VOLUME 101, ISSUE NO. 3 | STUDENT-RUN SINCE 1916 | RICETHRESHER.ORG | WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 2016
Dash and dine Forced smile Can the ‘happiest students’ ranking be unhealthy?
see Ops p. 6 Finding dorayaki A film writer searches Houston for an elusive pastry
see A&E p. 9 Twelve angry men The case for and against Rice joining the Big 12
see Sports p. 11
Joe Biden to visit campus next week Yasna Haghdoost and Drew Keller
Editor in Chief and News Editor
Vice President of the United States Joe Biden will visit Rice University next week, Rice’s Office of Public Affairs confirmed. The exact time and location of the event have not been finalized. Biden will participate in an event on the national Cancer Moonshot initiative he leads to accelerate cancer research, according to an anonymous source familiar with the plans. The source also said the event will be jointly hosted by the Baker Institute and MD Anderson. In 2015, Biden had called for the creation of the Moonshot initative in order to increase resources dedicated to cancer and to bring together disparate cancer researchers. President Barack Obama announced the creation of the initiative in his 2016 State of the Union Address, and placed Biden at the helm. Biden convened a Cancer Moonshot Taskforce in February, bringing together federal agencies and allocating over $1 billion to the effort. Biden’s expected visit marks the second high-level member of the Obama administration this year. Last April, Secretary of State John Kerry discussed the role of religion in world politics and diplomacy at the Stude Concert Hall. This event was also hosted by the Baker Institute.
Joe Biden
Housing and Dining to roll out Saturday dinner, extended dining hours and grab-and-go breakfast
shicong zhou/thresher
Amber Tong News Editor
Three pilot programs for meal service, namely Saturday dinner, a later dinner option on weekdays and graband-go breakfast are coming to Seibel, South and North serveries respectively, according to Housing and Dining Senior Business Director David McDonald. He said he hopes the projects will respond to various student needs, ranging from financial constraints, time restrictions and scheduling conflicts. The new Saturday dinner service will be available beginning Sept. 17 from 5 p.m. until 7 p.m. in Seibel and students may pay with tetra points or any unused guest swipes. McDonald said this new option ties into the larger conversation about low-income students’ experience at Rice. “Saturday dinner is purposefully not there because the idea was that students would go beyond the hedges Saturday night,” McDonald said. “But now we are in a different situation. We’re in an age where not everybody has enough capital to be able to go beyond the hedges.”
McDonald said he is coordinating with the dean’s office, the Student Association and residential colleges to finalize details such as pricing and menu. He said he does not want to detract people from student groups offering dinner at their Saturday night events, but thinks accessibility is an important consideration that trumps smaller concerns. Starting on Sept. 6, Mondays through Thursdays, a menu modelled on the dinner of the same day will be offered from 7:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m at the South servery annex. Students may use their evening meal swipe if they have a meal plan and haven’t swiped at another servery, or tetra points to pay for the meal. According to McDonald, this new option will cater to athletes who have practice or students who have classes during normal dinner times. “We hear it anecdotally, but we also feel like we need to respond to students’ needs when we can operationally,” McDonald said. “This is one of those times that we feel like we are going to try and see how it goes.”
SA Vice President Hannah Todd, who worked with H&D to bring the changes, said her ideas originated from the responses to a survey she sent out to Wiess College in fall 2015, when she was a senator. “A common theme was frustration with the meal plan’s rigidity and I saw real potential for a project,” Todd, a junior, said. “From there, [H&D] and I on behalf of the SA produced a survey for all students that reflected similar sentiments. To summarize a long answer, yes, this was something students wanted.” Todd said the future of these programs will depend on students’ reaction to them. “I am not positive about the complete timeline for the project but I do know that if the late dinners or Saturday night dinners are not being used, these options will be removed,” Todd said. “Regarding plans for other serveries, I think that it really all hinges on what happens at Seibel and South in their associated pilots.” A separate experiment with grab-and-go breakfast items came out of the observation that the
reason students don’t eat breakfast is that they don’t have enough time in the morning, according to McDonald. “One of the things that we hear about the most from students is why do we have to pay for breakfast when I don’t eat breakfast?” McDonald said. “Then it occurred to us that maybe we are just serving the wrong breakfast.” The new menu will retain most ingredients currently being offered and alternate between various premade items like breakfast tacos, sandwiches and biscuits. McDonald said he hopes more students will eat breakfast after the introduction of these new options. “People just don’t see the time value of sitting down for breakfast,” McDonald said. “We’ve just gotten to the point in our culture that it is ‘fuel.’ But it’s got to be very easily accessible to all.” The goal is to offer take-out breakfast in all serveries by Oct. 1, McDonald said. He added that all the pilots will be offered throughout the semester and H&D will make adjustments next year based on the outcome.
Trump candidacy divides campus GOP Elana Margosis Thresher Staff
The Rice University College Republicans will decide at their first meeting of the year on Sept. 8 whether to endorse Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. The Rice College Republicans chapter is part of a larger Texas and national Federations of College Republicans, both of which have endorsed Trump. College Republicans President Jake Blumencranz said conservative students are divided on the candidates, but Trump does not seem to have much support. “I have seen more [students] against Trump than for him, but we will all find out this week in the coming vote,” Blumencranz, a Brown College junior, said.
Former College Republicans President and current board member Sam Herrera said the decision could be contentious either way. “[W]e want to be very careful, because we are against alienating anyone in our club,” Herrera, a Duncan College senior, said. “We’re open to all viewpoints, and taking a stance one way or another could very well do that.” In addition to Trump supporters on campus, some conservative Rice students are considering casting their votes for the Libertarian Party candidate and two-term governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson, though many students are still undecided. This phenomenon is not limited to Rice: Young voters across the country are hesitant to support the Republican candidate. A recent ABC News/Washington Post
poll found that Trump is polling at less than 25 percent among voters under 30. Robert Stein, a professor of political science, attributes Trump’s poor polling numbers among young voters in part to millennials’ weak party loyalties. “I suspect the incidence of young conservatives not voting for Trump, at Rice and elsewhere, is largely due to the candidate himself and weak partisan ties young voters have for either party,” he said. Stein said third-party candidate Gary Johnson was likely to gain from this disconnect. “[Young conservatives] rely on their evaluation of the candidates’ conservative values, leaving Trump short and someone like Gary Johnson closer to these voters’ values,” Stein said.
Trump voters One Trump supporter is College Republicans Vice President Kyle Sheehan. Sheehan, a Lovett College junior, describes himself as fiscally conservative and a noninterventionist on foreign policy. Sheehan prefers Trump’s stances on foreign policy to those of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s. “He’s more noninterventionist than Clinton in a lot of ways,” Sheehan said. “He was always skeptical of intervention in Iraq.” Trump has repeatedly claimed to have opposed the invasion of Iraq, though PolitiFact, a nonpartisan fact-checking organization, rates Trump’s claims of early opposition to the Iraq War ‘mostly false’ and says that Trump did not oppose the war until after it had started. 0see GOP, page 4