mobility topics discussed at College’s education conference EMILY MARTELL FLAT HAT COPY EDITOR
The past 35 years have witnessed rising costs of higher education, dwindling public spending for universities and a widening wage gap. With this backdrop, researchers presented federal and state solutions to higher education challenges at the College of William and Mary School of Education Saturday, April 21. The events were held as part of the Conference on Higher Education and Social Mobility held at the College April 21-22, which brought in academics, administrators and policymakers to discuss and debate topics in U.S. post-secondary education. The first presenter of the morning was Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute Sandy Baum, who discussed her research question: Does federal financial aid facilitate social mobility? To motivate her question, Baum said that even though the federal government spends billions of dollars on need-based financial aid, low-income kids are still less likely to attend college. “Money, in the form of a voucher when you’re ready to go off to college, is just obviously not the only answer,” Baum said. “We have much bigger problems than that and there’s no way that you can hand
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people money when they’re 18 years old and expect their outcomes to be the same as the outcomes of people who have grown up in entirely different circumstances.” Instead, Baum posed an alternate financial aid system where the federal government would contribute, for example, $1,000 per year to a savings account for each child in a low-income family until the child reached college age. “We’re not going to solve all of their problems, but let’s think about how to structure the federal financial aid system so it does a better job, Baum said. “And that means thinking about what happens to children when they’re young and how we prepare them for college, how we help them make choices about college, and how we provide structures that help them to succeed when they’re in college.” Discussing her research, Senior Vice President of the Division of Government and Public Affairs at the American Council on Education Terry Hartle discussed a paradox of recent higher education; over the past 50 years, even as the federal government has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into higher education, economic inequality has increased. Hartle said that, according to the Pew Mobility Project, just over half of working class voters believe their children will fare better than they themselves did. For working class whites, the figure is 42
percent. Moreover, less than half of working class whites think that having a college degree would make a difference in their lives. “It would not deal with the other problems, Hartle said. “It wouldn’t make sure that they had access to good elementary and secondary schools. It wouldn’t necessarily help them choose the right institution. Indeed, it might make them easier prey for institutions that saw they had a lot of money to spend on postsecondary education.” The second presenter of the morning was assistant professor of economics from Temple University Douglas Webber, who discussed a risk-sharing plan — a plan in which the federal government would financially penalize colleges for poor outcomes, such as high student loan default rates and low graduation rates. “This deceptively simple proposal says, let’s take a percentage of that and charge a penalty to the school. It’s going to target schools where lots of students that take out loans, those loans are very large and those students have poor labor market outcomes.” Speaking to an audience mostly either employed by or attending public and private non-profit universities, Webber said he wanted to assure everyone that the risk-sharing plan would predominantly affect for-profit institutions, a sect of higher
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Scholarships, classes to be cut HEATHER BAIER FLAT HAT ASSOC. VARIETY EDITOR
The Christopher Wren Association, a lifelong learning program affiliated with the College of William and Mary, recently increased their membership prices due to budget constraints. The CWA provides educational opportunities to members of the Williamsburg community through its Town and Gown series and regularly scheduled courses. The Association is an independently funded arm of the College that provides learning opportunities to approximately 2,200 community members. The financial troubles started after current CWA President Bill Riffer had to move $45,000 from the program’s reserve to cover extra costs endured the previous year. See CWA page 4
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Students benefit from not having reading week
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education notorious for poor outcomes. The discussion then transitioned from the federal to the state level. Harvard professor of public policy, education and economics David Deming presented his research, which concerned the impacts of price and spending subsidies on higher education outcomes. Deming said that students essentially get a discount on their educations — by and large, universities spend more per student than they do in tuition. Vice President for University Advancement Matthew Lambert ’99 presented findings from his book “Privatization and the Public Good.” Lambert described the “highly-charged word” privatization as the process in which public universities begin to resemble private universities. He called this an apt description of what has been and is currently happening in higher education. Much of Lambert’s research for the book involved meeting with state legislators, who he said have considerable control over funding for public universities. “I found that [legislators] are at once, the most important owners of these public institutions, owners having a variety of meanings in their mind, but they’re also the least knowledgeable about the public agenda and about higher education broadly,” Lambert said.
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Alfred Ouyang ’18 says that not having a reading week before exams is a good thing for students at the College of William and Mary. page 5
Tribe crowned CAA Champions
The women’s tennis team defeated UNC-Wilmington in the Colonial Athletic Association Championship, taking the title for the third year in a row. page 10